Review of Multi Domain Web Hosting offers
Posted by Matt on March 8th, 2007
Review of Multi Domain Web Hosting offers from Charles LeightonI’m an avid photographer and sell my photographic prints via my three websites. When I look for a webhost I only choose ones that offer multiple domain hosting so that I can easily host my 3 websites at one place, with one control panel, 1 ftp and 1 bill. There are a number of compaines that offer multiple domain hosting, some have better features than others and some are cheaper, some faster, some more stable. In the review below I attempt to qualify these factors with my review of these three webhosting companies. The most recent hosting company I’ve tried is Host Gator. This was tried after having experience with both Blue host and Lunar Pages along with a number of other hosts that I have since dropped in the past due to one issue or another. Host Gator does not limit the number of domains that I can host on my account. If I choose to add more sites, I just register the domain and add it in the control panel. I have all the features I need here and I just have the baby plan. While it offers less space and bandwidth than some of the other plans Host Gator has been a good company to deal with. They also feature the swamp plan which offers twice the space and bandwidth. One thing I really like is that they have no setup fees and I pay the same price whether I pay by the month or by the year. Next I will review Lunar Pages which offers 10 domains in their multi domain hosting package. The basic plan at Lunar Pages is advertised as being the largest space and bandwidth of the plans reviewed on this page. What I especially like about LunarPages:
I have also tried Bluehost. Bluehost was one of the first companies that I tried. They are always upgrading their service with better servers, faster speeds, more features, more bandwidth and hosting space. They are a good company based in Orem, Utah. The reason I left Bluehost was thier shared ssl was shared by all the users. This is only a problem if you are taking secure information from your customers such as credit card information. If you are not taking sensitive customer information you do not need to use the SSL feature. Bluehost offers a great full featured plan and website response and uptime was great. Their 24 hour phone support is top notch. If there is a problem they don’t try to deny it like some companies. They will tell you what the problem is and will actually give an eta when it should be fixed. I like Bluehost, if they’d put a little more into their SSL service I’d go back. Their plan offers a total of 6 domains which is the least of any on this page but for me it is fine because I only have 3 sites with no plans to have more than 6 in the near feature. In the table below I’ve summarized the offerings of these 3 multiple domain hosting companies and their respective packages.
Other things to condider are the CPU usage allotment of the hosting plan. It is possible that a user may never be able to use all the advertised bandwidth because the hosting company has set the cpu usage limit too low. CPU usage refers to the amount of activity that your site performs on the server. A simple html page will not have much CPU activity even if it is heavily accessed. But a complex php sofware package with a backend mysql database with possibly complicated queries or a large database size or inefficient scripts will put a much heavier demand on the cpu. In this case it is common for anything more than a handful of users accessing the site at the same time to cause your hosting account to temporarily exceed it’s cpu allotment. This may cause your account to be temporarily suspended. If it happens too much the web host may drop you depending on their terms of use but all web hosts will protect themselves against high cpu users. Next we discuss shared ssl. Shared ssl is nice if you have a small business and do not want to pay a yearly fee of about $70-$300 for a private ssl certificate. Because I sell my photo prints online, I make sure the account I purchase offers shared ssl. Bluehost shares the ssl certificate among all it’s users so it can be slow at times. For a private ssl, in addition to the annual fee, you may have to pay an installation fee and will have to have a dedicated IP address for your website. This usually adds $2-$4 per month to your web hosting bill. Some web hosts do not offer this option, so if it is important to you, you’ll want to check with the webhost before purchasing the hosting package. Lunar Pages offers a dedicated IP for $2.50 additional per month. The cheapest private ssl certificates are usually through Comodo and they are a quality certificate recognized by all the popular browsers. HostGator does not offer the best shared SSL service either. Their SSL certificates are privately generated so they will show your customer a security warning. HostGator claims this is because your domain is not the same as the one on the SSL certificate, but that is not the issue, because we are not accessing it through the domain, rather the shared ssl domain which can easily be secured without errors if HostGator would spend the money on browser recognized certs and not just generate their own private ones. In summary, all three of these companies multiple domain hosting plans are good offers. For unlimited domains and month to month contract, go with Host Gator, for more space and bandwidth go with Lunar Pages and Bluehost is a great company as long as you are not using the shared SSL which is too slow, HostGator is also not a good choice for Shared SSL, but they will get you a private SSL for about $75/year which is very reasonable. |