Our Review of: HostMonster

Overview:

HostMonster, a sister company of Bluehost, is located near Salt Lake City, Utah. The parent company of HostMonster has been providing web hosting services since 1996, hosting many thousands of web sites world-wide. As a matter of fact, to date, they have hosted over 1,700,000+ web sites! This goes to show that they have the experience and capability to handle most any web site configuration possible.

With HostMonster, you can depend on the highest customer service, the utmost in tools and features to keep your web site running smoothly and the best price for the buck. Also, since HostMonster was formed and is in partnership with a much larger hosting company, rest assured that they have the experience and equipment to make you a very satisfied customer!

Pros:

• Owned by a web hosting pioneer, with many years web hosting experience.
• Tons of scripts come standard on each account.
• Great customer service.

Cons:

• Control panel is a little tricky for new users.

Features & Specials:

HostMonster has the disk space and high transfer allowances that large web sites crave. In addition to this, they also offer a free domain name, free setup, free site builder and the ability to host unlimited domain names on your account. This is a fantastic and hugely desirable feature, great for webmasters who have multiple domain names and one of the reasons we rated HostMonster so highly on the list.

They also offer free toll-free 24/7 365-day telephone and e-mail support. They also offer a vast list of free features with every account, perfect for an advanced web site that needs extra functionality.

A few notable features are Ruby On Rails, MySQL, Javascript/DHTML, PHP, Flash/Shockwave, multiple shopping carts, free search engine submission and more. HostMonster also offers free $50 site builder credits at both Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords, which gives you instant free traffic!

• Free credits at Yahoo! and Google for each new account.
• Host unlimited domains on each account.

Reliability & Speed:

HostMonster's datacenter is among the best, with guaranteed uptime of 99.9%. As noted above, they're a sister company of Bluehost, in which they share the company owned datacenter with. HostMonster's network is connected via blazing fast OC-48 backbone connections, with 24/7 monitoring. They utilize high performance Quad Opteron servers, with UPS power backup.

They also offer mirrored server storage backups incase of equipment failure, to prevent data loss. Web site reliability is a top priority at HostMonster and they do an excellent job at keeping a clean track record.

Support:

HostMonster wants you to be completely satisfied with every aspect of service and that means providing special attention to taking care of any problems that might arise, quickly and easily. To make this a reality, they offer free toll-free 24/7 phone support and free 24/7 web chat.

Their support center is located near Salt Lake City, UT, in Orem. With that being said, they offer 100% english speaking national support. Without a doubt, this is great for someone needing phone support for a tricky hosting problem!

They also run a comprehensive help center, complete with FAQs, knowledge base and interactive online trouble ticket system. Although they are a low-priced host, rest assured they will be there to help when needed.

Average Support Wait Times:

Chat Wait Time 9 seconds

Phone Wait Time 2 minutes

Control Panel:

HostMonster utilizes the famous Cpanel control panel interface, which makes it easy to manage all aspects of your hosting account. A few notable easy-to-use functions include the ability to configure e-mail accounts, domain management, website statistics, script implementation and database administration. We found it pretty easy to operate and have extensively tried it out. Even if you're a novice, it shouldn't be a big problem for you to manage...

What sets them apart?

Summary:

HostMonster was chosen as the #8 rated web host, because of their outstanding storage/transfer allowances, ability to host unlimited domains on 1 account and great account features. This, along with knowing that if a problem arises it will be handled quickly and courteously makes them a great hosting pick! Check out HostMonster today and see their great service for yourself.

HostMonster Ratings ChartScore: 89%