Host Monster Review

Host Monster Company Overview

HostMonster was founded in 1996, hosts more than 750,000 domains and is headquarted in Utah. The company emphazises high quality, no-outsourced support via a 24/7 toll-free telephone number with hold times less than 2 minutes. Customer satisfaction is the center of HostMonster's company strategy.

HostMonster offers one-for-all and all-inclusive web hosting plan. Something, that is special about it is, that it can be cancelled at any time. This hosting package can be pruchased for $5.95 /month as a 1-year plan, so the total amount of cash that is to be paid is extremely affordable. Most other companies make their customers pay 3 years in advance for the cheapest avilable price, HostMonster doesn't. The plan provides unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage and a free domain forever. Additionally HostMonster gives a bundle of $50 in Google Adwords credits with that plan.

HostMonster guarantees 99.9% uptime and a cancel-at-anytime-guarantee.

Price Value

Individuals and small to medium sized businesses will find an excellent price value with HostMonster's package. The price of $5.95 is only to be paid for 12 months in advance and the package can be cancelled at any time.

It includes unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, a free domain forever, can host unlimited domains on one account and provides unlimited email accounts. Geeks among us will love that it provides SSH Shell Access, PHP, Perl, Python, mySQL and PostgreSQL databases, SSI, Frontpage Extensions, .htaccess overrides, custom Cron Jobs and Ruby (RoR).

Ecommerce features provide the customer with several shop systems and a shared SSL certificate for secure submission of credit card data. A site builder with templates makes it easy to launch a own web site even for beginners. Multimedia features support streaming audio and video, RealAudio, Real Video, Flash, Shockwave, MIDI files and own Mime types.

A 1-click application-installer helps to easily deploy more than 50 web applications like Blogs, Forums, Content Management Systems, Galleries and much more.

Additionally, HostMonster gives $50 in Google AdWords credits, a free search engine submission, 24/7 toll-free customer support, 99.9% uptime guarantee and a cancel-at-any-time guarantee.

The price value for this high-quality, all-inclusive hosting plan is excellent. Although there are cheaper hosting plans in the industry, the price of this cutting-edge package (with its short payment cycle) is a bargain.

Reliability and Performance

HostMonster's data center is connected to the internet through a redundant OC-48 backbone connection with multiple carriers. This guarantees for total network reliability and high network speed.

HostMonster deploys high-end Intel based servers with Quad Opteron processors, running on customized Apache Web Server setups for lightning-fast server performance. Web servers are backed by mirrored RAID array storage devices for total data security. Additionally courtesy site backups are performed on a regular basis.

The data center is protected against power outages by UPS battery bays and diesel emergency generators. The physical security and the network security of HostMonster's data center is guaranteed with 24/7 monitoring and surveillance by highly trained professionals. HostMonster guarantees 99.9% uptime.

This is a very high standard in performance and reliability of both, the network and the hardware.

Features and Control Panel

HostMonster deploys the industry-favorite cPanel control panel for management of all hosting plans. CPanel is easy to understand and intuitive. Its large icons and orderly arranged functions make it self-explaining. In a snap, the customer can create new email adresses, set up cron jobs or create a mySQL database.

CPanel is the #1 control panel software in todays web hosting industry. Only some very few custom, self-developed solutions provide more value to the customer.

Support

HostMonster's company policy is to emphazise outstanding customer support. It can be seen as their flag-ship. They offer 24/7 support by a toll-free telephone number with a hold time less than 2 minutes. Additionally, support can be contacted through the help desk ticket system, live chat and email.

HostMonster offers a vast amount of information for customers to help themselves, too. There is an extensive, searchable knowledgebase, many video tutorials, a "getting-started-wizard", documentation for the control panel and an active user forum.

Host Monster's support is a no-outsourced, US-based support. We found out, their support quality, response times and friendly, helpful advice is awesome. We doubt, there is a higher support standard anywhere.

Conclusion

Being in business since 1996 and hosting more than 750,000 domains, Utah-based HostMonster knows, what they are doing.

With $5.95 for only 12-months billing period, they offer a very complete hosting package at state-of-the-art quality and excellent price value.

Reliability and performance of network and server hardware is outstanding. Host Monster uses cPanel to manage hosting accounts, wich is the best choice in our opinion.

With their not-improvable, outstanding customer support, they meet the highest service levels. We now understand, why host monster is so sure about their ability to satisfy customers, that they give a cancel-at-anytime-guarantee - because nearly nobody will.

We rate HostMonster to be a high-quality web hosting provider at a very affordable price with outstanding features and support.