Real Web Hosting Reviews

How many "independent" shared hosting companies are there?

A search for "web hosting" returns hundreds of web hosting company results. But how many of them are really unique offers?

Resellers.

Most web hosting companies, such as GoDaddy and 1&1 offer reseller accounts. Anyone can resell these hosting plans under another name. These ‘re-branded’ offers can cost less than the original plan and the technical support is usually provided by the original company. However, any first-level contact is provided by the reseller. You can find details of the GoDaddy reseller account plan on their website.

To make reseller accounts more attractive, hosting companies give away templates and tools for resellers to create their own website. As a result, the reseller home pages often look the same.

SF WebHost (Reseller) & GoDaddy. Yes, the image was taken from 2 different websites!

SF Web Host, a GoDaddy reseller.

GoDaddy website

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Some resellers combine offers from different companies under their own brand, and may have a unique design.

Working with a reseller may help you save money, but you need to know that they do not own the infrastructure; they are limited to what the seller provides and cannot provide customers with a better service than the original provider, merely the same service. If you suspect a web hosting company is a reseller, inquire by email or compare their listed offers to the offers we list on our site. If you find exact services, they are very likely a reseller.

GoDaddy resellers:

• http://www.sfwebhost.com/
• http://www.webnusites.com/
• http://www.snndomains.com/
• http://www.webmassala.com/
• http://www.eserveglobal.com/
• http://www.nolabydesign.com/
• and hundreds of others!

Different companies, same owner.

Different companies can belong to the same owner. For example, Nexx and HostICan belong to the same group. They share the same data center, and very likely the same internal infrastructure: DNS server, firewalls, etc. Each company offers different plans at different prices.

If you are happy with the customer service offered by one of the providers in the group, you can switch to any plan under this group to better suit your needs, or to save money, knowing that the same team is behind it.

Endurance International Group owns 20 hosting companies, including:

• iPowerWeb
• Pow Web
• Dot5 Hosting
• StartLogic
• Fatcow
• Globat

Dedicated server split to shared plans.

Selling shared hosting plans seems like an easy way to make a buck to some people. Buy or rent a dedicated server, install one of the many free software (examples) to splice it into smaller parts, and resale them to the public. This was very popular a few years back.

But a good shared hosting experience requires 24/7 monitoring, a support team to answer customers, an operation team to handle software updates and hardware failures, etc. Margins are very low in this business; a company must own a lot of servers and have a lot of customers to survive.

While this type of substandard hosting service may be cheaper, it is certainly not the best way to go. Always check to see how long a hosting company has been in business. If they haven’t been in business very long, they may not provide a very good service.

There are many web hosting companies, but few of them manage their own infrastructure. Check carefully before switching hosting companies, you might actually end up changing to a reseller host with your original company!

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