When anyone from digg, reddit or any other social networking sites visits the link, they will actually load all the 9 different pages in the 9 different hosts. With over 2000 hits, this experiment seems to have a clear result on why Burton Hosting is the host to be. It had only 4 timeouts (comparing to approximately 2000 by AnHosting and MidPhase)!

Believing in providing an efficient service at budget prices, Burton Hosting’s plans are as affordable as your regular soda beverages. Their Personal plan is only $6.95/month and it comes with PHP5, MySQL, control panel, 10GB Web space, 100GB Bandwidth, 100 Email accounts and 100 Subdomains. It’s everything you need in a hosting plan.

Visit Burton Hosting to learn more about their offerings here.

KnownHost offers one of the more affordable VPS plan you can find around town. Their cheapest plan, the VPS Mirco, goes for as low as $20/month. With it, you get 128MB of RAM (burstable to 512MB when needed), 7GB of storage, 125GB bandwidth and 2 dedicated IPs. You do not get any control or power panel to help you manage your account for this price. These can be subscribed for an additional $6 and $2 per month, respectively.

Also, you need extra bandwidth, my suggestion is to get the same plan that is hosted in their California datacenter.

The downside, their technical support is only available if you opt to use one of the offered control panels. Hence, I didn’t get a chance to experience their support capabilities. Yet, throughout my time with KnownHost, I didn’t encounter any downtime.

If you are confident with your UNIX commands, there’s no stopping you in getting this great offer from KnownHost.

As mentioned earlier, you get a meager 100MB of storage and 1GB bandwidth in exchange for $5. By the looks of it, this may seem small in comparison by todays’ web hosting feature standard, but if you are only just trying to get your hands wet in web hosting or just want to host your not so important personal website, this plan should be more than enough to get you started. After all, the plan is complete with php5, unlimited MySQL databases, fantastico one-click installers, CGI-BIN and FTP account; all the essentials for your web hosting needs.

If you are looking towards such a direction, go ahead and try Plus Brain out. However, before you really commit yourself to them, please make sure you read all the terms and conditions set forth by the company so as to avoid any unnecessary mess later on (I know $5 isn’t worth that much of a hassle, but it still pays to be vigilant).

On contrary to the plan name, the reseller plan is actually $1.50 for every 1GB of storage and 10GB of bandwidth multiples. Each plan is inclusive of the WHM, domain reselling account from eNom, weekly backups and all year round technical support.

Hold your horses before you think that $1.50/month is way too cheap for a reseller account. On an average, a single reseller would have between 15 - 20 customers of their own. That means around 15 - 20 GB of storage. Doing the math, it should really work out to about the same price as any other reseller account. The only difference here would be paying for what you use.

On the downside, you might not get to access their premium forum. Not really a big loss I guess, since you can always go to Web Hosting Talk, the ever bustling web hosting forum

If you are interested, then click on to Hosting Puppy and check out their plan further.

First off, THC’s Rudolf Web Hosting plan gets you 250GB Storage, 3,000GB Bandwidth, Unlimited MySQL, PHP4, and a free domain. You will also be promised a shared SSL certificate, anti-spam, 24/7 support and 99.9% uptime guarantee for your account. The best part - you get to own all of these FOR LIFE!

The idea here is to pay $95 one-time fee and never be billed again,… ever. In exchange you get all the above hosting features for the rest of your life.

So, why such a move?

THC said that the Rudolf Special was rolled out as a holiday promotion to increase awareness and attract valuable websites to THC’s unmatched service, quality and affordability.

In my opinion, its as good as 2-3 years’ worth of hosting service without the hassle of the constant billing process. And, the chances of the company folding within these short years? Minimal.

However, you have to take note that you will not be refunded if you pass the 30-days mark for a money-back. Also, the plan will no longer be offered when it reaches the 1000 customer. It’s best for you to check the FAQ to get a clearer picture on what is offered.

THC’s lifetime plan comes in both UNIX and Windows version.

PRQ, reportedly operated by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, two of the founders of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent tracking site well known for being a frequent target of Hollywood movie studios and other intellectual property crusaders, is located in Sweden.

Gottfrid and Fredrik’s experience with The Pirate Bay has given PRQ’s operators a wealth of experience in dealing with hostile legal action from corporate interests.

PRQ provides bulletproof hosting, secure no questions asked services to a limited number of customers, maintaining almost no customer information and keeping few or no logs of their activity. Previously only well-known amongst spammers and gambling site operators, bulletproof hosting may in this instance be a vanguard in fighting for people’s rights to freedom of speech.

US District Judge Jeffrey White issued the order to pull down Wikileaks Friday, February 15, at the behest of Swiss bank Julius Baer, which accused the site of illegally hosting some documents that the poster alleges show the bank enabling activities like money laundering and tax evasion.

The all-points takedown notice has been criticized broadly as an offense against freedom of speech. The order has been largely ineffective in silencing the site, which is still available via its IP address and at its India- and Belgium-based domains.

A quick check to the belgium site reveals that Julius Baer had dropped its lawsuit against Wikileaks.

Examples of the new features the company included in their new plans are the cPanel web hosting and the unlimited domain hosting.

Afhosting.com offers three plans all catering to different customer types. The Starter plan with 30GB storage and 100GB bandwidth capacity is geared towards the personal websites and only cost $5.99 a month. For less than double the price, you get to enjoy their professional plan; complete with twice the storage and bandwidth capacity. They even have the Business plan with its’ unlimited bandwidth for only $14.99/month.

Kenny O, ICT for Afhosting.com, stated, “With Online Site Builder, which is included free with all our web hosting plans, you can build an informative, attractive web presence that you can update and maintain in-house, without contracting outside developers.”

Steve Marshall is an English travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working, thanks to the United States government.

From the opening of a New York Times article, A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears, this paragraph initially conveys a message of fear and panic across the cyber-world. However, reading further into the article reveals yet another issue.

The story goes that Steve, a british national who lives in spain and operates a travel agency, had 80 of his websites disabled; just because the American government suspects him of promoting terrorist activities.

eNom took down his websites from their Domain Name Servers when they learned that they were on the US Treasury’s blacklist, without even notifying Steve of the incident.

For starters, this is absurb and a perfect example of the American government nosing into other people’s businesses. On top of that, it shows the incompetence of the American government in generalizing everything in site that has the slightest hint of threat to them.

How could that they blacklist all of Steve’s domains that has a term “Cuba” not also shut down the last remaining domain, www.cuba-guantanamo.com? It is just as if they are choosing the list from a dart board.

Such overly generous offering has always been frown upon. Many in the web hosting community brand the practice as “overselling” - wherein a host portions out far more storage of bandwidth than it actually has - at best a marketing gimmick.

However, doing some research off Google, I found this positive thread review of VEXXHOST from Webhostingtalk. Not to sound too eager, but I am pretty convinced that this web host might have some flexing muscle after all. An excerpt from the thread as followed:

…So far no downtime, pretty fast load time. Now for [their] support I go through the contact form and I recieve assitance about 15-30 minutes later, which is pretty good but it might be faster if you go through the ticket system where you can choose if it is urgent or low priority. So far I am very happy with there service.

Providing a range of services, including shared hosting, reseller, virtual private servers and dedicated server plans, the company says it also offers Fantastico, a money back guarantee and discounts on the Web CEO SEO software.

For starters, web hosting is a promising industry with huge untapped market. So far, only a very small amount is hosted by large web hosts (4-5%) while others are gathered in small or middle hosts (more than 10,000 accounts). What Google has is tons and tons of money to start a web hosting business and expand it into a world class act. Before we know it, Google will be eating up our customers.

There are no major obstacles for Google to get into the business, really. In a web hosting business, as long as you have a web connection, you can easily resell hosting. And, Google have that and more…

Many will eagerly pay to get pay-per-click. Google can easily give up #1 spots on the search list to market a their Web hosting packages. Or simply create new marketing spot above the search results to accommodate it.

To build a great hosting company, you need the skilled staff to provide smooth traffic for the customers; block harmful viruses, worm, and hackers; and maintain the 100% uptime to avoid server downtime. Google has all of them.

A desirable e-mail extension is one of the perks from having your own domain name. Why can Google enter the business? Gmail of course! Although wasn’t flawless, at least Google has mail service. They already have huge amount of e-mail customers, meaning they’re familiar with e-mail management and can promote hosting service to uncountable customers.

Most will only do business with a brand they trust. And, Google *is* a household name.

To counter such an act will require tremendous amount of effort, not to mention, deep enough pockets to offset any marketing campaign made.