Hostmonster

Enjoy low cost Web site hosting with PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL for just a few dollars per month.

Use Hostmonster for low activity, low intensity Web sites. Feedback from Hostmonster users, people with a range of site sizes and types, suggests large sites will quickly reach the processing power limit provided by Hostmonster and will have to move to a higher power package, something Hostmonster does not offer.

What is the limit? Web sites based on static pages and simple Content Management Systems survive for years. Drupal is an example of a modern extremely flexible CMS and it can run on Hostmonster when used for simple sites. As soon as you switch on a number of Drupal forums and other compute intensive options, the Web site starts to use too much power per page and slows down to the point where you need an alternative service.

Again using Drupal as an example, although this applies to most modern CMSs, anonymous visitors see less intensive pages than people who are logged into a site. The logged in users receive pages full of special items based on their individual profiles and can use 20 or more times the processing overhead of a regular page. A site with a couple of logged in users and lots of anonymous visitors might survive on Hostmonster while a site with a few hundred users logged in at the same time will run over the resource usage limit.

When you have sites that expand past Hostmonster, you need a Web hosting service that includes the option of a VPS, Virtual Private Server, as the next step up before going to a dedicated server.

VPS and other higher power servers are fine when you have lots of visitors and money rolling in but where do you put all your experimental sites, all those sites that are only for a limited audience, and breakout sites? Hostmonster. Hostmonster lets you set up 100 MySQL databases which means you could set up 100 sites based on Wordpress or some other simple application.

Consider a shop that sells food. The shop might have a standard brochure style site that just lists their product range, telephone number, and address. They then start selling a special brand of coffee and decide to set up a site devoted to that brand, listing the styles of coffee and the origin of the beans. Next they start selling wheat free licorice and want a special site for the licorice. None of the individual sites will see a lot of activity because customers will visit just once to read about the product. The sites would be mostly static HTML and use very little resource. You put them on Hostmonster.

If the shop wants to add discussion forums to the coffee site because they are selling tons of coffee, they are making a big profit and can afford a better service. Move the coffee site to a VPS. Your cost for that one site might jump but the customer is already making hundreds or thousands of times more profit from the site than the cost of the site.

Hostmonster is the place to start sites, to reserve domains from purchase through development until they start to build big activity. A Hostmonster account could hold a separate Web site for every student in a class or every branch of your family or every historic building in your region.

The cost per site works out at a few cents per month. You could buy an account and donate it to your local school or charity as a form of sponsorship, or donate one site within the account. The low cost makes the possibilities endless.