I'm just starting to look for somewhere to host my website. There seems to be a lot of companys in the > $10 (IPowerWeb for example) range and then another group that is $20+ (EarthLink for example). They seem to offer similar services, in fact the cheaper ones promise more. Does anyone know if there is a good reason to go with the $20+ range webhosting? Are they more expensive because of name alone or do they really offer twice the service?

Thanks in advance,

Tim

There are a lot of hosts offering very cheap (or people may want to use "Affordable" instead) service. These hosts, though, usually don't have a real solid business plan especially a solid long-term business plan. For sure, they do not consider the effor they put into supporting their clients to be more worthy than their cost to their providers. You will see that many hosts are closing due to the fact that they can't really support their customers anymore.

So, the extra price you pay may not be for extra space/bandwith/feautures but most probably to support yourself. As one always say "you always get what you pay for". Bring your money to hosts that not only can support themselves, but also has the ability to support you too ...

just my 2 cents.

regards,
-dave

Bigger companies tend to charge more cause they have more overhead. They also have a big trade name which sells even more. Take AOL for an example. You can get any dialup for 9.99$ per month. But AOL charges almost 30$ now I think. Their name is what drives prices plus the constant expansion of staff. Smaller companies work more on a one on one basis and tend to not have many staff. Beleive it or not small-medium sized businesses can be better. When you call big companies you can be in a call queue for hours. Where most small-medium companies won't be near that long.

NixHosting,

that's also true ... perharps my opinion above was to one extreme :)
However, I am just really pissed to see many hosts offering 60GB of bandwith, 3GB of space for $35/mo ... This kind of host are what I really meant in my opinion above.

Thank you for your input.

regards,
-dave

Do either of you have an opinion on iPowerWeb? They were recommend on the "Web Hosting Reviews" page.

It's not so much twice the service, but different levels of the hosting food chain, and different overhead.

Earthlink is one of the country's oldest ISP's, founded in 1994. They provide hosting direct to customers from their own facilities (they are a facilities-based host). From a company like theirs, you can also get telephone support, rely on the fact that they have an experienced staff of network and server admins on hand to keep everything up and running, and that they will be using heavy-duty commercial grade servers. Their service is expensive to provide, due to overhead costs.

Some hosts rent or purchase a server and sell hosting from that (server-based hosts). These server-based hosts don't have the overhead of maintaining a corporate infrastructure, a backbone network and/or a hosting facility, a call-center or rack after rack of commercial-grade servers. With lower overhead, they can charge lower rates.

Resellers purchase space on servers, from either other resellers, server-based hosts, or facilities-based hosts. They have the least overhead and can charge the lowest prices.

All of these hosts can either be good, bad or ugly, so the price and the level of the industry is not a good indicator of how good the service will be. There are some notoriously bad hosts at the facilities level who charge a chunk of cash for their services. And some excellent resellers who charge little money for their services.

I have a Hosting company, and we sell packages of all sizes. What I would suggest that you do is call them. If you are not able to get a real person, go somewhere else