IX Web Hosting is a solid option when looking for a Wordpress Web Hosting provider. Easy, scripted installer allows fast installation of Wordpress as a blog or CMS. I use Wordpress on many of my websites with great success. Wordpress is easy to be installed and it is easy to be customized, too. I use about 6-8 different plugins and I usually fall back to my favorite Wordpress Theme Thesis.

Thesis is not a free Theme, but in return for the price tag it a) comes with great support and b) is frequently updated. It also has a great benefit of being very SEO-friendly. You will not need the All in One SEO plugin (even though that is a great plugin) because Thesis has many or most of the options built-in already. This reduces the need for an additional Wordpress plugin on your site = less maintenance.

IX Web Hosting offers a huge traffic allowance with each of their accounts. They market it as “unlimited”, but if you read the ToS (Terms of Service) you can see that there are other ways how this is limited (think CPU and memory on the server). However – read this – it is important to know – the overall web hosting package still offers huge amounts of bandwidth and most users will fail to come even close to those limits. So, the unlimited is a marketing gimmick, but the cheap web hosting behind it is very good (one reason why I like IX Web Hosting for Wordpress hosting).

Check out IX Web Hosting here.

Check out Thesis here.

How do I pick a web host when I have the need for web hosting? I ask myself this question in one way or the other quite often when having an idea for a new website (I am a website addict so to speak). For one I often go back to the web hosts I know, but I also try new ones depending on my needs. As an example not too long ago I was starting a project targeting users in the Eurpean Union and so I was looking for a web host in Germany. I found a good host by leaving the established path.

So, how do I find and pick a new web host? I browse the internet and visit web hosting forums, webmaster forums, hosting blogs and web hosting related resource websites. I look at forum discussions where other people were searching for a new host and then research the recommendations other people make. I always pick a host that offers a money back guarantee and I always have a plan B in mind when trying a new web host. I also contact sales or support to see how fast they respond and even more important – how they respond. This often gives you a good indicator of what to expect from a web host in general.

I do not do complicated speed tests or performance testing. I follow my own look and feel and decide then if I like this web host or not. I know how fast my websites have to load and how long it takes to upload files to a host (I have many websites as you can tell). Only when I see a problem I test ping times or use an external tool to verify the performance.

Always do research and spend some time doing so before signing up with a web host. I always maintain a list of 2-3 web hosts in case one goes belly up and I need to switch my site over to a new provider. This happened to me about 8 years ago and I felt being hostage of a web host and learned/prepared from that incident. So, this is never going to happen again to me (knock on wood).

I am writing this using first hand experience. One of my websites that was running quietly by itself decided to go belly up and this happened without me noticing for quite a while (blush/red face). What actually happened was a process that started filling the error log with messages and then when the account ran out of disk space, CPanel automatically took the site down – replacing it with a default page (in this case a basic Wordpress html page as the site was running wordpress and the database could not grow anymore). For whatever reason I did not see the emails notifying me about the account running out of disk space. As a result – this one specific website went offline for 2 months (!).

Now I know that this was clearly my fault and as a result I earned less money online. However, as the glass is always half full for me and not half empty there is a good take away lesson here – especially since this website is about web hosting. I am hosting many of my websites on so-called reseller web hosting accounts. I limit each account to a certain amount of disk space. If I would have hosted my website on a web hosting account with unlimited disk space instead I would have been just fine. My website did not run out of disk space because I was using GigaBytes of disk space, but it ran out of disk space because of an 80 meg error log. If I would have hosted my website on an account with unlimited disk space my site would have never been down. My website has been de-indexed from the search engines and I need to wait now until the engines find it again, re-index it, and then recognize that the site was there before and give me back my rankings.

So, the lesson I learned is fairly clear – pay more attention to my websites – even those that are designed as “set it and forget it”. My advice for you is if you are looking for web hosting or want to avoid that something like this happens to you, pick a web host that offers cheap web hosting with unlimited disk space. Here are my current favorites that fit this category + have a good reputation for high uptime and great support.

Hostgator

IX Web Hosting

JustHost.com

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Are you wondering what all the web hosting companies have to offer that separates them from each other? So am I sometimes. Unlimited bandwidth – it seems like every web host has that to offer. Unlimited disk space? Check – again it seems like that unlimited hard drives must have been delivered by the dozens to web hosting companies across the country. However, whenever I check out the local computer store, I never find hard drives with unlimited storage. And sure enough, if you would read the fine print (TOS) of many of those “unlimited” web hosts, somewhere buried deep down in there is a clause that sets things “right” when it comes to unlimited bandwidth or unlimited disk space. Thank you very much.

So, of course even many of the best web hosts out there are using the unlimited features to advertise their services and products. Are they different from all the other ones? It’s hard to tell, but you can be pretty sure that if your shared web hosting account reaches certain limits that they recommend you to get a dedicated server and right that is. The limit is usually not the bandwidth or the disk space, but the impact of your website to the CPU and the memory usage and that’s when unlimited suddenly becomes very limited.

So, how to work around that? Well, accept that unlimited does not mean unlimited. However, accept that you have certain resources you can use and that most people will never reach the limits of an unlimited web hosting account. The few that reach it, pretty much know that they should rather have a cheap dedicated server or a VPS for web hosting and that their busy website affects other websites on the same server in a very negative way.

So, now we got this out of the way, sign up for a web host that is known for good quality. I recommend the following web hosts as your web hosting providers of choice:

Hostgator

IX Web Hosting

JustHost.com

This posting is proudly presented by the Cordless Leaf Blower Website.

IX Web Hosting and Bluehost web hosting are both very solid web hosting companies. Both web hosts fall into the category “good web hosting company”. We wanted to compare both web hosts, but the different web hosting packages on each side make it a little difficult to do this for all packages. However, below you will find a high level comparison of features and pricing for the Business Web Hosting packages on each side.

Bluehost Web hosting is a professional web hosting provider. Bluehost promotes a business web hosting package with unlimited storage, unlimited transfer and unlimited domain hosting. To compare Bbluehost with ixwebhosting, we picked the ixwebhosting business package. This Business Web Hosting Package is not only aimed at businesses, but also at webmasters who require a little more from a shared web hosting account. The Ixwebhosting business plan comes with unlimited storage and unlimited data transfer as well as unlimited domain hosting.

In addition to above hosting features, ix web hosting is offering two free domain names when you sign up + multiple dedicated IP addresses. IX Web Hosting also comes with free merchant account access for ecommerce website hosting. This ixwebhosting business hosting package is currently selling at a low $6.45 per month, while the Bluehost hosting is selling at $6.95 per month.

Conclusion: IX web hosting is offering more hosting features for less money compared to Bluehost! Both web hosts are great companies to host with.

Read our review about the IX Web Hosting Expert Plan

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