A host must be dependable, secure reliable and robust.
We ensure the backgrounds of the host are solid and they have a proven historical track-record of reliability and service.

All our top five hosts meet these criteria, each hosts tens of thousands of customers a around the world and have been in service a minimum of three years – one has six years’ service.

Figures quoted by hosting companies for server uptime are usually measured over a twelve month period excluding maintenance times. Our Required uptime is 99.5% This is a more than acceptable level and is exceeded in all cases by our top five.

The host must demonstrate secure practices and backup procedures

The service must provide enough storage to host a good sized site and enough bandwidth to cope with the kinds of files and information accessed by your audience.

Our minimum criteria is 800MB storage space and 20 GB bandwith This is more than enough for the average website. We have seen a quote that the average site, if there can be such a thing, is about 25MB (source lunarpages.com) This means you could have a decent sized site on any of our hosts with ease. This level of capacity would only need to be any greater if you intend to have a very high number of vistors ( 1,000,000+) per month and vey large files on your site. Our hosts comfortably exceed these levels on all counts – some by a very long way! So you’ll have no trouble hosting with any of these companies. In any case they will offer you a package to suit if your needs are greater.

We also insist on sufficient email capacity – a minimum of 50Mb per inbox is required over several email accounts.

The service must include the basic features that web development demands. Of course, where possible we want more, more, more, as long as quality doesn’t suffer in other areas as a result!
As a bare minimum we demand:
A user friendly online control panel for your account
MySQL database
Frontpage extensions
POP3& SMTP
Email forwarding
Web Mail
CGI Bin
PERL
FTP

All the hosts offer these and more.

While we’ve listed the basic plans offered by these companies, they may and do offer more sophisticated packages for those that need them. Add-in features can also be bought for specific plans, so just ask the host for details.

There must be a toll free telephone support service 24 hours per day 365 days per year. There must be a record of exemplary customer service and a ready source of user feedback to monitor user satisfaction

Our hosts must be exactly that – the host. Not a third party that’s reselling the host’s services. We insist they must run their own servers. This means you have direct contact with the people running the box. The bottom line is better service to you.

The cost must be under $10 per month. Please note that to achieve this, you may have to sign for a one-year contract. This is standard practice in the industry. See individual deals for details. There are often many special deals – e.g you may an additional month free or they may include a free domain name etc.

We haven't just taken the host's prices at face value, although, we obviously list these too, we've looked at what you are actually getting in the packages and tried to make the fairest comparison we can.

We've called it the tendollarshack monthly price comparison

Firstly, we've chosen closely matched products from each host that will meet the needs of the majority of users. Of course, the packages aren’t all identical. For example some are e-commerce ready, others aren’t and they have a range of technical differences and similarities, so you've a choice here to suit your individual, technical or business needs.

Secondly, we’ve tried to anticipate the needs of the ‘typical customer’.

"Can there be such a thing?" I hear you ask maybe not, but that hasn't stopped us inventing one!

Our typical customer wants a host that will give ample storage and bandwidth to host a typical personal or small business website - nothing massive but not tiny either.

Take our Bandwidth Calculator for a spin (you'll need javascript enabled on your browser) to get a feel for the amount of space and bandwidth you yourself may need. You may be surprised how little you actually require. It will also tell you straight away if your requirement will blow the capacity the of the packages here and you are indeed not a typical customer!

Our typical customer also wants a domain name registered at the same time and they want a 12 month contract period.

We've used this benchmark because domain-name registration can account for 15%+ differences in annual costs at this level. Some hosts include it in the overall price, others don't, so we've included it for all cases. (note you can get domains registered elsewhere, often more cheaply but sometimes, don’t you just think “for the sake of five bucks, what the hell!!! “) Also some hosts are offering one or two free month's hosting in addition to the twelve month period, so we've factored that in too.

So, the 'tendollarshack monthly price comparison' tries to show how the costs actually compare across the packages for as generic a customer requirement as possible.

In some cases it increases the monthly cost from that advertised and in one case, the deal is so good it is actually lower than the advertised cost!

Overall, price is just one consideration, you need to consider what you want included in your package - do you actually want a domain name set up at the same time for example? We’ve factored it in, but you may want to factor it back out! Or do you want e-commerce facilities and what value do you place on these attributes?

Sounds good, yes? Oh the power of marketing! Well, read on… let's talk about this phrase that's designed to lure us in.

Most hosts advertise in this way – It’s great marketing and it is, of course completely true: There are no set up fees and the monthly cost is actually extremely low (as we will go on to explain). However there’s a catch – it may not actually mean what you think it does!

You'd be forgiven for thinking that 'No Set Up Fees, Low, Monthly Costs' means you can get an account for free then pay your hosting fees on a monthly basis.

Far from this being the case, you'll actually need to pay for a whole twelve months of hosting up-front.

This is standard for nearly every host you'll come across.

The monthly figure they quote is just illustrative to give you a feel for the value you are getting and make the cost appear more palatable. Also, the free set up offer is nearly always conditional on you taking a 12-month contract.

If you don’t want to be tied in for twelve months, most hosts will offer three or six month terms, but you will be hit with a hefty set-up fee of around $20 to $30 plus you’ll probably pay more per month.

This is common practice industry-wide and please do not be put off. We're sure you still want to be around on the web a year from now and, believe us, you don't want to be swapping hosts willy-nilly. Just ensure you research your prospective host before committing.

Look through the hosts' user forums. They are open to non-members. Ask questions - they all have a 'pre-sales questions' section, and seek recommendations - as you are doing right now!

Very importantly, having said all that stuff about the marketing of these packages, these are absolutely bargain deals...

The cheapest deal here works out to about US$6.66 per month (that's not what the host quotes, that's our own tendollarshack monthly price comparison). Lets think about that for a moment…. They are practically GIVING the service away at these prices.

In fact, as a new customer, your host will probably have invested more money in you than you have in them!

Consider the huge investment in marketing and set-up costs - which they are writing off in these packages as part of their drive to build market-share.

At these rates, if you were to make just one call a month to their toll-free helpdesk it could well cost them your annual hosting fees.

These hosts want you to be happy, productive and provided with all the right resources to maximise your potential and therefore increase your usage of their services.

You then move up the host's value-chain and so they begin to see a profit from you. Which means, in the meantime, you’ll be getting a great service and support to ensure you’ll stay with them long enough!!

Bandwidth determines the amount of data, or pieces of information, that can pass from your website in a given period of time. When looking through web host specifications, you will see bandwidth figures quoted in Megabytes or Gigabytes per month or kilobits per second.

The higher the bandwidth, the more information that can be passed during the period in question.

The amount of bandwidth your site requires is determined by the number of visitors to your site, multiplied by the average size of your pages, muliplied by the number of pages downloaded per visit.

Therefore, more bandwidth will allow you more visitors, more page hits or larger page sizes or file downloads per month.

However, you may be surprised how little your site will need. Try our bandwidth calculator to find out.

The Bandwidth Calculator is designed to allow you to enter any three of the four basic variables that determine the bandwidth requirement of a website.

You enter any three of the following four variables (these are markerd with a * on the calculator) and the calculator does the rest:-

Visitors Per Day
Number of Pages viewed per visit
Average Page Size
Bandwidth of web host service in Gigabytes per month

Some days you'll get more traffic than others. Set this number to the amount you'd multiply your average daily visits by, to allow for peak periods

For example, if you get on average 100 visitors per day, but on the odd day you get 300 visitors, set the Contingency multiplier to 3 (300/100)

the average number of pages each visitor will view per visit

Estimate the average size of your web pages. Large pictures and video will seriously increase your bandwidth requirement. So if you have any of this kind of thing, make sure you estimate the number of downloads that your visitors will make per visit and include this with your page-size figure

Exceeding your bandwidth allocation normally results in penalties, possibly financial, from your host

The amount of file transfer bandwidth in Gb per month that your site will use per month (ignoring your Contingency Multiplier) Or the monthly Bandwidth limit of the web host service you are assessing

The amount of file transfer bandwidth in Gb per month that your site will use per month (including your Contingency Multiplier) This is to be on the safe-side so that you'll have ample space for unexpected traffic surges.