Rating:
(4/5) 
Currently rated as #4
Type of Review:
Price and Cost Effectiveness, Data
Center, Connectivity, Customer Service
General Impressions:
Pros:
- Cheap but with long sign-up times
- CPanel control panel which is easy to use
- Multiple domains
- 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
Cons:
- Only one plan which makes upgrading as your
business grows difficult
- Not recommended for Ecommerce (low level shopping carts, and
no real support for their open-source shopping carts)
Price Vs. Features and Support:
You do get a lot of storage & transfer for the
price of just $6.95/mo (with 12 month signup). But
keep in mind that most websites use less than 50
MB of storage space, and less than 2 GB of transfer
per month. The lack of any available upgrade path
is a common problem among "one-plan wonder"
hosts.
There is also a lack of specificity
on their public site regarding what features are
available once you do sign up. PHP and MySQL are
fairly standard in the industry, and are available,
as are Joomla and Drupal (open-source content management
systems) and WordPress blogging modules. Most hosts
offer at least the option for ColdFusion, Java,
.NET, etc., but it took a phone call to find our
exactly what is available.
Ecommerce:
They offer Agora Cart, Zen Cart,
and osCommerce which are open source
(free) shopping carts that anyone
can download by going to their
respective websites. Since they
are free, you are not going to
get the tech support that you would expect
with software that is backed
by a company's tech support department
(like Miva Corp.). But if you
are tech savvy, and you just
want a basic storefront, then
it will probably work for you.
Servers & Connectivity:
ANHosting is based in the Equinix
IBX Center in Chicago, an impressive facility that is secure
against threats both man-made and natural. The Chicago facility
has over 200 networks available, accessing most major Tier 1,
many Tier 2, and most Broadband networks along with major international
carriers. It's an impressive datacenter and your data should
be well-taken-care-of there-in.
Customer Service:
ANHosting uses the MPCustomer Help
Desk system. This is a very robust
system that allows the user to
ask a question via the trackable
ticketing system. They now have
a live chat and phone service
available for support, which
is an improvement over their
previous ticket-only support.
