Rating:
(4/5) 
Currently rated as #5
What This Review Is Looking
At:
Price and Cost Effectiveness, Data Center, Connectivity,
Customer Service;
General Impressions:
Pros:
- Host Unlimited Domains
- Drag & Drop SiteBuilder
- "Unlimited" websites on a single
account
- 24/ Phone support
Cons:
- "One Plan Wonder" with nowhere to
go if you ever need to upgrade
- Limited Ecommerce Options
Cost Vs. Features & Support:
HostMonster is a more recent entry in the field
of one plan hosts. Their version of the one-plan
host makes the question of domains, disk space,
and bandwidth (the usual round numbers used as a
baseline comparison) moot with the word "unlimited."
While this sounds good, our experience with "unlimited"
plans is that there is a limit, but you don't know
what it is until you exceed it and have to pay a
hefty overage fee. Make sure you read the service
agreement or otherwise get in writing what, exactly,
is allowed on their plan.
Beyond that Of interest is the availability
of the lesser-known scripting language "Ruby
on Rails", which is not a common offering. More common, PHP and MySQL join well
known open source apps like Coppermine, Mambo, and
Joomla to round out the tools offerings. All in
all a good selection for a CPanel/Fantistco host.
The unlimited domains is a nice touch. The room
provided on the hosting account is good for a few
small sites, so you could certainly save some cash
if that's what you need. Obviously "unlimited"
is only "unlimited" until those GB run
out.
Ecommerce:
Basically, this isn't the kind of host to consider
for any serious, mission critical online shopping
sites. They do provide the open-source Agora Cart
and osCommerce, sturdy if not quite feature rich
carts that will run basic stores.
Support for Zencart and osCommerce are now featured.
They support SSL for security and you can generate
a free cert, though unsigned certs aren't much
better than no cert at all.
Servers and Connectivity:
HostMonster claims they're running on Quad proc
Opterons, and the test site we set up responded
well. Keep in mind, no matter how powerful the
server, it can still be overloaded, the difference
is only where the threshold is breached. They
offer data backups, always a nice feature, and
run on a very impressive OC-48 backbone connection.
Customer Service:
HostMonster offers 24/7 tech support through their
email response system and phones. Response
was generally good, though the first level support
was prone to simply opening tickets, which we
could have done ourselves via their help desk.
Still, this is pretty much the norm as far as
first level support goes, so we can't knock
them too much on this. They provide the phone
support, which is a big plus over any host that
doesn't.
