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iPower - The Leader in Web Hosting founded in October 2001, provides web hosting and web services for small and medium sized businesses worldwide looking to build, manage, promote and profit from an online presence. They have now over 700,000 member websites from over 100 countries.

They now offer one free domain name, 1,500 GB of space, 2,500 e-mail addresses, 15,000 GB of bandwidth, and the ability to host unlimited domains with just one hosting package for $4.95 a month. You’ll also be able to market your site with $80 worth of search-engine marketing credits! Surely the plan includes PHP and MySQL support (25 databases) and other options common to all providers.

A competitive plan for this price. Recommended.

Reliability and speed of access
Suppose you run big budget advertisements for getting visitors at Ad networks like Google Adwords, Yahoo or MSN and your host regularly becomes down. As you see, you will lose money at the very basic level. Look for web hosts which guarantee at least 99.5% or higher..

Data Transfer (Traffic/Bandwidth)
Do not believe web hosts that advertise “unlimited bandwidth”. The host has to pay for the bandwidth, and if you consume a lot of it, they will not silently bear your costs. Many high bandwidth websites have found this out the hard way when they suddenly receive an exorbitant bill for having “exceeded” the “unlimited bandwidth”. Always look for details on how much traffic the package allows. If you have a highly popular website, read deeply policy statements about unlimited bandwidth.

Disk space
Basically the thumb rule is simple. If you don’t need, do not buy it. If you will run a blog with only web pages and images without media files like mp3, avi files you will not need such let’s say 10GB and don’t forget to use disk space wisely. If you don’t need files make backup to your local computer and other data storage medias like dvds.

Technical support
Your techie guys should respond you individually and know what they are doing. Test them with some questions and problems and email at the night hours to see when they will reply back.

Control Panel

This is called various names by different hosts, but essentially, they all allow you to manage different aspects of your web account yourself. Typically, and at the very minimum, it should allow you to do things like add, delete, and manage your email addresses, and change passwords for your account. I would not go for a host where I have to go through their technical support each time I want to change a password or add/delete an email account. Such chores are common maintenance chores that every webmaster performs time and time again, and it would be a great hassle if you had to wait for their technical support to make the changes for you.

Multiple Domain Hosting and Subdomains
It becomes important when you plan to open many websites. Be sure that you have enough limits at least for the next 2 years.

Price
The most expensive doesn’t mean always the best.

Monthly/Quarterly/Annual Payment Plans
My thumb rule is like this. I first get a one-month plan and continue with it 2 months. After that if everything is nice, I get a 3 months again, then 1 year payment plan. In that way, you assure that your host suits to your quality standards.

International Hosts
I prefer to host my sites in USA companies, because mostly they are more established and offer more options than local country solutions. The reason is simple, mostly all new developments are made in USA and other countries copy them offering more expensive plans with less options.