Heck, if you’re a bad website builder, you’re a bad website builder. There’s just no getting around that fact. And if you build your website right the first time, there’s no reason you should have to revisit it again, not for a long time. And if you do, your web site should hopefully bring in enough money that you can afford a web design better than the ones these sites’ll give ya.

With the same number of website builders as there are deadly sins, let’s take a look at the seven sites in particular you don’t even want to waste your time with.

1. GoDaddy Website Tonight

Corresponding deadly sin: Lust

Entertaining though their highly-sexed commercials may be, the GoDaddy Website Tonight interface includes so many ticks and upsells that you wonder how to even navigate, let alone construct a page of your own. And while I’ve always been a fan of GoDaddy’s prompt 24-hour customer service, the business here is building websites, not hosting them. If you’ve got a site to build and need a simple way of doing it, GoDaddy is not the builder for you.

2. Site Build It!

Corresponding deadly sin: Wrath

As if the almost-angry exclamation point weren’t enough to make you wonder about Site Build It, the general layout of the site itself helps you understand what it wants to help you accomplish: build another site like Site Build It. Essentially, it wants you to set up shop on the Internet quickly and easily; professionalism be damned. It can be effective, sure, but is it really the kind of site you’ve been looking for to build your Internet presence – or do you want a little more?

3. Weebly

Corresponding deadly sin: Sloth

We know we rated Weebly 5/5 stars in our review – heck, you’re talking to the same reviewer here – but there’s a reason Weebly should sometimes be avoided: if you don’t want such a dang simple web site.

Sloth is the appropriate deadly sin here, because there’s no ambition to Weebly’s site building tendencies, unless you yourself have the same lazy tendencies as it comes to building web sites. And if that’s the case, the 5/5 star rating makes perfect sense.

4. Homestead

Corresponding deadly sin: Pride

Why pride? Because Homestead thinks it’s more than it is, riding on the curtails of the far-superior Intuit site builder. There’s really no reason Homestead should exist, really, because it does come from that Intuit family of web site builders, and because Intuit already does the website-building thing so well already. Homestead’s lack of identity was a problem for me when I reviewed it and still remains reason enough you should avoid it altogether.

5. Soholaunch

Corresponding deadly sin: Greed

Greedy thanks to a too-high price of about $20/month, Soholaunch is in my dog house not because it’s necessarily the worst website builder you’ll find, but because website builders are inexpensive enough that I have a low tolerance for the monthly expenses they demand.

Marketing itself as a site builder for business, Soholaunch fails to realize how superior a resource like Intuit is, and fails to charge the appropriate price. A simple yet powerful complaint.

6. Jimdo

Corresponding deadly sin: Gluttony

Like so many at the all-you-can-eat-buffet, Jimdo isn’t satisfied until it’s had more. How so? Well, Jimdo starts off by doing everything the right way – quality service, attractive site templates – and then drops this bomb on you: unless you pay for their service, you’ll have to host ads on your Jimdo-made site.

Not exactly a new innovation, to be sure. But the pricing plans after that, like calories, add up quickly, making it a website builder you’ll want to avoid in favor of something a little simpler and a little bit more willing to share its extra fries.

7. Angelfire

Corresponding deadly sin: Envy

Remember when Angelfire was all the rage? Yeah, me, neither. A healthy dose of jealousy has kept them modern, however, as they’ve updated their web site over the years to compete with the other free web site builders out there. The problem? They haven’t really kept up with website builders in general, and are simply an also-ran.

While the tone of this article has taken a holier-than-thou approach, realize that there are redeeming qualities in some of the website builders here. Weebly, for example, is far superior to Angelfire. But if you have been considering a website builder on this list, it might be time to second-guess yourself.

The iPage website itself is professional, informative and definitely aesthetically pleasing. It without a doubt meets the standard you would expect from a company that has been in the business this long. Also, at the top of the homepage, there is a small dropdown menu that allows you to change the currency in which you purchase your hosting services, with five different currencies available to choose from. This is the first time I’ve seen something like this, and found it very welcoming. Personally, I really do wish more hosting companies did this, as it is a pain converting dollars to pounds so often!

As is my custom, this review will be broken down into a few sections:

• Features and Pricing
• Terms Of Service
• Testing
• Customer Support

Features and Pricing

iPage use a fairly common pricing structure, which is ultimately giving unlimited (using the term ‘unlimited’ loosely), disk space, bandwidth and other features. They do, however allow you to choose how long you wish to host with them. They do offer frequent discounts as well, however the average monthly cost seems to be between $2.95 and $4.95.

The pricing terms are pretty standard. You can be hosted with them for:

• 12 months
• 24 months
• 36 months

iPage do not offer monthly, semi quarterly or quarterly pricing structures. This is indeed a pain, and I wish all web hosts would jump on the ‘varied pricing periods’ band wagon however it seems this will forever remain a dream.

As far as features go, they offer pretty much everything you could ever want; unlimited domains, mysql databases, e-mail addresses and much more. They also offer a free site builder/blog for the inexperienced user. If you do not own a domain, you are given a free one for the life of your hosting account too.

iPage also offer a one-click software/script installer, which includes the likes of blogs and online stores, which is mentioned on the features page. They also offer something similar which goes by the name ‘Script Library’.

They also sport an ‘anytime’ money back guarantee. If for whatever reason you decide to cancel, they will refund you for the remainder of your host account. Also, if you decide to cancel within the first 30 days of your hosting account, you will be refunded in full. They do mention, however that if you register a domain with them, you will have to pay a domain fee. This fee allows you to transfer your domain elsewhere.

Something odd I noticed during my review of iPage, however is that there is no mention of FTP accounts on the ‘features’ and ‘web hosting’ pages. This may be a feature that is limited or completely unavailable.

Terms of Service

IPage have a different kind of terms of service page. Instead of one long page full of text, it’s broken down into several links. Around thirteen links in total make up varied policies, acts and forms. However, when taking a look through, some of these pages were quite long, and all combined would probably make up around three ToS pages.

I read through some of the policies and acts, such as the user agreement, and the acceptable use policy, and to no surprise, they were filled with legal jargon. However, this agreement is pretty much the standard you would expect to see upon reading it.

The cancellation policy states that you are entitled to a full refund within the first thirty days of receipt. It also seems iPage do not have an uptime guarantee of any kind.

Testing

After the initial sign-up process, I received a few of the expected e-mails; a confirmation of my services, an invoice and a welcome/getting started e-mail. Now, most getting started e-mails tend to annoy me as they do not include the desired information I wish to have. This was definitely not the case with iPage. The main body of the e-mail started off by thanking me for hosting with them then proceeded to inform me how to get started. It also told me how to set-up e-mail, gain traffic, and how to make use of scripts such as blogs. There was also a sidebar with all my important information with links to areas like account settings, control panel, user guides and support information. It also told me vital information like account login information, nameservers and mailbox server information. The amount of times I see an e-mail like this when I sign up with a web host is very few, so iPage instantly won me over with this.

When logging into the control panel, I was immediately surprised to notice that they did not use the industry standard cPanel control panel. They instead made use of the vDeck panel. The panel itself looks very professional and sleek. It makes use of a sidebar and modules to separate important information and applications and scripts. The ‘Website’ module even has an item dedicated to the WordPress platform for ease.

I decided to give the vDeck script installer ‘SimpleScripts’ a spin and see what it had to offer. The script installer offered a ton of scripts, more than I thought I’d initially see. It contained popular scripts such as Joomla, Drupal, PHBB3, and many more. It also contained some modules I didn’t expect to see, such as mailing list and live chat scripts. vDeck is certainly impressive and one heck of a contender against cPanel.

I went ahead and installed the script Joomla, and it was as easy as I had initially hoped. I clicked on the script, clicked the ‘Install’ button, and it prompted me to choose what version I’d like to install, and any additional information I wanted to enter, such as user data and site information.

As usual, I went ahead and monitored the uptime and downtime of the website for the period of one week using a service called Pingdom. I was happy to see that iPage only suffered one downtime occurrence, which only lasted five measly minutes. iPage sat comfortably at 99.95% uptime. This is certainly a strong number and I am definitely impressed that the up-time was that high. iPage are doing a good job of keeping websites online!

Customer Support

iPage offer a telephone support service as well as a live chat support service. It seems they do not offer any kind of e-mail or ticket support however. They have a services information ticket form, as well as a form for account specific enquiries.

iPage could certainly make use of using a ticket and e-mail system, however it seems that they are living in the era of live support and believe in giving their customers answers to their questions as quickly as possible, and I can certainly support that.

I went ahead and decided to ask a live chat representative a question concerning submitting a html website to google. The transcript went as follows:

Ramon Riley: Hi, how are you today?
Smair: Hello, I’m fine thanks, and you?
Ramon Riley: I’m great, thank you. How can I help you today?
Smair: I was wondering how I would go about submitting a html website to google?
Ramon Riley: Are you referring about Google Analytical tool?
Smair: No, I meant using meta tags, and so on.
Ramon Riley: To submit your website, you can use Google Webmaster tool.
Smair: How would I go about doing that?
Ramon Riley: You can submit your website to Google at:
Ramon Riley: http://www.ipage.com/product/googlewebmastertools.bml
Smair: Okay, thank you.

That conversation was short and wasn’t particularly friendly besides the first response. It took around seven minutes to be acknowledged by someone to help me with my query, and it took around three to four minutes per response. Their customer service representatives really let them down on this one, because live support is supposed to be fast and easy. Also, I was given a robotic answer to my question, in fact, the conversation itself pretty much felt completely robotic. I was given a link to a product page to a tool I knew nothing about. I wasn’t given helpful step-by-step instructions; I wasn’t given a direct link to a helpful article listed in their knowledgebase, no, I was given a link to a webmaster tool. I may be coming on a little harsh here, but hey, support representatives should really try and help their customers with whatever queries they have, even if they are simple.

My Conclusion

iPage are a good quality ‘unlimited’ host that offer all you could ever want in a web hosting plan. They carry great uptime results and are a reliable service for the price. The custom control panel they offer is definitely of high standard, as is the script installer. iPage however should execute more payment plans as roping in customers for a minimum period of one year isn’t as enticing as one would think. Also, they should re-consider the way they handle their customers during technical support issues as making customers wait is not an option. The representatives should be more friendly and helpful as opposed to cold and short.

While most of us tend to spend Valentine’s Day emptying our wallets in an effort to impress our significant other (and subsequently, helping the local restaurant and florist industries to stay afloat for yet another year), eight years ago, three guys named Chad, Steve and Jawed decided they weren’t going to conform to this notion and instead, started work on a website that quite literally changed the world; YouTube.

They officially registered the domain YouTube.com for a few dollars on February 14th 2005 and just over a year later, sold the website to Google for $1.65 billion; so not a bad ROI then.

There’s a whole host of reasons that the site was so successful with the most obvious being that they managed to create a product that was in high demand at the right time, and did it well. I remember the times before YouTube and I remember embedding music video codes on my Piczo site (yes, I was a teenager), often struggling to find the code I needed on the poor selection of sites available. Needless to say, YouTube solved this problem within just a year-or-two of operations and opened up a world of other, user-generated content too.

I think another huge reason was so successful is the fact that it marketed itself. Every time a user embeds a video from YouTube on their site/blog, the YouTube branding is prominent on the video player and this alone would have introduced a huge number of people to YouTube. Sure, it might seem like an obvious tactic now, but back in 2005 it wasn’t something that every company was doing.

However, I think the main reason for YouTube’s success is the almost democratic nature of the site. The journey YouTube has been on over the past few years has been governed almost entirely by its users as they’re the ones uploading the content. Essentially, it’s this democratic nature and community-oriented experience that’s at the heart of just about every hugely successful website out there.

Think about the sites you visit on a daily basis for example; Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace (back in the day), Instagram and even Google to an extent – their users are at the heart of them all as essentially, it’s the user-generated content that drives the sites forward.

So, who should we thank for the success of YouTube? Ourselves. We made the site what it is today.

Of course, none of it would have been possible without its founders, investors, a great initial concept and a number of great decisions made over the past eight years but these days, it’s the community that drives the site.

History of YouTube Infographic

Here’s a brief history of the YouTube.com site from formation to the present day.

So your vertical response platform of choice shouldn’t be a choice at all, right? AWeber for the win!

But not so fast. Whenever something comes at a price, there should be a question we as potential customers are always asking: is there something out there that’s not only better, but cheaper? Let’s take a look at five email marketing options not named AWeber and see which might be the best “alternative” for you.

1. iContact

Here at Clickfire we wrote in our iContact review that iContact is concerned not only with the function of vertical response, but the visuals as well. Sending out an email newsletter, after all, is a visual experience unless your emails make more noise than mine do. iContact differentiates itself from the mainstream boys like AWeber by making things easy on the eye – and that’s exactly what some people prefer.

If you’ve got an online business or presence that needs to worry more about how your brand looks than how its newsletter operates, this might be the vertical response software for you.

2. Constant Contact

The beauty of Constant Contact is that they immediately make a name as an AWeber alternative with the classic offer: try them out for free. Sure, it’s not hard to find free trials of online services these days, but Constant Contact’s 60-day free trial is noteworthy enough that it alone should merit your consideration.

Constant Contact’s features are all there, and the pricing plan – once you enter day sixty-one, that is – is affordable and definitely a great alternative to the likes of AWeber. Should you decide to opt for Constant Contact, you’ll likely wonder why you considered many other alternatives.

3. StreamSend

StreamSend, although somewhat difficult to pronounce, definitely sets itself up as an AWeber alternative by adding plenty of features. After all, it’s hard to miss the big guy like AWeber if you find someone else that gives you all the goods.

All of the features, from analytics and full-on email crafting, are here – but it’s not any one particular thing that StreamSend does that merits your consideration as making it your AWeber alternative. It’s the combination and the compilation of all of these features that ends up hitting the home run.

4. JangoMail

We like the catchy name, as you found out our JangoMail review, and although the actual email editor looks like it belongs in the late 1990′s-Internet, the combination of price, features, and overall quality were enough to give a general thumbs-up for yet another AWeber alternative.

How does JangoMail make it happen? A simple pricing plan that’s fair, solid analytics and of course, the aforementioned email editor that does everything AWeber is capable of. JangoMail might sound like a simple but catchy younger brother to AWeber but it packs a more powerful punch than that.

5. myEmma

Emma (review), located at myEmma.com, is the email marketing solution that you should really give a second look at. It’s not only a considerable AWeber alternative, but it’s an alternative to the four other email marketing solutions we’ve already listed.

Why? It’s focused on the visuals, and makes a perfect way to brand your email newsletter as a small business. You can essentially “download” all their good stuff for immediate use and look like a quirky professional within a matter of minutes. Is that enticing enough to leave AWeber? For certain businesses it is.

The point of all the above is to demonstrate that while AWeber is a fine choice as your email marketing solution, there’s a lot more to the story if you’re just willing to dig a little and find out what else is out there. Today’s web isn’t all about the one or two companies doing it right (cough – unless you’re talking about Google – cough), but the multitude of options you have on your plate. Make the best use of them.

IPOWER are a US based web host similar to that of iPage and FatCow. You may have noticed these similarities, and this is because they are all owned, along with several others, by the Endurance International Group (EIG). IPOWER was founded three years later than iPage however. Let’s go ahead and scope out the details and see if iPower along with the rest of its sibling hosts contain mostly similarities or are quite different than one another in aspects including reliability, speed and script performance.

As always, this review will be published in the following sections:

• Features and Pricing
• Terms of Service
• Testing
• Customer Support

Let’s go ahead and get started.

Features and Pricing

IPOWER, unlike iPage, have a pricing structure with varied plans, instead of a varied term pricing system for unlimited specified features. IPOWER are currently offering three pricing plans. They are as follows:

• Starter Plan: $3.95 p/m
• Pro Plan: $8.95 p/m
• Pro Plus: $12.95

IPOWER does not allow you to pay monthly, quarterly or biannually. You are given two pricing periods: yearly, or biennially. This is certainly inefficient as you have to pay a large sum at the beginning of the period and can’t really take out a ‘trial period’ with the host.

The Starter Plan contains 5GBs of disk space and 250GBs worth of bandwidth. This is definitely more than enough for any starter website. You are not offered a free domain with this plan, and if you wish to buy one from them, it’ll cost $13.99 per year. You are also limited to using one domain, and are only given one MySQL database and e-mail account. This is extremely low and they should really offer more of these resources with this plan as it is definitely not adequate. The account also has limited e-commerce features offered. With this plan, you also have to pay a $10 setup fee.

The Pro Plan offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth. You are also given a free domain name for the lifetime of the account. You are allowed to use unlimited domains in conjunction with the account. You are only given 25 databases though, and for a ‘pro plan’, I was honestly expecting a much larger number. These days, hosts offer up databases in the thousands, and most of the time, unlimited. I am unsure why iPower reserves such a low number of databases for a higher priced plan. The amount of e-mail accounts has significantly improved however as it jumps from one to 25,000. Unlike the starter plan, you are given access to e-commerce features and varied scripting functions and platforms.

The Pro Plus plan is somewhat similar to the Pro plan, by offering you unlimited disk space and bandwidth, however they offer three free domains for the lifetime of the account. This is something I have never seen before, as most hosts just offer one free domain in the highest price account. This is definitely a great offering from IPOWER. Yet, they are brought right back down as this plan only offers 25 MySQL databases; the exact amount from the Pro plan. I would’ve thought they would offer at least double that of the plan below, but to my surprise, I was incorrect. It seems almost not worth it to shell out and extra 5 dollars a month for a limited amount of databases. Aside from this, you are given unlimited e-mail accounts, as well as a premium website builder, and various premium scripts such as ShopSite (a premium website builder).

In my personal opinion, the Pro plan seems like the best one to go for. The starter plan is simply not adequate due to its lack of resources, and the Pro plan pretty much just hits the mark. The Pro Plus plan is essentially not worth it as all you’re getting is a couple extra domains and e-mail accounts. I’d say stick to the Pro plan and keep it safe and save yourself a little money.

iPower also offer a 30 day money back guarantee where you will be refunded in full for whatever pricing period you have chosen.

Unfortunately, IPOWER do not offer any sort of up-time guarantee, so it’s a guessing game from here on out.

Terms of Service

The iPower terms of service page is somewhat identical to that of iPage’s. The only difference really is the change of name. It is broken down into links, with several policies and acts. The user agreement link is a long article full of legal jargon, which is what you’d expect; however the policies outlined within it are very standard.

The unlimited usage policy states that if any user exceeds whatever IPOWER deem as the strict usage limit, their hosting account will be suspended or deleted without warning and the user should understand, and have knowledge in the fact what could be considered using too much resources and ultimately causing problems for others on the server.

The other policies include SEO agreements, anti-spam and domain name and copyright disputes.

Testing

Testing IPOWER was a new experience for me. Why? I never actually got to test the services thoroughly due to a nameserver issue. I bet you’re asking: “Why are you posting this if you can’t complete the testing process of the review?” The reason is because this gives a whole new take on the reviewing process. The interesting fact is; these things happen. Customers have to deal with complicated issues that don’t normally occur often.

Let me elaborate a little more on the situation. At the beginning of every hosting review, I start the monitoring process. This means for a specific time frame (let’s say a week), the uptime and downtime is monitored. Initially, I change the nameservers to the web host I am reviewing and leave it to monitor for one week. At the end of the week, I’ll have a specific frame of time where the monitoring tool I use (thanks to pingdom for providing us this tool) gives me a detailed report.

The issue with IPOWER was the nameservers did not propagate properly. This resulted in a monitoring report that had nothing but downtime. It was a meaningless report. I contacted IPOWER about the situation (the transcript can be seen below in the Customer Support section) and they suggested I contact my registrar as it wasn’t really an issue of theirs. I proceeded to contact my registrar, they did not understand the problem and suggested it was a problem with my web host. It seemed like a back-and-forth blame situation was happening here. I still do not understand why the nameserver propagation did not work, but after resetting the nameservers multiple times, it finally worked! However, this was at the end of the monitoring period and I couldn’t test the service thoroughly.

Luckily for you, the reader, IPOWER is a sibling to iPage, Fatcow and many others. IPOWER is pretty much identical to iPage; the control panel, welcome e-mails, script installation are all identical. EIG own these web hosts so it seems they must utilize a lot of the same software for some of the web hosts they own. This isn’t exactly original or good business practice but it sure is a good situation for this review. Feel free to read the iPage review to get a peace of mind on how iPower operate.

Customer Support

The customer support service from IPOWER is similar to that of iPage. They offer live chat support, telephone services and ticket support. I did contact their live chat support to resolve an issue I mentioned earlier regarding nameserver propagation. The transcript went as follows:

Stewart Davis: Hi, how are you today?

Smair: Hi there, fine, and you?

Stewart Davis: I’m great, thank you. How can I help you today?

Smair: I’m having a DNS issue. I set-up my nameservers around 6 days ago, and I still cannot access my website. I use namecheap, and set my nameservers to ns1/ns2.ipower.com.

Stewart Davis: Could you please provide me with the domain name?

Smair: <DOMAIN NAME>

Stewart Davis: Could you please provide me with your account username?

Smair: <USERNAME>

Stewart Davis: I have added the domain name to account.

Smair: Would you be able to tell me why it wasn’t working initially?

Stewart Davis: I have noticed that domain name is still not propagating to IPOWER. Please contact your current registrar and ask the status:

Stewart Davis: <registrar and address>

Smair: Okay, will do. Thanks.

Stewart Davis: You’re welcome!

Stewart Davis: Is there anything else I can assist you with today?

Smair: No thank you, have a nice day!

Stewart Davis: Thank you for chatting with us. Please feel free to contact us at any time. We are available 24×7.

Stewart Davis: Take care, and have a nice day!

IPOWER had extremely fast support responses. I was connected in under 30 seconds and I received a response shortly thereafter. The representative was very friendly and answered my questions thoroughly whilst providing additional information. I felt very welcomed and the responses were much better than I had originally expected. This was definitely a nice surprise.

Conclusion

IPOWER are a US web host owned by EIG; a sibling to those such as FatCow, iPage, JustHost and many more popular hosting companies out there.  They offer varied plans at a somewhat fair price, however some features are extremely limited, such as databases. They only allow two pricing periods, therefore it is a long-term commitment signing up, so you better make sure you are 100% convinced before signing up. The customer support service was very friendly and informative also. Due to initial issues, the reliability of the host is brought down as the issue was extremely abnormal. If the host could have avoided this issue, and had impeccable uptime (I guess we’ll never know), they would most likely be a 4 star host.

As it turns out, there’s quite a bit a logo has to offer a business – not the least of all, making you feel like you finally have a legitimate business up and running in the first place. A great logo can impact your web presence, your confidence when handing out business cards, your company’s memorability – heck, it accomplishes a lot. That’s why you need to get it right.

Enter the concept of crowd sourcing – turning to a crowd of designers to compete for the rights to sell you a logo rather than a single Photoshopping individual. The concept is pretty simple: you post up your logo needs and freelance designers from across the globe send you their concepts. You choose the winning design, pay them, and you each go on your merry way.

But choosing a logo – or any type of graphic design project, for that matter – isn’t the only decision you’ll have to make. You’ll also have to choose your crowd sourcing site, and this might be more difficult than it sounds. Luckily, Clickfire is here to present you with three “you can’t go wrong with…” choices that, well, you can’t go wrong with. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. 99 Designs

Click over to 99 Designs (see my review) yourself and you’ll see exactly why crowd sourcing is a concept that works. Although the real average of design “entries” you’ll find by posting a project at 99 Designs is 86, the point remains the same: you give these designers something to work with and you won’t be hard-pressed for a plethora of logo and web design options.

Paying out about half a million dollars in projects per month, 99 Designs is one of the most popular sites to accomplish the feat of crowd sourcing, which instantly makes it attractive to anyone who’s after the previously-mentioned plethora. And although Shakespeare asked** “what’s in a logo,” the truth is you can post any type of design project at a site like this. The options are plentiful and affordable – and that’s all you can ask for.

2. Crowdspring

What differentiates Crowdspring (see my review) from 99 Designs? Very little, actually, but that’s the point: it’s another solid option for your graphic design project.

A simple browsing over at their site will show you the same types of options you have available: post up projects for logos, web designs, banners, whatever. The end result is always the same: give out a healthy enough “reward” prize and you’ll be swimming in designs faster than you can say “Clickfire.com.”

3. DesignCrowd

I know what you’re thinking: I just took the two previous crowd sourcing sites and mashed their name together to construct a fictitious crowd sourcer and round out my promise of “three.” Luckily for you, that’s not the case, as DesignCrowd (see my review) is a legitimate site promising 50+ designs to choose from with every project you post.

The prices are reasonable – you’ll find lots of project budget minimums at about $200, as low as you’ll find anywhere – and you can fetch anything from T-shirt designs to stationary jubilation. Overall, it’s not a bad choice; but then again none of these crowd source sites are.

*No, he didn’t.

**Still didn’t.

SEO has never been an easy job. In fact, it is arguably one of the most difficult jobs out there in the world of computing. Why? Well, simply because it changes so often and there is no exact formula to achieving the first page rankings that so many companies desire. It is also an extremely competitive industry and one that requires a well organised, smart, up-to-date SEO campaign in order to be successful.

You might think that you’ve got your SEO campaign covered and this may very well be the case, but for how long? In an industry that moves forward as quickly as SEO, you need to be one step ahead of the competition and the search engines if you want long term rankings, but how do you do this? The answer; with video.

Strangely, very few SEO’s appear to be using video in their campaigns at all. Many of them are viewing it as “the latest trend” but it’s much more than that. Video is almost certainly the future of the web and those SEO’s that haven’t yet realised the huge benefits of video are going to quickly fall victim to the competition with SEO’s that have.

Don’t believe me? Here’s 4 reasons why your SEO campaign is truly doomed without video.

#1 – People Love Video

Let’s face it, people love watching videos online and it’s doubtful this is going to change any time soon. Take the recent success of viral sensation, Gangnam Style for example. This video is closing in on a billion views which is crazy when you take into consideration that the global population currently stands at just under 7 billion.

Of course, people love a lot of things; chocolate, money, gold, the love of a beautiful woman/man and you might be thinking; “why should I care what people love? I’m just an SEO after all”. The answer to this question is because that’s your job!

Think about it. Why do you spend hours writing a guest post? Because people love reading great content and will likely link back to it if they love it. Why do you create stunning infographics? Because people love information presented in a visually appealing way and will often share this. SEO is all about creating what people love as this is what attracts attention and inevitably leads to high quality links to your website.

#2 – Google Owns YouTube

What’s the one search engine that every SEO is trying to please? That’s right, Google. It’s the Google algorithm updates that everyone pays attention to and we have to remember, Google owns YouTube.

Why is this important? Well, firstly, it shows the faith that Google has in online video content. Since Google bought the site back in 2006, daily video views have escalated to over 4 billion views per day (and this was reported back in January 2012) and Google has started incorporating YouTube results into their organic search results. Secondly, YouTube is now the second largest search engine in the world (only second to Google). This means there are more searches every day on YouTube than on Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com or any other search engine. Obviously, this means people are searching for video content regularly which presents a huge opportunity for SEO’s and online marketers.

YouTube video views have been rising at an exceptionally high rate since the site first launched and there is no sign of this slowing any time soon. This further emphasises the point that video really is the future of the internet.

#3 – Online Video And Social Networks Are A Match Made In Heaven

As an SEO, you know just how important “social signals” are to Google and other search engines these days. Social shares on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks show that people are actually engaging with your content and therefore, your content must be high quality and also something that Google should be recommending to their users.

Obviously, getting genuine social shares is not an easy task, even with exceptional written content. However, it seems to be a completely different story with video. How many times have you seen a video in your Facebook or Twitter feed? Probably quite a few as people are constantly sharing videos; I see them on a daily basis.

Clearly, as more people see your video, it is going to attract more attention. This can often be media or press attention which can mean a nice, juicy link from their highly authoritative website.

#4 – Your Most Fierce Competitors Are Already Using Video

You know what they say, the early bird catches the worm and when it comes to video and SEO, this might not be far wrong.

Every industry has competitors, both online and offline, and it is quite likely that your most fierce competitors are already using video in their SEO campaigns. The truth is that if you ignored every advancement in SEO (such as the importance of high quality guest posts, social signals etc), your competitors would soon start ranking a lot higher than you and quite soon, you (or your client) would start to lose out on a lot of business.

If you don’t start thinking about video now, you’ll have a lot of catching up to do when you realise that your competitors have already gone through the lengthy process of having a video produced and have also started to integrate it into their SEO campaign, resulting in an influx of highly authoritative links to their site.

Sure, you can try and copy them at this point but the fact you didn’t act first means you’ve already lost the battle. It means your competitors are more “on the ball” and are likely going to be one step ahead of you in terms of SEO for the foreseeable future.

The Final Word

Incorporating video into your SEO strategy isn’t as hard as you might think. You can start by setting up a YouTube channel, sharing your video on social media profiles, adding your video to business directories and of course, your own website. The more of a buzz your content generates, the more attention, links and ultimately sales it’s going to generate for your business.

Remember, you don’t necessarily have to spend thousands on a professional production to create something your target audience will relate to. In fact, some of the most successful viral ads in the world were produced on shoestring budgets. So long as you create something that represents the personality of your business and appeals to your target market, you’re good to go.

Image Credit: Id Software LLC

One of Clickfire’s own reviewers has previously reviewed this host, however that was over five years ago and we felt it would be appropriate to post an updated review as they are an extremely well-known web host. The industry itself is constantly growing and updated reviews are definitely a must.

As usual, this review will be broken down into sections, consisting of:

• Features and Pricing
• Terms of Service
• Testing of Services/Uptime
• Customer Support

Features and Pricing

Bluehost execute a simple yet effective looking website; neither too much nor too less. They have the right amount of information displayed on the homepage not leaving you to look around the site for information that may be buried. The features and initial pricing structure are displayed front and center.

Bluehost do not have a set structure of plans, and instead offer all customers the same set of features. They do not use any plans of any sort and this is due to the fact that they are a web host who offer certain unlimited features. Bluehost are one of the veteran hosts that decided to incorporate the word unlimited into their features and made it one of the biggest marketing strategies used today within web hosting. Bluehost do allow you to choose how long you wish to host with them though, and the contract lengths are as follows:

• 12 Months – $4.95 per month
• 24 Months – $3.95 per month
• 36 Months – $3.95 per month

Unfortunately, BlueHost do not allow you to pay month by month. This is one of the most annoying pricing strategies used by web hosts to gain long-term customers, and it surprised me that a veteran host like BlueHost incorporated something like this.

The features that BlueHost offer which are unlimited are as follows: disk storage, bandwidth, domain hosting, pop3/imap e-mail support, e-mail accounts, add-on domains, parked domains and sub domains.

They also offer a free site builder for inexperienced users, as well as a free domain name for the length of your hosting account. You are of course given the use of FTP accounts and several varied SQL databases.

Upon sign-up, you are given the opportunity to include add-ons to your purchase. These include SiteLock domain support, website back-ups and a service called the BlueHost Pro package. The Pro package states you will receive the fastest servers available, better hardware, and increased security. It costs just under an extra 20 dollars per month for this package. Personally, I don’t think it’s worth it, and is most likely a marketing ploy used by the company in order to appeal to new, and potentially gullible consumers.

Terms of Service

The terms of service section is fairly long and boring. It is not particularly a joy to read, however it is pretty much the bog-standard terms and conditions you will see these days employed by the majority of web hosts.

It does state important information here and there considering the customer’s account, for example: BlueHost will set your account to auto-renew, and this is stated not to be an obligation, but a courtesy. The same applies to the domain of a customer’s account as well. If you wish to disable this service, you must notify BlueHost sixteen days before the next renewal period.

You can cancel your account at any time, and are given a 30-day money back guarantee. If you cancel within the first three days of sign-up, you are entitled to a full refund, however if you cancel after those three days, you will receive a refund consisting only of your hosting services but not your add-ons. Add-ons become non-refundable after the initial three day period.

It also states that BlueHost does not have any set limits for a hosting account; therefore you do potentially receive unlimited hosting. The same rule applies to site transfer.

Testing

After my initial sign-up, I received two e-mails; one was the obligatory “thank-you” e-mail, and the other contained several links to important resources, such as the control panel. Also, the day after, I received a phone call from a BlueHost representative verifying my domain and details, most likely for security reasons.

I logged into the control panel and was unsurprisingly met with the, albeit well customized, cPanel control panel. One feature I liked most about BlueHost’s control panel is that it gives you a lot more information in regards to your hosting account. Most web hosts that use cPanel often tell you how much allocated disk space and bandwidth you have used, yet BlueHost tells you much more. For example, the panel told me important information such as when the hosting account expires, programming versions, machine name/version and the account IP address, all of which is handy to know. Here is a small preview of the control panel itself:

The control panel itself has many more items available, moreso than most other web hosts. There were several other modules, for example; a promotional module – which contained items linking to free cloud storage, free adwords coupons, free templates and other discounts and free promotional items. Other modules included SEO (search engine optimization) tools and partner links.

The first script I decided to install was of course WordPress. BlueHost have recognized that WordPress is among the most popular platforms out there today and have given it its own item in a module to easily install it. When I clicked to install it, I was given a choice of what version to install dating back from version 2.5. It also asked me if I wanted to create an administrator account or have one generated for me. It even allowed you to install a couple of popular plugins to get you started.

I then went on to install a few other scripts. Bluehost makes use of a script installed called ‘SimpleScripts’ that contains tons of platforms such as Joomla, Drupal, Magento, PHPBB and many, many more. The next script I installed was the content management system Drupal. The installation method was completely similar to that of the WordPress installation; it allowed me to choose the version, administration details and so forth. I installed a majority of other scripts ranging from e-commerce to forums, all of which had an easy installation, and worked perfectly. The installations were extremely fast and easy to complete

The site loading times, after installing the scripts mentioned above, were very fast. As BlueHost has its datacenters based in the United States, and I am based in the UK, I was happy to see extremely fast loading times. I used a service called Pingdom to monitor uptime and downtime. The results were quite surprising, however. The website received an enormous amount of downtime within the four-week time span. I received a total of 16 downtimes and 3 hours 40 minutes worth of downtime. This is unacceptable and is definitely a high risk to those looking to host a website for a growing business. The websites uptime after this four week period was 99.46%. This is a definite weakness from BlueHost and one that should be taken seriously.

Thanks to Pingdom for providing uptime results!

Customer Support

BlueHost utilize all mediums of help and support; you can submit tickets, call them, use live chat support, e-mail them and even send them a letter. You can phone their customer support line 24/7, however their other departments have varied calling hours. If you’d rather receive support via live support, that is also a 24/7 service. Their support number is toll-free within the US however it is not if you are calling from outside the US.

I went ahead and opened up a live-chat support conversation with a BlueHost representative. I unfortunately could not call their support number due to the obscene charges I would receive as I live in another continent; bad news for international customers. BlueHost have very specific categories when it comes to using live-support. This leads me to believe there is at least one representative per category. I proceeded to select the “E-Mail Questions” category and pose a question concerning using custom domains in conjunction with an e-mail address. You must enter your domain name and the last four characters of your hosting account password before proceeding however.

I was connected to a representative within five seconds and typically received replies typically every 15 seconds. These were in fact fast response times; however it felt like I wasn’t even talking to a human. The representative came off as a robot shooting me with answers from a knowledgebase. I feel BlueHost need to be more interactive with its consumers to truly help them, instead of blurting out a list of instructions, which is what I received.

After I received the information I needed, the representative asked me if I needed any more assistance, and that was that. I was then greeted with a survey questioning the legitimacy and helpfulness of the answers and instructions I received from the representative.

My Conclusion

BlueHost are a reasonable host that offer fairly cheap services with fast load times and helpful support services. They offer truly unlimited features such as disk space, bandwidth, e-mail accounts and domains. To top it all off, you also get a free domain for the first year of your hosting account period. If you decide to host with BlueHost, you are at a definite risk of receiving downtime which is, of course unacceptable for commercial businesses. The support is helpful, but feels automated and cold, which is generally distasteful and un-interactive towards consumers.

BlueHost Signup Takes 2 Minutes

Yes we actually timed it…

[Authors note: All data was collected and reviewed by using a monitoring service called Pingdom over the course of 4 months.]

All web hosts state they can offer you 99.99% uptime, hell; it’s pretty much a requirement to have that statement within a Terms of Service these days, but how do web hosts really compare when it comes to website downtime and sticking to their ToS promise? Let’s find out!

We will be basing these reports off of three previous web hosting reviews:

• Green Geeks
• MyHosting
• ClickHost

The first two hosts mentioned are better known than ClickHOST and have a larger consumer base and following. Both companies established themselves a fairly long time ago, and ClickHOST is a more modern web host, so it will definitely be interesting to see how these results pan out based on the longevity of the aforementioned hosts.

MyHosting Uptime

Let’s start with MyHosting. They have been in the business since the late nineties, so they should have the definite advantage here. Overall, they have 99.80% uptime. That’s a reasonable start for the web host, and is pretty average, I’d say. However, the website did it have its fair share of downtime, which was surprisingly a lot. It had a total number of 25 downtimes, and overall 6 hours, 25 minutes worth of downtime. The average response time was 86ms. That isn’t especially great if you’re a business running some sort of e-commerce platform, and you can’t afford the risk of even a minute of downtime. For a web host that has been in the business for so long, they surely should have some tricks of the trade up their sleeves to enhance their uptime, yet, they do not.

GreenGeeks Uptime

Next on the list is GreenGeeks; this is a company that prides themselves on the fact that they use environment friendly equipment and do their part for the earth. This will have an interesting intake on results due to the different hardware they use, which will most likely be different than what the majority of other hosts out there use. Unfortunately, in this case, Green Geeks had the worst downtime so far. The website had on average 99.7% of uptime and a whopping 7 hours worth of downtime, over 21 separate occurrences. GreenGeeks has fair load times, and it is quite surprising to see such a large amount of downtime; however it may potentially be the fact they can’t utilize the best hardware available due to their ‘green’ policy. The average response time for the host was 1234ms which therefore proves page-load times aren’t as great as they could be.

ClickHOST Uptime

Next up is ClickHOST. This is an independently owned web host so I can only hope good results come from the status information. ClickHOST had an average of 99.9% uptime; way to stick to the TOS agreement! The amount of downtime was only 3 hours worth, over 7 occurrences, which is less than half than that of the aforementioned hosts! The response time the host carried in conjunction with loading times was 759ms which is very good.

Conclusion

I found it very surprising that overall, the small independently owned web host had the best results out of all three web hosts. Most would generally assume that the bigger players in the field would have better hardware, more datacenters and overall better uptime, minimal downtime and great response times. It seems the bigger hosts could learn a thing or two from ClickHOST. The amount of downtime was also significantly smaller compared to GreenGeeks who carried a whopping downtime of over seven hours. MyHosting were not far off in the run of having the best uptime by just being off by 0.1%. That is definitely a fair difference but has the potential to be rectified.

If you’re looking for a new web host, ClickHOST are the host to go with. With an uptime like this, you definitely won’t be let down. You can be assured that if you’re running an online store, you won’t miss out on any potential customers. ClickHOST have the fastest response times, so load-times will definitely not be an issue either. This just goes to show that the independent players in the trade can fend off much better than the bigger players.

Disclosure: Leverable, the company that owns clickfire.com has a CPA agreement with ClickHOST and may receive compensation for referrals from this site. Leverable later undertook SEO services for ClickHOST.  Find out more about how Clickfire web hosting reviews work including the three listed in this post.

The HostPapa website is unsurprisingly very green! It is also well designed and professionally made, as upon visiting the website, it states the features and the price front and center. They also sport informative content boxes placed in the right places, displaying information such as stating they are green and what it is. They also state some of the features they offer, such as script installations like WordPress. Along the bottom of the website, they state the awards they have received as a web host as well as publications they have been featured in along with payment methods. The footer contains a boat load full of helpful information such as service information, company information and additional services and tools.

Now, we’re going to break this review down into a few sections:

• Features and Pricing
• Terms of Service
• Testing
• Customer Support

Let’s get on with it!

Features and Pricing

HostPapa are an unlimited host, as stated on their webpage. But what exactly do they offer which constitutes as unlimited? The web hosting features page states that they offer unlimited disk space, bandwidth, and use of domains on one hosting account. Sub-domains and parked domains are also considered unlimited. One feature that can swing either way these days with web hosts is also unlimited, and those are MySQL databases, so that is a gigantic plus right there.

E-mail wise, you are given unlimited e-mail accounts, along with unlimited forwarding accounts and responders.

The features page states you are given access to FTP however it does not state anywhere how many accounts you will receive. As a safe bet, I would assume you’d receive the one FTP account for the hosting account; however you could end up with unlimited FTP accounts too. We’ll find out how many we really get later in the review.

You are given a free website template with hundreds of design templates, and if that isn’t your cup of tea, you are given access to tons of varied scripts to install, from content management systems to e-commerce platforms and mailing lists.

HostPapa also give you a free domain name for the life of your hosting account. Not only this, but they also provide a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

They do offer a refund policy, which states you can receive a full refund within thirty days if you are unhappy with your web hosting account.

As far as their pricing terms go, I am extremely pleased with the way HostPapa has decided to execute them. They all you to pay:

• Monthly
• Quarterly
• Biannually
• Yearly
• Biennially
• Triennially

The prices differ however, as they often make use of discounts and pricing term sales. If you decide to choose a pricing term that is less than one year, you are required to pay a one-time setup fee of £10. I would also like to note that the pricing terms under one year are NOT available within the United States. This pricing structure is only offered to specific countries. If you are within the US, you are able to pay in the latter three terms within the list above.

Terms of Service

The HostPapa terms of service agreement isn’t extremely long, it is reasonably shorter than most I have come across. The legal jargon and language used also isn’t as confusing as one would normally expect. It is contained with 18 sections.

It contains the standard terms you would expect to see, such as the acceptable use policy detaining users from using their account to host unlawful material such as illegal downloads or adult material. It also states that doing this would obviously result in the suspension or deletion of the account.

The terms also state that, in conjunction with the 30 day money back guarantee, you will not receive a refund of any additional fees, including the setup fee (if one) and domain registrations and add-ons.

Testing

Upon signing up with HostPapa, I was greeted with several e-mails; the first of which thanked and welcomed me to their web hosting service. The next two e-mails consisted of an unpaid and paid invoice confirmation. The fourth and final e-mail was a ‘getting started’ e-mail giving me a bunch of important information. The e-mail started off by linking me to a tutorials page filled with hundreds of helpful video tutorials on how to do both simple and complicated tasks. The e-mail contained general information such as domain names, hosting plans and the IP address. Following this was my cpanel login information and FTP account information. Then the e-mail proceeded to inform me about how to setup my e-mail and webmail. At this point, I was a little edgy wondering if the e-mail would even include nameservers, but lo and behold, there they were starting me in the face! The bottom of the e-mail contained some important billing information if the situation were to ever arise to be in need of it.

As mentioned earlier, HostPapa execute the industry standard control panel cPanel. They had spruced it up of course, to match their green design along with some varied modules, which included the usual domain, database and mail applications as well as some marketing and SEO tools and some additional services such as SiteLock. HostPapa also offers one of the best script and software installers out there by the name of ‘Fantastico’ which is definitely a step in the right direction.

I began to test a few things out within the control panel, such as setting up e-mail addresses and creating and managing MySQL databases. Everything went smoothly without a hitch, and I figured it was time to see if installing a mix of scripts would be as easy too. The first script I installed was the SMF discussion board. I entered the requested the information (such as a username, password, installation directory and such) and clicked install. Within just a few seconds, I was already in the administrator dashboard on the website. The installation process is literally lightning fast! Another neat thing I noticed within the software module is that there was a ‘reset php.ini’ application. This can definitely come in handy in certain situations, for example, when you are updating the file size limit within WordPress.

As usual, we monitor the uptime and downtime of the web hosts we are reviewing using a service called Pingdom. When I looked at the monitoring graphs for this host, boy was I pleased. HostPapa managed to maintain a whopping 100% uptime, which is astounding. No downtime had occurred at all. The monitoring process does only last for a one week period, but this is surely a note of great things to come when the host can abide by the standard 99.9% up-time guarantee.

Customer Support

HostPapa certainly have all bases of customer care and support covered. They offer a 24/7 phone support line, along with a 24/7 live chat support service. If needed, they also offer ticket submission support. They also have a knowledgebase full of helpful articles and information. The phone support also includes toll-free numbers to several countries such as the UK, India and Belgium.

I went ahead and opened up live chat support to speak to a representative. I proceeded to wait around 8 minutes before anyone had answered. I was extremely close to just closing the support window as I was greatly frustrated due to the fact a representative was taking so long to respond, especially since I was “first” in the queue. When I did eventually get through, I was speaking to a somewhat unfriendly representative who gave adequate answers. The transcript went as follows:

DonP:  Hello, how can I help you?

Smair Habib:  Hi there, I installed an SMF forum in a directory called /SMF, I was wondering how I would get my domain to point to it?

DonP: you could just set up a redirect on your domain to go to that folder.

Smair Habib:  How would I go about doing that?

DonP: You can use the Redirect icon in the cpanel, or set up an .htaccess redirect through your file manager, or set up a redirect script in your index file. The easiest would likely be the cpanel redirect.

Smair Habib: There is a check box that says “Wild Card Redirect”, should this concern me at all?

DonP: no, just ignore that option.

Smair Habib: Okay, thank you for your help!

DonP: No problem.

As you can see, in the first response, the representative did not care to elaborate more on what the solution was. If I was a beginner to web hosting, I wouldn’t know what a redirect is, and I’d most likely need assistance setting it up. It just seems that the representative above was uninteresting in providing thorough answers and just wanted to get through live chat requests quickly.

Conclusion

HostPapa is a green web host that pride themselves on using 100% renewable energy to power their servers to provide an extremely reliable service for their customers. They offer unlimited features and varied pricing terms to please their customers based in the UK. Unfortunately, these pricing terms are unavailable in the United States. They have brilliant uptime support however the customer support is unsatisfactory. Being a green company, they will definitely appeal to a large customer base, and if they brought up the quality of support, they could be a reliable legitimate business.

Visit: Hostpapa