[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.

Features

The first place to look for differences is obvious: the features. The types of features a web hosting company offers can be a dealbreaker for even the less web-savvy among us. Why? Because even a great price is worth nothing if it doesn’t get your online presence anywhere. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the offerings at both HostGator and InMotion.

It’s not difficult to see that InMotion Hosting basically takes a shellacking. Unless InMotion has a great price (such as paying you to host your web site, it looks like this is a battle that’s probably going to end pretty early on in the process. Let’s take a look.

Pricing

Although there are $5.95 and $6.95 versions of the InMotion plan, we like to keep things simple by showing the cheapest options head-to-head. The cheapest option in InMotion’s system is the “Starter” option of their “Value Class” – and, yes, what a sad world we live in that we still have to separate web hosting plans based on their class.

The price is more attractive than HostGator, but of course the decision you really face is whether those two extra bucks or so each month are with the perks. We think they are, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Customer Support and Other Issues

The customer support on both sides is pretty satisfactory here, with 24/7 support being pretty well established as the industry standard by now.

One issue that bears mentioning is the idea that no pricing plan is created the same, even, in some cases, the prices look similar. If $3 gets you no bandwith on one hosting provider, for example, but $6 gets you unlimited hosting bandwith on another, what does that mean? The $6 hosting provider is really the one offering the sweeter deal. And that leads us to our conclusion.

Conclusion

What to make of this matchup? Quite simply, HostGator wins out. It’s got the better features, the better support, the better everything. The price may look a few dollars more expensive in our breakdown, but when you consider that getting the same hosting benefits will cost you more money over at InMotion, you start to see the scheme they’ve got going. Stick with HostGator and your web site will do just fine.

I just thought it was kind of funny that someone reserved the .org domain for the exact keyword phrase I was looking for, down to the very year of 2011. It will be interesting to see how well the exact match domain SEO tactic works next year at this time. Have a great Memorial Day!

Have you ever been afraid to sign up for a service because you didn’t know how much of your time would be robbed by filling out forms and being pitched products you don’t want? This was a fun little experiment that tests the ease and speed of signing up for Bluehost web hosting as opposed to others. What really matters is the quality of the service, but don’t you think the sign-up is an indicator of how smoothly things are going to go as a customer? I was thinking testing Godaddy next.

HostGator has an interesting early history. Tell me about your founding the company as a college student.

I wouldn’t call the beginning all that interesting. I had always believed that I’d be successful at an early age and that by attending college I was essentially giving up on my dreams and admitting defeat. I spent my first two months at Florida Atlantic University as your typical freshman screwing off having fun. It was the first time in years that I wasn’t working 24/7 on some type of Internet venture.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that while I was having a blast I was wasting my time and accomplishing absolutely nothing to reach my goals. I found myself constantly conjuring up ideas that would allow me to drop out of college. With only a few thousands dollars to my name the only logical choice was the Internet. I was tired of the unstable advertising market and wanted a recurring revenue source, which is why I decided to give web hosting another try. There I was sitting at my crappy little dorm room desk pounding away at the keyboard in search of the perfect hosting domain name. I tried hundreds of domain names that all ended up being taken before thinking of and registering Hostgator.com.  One name I specifically remember trying to register that was taken was hostlion.com. I sometimes where we’d be today had hostlion been available.

The dorm room made for terrible working conditions. My three roommates were very loud at times, the AC rarely worked, and worst of all the Internet had daily multi hour outages. I don’t think a day ever went buy that I wasn’t calling IT and demanding to speak with a manager.

Life was pretty boring with me being either in class, sleeping, or working on Hostgator. The funny thing is that I don’t believe I ever completed any of my homework in the dorm room. In my mind the dorm room was company headquarters and reserved for only official gator work. I was required to go to class so instead of paying attention to the teacher I’d complete all my work from my previous classes to give myself more time to focus on Hostgator. It wasn’t until the end of my first semester that business really started to take off and become difficult to juggle with classes. Halfway through second semester I was being woken up numerous times a night from both support and sales calls. I also rarely made it through a class without having to take numerous “restroom breaks” to take a call.

I finished out my first year of college with decent grades and was finally able to spend my summer months 100% focused on HG. The business continued to thrive with me investing a total of about $1,000 of startup money into it. Summer quickly came to an end and due to support volumes I had to make the decision of putting school on hold or closing shop. Dropping out of school was a no brainer to me since I was already making more than the average college graduate. When I told my dad about my decision he did everything he could to try to change my mind. He had trouble understanding why I couldn’t find someone to run the business for me while I focused on school. My mom was cool about it and pretty much told me that she had faith in whatever decision I made. The rest of my family and friends were very unsupportive. They argued with me saying I was making the worst decision of my life.  Ironically many of these people are now the ones constantly asking me for a loan.

When did you start offering reseller hosting? And what was it like to launch that product line?

If I recall correctly reseller hosting was launched about the same time as shared hosting. It was dedicated hosting that wasn’t offered until years later. In the beginning I hated reseller hosting and for good reason! I wasn’t that technical of a person and unfortunately resellers were always asking me for support on issues I was clueless on. It wasn’t until I started experimenting with advertising that I fell in love with resellers. I did a $1,200 advertising campaign targeting shared hosting on yahoo, which generated zero signups. I then did a test run for reseller hosting and found that I was able to convert resellers at $80 a pop. I quickly carried the unlimited domain offering over from our reseller hosting to our shared plans. With Hostgator being one of the first hosting companies to focus on unlimited domain hosting business almost instantly exploded, and to this day we grow as fast as we can hire qualified employees.

Which of HostGator’s services are the most popular? What about the least popular?

The order of popularity from greatest to least would be shared, reseller, vps, with dedicated being our least. Our vps offering is only about a year old now, but it has already surpassed all of our expectations. The downsides to offering vps are that it’s a lower margin product and it has somewhat cannibalized our dedicated server sales.

What do you spend most of your time at work doing? How have your day-to-day responsibilities changed over the past few years?

The first two years in business I spent practically 100% of my time doing phone and chat support. The following few years I spent most of my time doing sales and support tickets. I now spend most of my time responding to customers that reach out to me as well as working with employees. We have over 400,000 customers yet our websites still says, “If you ever have a problem with the regular support, just ask that your ticket be assigned to Brent and he will personally take the time to give you the VIP attention that you deserve.” This is great as I’m able to help the customers who need it most, but most importantly it allows me to keep a pulse on the business. I have a theory that if just one customer reaches out to me with an issue hundreds if not thousands of customers are having the same issue.

Any host will say that they care about their brand, but most seem to look the other way when complaints appear on third party sites. HostGator has taken an active approach in confronting online negativity for years, responding to users on Twitter, WebHostingTalk, Clickfire and others. How has this unusual approach paid off for the brand? Has it been worth it?

We realize that our reputation is everything and because of this we will do everything in our power to protect it. Anyone who is posting, is going to be very vocal not only online but in person about your brand. If you are able to reach out to them, apologize, and attempt to make things right you’ll usually turn a basher into a promoter. There’s no way to gauge how successful this has been for us, but I personally believe if we didn’t take this approach we wouldn’t be where we are today.

Customer service comes up a lot in our reviews at Clickfire. It seems an inescapable pain point for all web hosts. We don’t get very many complaints about HostGator, so you must be doing something right. How is HostGator’s customer service different from other support models?

The majority of hosting companies claim to have 24/7 phone, chat, and ticket support along with a 99.9% uptime. The difference is that very few companies live up to this claim as HostGator does. Another major difference is that no employee is too important for a customer to talk to. If a $6 account wants to talk to me or any other upper management they can.

Why do you think so many people looking for web hosting choose HostGator over the many other shared cPanel hosts? What’s different? Is it your aforementioned attention to the brand over the years?

To reiterate what I said earlier I once again can’t stress enough how important a great reputation is to any company. If we ever lose it we’ll be no different than the other monster hosting brands that have come and gone over the years.

Not too long ago, we moved clickfire.com to dedicated hosting after our “unlimited” host  took us offline  without warning for resource overages that originated from WordPress. How can a HostGator shared hosting customer monitor their resource and inode usage so as to ensure that they don’t violate your Terms of Service?

In our control panel we have a section that reports a customers cpu usage, memory usage, processes running, as well as inode usage.

Some web hosting companies use affiliate marketing as the main channel to acquire customers. HostGator seems to deploy a wide variety of advertising. Are you satisfied with the affiliate performance and do you have plans to spice things up for publishers?

We’ve done a horrible job to date managing our affiliate program. HostGator has been lacking a proper affiliate manager; affiliate software, as well as the billing software to do the job correctly. We have just hired Taylor Hawes and have entrusted him with the task of completely overhauling our affiliate program.

How is the SEO Hosting product working out? Have any search engine companies expressed concerns over the implications of a product that enables one account to potentially hide affiliated domains?

Seohosting.com has been a very successful brand for us that represents a significant amount of Hostgator’s revenue. We haven’t heard from any of the search engines and don’t believe we ever will. We are worried about IPv6 becoming the new standard and replacing IPv4. IPv6 could destroy the market, but it could just as easily be the best thing to ever happen to it. It’s very possible that the major search engines may decide to put more relevance on legacy IPv4 ips.

Are there any new products or services in the pipeline at HostGator?

Windows shared hosting is very close to being launched.

We have been working on a new backup storage offering that will be launched in the coming year

We will be launching a new brand under the name Launchpad.com that will offer discounted domains and hosting.  The objective of this brand will be to compete with godaddy and more specifically go after their market share.

And last I’m sure we’ll be doing our own cloud hosting solution in the near future. I’m not a big fan of cloud hosting, but I do believe we’d be able to do it better than anyone, so I figure why not.

What do you think HostGator’s biggest challenge will be over the next few years?

I have no doubt our biggest challenge will continue to be finding the qualified employees require to keep up with our growth. We plan on spending millions on tv commercials but in order to accomplish this we need the man power to support it.

Okay, enough about hosting. What do you like to do for fun?

I enjoy traveling overseas, paintballing, floating the river, camping, pulling pranks, and basically anything else that gets me off the computer.

What is a VPS?

By combining virtualization technology with the method of separating a single server into multiple (a la “shared hosting”), virtual private servers were made possible.  With that said, since a VPS is “virtually” separate from other servers, it basically functions like a dedicated server with features such as independent resources (RAM and disk space), and has its own operating system and software.  However, since a VPS is still technically in a shared environment, you can’t avoid having shared aspects, with one of the few being the central processing unit (CPU).  But at the same time, you’re able to get the cost effective benefit of being on a shared server with much more advanced features.

3 Levels of Hosting Compared

Who Needs a VPS?

Okay, let’s say that you start off on a shared hosting plan, which is sufficient for basic websites or blogs mainly made up of static, HTML-based content and have moderate traffic.  But what if your website or blog eventually grows in size, popularity, you add dynamic content, or your business is on the rise (which are usually goals of most website owners)? 

Well this is a common scenario for small and medium-sized businesses and active bloggers whose websites or blogs require a flexible and scalable hosting solution, but they’re not quite in need of a fully dedicated server nor are ready to make the financial investment toward one.  This is where a VPS comes in as a perfect fit.

Detail of VPS Features

Platform Control

• Root/SSH Access – Since you have your own operating system and software on a VPS, you can install, configure and upgrade any server-level software that’s compatible.   You can also utilize the command-line access and have the option of operating as the root user.
• Email Server – You’re given a unique IP address and have access to your own email server that only manages email from your domain, which gives you more control, increased performance and security. 
• Security – Most hosting companies will also give you full control of customizing your firewall and setting up access levels of IP addresses for different services.

 
Performance

• Scalability – If you’re like most website owners with a goal of constant improvement or growth whether by creating more websites or increasing traffic on your current one, there’s a high chance of outgrowing your hosting plan if you’re using a shared server.  Then, you have to deal with the hassle of upgrading and moving.  But with a VPS, when you need extra room, you have the option of adding more resources without having to switch machines.
• Dynamic Website Support – Since you have a high level of control where you can modify your settings and usage patterns with a VPS, you have the ability to have greater support when it comes to handling resource-intensive applications or large, dynamic websites.

 
Support Levels
As with the variety of hosting plans, there is a variety of support that you can get for your account.  For a VPS specifically,  there are 3 levels of support possible, but the availabilities of each depend on your hosting provider.

Burstable RAM
Burstable RAM is a unique feature offered on a VPS (also depending on your hosting company), which is basically allocated memory that is stored and available when needed.  Utilizing burstable RAM can be a lifesaver in times of unanticipated traffic spikes, such as the “Slashdot effect” or the “Digg effect” where your website can get linked to a popular website causing a sudden major increase in your traffic.  And if you don’t have enough resources to handle the load, it can decrease the speed of your website or possibly cause it to crash.

VPS Pricing

Not only is VPS hosting an attractive alternative because of its beneficial features, but it also has a nice looking price tag.  You get the closest thing to having a fully dedicated server, which can cost hundreds of dollars per month, but at a fraction of its price.  And with the demand of VPS hosting on the rise, the prices are getting lower and lower.

Conclusion

To VPS, or not to VPS? Evaluate your requirements regarding what type of website(s) you want to get hosted in terms of  resource needs, features, support requirements and price. Unless you plan to have a very basic website or have the means to go directly to a dedicated  server, keep in mind that there is a middle ground with VPS hosting.

• Installation of Software Apps - a server side program or software update that the client may need.
• Configuration Tuning – MySQL or Apache performance modifications.
• Complex Software Set Ups - Configuration of multiple components to work together without conflicts.

Doug showed me around the A Small Orange Web Hosting office and AtlantaNAP facility. Call me strange, but I love visiting the inside of big datacenters. The isolation, the computing power, the air condition… I don’t quite know what draws me to them.

Look at those clean floors and feel those servers purring.

I didn’t ask if the ramp was for people or servers.

A peaceful spot in AtlantaNAP. Be assured you won’t be disturbed here.

Douglas Hanna, CEO of A Small Orange Hosting, and Clickfire Writer in Days Past stands between the fenced wall of server racks at AtlantaNAP

The unassuming appearance of the AtlantaNAP building (from outside, it could have been mistaken for a cotton warehouse) and the extreme security gave me an eerie feeling and reminded me of the super secret Wildfire facility in the movie, The Andromeda Strain.

I think you can get feel for the AtlantaNAP datacenter despite the limitations of my iPhone camera. The tour turned out well despite the forgotten camera. Doug got a new hosting client. I got a new server

Before you choose a hosting plan for your webiste initiative, it is important that you understand the most popular hosting option online – cloud hosting.

The Different Types of Cloud Hosting

In general, cloud hosting can be split up into two different categories: public hosting and managed private cloud hosting (also known as enterprise cloud hosting). With public hosting, you share a set of virtual servers with other web masters. With managed private cloud hosting, you have your own dedicated servers for your storage needs. Enterprise cloud hosting solutions provide all of the benefits of a cloud hosting solution while allowing you to manage your servers yourself for security measures and greater data storage flexibility. Enterprise hosting is perfect for larger businesses or webmasters that deal with sensitive data on their servers – data like intellectual property that could be vulnerable on a public cloud.

To understand the differences between these two major cloud computing types, think of how you might eat a pizza.

With the public cloud, imagine that you are eating a pizza with a few of your friends. Everyone can take a piece of the pizza when they want it but nobody has their own pizza – and you have to eat the pizza put out for you instead of being able to choose the toppings. With managed private cloud hosting, you can think of everyone as having their own individual pizza – where they can choose the toppings.

This relates to cloud hosting because a public cloud hosting solution allows multiple web masters to access the same virtual server network but they cannot control some aspects of the hosting option. For example:

• You cannot control where your data is stored (which individual server).
• You lose some security features with public hosting (your information is stored along with others).
• You cannot control the speed at which your web space loads (most public cloud servers are limited to about 10 mbps).

So, public cloud hosting might not be the best option for web sites that regularly handle a large amount of traffic or deal with streaming high definition video. However, the public cloud also has its share of benefits. For example:

• You can trim your IT budget – all servers are virtual and hosting plans are cheap when you are willing to share the servers with others.
• You can save time – the public cloud does not really require any management on your part. You just choose the data that gets stored and your third party cloud hosting provider handles the rest.
• You can forget about maintenance – your public cloud hosting provider will also maintain the physical servers so you don’t have to clean and maintain a set of physical servers.

With enterprise cloud hosting from Rackspace and others, you have several options for cloud computing. For example, you might have a few physical servers in your possession. However, you regularly need more processing power or memory during peak traffic hours or to test out a new web application. Enterprise cloud hosting allows you to use a virtual layer of servers as either your own dedicated server network or as an addition to any physical servers you might own. The primary difference between a public cloud and a managed private cloud is that you have full control over the following with private cloud hosting:

1. Who can access your data.
2. Where your data is stored.
3. Who manages your storage needs and server networks.
4. How your network is organized.
5. Who can access your data at any given time.

With an enterprise hosting solution, you can also boost the performance speed of your servers. For instance, the typical managed private cloud hosting solution could run at 100 mbps. With a collection of physical servers also supporting the network, the sky really is the limit with storage space and processing speed.

There are a few disadvantages to a managed private cloud server. One of the most important is that it costs a little more than public cloud. In addition, you must usually sign a long term contract from a cloud computing company. Of course, you are also responsible for managing your enterprise cloud hosting solution. Luckily, as you will read in the next section, doing so is easy.

How to Manage an Enterprise Hosting Solution

Enterprise cloud hosting solutions provide users with their own dedicated and discrete collection of resources – both physical and virtual servers. Each network is managed with a collection of virtual servers that act as the flexible portion of your network. So, if you maintain some physical servers but need more storage space or bandwidth, you can instantly add a virtual server – a far cry from the days when you would need to purchase additional physical servers when the need arose. Doing so locked you into the purchase, of course, if your additional data needs dropped off and you no longer needed multiple physical servers; not an issue for enterprise hosting solutions.

Building an Enterprise Network Server

Although dependent on your specific service provider, most enterprise hosting solutions will come with software that allows you to organize your individual storage units across different web site or applications. You can also compare the amount of storage, memory and processing power that you have purchased with the amount that you are currently using.

Each of your individual networks, if applicable, should be divided into separate environments for easy access and management. For example, if you manage hosting for several large e-commerce web sites as well as a company database for your employees, you would likely want to split each of these individual areas into different environments – especially if each one requires a great deal of storage, perhaps with different security implementations like fire walls and password protection.

When building your server, you will have two different options: to use a template server to quickly inject your physical and virtual storage or to create a custom template for your storage needs. It is important to carefully evaluate your storage needs. If there is not a template that fits your business model, there is no need to use a template when it takes only a few minutes to create your own custom environment.

Bringing an Enterprise Hosting Network Online

Once you have implemented your server environments, you can begin deciding which servers will go online with which public IP addresses. In order to bring a server online, you must simply select the IP address that will be associated with that server environment and choose your preferred protocol. Finally, you can create a name for the network as it appears online and save it to your workspace. Many services will then require you to create a node to bring the servers online. Creating this node is as simple as re-entering the information for that server environment to attach it to the Internet. This is where managing your enterprise hosting solution can allow you to enter multiple public IP addresses or customize access to those servers.

Could Cloud Hosting be Right for You?

A managed private cloud hosting solution allows you to take advantage of the flexibility provided by cloud hosting and combine it with security features that you would expect on a private cloud hosting network. This type of managed hosting network does require some management on behalf of the user; one of its primary benefits. Managing an enterprise hosting solution is easy with a high quality service provider as you can use custom or prefabricated templates to set up your network(s) and add or remove storage as you need it – quickly and easily.

Public cloud hosting allows you to save money on your cloud computing but does not afford the same security benefits as managed private cloud (the lack of a firewall, for example). When you use a public cloud hosting solution, you are sharing storage space with other web masters to cut costs but lose control over where your data is stored and how much control you have over that data as it appears on your virtual servers.

One of the major concerns with VPS hosting options (virtual private server) is that there is no guarantee that you will receive all of the resources that you need – or pay for. With VPS nodes, other users of that same node can begin bleeding into your resources, limiting the amount available to you. Many VPS hosting users switch to cloud hosting for this reason alone – you are guaranteed the resources you need and can scale on-demand. Finally, cloud hosting solutions give you the benefit of being able to customize your servers any time you need to do so. With VPS hosting, this can be very difficult.

When you choose cloud hosting from a third party hosting provider, be sure to evaluate your specific business needs before choosing a type of cloud hosting plan. After all, you never want to be stuck without enough storage space or processing power to accomplish your business goals. Think carefully about whether you are fine sharing your pizza with others, or if you want a whole pizza to yourself.

This article was written by Anthony Benedict, who helps run and maintain Rackspace.com which delivers enterprise-level hosting services to businesses of all sizes and kinds around the world.

The short answer: no. There is no such thing as a BlueHost coupon. Most people don’t know this, and the result is that a couple thousand people use Google search to try to find BlueHost coupons. Those searchers will find tons and tons of sites talking about BlueHost coupons as though they do exist, and none of them will ever actually have a BlueHost coupon code anywhere.

Don’t believe me? We asked BlueHost directly. By using their live online support, we asked them if there is any such thing as a BlueHost coupon or BlueHost coupon code. This is what they said:

Not only did BlueHost inform us that they don’t offer coupon codes, they warned us to be careful about scams. That’s a pretty big deal.

So, why are so many sites claiming they have a BlueHost coupon? It’s the same reason a lot of people do a lot of things. Money. BlueHost offers an affiliate program to anyone who has a website. They put a link to BlueHost, and every time that somebody clicks on that link and buys BlueHost hosting, the site owner will get some amount of money in exchange for the customer.

We’ve tested the BlueHost.com affiliate program for an extended period and found that the tracking is above average as compared with other Web Hosting affiliates and payments generally made on time.

Some of the less-then-honest sites will claim to have BlueHost coupons just to get you to visit their site and click on their link, all so that they can earn a quick buck.

The problem is that this confuses the consumer. They see so many sites offering a BlueHost coupon, and they become convinced that such a thing exists. Therefore, they keep looking for one. The result is that the problem perpetuates itself. There’s the thought that there might be a BlueHost coupon code out there, so someone searches it. Then, they see tons of sites offering BlueHost coupons. They then believe that it must exist, so they keep searching for one. It’s a waste of the consumer’s time, and a pretty gross one at that.

But not all is lost. There is a way to get a discount for BlueHost web hosting (read our review). Now, it’s not a coupon, but it does come from the affiliate accounts I mentioned before. Despite any potential ill intentions, there are some who offer this affiliate link with good intentions, and any of them can be used to get you a discount. As an addition to the affiliate program, anybody who signs up for BlueHost by clicking on one of those affiliate links gets a special price. Their hosting is usually $6.95 per month. By using an affiliate link, you can get prices as listed below:

• 12 months: $4.95 per month: $59.40 total
• 24 months: $3.95 per month: $94.80 total
• 36 months: $3.95 per month: $142.20 total

Make no mistake, though. This is not a BlueHost coupon code. This is a promotional price, and it only applies until the customer renews with BlueHost, at which point the price returns to $6.95 per month. However, there isn’t a huge rush to grab this promo until you are ready. This promo is available through affiliates only, but it doesn’t have any set end date. And it’s been going on for over a year now. We asked BlueHost about this as well, just to make sure, and this is what they said:

So, the definitive answer is that there is no such thing as a BlueHost coupon code, but they do have an ongoing promotional rate for new accounts that sign up through an affiliate link.

Hopefully, this has cleared up any confusion about whether or not a BlueHost coupon exists.

But, were you looking for a web host that does offer coupons? We can help there, as well as help you determine which ones are good hosts. You can visit our Web Host Reviews page to see which web hosts have proven to be a good value, then you can visit the CouponClaim.com Hosting Coupons page to see which ones offer coupons. For example, you can take a look at our IX Web Hosting Review, which has an excellent 20% off coupon on our coupons page.

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HostGator’s September 09 Newsletter says the company currently has billboards “posted in 10 major U.S. cities and that number will be increasing soon.” I’ve been noticing HostGator billboard ads in the Atlanta area since September. I’ve seen web hosting billboards fragvertised before. And, I’m accustomed to seeing the blue and yellow HostGator mascot “Snappy” online, but on the way to work? On the way to dinner? While running errands? I’m going to have to adjust to that.

HostGator is not a host I’d call modest when it comes to advertising, whether online or offline. Their bite into advertising can sometimes annoy loyal web affiliate advertisers who receive 400k in payouts per month (apparently this figure does not include Commission Junction, where the affiliate ads on Clickfire come from). Consider this. If I’m on my way to get a cheeseburger after work, am I going to see the HostGator billboard, pull over, and order hosting for that new Web site I’ve been wanting to build? No, but here’s the scenario that affiliates may fear the most: I am going to either write it down or force myself to remember the name in the largest lettering: Hostgator.com. When home, I Google “HostGator” and click the number one listing (Google displays the brand site first in organic search). Unless I decide to do some research or comparisons, I’ve just bypassed affiliates and gone straight to the source to purchase my web hosting.

Do billboard ads “take” sales from online publishers? Will HostGator billboard advertising even work? How about we have some fun with HostGator’s latest campaign. Let’s do a crude test. Let’s take the three HostGator billboards in my neighborhood and see how long they stay up, the assumption being that no company would continue an unprofitable ad campaign.

Estimated start: Sept 09. Status: still live. See you later alligator? Not yet. It’s still there right next to the KFC on Cobb Pkwy, Marietta. Dude, get some chicken and stop standing there like a nerd.


Estimated start: Sept 09. Status: removed.  This reptile at Roswell Rd and W Wieuca went into hibernation by November. I think a whiskey ad appears now.

Estimated start: Sept 09. Status: still live. This one took me by surprise because of it’s remote location on Upper Roswell in Marietta.