Review Hell Blog: Web Hosting

In June of 2015 Endurance International Group (EIG) acquired Site5. It was revealed today that EIG purchased another big web hosting company in the last quarter of 2015, IX Web Hosting. EIG acquired the assets of Ecommerce, LLC (the parent company of IX Web Hosting) for $28 million in November 2015.

The Ecommerce, LLC acquisition includes a total of 72,000 subscribers from three different hosting brands: IX Web Hosting, Cloud by IX, and Host Excellence (all three have been added to the long list of EIG hosting companies…)

It has become common knowledge by now that Google has decided to favor HTTPS websites over HTTP, assuming all other factors such as responsive design, page load times, and quality of content remain the same.

This decision by Google has sparked a good deal of debate on the Internet, with more and more webmasters moving their websites to HTTPS. Furthermore, it has also provided several web hosts and SSL providers with an opportunity, wherein they can try to upsell their SSL certificates by telling customers that their websites “need the SSL certificate in order to do well”.

The question is, do you really need an SSL certificate for your website? In this post, I will attempt to answer this question.

When it comes to web hosting control panels, the choices and options are far too many. We have open source and free options, as well as proprietary ones. cPanel, Plesk, VirtualMin, InterWorx, DirectAdmin, you name it!

As such, it often gets tough to decide which web hosting control panel one should opt for. On one hand, as an end user, you need to know which control panel will make your life easier in the long run, on the other hand, as a web hosting provider, you should be aware of the pros and cons of the web hosting control panel that you are offering, so as to be able to serve your customers in a better manner.

cPanel and Plesk are two of the biggest names in this field, and each of them has a loyal following and user base, as well as a long list of advantages and disadvantages. So, which one beats the other? In this post, I will offer a comparison of cPanel and Plesk.

Since web hosting is a saturated market, pricing tends to be competitive and you can get great deals for prices that won’t break the bank. In fact, more and more web hosts offer deals to attract new customers, and go as far as offering 50% off or more in discounts.

Yet, customers being over-charged is also a harsh reality of the web hosting industry. At times, web hosts compel their clients to pay for unnecessary services, whereas at other times, the pricing for general products such as domain names and SSL certificates is enhanced.

So, how do you figure out if your web host is overcharging you? In this post, I will provide instances of common cases wherein web hosts force their users to pay extra and indulge in unnecessary expenditure.

In the long-term achieving zero downtime is considered a myth. In order to remain in a healthy environment servers will need to go through maintenance, as it’s also a way to avoid drastic downtimes in the future. Businesses and web hosting companies need to be able to schedule maintenance to avoid and minimize any unplanned downtime or outages. In the grand scheme of things, even the largest organizations in the world are sometimes hit with outages, server issues, and maintenance that hinder their ability to achieve zero downtime.

Looking at the rate with which EIG is purchasing one brand after another, one can only wonder: how exactly does one stay aloof from the EIG juggernaut, and opt for a web hosting firm that will manage to remain independent? In this post, I will attempt to answer this question.

Well, another quality web hosting company has been purchased by Endurance International Group. According to to their latest earnings report EIG bought Site5 and it’s assets, in full.

Quoted from their 2015 second quarter earnings report:

During the quarter, the company acquired assets of Verio and Site5. The total cash consideration for these acquisitions is expected to be approximately $36 million.

It’s time to add another couple of web hosts to the long list of EIG hosting companies…

A big thank you to Shawn Purdy for providing his technical expertise in this interesting guest post for Review Hell readers. In this topic we will focus on security and performance. What we will cover in the article you can check fairly easily. It will help you determine if a host cares about its servers, or its clients.

I’ve been meaning to create this post for quite sometime because I knew it would be helpful to have a page dedicated to the subject of EIG hosting for visitors to reference: including their background, what hosting brands they own, noteworthy outages, and trends of reliability/support. I have included some of my own opinion, however I feel that if you read through this whole post, follow the sources that I have referenced, and think about the whole EIG story things do add up.

Semi-dedicated hosting is a unique type of shared web hosting plan that offers increased performance and reliability to web hosting customers that require more power and resources than standard shared hosting plans provide. The main difference is semi-dedicated hosting plans have significantly fewer hosting accounts on a shared server. This means more server resources per account which increases speed, performance and overall reliability.