Overview
Here, we review some of Web Hosting's biggest players. Why should a small business care about the size of their web hosting provider? There are several reasons why "size matters":
  • Staying power: Today there are literally hundreds of web hosting companies out there. With not very much to differentiate them and with economies of scale still holding true, it seems safe to predict that consolidation will be a characteristic of this industry over the next few years, and that mergers and other actions will winnow the field dramatically. While you won't be thrown out of business if your web hosting provider goes away, it can still be tedious and unpleasant to have to switch.
  • It's a big, big world out there: Your business may be small today, but you may already aggregate an audience from across the nation (or planet). This means that it's important to have good internet connectivity everywhere.
  • 24/7 operation: These major vendors all offer 24/7 phone support. With smaller hosting companies, you often only get chat and email support. Others may claim 24/7 phone support, but the person answering at night does little more than take a message and email it to the real administrators.
  • Experience: Have smaller hosting companies dealt with hacker attacks? Simulated power failures? Do they really know about all the software packages they provide, or are they literally just hosting them for you? Is your data securely backed up and, equally important, do they know how to restore it?
Requirements - What Really Matters
For small businesses where shared hosting makes sense, the following requirements top the list:
  • Reliability: Nothing else matters if users can't reach your site. While we may not fully understand the intricacies of the internet topology, we want to be assured that our web hosting provider has enough growth headroom, component and network redundancy and expert manpower to take care of all this for us.
  • Ease of Use: While many business owners are quite tech-savvy, they don't have fleets of computer programmers on hand to execute our every wish. Everyman tools like a control panel and website builder are important.
  • Comprehensiveness: While you're not going to grow to 1 Billion hits/day anytime soon, it does matter that we should be able to add eCommerce capability, search marketing etc. without having to switch web hosting vendors.
  • Value: While the companies reviewed here may not offer the most features at the lowest price, they do offer good value for the money.
  • A Trusted Name: As we've touched on before, many of the details aren't practical for us to investigate or comprehend. Here's where a trusted name acts as a proxy guarantor that both the big and little things have been taken care of.
  • Popular Development Tools: PHP, MySQL, SSL, FTP - these vendors have all these covered, with the exception of Microsoft bCentral.
Yahoo! Web Hosting
Recommendation 
Yahoo! Web Hosting
"The Cream Of The Crop"

Yahoo may well have the busiest website on Earth. This perspective gives them a unique advantage in hosting websites for the rest of us. High speed network connections to every major Internet hub, multiple data centers staffed 24/7 - many Yahoo hosting customers report that their sites have never been down.

Ease of use is first rate with a friendly control panel and a capable website builder too. Because so many people have used Yahoo services before, they also get a leg up in ease of use because people are already using Yahoo Mail, Wallet, GeoCities etc. Heck, you've probably even got a username and password there already.

Seemingly unique among the vendors here, Yahoo includes a domain name registration with it's hosting plans. This is typically the first step for any business coming online, so it adds both value and convenience to make it a part of their hosting offering.

Yahoo scores well on value, particularly among this group of major hosting providers. When you factor in the time saved by working with a vendor with so many tools that you're already familiar with, Yahoo comes out farther ahead. Yahoo also has a wide and flexible range of product offerings. Plans begin at $4.95/mo(!) for static sites plus email thru $19.95/mo for dynamic sites with PHP and MySQL, to full ecommerce storefronts (up to $299.95/mo) processing thousands of transactions a day [we should all be so lucky], Yahoo seems to have an offering for everyone.

Yahoo! Web Hosting - Plans
  • $4.95/mo - for static web sites
  • $8.95/mo - above plus domain name registration, business email.
  • $11.95/mo - above plus more capacity, security, 24/7 phone support
  • $19.95/mo - above plus dynamic programming facilities
  • $39.95/mo - super sized

Microsoft bCentral
Here's the problem with Microsoft - they make so much money on all their products that deriving a mere $20/mo from your small business means very little to them. In fact, their lowest priced plan starts at $30/mo. In support of their other products, they supply Access as their database instead of the usual PHP/MySQL combination.

DellHosting (In Cooperation with Sprint)
For as aggressive a company as Dell seems to be, their hosting offering seems distinctly weak compared to their peers here. They're in the bottom 2 in bandwidth, emails, disk space and don't include a free domain name. Moreover, they have the highest setup charge. Add to that the fact that they are offering this in conjunction with Spring (who knows how long that will last).

Earthlink
Earthlink has a mid-level offering with little to distinguish it from the others. This would appear to be a good fit only for subscribers to the Earthlink ISP - who are comfortably using their tools and working with their support mechanisms.

Interland
While you may not have heard of Interland before, they are one of the larger providers of web hosting to small businesses. They're generally competitive in the amount of Bandwidth/Emails/Disk included in their plans. Interland offers shared hosting, dedicated hosting as well as website building services. Prices start at $7.95/mo.

ValueWeb
Like Interland, ValueWeb has a competitive offering but still falls in the main pack. One nice feature is that they supply Urchin web statistics reporting.