DuVash Top 10's

Founded in California in 1997 StartLogic slowly grew, and today they are hosting over 100,000
domains, offering more diversity in their plans than most hosting providers (All but DreamHost and
GoDaddy actually) you’ll find.

StartLogic plans are targeted at the common beginner as well as the advanced developer.
In addition to the conventional means of customer support, StartLogic also offers a number of
other useful tools to help you overcome any problems you are experiencing.

Plans And Pricing:
StartLogic most popular plan is the  “ProLogic” plan which is very cost effective.
For $4.95 a month, this plan comes with unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited e-mail
accounts, CGI, PHP, MySQL, and more. This plan also comes with a free domain name.
For the amount of features that you get, including software support, multimedia, host manager,
web builder, pre-configured scripts, e-commerce and promotions, this plan is actually quite a steal.

Another unique plan at StartLogic is “WindowsLogic”.
It comes with 2GB of disk space and 60 GB of bandwidth for $9.95 a month, in addition
to the features mentioned in the ProLogic plan.
This plan is slightly more expensive than the ProLogic plan because it is for ASP.NET developers,
offering .NET support.

Data Center:
StartLogic’s data center is located in Phoenix, Arizona, and provides redundant optical fiber
connections through such companies as Cox, Qwest, and ELI, in addition to multiple Internet
backbone providers, including UUNET, Broadwing, and Global Crossing.
Like most data centers, the facility is equipped with raised floors, temperature control systems,
redundant power, physical security, and surveillance systems. Servers up-time with this company
has also been excellent, and StartLogic was praised a-lot for it.
StartLogic has strategically located their data center in Phoenix, Arizona, due mainly to the city’s
protection from extreme climates and being home of the world’s largest power plant.

Customer Service:
StartLogic’s customer service team is actually almost identical to that of LunarPages.
The thing that stands out about StartLogic is the amount of self-help resources they have
on their web site. Customers can use a troubleshooter in which a step-by-step approach
is taken until the problem is resolved, in case something went wrong using the Getting-Started-Guide.
The site also features FAQ sheets and a Knowledge-Base,  categorized for easy searching.
Of course, if you cannot find your answer in their self-help, or simply choose not to use it,
you can rest assured that you will receive quality responses in a timely manner.
You may also use StartLogic’s Toll-Free no., or the live chat right on their web site.

Control Panel:
StartLogic uses the vDeck control panel, which is one of the most functional and versatile
web site managers on the Internet today. The vDeck is of course slightly different than cPanel,
but still (and maybe even more) very easy to use for almost any user.
The panel allows you to manage every aspect of your web site and it is complete with tutorials,
walk-thrus, and a help center. The vDecks best feature is that it makes complex procedures
such as building a web site or installing comprehensive CGI, PHP, or Java scripts simple.

Conclusion:
StartLogic has proven they are capable of serving web sites with maximum server uptime and
efficient customer service. Although StartLogic itself is a fairly new web host, the people behind
StartLogic have actually been in the hosting industry for many years, and will be an excellent choice
in quality web hosting.
Visit the official StartLogic website.

Total Score: 5 Stars

BlueHost was founded at 1996 in the already growing market of hosting providers.
13 years later they are one of the major hosts for business as well as personal websites.
They are both affordable and reliable and have won many awards including Support Award
in 2004 and the Best New Host award from 100BestWebHosting in the year 2003

BlueHost Features:
Bluehost’s hosting cPanel is easy to use with a friendly user interface, rich with features,
which are easily accessible, and include file & mail management, web & disk usage statistics,
forums, fine domain tuning (DNS, Sub-domains etc), search engine submission, security settings
and many more

BlueHost Support:
BlueHost provides quick and responsive support, at the highest level. BlueHost , as many other
web hosts offers several methods of customers support – email, telephone and chat customer support.
They also post a comprehensive help section, which includes FAQ, live chat, and a knowledge base
where customers can search previously asked questions to find quick answers.

BlueHost Hosting center:
BloeHost data center consists of High Performance Xeon Servers, OC-48 backbone connection,
UPS power back-up, diesel back-up generator, 24/7 network monitoring, and mirrored storage backups.
They also guarantee 99.9% network and server up-time, as expected.

Conclusion:
BlueHost offers a great value for your buck.
With award winning customer support , reliability,  and infrastructure, you have another great
choice for a personal website/own business hosting solution.

Total Score – 4.5 Stars

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Established by four Californian Computer Science undergraduates in 1997, DreamHost has grown
to become one of the larger players in the web hosting business, with a full-time staff of 50 and over
500,000 domains hosted. Fortunately, this growth has not prevented DreamHost from retaining
their original customer oriented focus.
DreamHost has the most loyal customer base in the web hosting industry, with many customers
rising to defend the company in times of trouble. This may be the result of the irreverent attitude
of those running the company and the almost total transparency shown when things go wrong.
This attitude is reflected in the very amusing monthly newsletter and official company blog.

As you can imagine, hosting 500,000+ domains requires some impressive hardware and the
DreamHost data center, consisting of hundreds of multi-CPU servers running Debian Linux, is more
than adequate for the task. The data center boasts a UPS system, with back-up generator and
multiple redundant gigabit connections to the Internet.

Plan Features and Pricing
DreamHost currently offer four different shared web hosting plans at various price points,
but the primary difference between these plans is the disk space and bandwidth quotas offered.
Interestingly, the space and bandwidth provided by DreamHost hosting plans grows each week,
as a kind of ‘loyalty bonus’, encouraging customers to stay with DreamHost for the long-term.

Control Panel
Unusually, the admin panel provided by DreamHost is not an ‘off-the-shelf’ commercial product,
such as cPanel, instead DreamHost have their own custom written admin panel. While this panel can
be a bit of a culture shock for those coming from other hosts, in our opinion, the DreamHost
panel offers a level of functionality and ease-of-use that exceeds packages such as cPanel.
Just about every task that you need to do, from managing the billing for your account, creating email
addresses – locally or on Gmail, installing software, registering domains to DNS configuration can be
done via the panel with a minimum of fuss.
For those that enjoy doing things manually, DreamHost provides full shell access with all accounts.
DreamHost also supplies a web-based FTP client for those situations where a ‘real’ FTP client is not
available, although, due to the inherent limitations of such web-based clients, we suggest that you
use a ‘real’ FTP client if you can.

One thing that DreamHost does not offer is any kind of easy-to-use page creation utility, you will need
to design your websites locally on your own computer and upload the relevant files to your DreamHost
web space, or take advantage of the excellent ‘one-click-install’ feature of the admin panel (see below).

Scripting Support
All DreamHost plans support the full gamut of server-side scripting languages, including PHP4, PHP5,
CGI, Perl, Python and Ruby / Ruby-On-Rails.
CRON access is available for those that require scripts to run at regular intervals and custom .htaccess
files are available on a domain-by-domain (or sub-domain) basis.
DreamHost also provide full shell access (SSH and Telnet) on all accounts.
The DreamHost admin panel also provides for the ‘one-click install’ (and upgrade) of various popular
scripts, such as WordPress, Joomla, phpbb, Gallery2 and MediaWiki. The number of applications
available through this ‘one-click install’ page is less than that provided by something like HostGator,
but most of the popular packages are represented.
Of-course, packages not supported through this page can be installed manually.

Reliability
DreamHost has a reputation for excellent reliability and indeed during the first few years of hosting
our sites at DreamHost this proved to be the case.  To DreamHost’s credit, when there are problems,
the company shows an almost total transparency, explaining exactly what went wrong and why, even
if the explanation casts their own staff in a bad light. This honestly is a refreshing change for a web hosting
company and we firmly believe many other companies could learn a thing or two from DreamHost in this
respect.

Technical Support
All direct technical support for the DreamHost is provided through support tickets sent via the admin
panel. All of our support queries were answered promptly, usually within 12 hours, the actual replies
were always friendly and provided the information needed to resolve the issue at hand.
DreamHost have said that they are currently hiring more support staff, so I expect the response time
for support requests to improve in the future.
The more expensive DreamHost plans do provide, for customers within the United States, a limited
number of support ‘call-backs’ per month, but since we’re located outside of the United States,
we did not have the opportunity to test this method of technical support.
DreamHost also maintains a wiki and customer support forum, both of which can be an excellent source
of information, often avoiding the need to lodge a support request.

Conclusion
Overall, the DreamHost plans represent excellent value for money.
Aside from a few minor Outages we’ve experienced (we’re talking twice in a 7 years time…), which were
also resolved very quickly.
It does seem DreamHost is the absolute number 1 host for the experienced user.

Total Score: 5 Stars

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