I am a Brunswick based webhost and I wanted to let you all know you do not have to overpay the bigger boys for many things that can be provided at a much more reasonable cost..or even for no additional cost. If you look at only the bottom line you will miss out on some features that really matter to small business websites:
I am not going to match $3/month against Bluehost(A company I actually DO respect). I will not even try. However my base package is $85/year. Here is what it offers:
Web Space: 1 Gigabyte, Data Transfer: 20 Gigabytes*, Databases: 5, Server OS: Centos 7 Linux
No Set-Up Fee.
$85/Year(@$7.10/month)
*Gzip compression enabled to reduce your transfer usage
*Free Basic SSL by Lets Encrypt
*Free Dedicated IPV6 Address
*Client managed
*Secured Control Panel Access(Virtualmin)
*Secured FTP file access
*Webalizer and AWstats analytics
*Triple Nightly Backups
*Backup archive is 14 days
Compare the things I offer against your favorite host for the same money. You do not get even basic site backups at Bluehost until you are on their Prime shared hosting package which is normally priced at $179/year. You do not get free SSL until you are at their pro hosting package normally priced at @$287/year. I offer other things most of the big folks do not with the biggest being my triple backups. Not all of the big guys give you a fully functional https certificate for free and few give each site a dedicated IPV6 ip address for free either. On my own sites more than 70% of all traffic to my own sites are now flowing over IPV6.
Take a look at this third party post about what the bigger companies are actually charging for the same basic SSL I offer for free:
Naked Security SSL Comparison
Godaddy and others have very restrictive usage limits in the terms buried in their TOS….the unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth are usually smokescreens for harsh cpu limits, databses query limits, and other hidden limits. Also few take backups of your website data as seriously as i do. I perform 3 backups per night…for every account..for 14 days at no additional cost to the client. If your site gets to the point it is causing issues obviously I will throttle it..and then immediately contact the owner with options for higher end products such as a VPS, or even a dedicated server. While my feature list may look short, it actually reflects more real-world usage for most smaller sites I have run across. Also the larger companies will take your entire site down for a simple single url DMCA notice instead of properly following the procedures. I have had it done to me and had it done to now clients of mine as well. My control panel, Virtualmin, provides more than 40 software packages easily installable with one click. Some of the more common ones are WordPress, Drupal, Node.js, Ioncube, PHPMyadmin, WHMCS, Bugzilla, Zencart, just to name a small sample of the list. All client accounts get all of the install scripts offered to them.
I have run my sites on this platform since day one and will continue to do so. I am a big fan of dogfooding and do not offer things I would not use myself. I cannot talk for the other small hosts but my service is 100% profitable and self-sustaining. I invite you to take a look at my hosting offerings at https://etc-md.com/rates.
I do hope you can see the value in my service that you may find useful for future clients or other individuals. I am not simply slamming the bigger companies and saying they are not suitable places for your sites but I am pointing out the pitfalls of the bigger companies. If you have any further concerns or just want to chat about hosting feel free to contact me.
William Warren
Owner: Emmanuel Technology Consulting
wwarren@etc-md.com
301-524-5271