Hostmonster is a web hosting company that’s been around since 2005. They operate out of Provo, Utah as one of several different web hosting companies owned by a single corporation. Under the same banner are familiar names like BlueHost and less familiar ones such as JustHost.
While Hostmonster does offer shared hosting as its primary product, they also have upgrade options to either a virtual private server (VPS) or various dedicated server hosting packages too.
Let’s now take a look at what this web host offers newbies to blogging.
Shared Hosting
At the time of writing, an initial shared hosting package is available for just $4.99 per month (usually offered when signing up for a period of a year). A free domain name registration for one year is provided which is useful for bloggers who haven’t bought their domain yet but have a name in mind.
The shared hosting package provides unlimited disk space and bandwidth usage. It’s possible to add multiple domains to host several blogs from a single account. Multiple email accounts can also be set up too.
Shared Hosting: A Mixed Bag
Shared hosting with any web host is a mixed bag. On the one hand, there’s often unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space and more. However, there’s also a fair use policy which will either restrict access or completely cut off access to the site when it exceeds what’s considered “fair” bandwidth usage.
What does this mean in real life? It means that for sites that have bursts of traffic due to getting mentioned on a popular site, e.g. Reddit.com or Medium.com, the hosting might get temporarily suspended or the site may be slowed down. At this point, upgrading to VPS hosting makes a lot of sense.
VPS Hosting
For blogs that develop a strong audience over the first year, a move to a VPS hosting plan is often called for. This is a virtual environment within a server where resources are allocated based on the server’s capacity.
Specific resources, one or more IP addresses and a fixed amount of bandwidth are included. Additional bandwidth usage must be paid for beyond the monthly limit specific in the VPS plan.
As a Hostmonster review, we include VPS hosting because it’s relevant to bloggers who are planning out their first 3 years. The Standard VPS plan is just $19.99 per month with a dual-core processor, 2GB’s of RAM and 1GB of bandwidth monthly. The VPS server is cloud-based too. Root access is provided for technically-minded customers.
Dedicated Server Hosting
No Hostmonster review would be complete without mentioning that the company also provides dedicated cloud hosting too. This is where a server is only used for your websites. The advantage here is another site being busier than usual won’t have any effect on your site’s speed or stability.
Dedicated servers offer powerful Intel Xeon processors and plenty of RAM, storage and bandwidth. They also come at a premium cost. However, it’s good to know they’re available should your blog grow to need one.
For new bloggers, Hostmonster provides acceptable hosting at an affordable price. Their US--based technical support is capable of answering basic questions. Most new bloggers should find that is sufficient though. The free domain offer is useful too.
