The new October 2008 NameCheap coupon code is out, along with higher domain name prices.  October 1st brought an industry-wide increase.  Still, with the increase, a top-level .com domain is only $9.69 at NameCheap.  Oh, and unlike other registrars, NameCheap doesn’t sneak stuff into your shopping cart. 

Apply The October 2008 Coupon For Additional Savings

Use the October coupon code at checkout, and get your domain name for only $8.81.

Special Web Hosting Package

I found a super cheap web hosting package.  I don’t know how these guys do it.  $2.80/month for cPanel web hosting with unlimited disk space?  Man, that’s insane.

Get the NameCheap October 2008 Coupon Code and special hosting package here.

Don’t make price your number one reason for picking a web hosting company. Cheap prices don’t translate into quality web hosting, but it is possible to save money at the time of checkout and in some cases, even put money back in your pocket a few weeks after your purchase.Most web hosting companies offer pretty much the same thing and that’s where it can get confusing. So once you’ve decided on the features you want from a web host, grab a sheet of paper. You’ll be making a simple comparison chart for helping you find a winning web host by fine tuning a few details.

First off, stay away from reseller hosting. You can smell them a mile away. Resellers are “web hosting companies” that aren’t really hosting companies at all. You’re next door neighbor could be a reseller simply buy paying a big web hosting company a fee for renting disk space on one of their servers. Then the reseller rations out the disk space he rents into tiny segments and resells it to you. You’ll typically see small packages like 25, 50, 100 and 200 megabytes of disk space for monthly fees that far exceed what a professional hosting package costs for unlimited disk space. You simply cannot save money taking this route. When in doubt, contact their customer support and flat out ask them if they are a reseller.

And unless you have a specific need for Windows hosting, we’ll assume you’re looking at shared Unix hosting. It’s the most cost effective and offers the most disk space and bandwidth.

Most of the top web hosting companies now offer unlimited disk space, bandwidth, email, databases and the ability to host unlimited domain names on one account. Because of that, we aren’t going to include those features in our comparison chart, but consider them during your search.

One point I’d like to make, being able to host unlimited domains on one account is extremely cost effective if you’re into niche and affiliate marketing. You’ll be able to register additional domain names and host them on the same web hosting account with having pay for additional hosting.

The duration of plan offerings range from 3 to 36-month plans. More often than not, any plan below 12 months comes with a setup fee, plus you’ll have to pay extra for registering a domain name. So when you add up the setup fee and the cost of the domain name and hosting service, you’re really not saving any money. Also consider that when you register a domain name, the least amount of time you can get it for is one year.

For this chart, compare only 12-month plans.

Turn the paper sideways and make the following columns:
Hosting Company Name
Price/Month
Control Panel
Support
Guarantee
Coupons
Other Offers

Hosting Company Name: Down the left side of the chart, write down the names of the hosting company that you’re interested in.

Price/Month: Enter the price per month for the 12-month plan.

Control Panel: The control panel is the interface from which you’ll manage your account. Just to name a few, there’s cPanel, Ops, and vDeck. You’ll also find some custom written ones. cPanel is the leading control panel and I highly recommend it. With all else being equal, pick a web host that has cPanel. Interjecting just one strong point, cPanel has very powerful email filtering options that allows you to filter out spam on both the entire domain or individual email address on the domain.

Support: Look for support that’s available 24/7. If something’s going buggers on your account, you want action now, not 12 hours from now.

Guarantee: Look for an *unconditional* 30-day money back guarantee. I’ve seen as little as 15 days and that doesn’t give you enough time to build your site and then get traffic to it. I’ve also seen a 120-day guarantee, but it wasn’t unconditional. It stated something to the effect that “…if we don’t provide you with everything we said we would…” I think you’d have a hard time getting your money back from that one if you needed to.

Coupons: Before you actually place your order, look at the web hosting company’s order form. If there a space for entering a coupon code, use your favorite search engine to find one. Pay attention to the details of the coupon offer because some coupon codes are only good on the super-size plans while others are good on all plans.

Other Offers: If the hosting company offers any other extras that would help sway your mind, write them down. Some offer free software, advertising credits at Google, Yahoo or Miva, or even the help of a live webmaster. If you can get a domain name for free, read the fine print because it might only be free for the first year with an annual renewal fees thereafter. Other companies give you a free domain name for life as long as you remain their customer. Some web hosts are now integrating Google Webmaster Tools into their accounts.

You might even find special incentive offers from 3rd parties like rebates which put money back in your pocket. While a coupon code can get you an instant discount during the checkout process, rebates can sometimes get you deeper discounts if you’re willing to wait 6-8 weeks to get them. Just be sure to follow the instructions because you usually can’t combine coupon codes and rebates.

When you’re finished, count the web hosting companies on your chart. Let’s say you have five. Assign a unique number (1, 2, 3, 4, or 5) to each company with 1 representing the company that you’d like most to host your website and 5 representing the one that appeals to you the least.

I hope you found this information helpful.

Keek

Get coupon codes and discounts designed to save you the most money on professional, award winning web hosting.  You get cheap pricing, not cheap web hosting.

 I get asked a lot for WebHostingPad reviews, so here it is. 

No Boring Canned Review

I’m not going to rattle off a litany of features like other so-called “review sites” do because reciting features is not evaluative review.  So I’m going to look you in the eye and tell you what I think of them and it’s based upon real-life, first-hand experience because I have several hosting accounts with them.

The WebHostingPad affiliate department personally asked me if I would promote their web hosting services.  I said, “sure”.  Gotta love the webhosting companies knocking on my door for a change.  Not long after that I decided to purchase one of their one-year plans for myself and here’s why…

Other Hosting Companies Are Just Plain Rotten

I have many sites spread over several hosting companies and I’m not happy with any of them.  The worst service comes from a very large web host in Chicago which I won’t name.  Every morning I’m locked out or my site for a couple of hours.  I can’t even get into cPanel.  Then “just like that” it clears up.  It’s one of the web hosting companies I was actively promoting, but I have since stopped.  I can’t recommend a company with lousy service. 

Every month I buy a handful of domains and there’s no way I’m going to have it hosted in their farm.  That’s why I purchased the WebHostingPad account (I have a couple of them).  Besides, it would allow me to experience their service first-hand and if it didn’t work out I wouldn’t promote them either.

It turns out their service is everything you want in a web hosting company.  It also turns out that I don’t have those “dead air” times like I do with the Chicago company, so now I know it wasn’t and ISP problem like I thought it was. 

All web hosting companies have problems from time to time.  With all that equipment, there’s a lot to go wrong.  WebHostingPad is no exception and I’m not going to lie about it, there was one little issue one night. 

Excellent Customer Service and Technical Staff

Back in April 2008 I was getting an error from my account, something about the server I was on being low on disk space.  Now normally the server guys monitor those things and take action to prevent it from happening.  I used to work in an IT department for a software company so I know all about low disk space being caused by massive output from a runaway script.  I can also see some webmaster playing around with logs or backups, things that create large files and not moving them off the server or realizing that they accidentally left a log turned on. 

So I copied and pasted the error message I was getting and sent it to their customer service department.  I’m not kidding you when I say two minutes later I had a reply from them.  They said they are currently working on the issue and that it would be fixed shortly.  It was.  Now THAT is customer service.  No wonder they’ve won awards for it.  Other hosts have replies like, “Yea, yea, we know.  Everyone’s emailing us.” 

Other Hosts Not So Prompt

I also have accounts with another host in Oklahoma.  Many times my email goes out or my site becomes unavailable and more often then not it takes hours to get a reply because “Chuckie” (not his real name) is in the middle of the mix.  He’s a one-man-show.  He’s the tech support, the customer support, the billing support, the whole nine yards.  Kinda hard to deal with customers when you’re up to your butt in rattlesnakes.  Bless his heart, he works hard, but I can’t have my sites going missing when I’m sending traffic to them.

John Rocks!

I also had a second encounter with WebHostingPad’s affiliate department.  I had a couple of questions that could only have been answered with some pretty deep analysis on their part.  I was promised an email back before the end of the day and as promised, I got my answer on time.  It completely blew me away.  I was expecting the brush off because of the detailed nature of my query, but John did the research and explained what he found.

Ok, I Lied…Just A Note About WebHostingPad’s Features

I said I wasn’t going to recite the features of their web hosting plans, but I will mention this, they are one of the few web hosting companies that consistently remain in the forefront and out-do the competition.  Recently they’ve done it again with unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth.  And if that wasn’t enough they slapped an extra two, four or six months free depending upon the plan you choose.  WOW!

WebHostingPad Is #1

The awesome service never stops.  WebHostingPad is #1 in my book.  Their hosting is stable and the staff is very knowledgeable AND courteous.  They say it’s difficult to interpret tone in an email, but from the correspondence I’ve received from their people, they seem like a happy bunch.  Happy people give good service.

Get A $25 Off WebHostingPad Coupon Code

And now for a shameless sales plug.  They have a 30-day money back guarantee so if you want to give them a try, use coupon code: visititnow when you purchase a WebHostingPad plan right here and I’ll give you an instant $25 off any one of their 6, 12, 24, or 36-month plans.  This is an exclusive off from me to you.

We are pleased to offer you this exclusive $25 off coupon code for any 6 to 36-month hosting plan at WebHostingPad.   All come with unlimited disk space and bandwidth.  Host unlimited domains on one account.  The code is case-sensitive, so type it in carefully. The verification process will let you know if it’s right or wrong.

We have several accounts with them and couldn’t be happier. You can read our WebHostingPad Review here.

You just can’t beat the unlimited disk space and bandwidth and the low, low prices – as low a $3.96/month. Come on, who does that? That’s unheard of. I don’t want to repeat every little detail of my review, but I will reiterate this, both the service and customer support is incredible. My emails are always answered in a very timely manner. I couldn’t be happier.

The ThinkHost $50 coupon code has been extended for 72 hrs and expires after midnight May 31, 2008.  ThinkHost is carbon-neutral and powered by 100% renewable wind and solar power.  Sign up for a web hosting account and they’ll even plant a tree on your behalf. 

They have a 120-day money back guarantee.  The standard in the industry is 30 days.  It’s a great place to host your WordPress and b2evolution blogs.  The blogging software comes free with your account.

ThinkHost offers free hosting to US based, registered non-profit progressive organizations whose primary focus is environment, grass roots democracy, peace, social/economic justice or human rights.

If your group is not USA based, not registered as a 501c3 or doesn’t fall into the categories mentioned; as long your organization is non-profit and provides a direct benefit to the community, you can still qualify for free setup and a 6% hosting discount.