These coupons will be available for a limited time only!

Hostgator coupon
This coupon will give new clients a 25% off. Simply type HOSTINGALT25 on the coupon field during an order on Hostgator and you will receive a direct discount of 25% on any of the hosting plans they offer:

Hatchling Plan ($3.96/month)

• Single Domain
• Unlimited Disk Space
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Unlimited MySQL Databases
• Unlimited Email Addresses
• Unlimited Sub Domains
• Unlimited FTP Accounts
• $100 credit on Google Adwords
• Latest cPanel

Baby Plan ($6.36/month)

• (All the same as Hatchling Plan but with:)
• Unlimited Domains
• Unlimited Add-on / Parked Domains
• Private SSL Allowed
• Dedicated IP Allowed

Business Plan ($10.36/month)

• All the same as Baby Plan but with:
• Your Own Toll-Free Number
• Free Dedicated IP
• Free Private SSL
• Anonymous FTP

Dreamhost coupon
This coupon will give new clients a $75 discount! Simply type HOSTINGALT75 on the coupon field during an order on Dreamhost, you will receive $75 discount directly on their hosting plan:

Dreamhost Plan ($9.95/month, now for only $5.95/month!)

• Free Domain Name
• Unlimited Storage
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Unlimited Email

Remember, this coupons will be available for a limited time only. We will update this post when we expire the coupons. If you have any problem with this coupons please contact us.

Hostgator just informed us of a new promotion. Starting next Tuesday, August 19th at 12am CST, Hostgator will be running a 24 hour, 45% off on all new hosting packages. The sale will continue until 11:59pm CST that evening.

That means you can have the following plan (Hatchling Plan) for $2.73/month:

• UNLIMITED Disk Space
• UNLIMITED Bandwidth
• Easy Control Panel
• 1-Click Script Installs
• $100 Google AdWords Offer
• 4,500 Free Website Templates
• 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
• 45 Day Money Back Guarantee
• 24/7/365 Technical Support.

Or the same as the Hatchling Plan, but with UNLIMITED Domains (Baby Plan) for $4.39/month.

Or, if you need a plan similar to the Baby Plan but with Private SSL & IP (and you will also get a Toll Free Number) you can grab it (Business Plan) for $7.14/month.

Also, you can grab the opportunity since the domains will be as low as $8/year.
Remember, the promotion will only be available for 24 hours, as stated in the beginning of this post, so set up a reminder!

To check them up simply click here.

If you are interested on buying a hosting plan from HostGator wait! We have great news for you!

Coming this Friday through Monday, HostGator will be celebrating Memorial Day by offering 50% off all New Hosting Packages! The sale will start at 12am CST on Friday, May 23rd and continue through the entire weekend. The promotion will end on Monday, May 26th at 11:59pm CST.

This 50% off means Hosting starting at $2.48/month!

Promo link here (the promotion will only be available from this Friday through Monday)

That’s right, now from $4.95/month you get unlimited domain hosting, unlimited hosting space, unlimited file transfers, unlimited email accounts, free domain name, free site builder with templates, free instant set-up, and over $200 in offers, covering advertising offers from Google, free credits from Facebook and other leading sites, all to help you grow your business.

All this is still covered by the excellent “anytime money-back guarantee” without any hidden fees of any kind.
There’s no reason why not to check them out and try their service. Go check them out!

They offered a decent service for a very small amount of money, which made them pretty popular and considered by many at the time as the hosting company of choice. Nowadays more and more people get into random problems with them which make some people to smell a scam all over it. Why did this happened?

Well, as said before, Hostgator seemed like a legit company, but they were bought by EIG (click on the link to read more about who and what EIG does), only after that did lots of complains kicked in, like the blackouts where their servers were down for hours without any response from the support team. Calls being redirected from a decent support team who actually got things fixed and knew what they were doing, to rude call centers in India who spoke barely English and simply repeated over and over that you had to email or open a ticked with the problem and hang off the phone on you.

People got mad when their websites were mysteriously turned offline and got their account banned for no apparent reason, some data estimative from this websites concluded that Hostgator seems to simply cut off the sites that are consuming more resources then the other ones, so they are able to fit more websites on less servers making more income and spending less, bringing a bigger profits.

Things get even worse, people can get their website offline and/or account blocked by simply a competitor of your website making a fake DMCA complain and sending it to Hostgator. This has happened already, Hostgator don’t seem to care about getting to the bottom of the issue, that simply takes too much time for them and they are so cheap that they prefer to lose a costumer then having a lawyer or someone with some kind of experience on this to actually look at the papers and conclude if they are fake, forged or actually the true thing.

Bottom line, Hostgator is not a scam, but they did fell pretty heavy on the quality of service they once gave to their clients. If you run some small blogs and have a very tight budget, then you have what you paid for, but if you run one, or some, websites that are very important or bring you a good revenue and you can spend a few more bucks on the hosting then avoid Hostgator! There are a lot of Hostgator alternatives out there, like Dreamhost (with unlimited plan, VPSs, etc) and MDDHosting (a very professional and FAST hosting company). Also avoid any EIG companies (click on the link for a list) because they basically share the same datacenter and have the same support system.

Unlimited is great! Why should I avoid them? You may ask.

Unlimited storage
Well… There is no such thing as unlimited storage. Unlimited is just a way of saying “don’t worry with the storage” or do you think they would really be putting up servers filled with hard drives over and over as your number of websites grown only to fit your needs? Of course not! That is even less possible since most of this “unlimited” hosting services are very affordable.

On some companies, there is a limit that most users don’t understand, the inode limit, it is a way of actually limiting your storage.

Unlimited bandwidth
Also, there is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth. Do you have an unlimited bandwidth internet connection? Did you read your ISP contract top to bottom? There is a “fair use” policy, they reserve the right to terminate the contract if they find you to be “abusive”. How they determine if you are an abusive user or not? They do as they wish (normally, they compare you to other users), they also use something called “traffic shaping” that among other things, they can “slow down” your connection on purpose in order to free bandwidth to another users. This also happens with unlimited bandwidth hosting, if they see you using too much traffic, you get either your account blocked or your contract terminated (without getting your money back) and in both of the cases, your precious websites will be down!

Unlimited MySQL databases
This one is tricky, if the database storage is shared with your storage, and your storage is “unlimited” then you will run into problems later, either by using too much space (as state before, on unlimited storage) or by using too much databases, tables, rows or some other reason. If on the other hand the database storage is shared with your storage, but your storage has a specific limit, you don’t need to worry too much, just keep an eye on how much storage you are using. If the database storage isn’t shared with your storage plan, then Huston, he have a problem, because if it is not using your storage, it is using storage elsewhere, and it sure isn’t unlimited even if they state so! Also, if they don’t state nothing about the number of concurrentconcurrent/active MySQL connections you can have, avoid them like hell!

Unlimited domains
About the Unlimited domains, this is no biggie, of course there is no such thing like unlimited domains, since they take up space and slow down the server, but only by a tiny little bit, so tinny that it is neglectable. Since domains are not free, you would have to spend an enormous fortune to create an impact on the server. So this “unlimited” is something more likely over 100, like 1,000 or even 10,000 domains. This is actually something that you don’t need to worry about.

Conclusion
If companies offer “unlimited everything”, they only want your money, and the cheaper they are, the worst they will be. On the other hand, companies that state how much storage and bandwidth they offer on a service, they are being honest and offering you a professional service. For some users who get confused if this limits are enough for their sites, some companies even state on average the number of visits your site or sites can take per day, but this is something that you need to get used to, measuring your bandwidth is something you should take in mind and optimize your website accordingly.

Note: If you are looking for companies that offer this kind of non-unlimited service, here is my favorite one: MDDHosting (this guys are great, they use LiteSpeed servers that are up to 9 times faster!).

If you are tired of GoDaddy either by the support they showed for SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) that lead to 22,000 boycotters pledging to move over 82,000 domain names from GoDaddy (http://godaddyboycott.org/), the reputation of “Elephant killer” that the CEO Bob Parsons (see the video below) received back in 2011 or by some other reason, here are in my opinion two of the best companies if you want a GoDaddy alternative for registering domain names.

GoDaddy CEO Kills Elephant

Namecheap

This is one of the cheapest domain registering services out there, and they also provide free WhoisGuard (something that most of the others providers make you pay high for!). The user reviews are also great. Just click on the banner and take a better look at their prices and services and see for yourself why I consider them the best alternative to GoDaddy.

Domain.comIf you aren’t satisfied with Namecheap, you can also try Domain.com (you probably heard of it already). You may check them out too and compare, but beware that you have to pay for WhoisGuard/Domain Privacy in Domain.com. Still, a great alternative to GoDaddy.

If I find more good alternatives to GoDaddy, for domains, I’ll list them here. But for now those are the best alternatives out here. If you have any suggestions please use the “Contact Us” form. I appreciate your feedback!

Although the company states only 8 sub-companies (http://enduranceinternational.com/our-company/our-brands) at this time of writing, it has nearly 60.

This is a complete list of hosting companies that are actually part of EIG. Since some new ones pop out once in a while I will keep updating this post. So stay tuned!

2slick.com
AccountSupport
A Small Orange
ApolloHosting
Berry Information Systems L.L.C.
BizLand
BlueDomino
Bluehost
Dollar2Host
Domain.com
DomainHost
Dot5Hosting
Dotster
easyCGI
eHost
EntryHost
FastDomain
FatCow
FreeYellow
Glob@t
Homestead
HostCentric
HostClear
HostGator
Hostnine
HostMonster
hostwithmenow.com
HostYourSite.com
HyperMart
IMOutdoors
Intuit Websites
iPage.com
IPOWER/iPowerWeb
JustHost
MyDomain
MyResellerHome
NetFirms
Networks Web Hosting
Nexx
PowWeb
PureHost
ReadyHosting.com
Saba-Pro
SEO Hosting
Southeast Web
Spry
StartLogic
SuperGreen Hosting
USANetHosting
VirtualAvenue
VPSLink
WebHost4Life
Webstrike Solutions
Xeran
YourWebHosting

They come, they buy, they squeeze everything in order to maximize the profits and when the users started to feel squeezed out (bad hosting performance, servers going down for lots of time, etc) the users start complaining and look out for alternatives, but most of the times, these clients end up buying services from another sub-company of EIG without knowing it!
This is one of the reasons why EIG prefers not to use their name on any of their hosting companies, because that would scare clients away!

One of the most known cases out there was Hostgator. They offered good service, excellent customer support but after being bought on June 2012, clients started complaining about bad performance, accounts being suspended without warning, terrible and time consuming costumer support, etc, and then the “blackout” of August, where all EIG servers where down for almost an entire day, only to be found later with even worse performance.

At least there are yet some companies that are out of EIG control, that have nothing to hide and that offer an overall better performance and good customer support. Some of these are companies like Dreamhost. I will compile a list of EIG “safe” hosting companies and will update this post as soon as possible. [UPDATE: Here it is EIG Hosting Companies]

What is an inode?

An inode is a data structure to store the information about a file or folder. A file consumes one inode (the size of the file is irrelevant) and a folder also consume one inode. Most hosting companies take in account everything, from your files/folders, emails, etc. Hostgator is no exception to this.

Take as an example WordPress 4.0, it needs around 1,400 inodes in a default installation, without any extra themes or plugins.

According to the Terms of Service of Hostgator, on shared hosting, there is a “soft” limit of 100,000 Inodes where you are automatically excluded from their weekly backups, and a “hard” limit of 250,000 inodes where you are automatically in violation of Hostgator Terms of Service (TOS) and most likely your account will be suspended. You are also violating Hostgator terms of service if you continuously publishing and deleting large numbers of files.

A lot of people hit this inode limits because they have lots of files, per example, most of the web gallery software (and CMS like wordpress) will generate thumbnails of the picture you upload, sometimes it will generate multiple thumbnails of multiple sizes each one, this is nice for faster load times (doesn’t need to download a big picture to display it on a small frame) but will consume lots of inodes. Imagine that your web gallery, or CMS, creates 5 different sized thumbnails of each picture you upload… you will be consuming 5 times as much inodes than you think.

With that you know that their “unlimited blogs” campaign isn’t actually unlimited, if you take in account the 1400 inodes needed just for a standard installation of WordPress 4.0, with a dozen of articles, a custom theme, some plugins and a couple of pictures, it will get above 3,500 inodes fairly easily, of course some wordpress websites can have a lot more articles, pictures, and whatever content and pass well beyond the 5,000 inodes.

If we take the value of 3,500 inodes as a “normal” WordPress website/blog, and divide the inode soft limit of hostgator (100,000) by the 3,500 inodes of a normal WordPress website/blog, we end up with a limit of 28 blogs before getting automatically excluded from Hostgator weekly backups, and by diving the hard limit (250,000 inodes) by the same 3,500 inodes, we know that after 71 wordpress websites/blogs it is a violation of Hostgator terms of service and most likely the account will be suspended, bringing a halt to all your websites/blogs hosted on that account.

For most bloggers and website marketers this limit is fine, but if you already had problems with this inode limit on hostgator or any other hosting company, and really want to get rid of it, take a look at Dreamhost. It’s a little more expensive than hostgator but they don’t seem to bother with inode limits (they didn’t even define an inode limit of any sort), but overall is a webhosting company with better quality, and of course, quality usually walks hand in hand with the price.