Hosting plans are to be selected carefully so as to remain on the safer side of web hosting. There are several companies coming up with various offers to attract the end users. The selection of a hosting company that can fulfil your demands is very tough. To help users in such circumstances, the customer review web sites come up with comments on these web hosting companies. The important aspect of going for such reviews is that, they are from trust worthy sources.

HostNine is a web hosting company that works under the shared hosting service. The hosting plans of HostNine are attractive and are mainly done with the help of VPS servers. The cost of setting up a HostNine hosting plan is as low as $3.95. But you will never have to worry about the quality of hosting delivered at this extremely low price.

The space available for your web site is high and the databases can be run with a relatively high storage space. Email accounts and mailing lists can be managed freely and easily. The web site is designed in a easy drag and drop method to make the work of the users easy.

The HostNine cPanel is user friendly and highly efficient. They can set up a web site with the help of the builders designed specially. The users can choose from four of the hosting plans named as basic plan, standard plan, advanced plan and professional plan. The plans differ in the amount of space made available to the user. If you are using a basic plan, there are restrictions on the maximum available domain accounts. But standard hosting plan and all others above it gives you the flexibility to use as many domains as you need.

You can create more than one web site within the single account you have created with HostNine. You can simply add the web sites into your account. This makes these hosting plans the favourite of all users. Standard hosting plan and the plans above that are highly used by customers to enjoy the freedom and flexibility allowed in web site hosting. CPanel of HostNine hosting is helpful to even the novice users. They can easily navigate through the tool even when they are not technically skilled.

I decided around the 24th of November that the way I was testing speed on each blog was inaccurate.

Therefore as of November 24th, we changed the way we are testing each host.

Fixed Page Size Testing

Now we are testing using a fixed size HTML file with 10k worth of text, or exactly 10,251 bytes. This same document is put on all servers we are testing.

Previously we were testing using the blog’s main index page which changes every day for each host and therefore not controlled or set fixed size.

In the results we post for November, you will see a sharp drop in ping / page load response times because of this switch. Now that the test page is only 10k in size, the response times sharply improved for each host.

If you want a more accurate result set, compare each screenshot test times after the 24th of November.

Faster Ping Resolution

Now that we are using a fixed page size, we could increase the resolution to get better results with our uptime reports. Previously we were testing using a 5 minute resolution, now we are using a 1 minute resolution. This will give us a better uptime percentage reporting for each host. Now if a host is down for a few seconds, we won’t report it as a 5 minute outage but will report it as a 1 minute outage. Still not completely accurate but it is a huge improvement.

In December, all days will have these new methods in place and will be a much more accurate result set.

HostNine tested poorly for the month of October. Below you will find our results:

Top Web Hosts for US Traffic in October 2007

For the month of October, HostGator came out on top with an amazing 512 ms average main page load time from tests via our US testing servers.

Below you will find all eight web hosts we tested from US traffic, ranked from best to worst.

#1 HostGator - 512 ms Average on US Traffic
HostGator Review - HostGator Customer Reviews - Visit HostGator

#2 Globat - 572 ms Average on US Traffic
Globat Review - Globat Customer Reviews - Visit Globat

#3 LunarPages - 589 ms Average on US Traffic
LunarPages Review - LunarPages Customer Reviews - Visit LunarPages

#4 MidPhase - 685 ms Average on US Traffic
MidPhase Review - MidPhase Customer Reviews - Visit MidPhase

#5 HostICan - 747 ms Average on US Traffic
HostICan Review - HostICan Customer Reviews - Visit HostICan

#6 EasyCGI - 1,260 ms Average on US Traffic
EasyCGI Review - EasyCGI Customer Reviews - Visit EasyCGI

#7 HostNine - 1,419 ms Average on US Traffic
HostNine Review - HostNine Customer Reviews - Visit HostNine

#8 IX Web Hosting - 1,499 ms Average on US Traffic
IX Hosting Review - IX Hosting Customer Reviews - Visit IX Hosting

Top Web Hosts for Non-US Traffic in October

Globat came out on top for traffic based outside of the US. We have several servers we use to test web hosts with and here are the results from those tests.

#1 Globat - 1,134 ms Average on Non-US Traffic
Globat Review - Globat Customer Reviews - Visit Globat

#2 HostGator - 1,184 ms Average on Non-US Traffic
HostGator Review - HostGator Customer Reviews - Visit HostGator

#3 HostICan - 1,219 ms Average on Non-US Traffic
HostICan Review - HostICan Customer Reviews - Visit HostICan

#4 MidPhase - 1,333 ms Average on Non-US Traffic
MidPhase Review - MidPhase Customer Reviews - Visit MidPhase

#5 EasyCGI - 1,631 ms Average on Non-US Traffic
EasyCGI Review - EasyCGI Customer Reviews - Visit EasyCGI

#6 IX Web Hosting - 1,753 ms Average on Non-US Traffic
IX Hosting Review - IX Hosting Customer Reviews - Visit IX Hosting

#7 LunarPages - 1,789 ms Average on Non-US Traffic
LunarPages Review - LunarPages Customer Reviews - Visit LunarPages

#8 HostNine - 2,528 ms Average on Non-US Traffic
HostNine Review - HostNine Customer Reviews - Visit HostNine

Best Overall Web Hosts With Worldwide Traffic

Overall, when we combine our tests from all US and non-US servers, we were given new numbers to rank hosts with. Worldwide testing concluded that HostGator was the number 1 host overall with a 741 ms score.

#1 HostGator - 741 ms Average on Worldwide Traffic
HostGator Review - HostGator Customer Reviews - Visit HostGator

#2 Globat - 764 ms Average on Worldwide Traffic
Globat Review - Globat Customer Reviews - Visit Globat

#3 HostICan - 914 ms Average on Worldwide Traffic
HostICan Review - HostICan Customer Reviews - Visit HostICan

#4 MidPhase - 915 ms Average on Worldwide Traffic
MidPhase Review - MidPhase Customer Reviews - Visit MidPhase

#5 LunarPages - 1,007 ms Average on Worldwide Traffic
LunarPages Review - LunarPages Customer Reviews - Visit LunarPages

#6 EasyCGI - 1,390 ms Average on Worldwide Traffic
EasyCGI Review - EasyCGI Customer Reviews - Visit EasyCGI

#7 IX Web Hosting - 1,596 ms Average on Worldwide Traffic
IX Hosting Review - IX Hosting Customer Reviews - Visit IX Hosting

#8 HostNine - 1,808 ms Average on Worldwide Traffic
HostNine Review - HostNine Customer Reviews - Visit HostNine

Top Hosts Ranked by Server Uptime in October

For server uptime, we were impressed to see HostICan have a 100% uptime score for the month of October. To experience actual 100% uptime, HostICan is highly recommended for server stability.

It appears that HostICan, as of November 25th, has 100% uptime again! Really amazing.

Here are the results of our uptime tests:

#1 HostICan - 100% Uptime
HostICan Review - HostICan Customer Reviews - Visit HostICan

#2 HostGator - 99.79% Uptime
HostGator Review - HostGator Customer Reviews - Visit HostGator

#3 MidPhase - 99.50% Uptime
MidPhase Review - MidPhase Customer Reviews - Visit MidPhase

#4 Globat - 99.47% Uptime
Globat Review - Globat Customer Reviews - Visit Globat

#5 EasyCGI - 99.44% Uptime
EasyCGI Review - EasyCGI Customer Reviews - Visit EasyCGI

#6 LunarPages - 99.02% Uptime
LunarPages Review - LunarPages Customer Reviews - Visit LunarPages

#7 IX Web Hosting - 98.54% Uptime
IX Hosting Review - IX Hosting Customer Reviews - Visit IX Hosting

#8 HostNine - 97.89% Uptime
HostNine Review - HostNine Customer Reviews - Visit HostNine

Keep in mind, we only sent pings every five minutes to each website. Therefore, if we found an outage and it really only lasted 20 seconds, we will still show a 5 minute outage. For this reason, the actual uptime percentage is lower than what we really experienced. Starting in December, we changed the ping times to 1 minute and we are testing using a controlled 10K page as well for better equality.

Please Reference: About HostNine Speed Tests
This reference has important information on how our HostNine tests are performed. We do not just send a tiny ping, these reports are from full page loads of this site’s main page. All uptime reports are based on 5 minute ping times, therefore, we acknowledge that reported uptime percentages are lower than actual uptime experienced.