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Hosting Options

Since this is what I’m looking at and I often think better with my fingers, as they say, I’m going to put the ten hosting options I’m considering in a table and post it here for comparison. The ten options are from seven hosting firms because two of them have more than one in my price range, which tops at €25 per year, all taxes included. All but one of the firms were picked after looking through a couple of forums about a month and a half ago, when I first realized I may well need to start looking for such options, seeing as Jen was already ignoring me for some time.
The tables will only include details that seem relevant to me and where there are differences between the offers. If I find conflicting values listed, I will post the range. All prices will be per year, since the hosting firms usually require payment for a year in advance for their cheapest packages, in Euros, and will include the 24% VAT and any listed exchange fees. If the price is given in lei, I will convert using today’s rate.

Hosting Firm: DespreGazduire eGazduireWeb EvoHost MxHost RedHost Webfactor XServers
Hosting package: Start 25 Start 75 Start 150 GW1 Evo Mini MX-Start PRO RH-0 RH-1 Personal Standard
Disk space: 25 Mb 75 Mb 150 Mb 1 Gb 50 Mb 150 Mb 100 Mb 300 Mb 500 Mb 1 Gb
Monthly traffic: 2.5 Gb 7.5 Gb 15 Gb 10 Gb 15 Gb 5 Gb Unlimited Unlimited 20 Gb Unlimited
MySQL databases: 1? 3? 5 Unlimited 1 1 1 5 5 10
Subdomains: 1 3 5 Unlimited Unlimited Unlimited? Unlimited Unlimited ??? 10
E-mail accounts: 1 3 5 Unlimited 5 5 1 5 100 100
Uptime guarantee: 99.9% 99.9% 99.9% 99.8-99.9% 99.9% 99.5% 99.75% 99.75% None? 99.9%
Backup every: 24 hours 24 hours 24 hours 12-24 hours 24 hours 8-168 hours 8 hours 8 hours 24 hours ???
Hosting price: €4.17*** €11.91*** €17.86*** €20.90* €17.38 €15.18 €11.16 €22.20 €15.18 €21.58*
Domain price: €9.91 €9.91 €9.91** €13.07* €12.20* €12.48** €9.92 €9.92** €9.99* €12.40-13.02*

Notes:
* As there was no mention of VAT, I assumed it was not included in the listed price and added it myself.
** Starting in the second year. First year free.
*** Taking into account the 20% discount valid until the end of September. Not cumulative with the free domain offer.

Other observations:
DespreGazduire: Not sure about adding them as I hadn’t heard of them until just now, when I was preparing to publish this and went to look for some more data about the others. They’re supposed to be a group of hosting firms who joined to provide such offers. The interesting thing is that they claim to activate the accounts as soon as you order them, deleting them if you don’t pay within seven days, so you have a week to test the service before needing to pay. They mention payment by SMS as well, but only up to €3 per message for the network I’m in.
eGazduireWeb: I’ve seen their services praised pretty much left and right on sites and forums that deal with the issue, without others contradicting the posters. However, the plural doesn’t seem to be the right choice, as it appears that a single person manages the entire operation.
EvoHost: I remember a few people recommending them, but the site seems suspicious to me because you can’t exactly find out detailed information unless you log on as a client and it seems like it hasn’t been worked on in quite some time.
MxHost: I remember choosing them several years ago, when dad wanted me to pick a host for his firm’s site. He gave up on that idea, but the name stuck, so they were the first ones I checked this time as well. A huge advantage is that they normally allow payment by SMS, which would add €1.24 to the price but allow me to handle it myself, without needing to ask dad to somehow go and pay in my name and therefore also avoiding even letting him know that I have my own domain. However, right now they say the system is suspended. Forum posts say that their services are good and they have entered a partnership that allowed them to set up a great data center, but also that they artificially inflate the traffic generated by those who have the cheapest hosting packages in order to force them to upgrade.
RedHost: There is some praise sent their way on forums as well, but what I noticed was that their staff is very active on said forums, answering any complaints about their services and trying to sort things out right away.
Webfactor: All I can say about them is that they’re extremely active on sites and forums that deal with the issue. Even if some posters would honestly recommend them, I couldn’t trust those recommendations because their staff is all too likely to jump in and recommend themselves whenever someone asks for a decent hosting service or complains about their own host.
XServers: Like eGazduireWeb, I have seen their services praised left and right. They seem a more serious company as well. The problem is that they made a very bad impression on me, because when I first started looking their site kept crashing and timing out, and it didn’t recover for nearly a full day. I haven’t seen that happen since, but it really didn’t help their cause.

At this point, I’d rule out EvoHost and Webfactor simply because something doesn’t feel right about them, and DespreGazduire Start 25 because that’s too tight even for me. eGazduireWeb, RedHost RH-1 and XServers simply seem too expensive for my needs, though if I was in fact wrong and either eGazduireWeb or XServers included the VAT in the listed price then it’d be quite reasonable, but I somehow doubt it, considering what they offer. Same goes for DespreGazduire Start 150 if I take the normal price into account. MxHost stays in contention thanks to the option to pay by SMS, assuming it’ll be made available again soon enough, no matter what else happens, but I am very worried about those reports about them inflating traffic…
RedHost RH-0 and DespreGazduire Start 75 may be the obvious choices at the moment, as the only ones that’d actually fit inside my price range in the long term, if you add together hosting and domain prices, and also offer quite enough for my needs. Unlimited traffic certainly makes the RedHost offer sound even more interesting, but there’s also the question of speed, which is something that XServers makes a point of stressing, as they guarantee at least 2 Mb/s at all times for every site hosted by them. On the other hand, I’d strongly prefer to have at least two MySQL databases, which would point me towards DespreGazduire, but the severely limited subdomains really rub me the wrong way. And the fact that I just learned about them now make me be quite suspicious anyway, so I’ll need to look into this further to see if they really are an option.

In conclusion, eGazduireWeb and possibly XServers seem to be the safe options, but also the expensive ones. RedHost RH-0 edges ahead of DespreGazduire Start 75 as the best option at the moment because I know a little more about them, but that can change depending on what else I’ll find out about DespreGazduire, and either way there are some problems with both offers. MxHost remains a possibility, but I’m certainly far more likely to dismiss them than I was before writing this. As for the rest, I think I can quite safely rule them out at this point.
If anyone happens to read this and has any further information or advice for me, please go right ahead and post a comment, because I most likely need to be out of here by the end of the month and really want to make the right choice.

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