American Discount Web Hosting

Email Accounts: 10,000
Platform: NT
Price: $8.90

Whether you’re looking for a Unix or NT-based hosting solution, you’ll find a pretty good selection at American Discount Web Hosting. This company is consistently ranked highly by their customers, so let’s see what all the fuss is about. For this review, we’ll be taking a look at their Gold Plan, for an NT-based platform.

This plan is priced at $8.90 per month, or you can get a discount if you pre-pay 6 or 12 months in advance. Free set-up is currently being offered, as well as several worthwhile incentives. For starters, you’ll get a free domain name, or if you already own your own domain name, they’ll extend it for a year, free of charge. Depending on where you commonly register your domains, you can save at least a few bucks. Free design software is also offered, but unfortunately, they don’t go into detail on whether it’s an online site builder, or something you’ll be able to download and use offline.

You’ll get 800 megs of disk space and 8 gigs of monthly data transfer, which is honestly a little bit low for the price. However, we have reviewed several NT plans in this price range that offer around these amounts for the same price or a little more, so they should be able to stay somewhat competitive. Their main problems will come from the larger companies that have access to more servers and rely on quantity sales to make up for their cheap prices.

An unlimited amount of email addresses are provided, but it gets a little sticky when it comes to databases. MSSQL databases are available, but you’ll pay a $20 set-up fee and an additional $10 per month. That destroys any value this plan had based on its price, particularly when so many plans in this price range offer at least one MSSQL database for free. This affected American Discount Web Hosting’s overall rating for this plan adversely.

A control panel is provided, as well as site statistics, support for Cold Fusion, and support for Access, ASP, ASP.NET, Perl v5.x, JSP Applets, CGI Bin, SSL and SSI. For technical support, you can select between 24/7 support via a live chat or support ticket, or if your problem occurs during regular business hours, their toll-free help line. It’s always a plus when a company offers toll-free telephone support, so this did help ADWH a little bit in their overall ranking.