PiWeb Hosting

Email Accounts: 75
Platform: Unix
Price: $5.95
Storage Space: .500GB

PiWeb Hosting currently has three different hosting plans, two of which are standard shared hosting plans, while the third is a reseller plan. We’ll be looking at their starter plan, which is priced at $5.95 a month. This is a good price, but is the plan worth it? Let’s find out.

You’ll get 500 megs of disk space and 15 gigs of monthly data transfer, which is pretty reasonable for this price range. Most sites that would require starter hosting wouldn’t come close to the monthly bandwidth allotment and the disk space, while a little low, should be sufficient for most small sites. 75 email accounts are provided, which again, is a little low, but given the intended market, this amount is pretty standard. Even a small company shouldn’t need this many email addresses.

SpamAssassin and ClamAV anti-virus both come with this account, and webmail is also provided. A lot of budget hosts are still not offering these options, particularly ClamAV, so this is nice to see. CPanel is the control panel for this account and Fantastico is also provided free of charge. For a plan in this price range, it’s great to see Fantastico offered for free, when many hosts charge an additional nominal fee for this service. You’ll be able to have 10 add-on domains and unlimited subdomains with this account, which is also nice to see.

5 MySQL databases are offered, which is standard at this price range. PHPMyAdmin is offered for their administration and several other tools such as ImageMagick are supported. An unlimited amount of FTP accounts come with this plan, and several other features such as site statistics and support for FrontPage extensions are provided.

Support is available 24/7 and appears to be online only. However, that isn’t too surprising given the price tag and should be enough support for most customers. A 99.9% uptime guarantee is offered, as well as instant set-up and a 30 day money-back guarantee. Overall, this is a great budget plan that doesn’t scrimp on the features and provides a lot of nice options for small to medium sized web sites.