ScarabWeb Hosting

Email Accounts: 10,000
Platform: Unix
Price: $12.00

ScarabWeb, a hosting company that was featured in our 04/24/2006 Podcast, offers a variety of different hosting plans that are all pretty reasonably priced. They consistently run special offers on their hosting plans, so you’re pretty much guaranteed of finding a very good deal with this hosting company.

For this review, we’re going to take a look at their Rhodium Shared Hosting Plan. This plan starts at $12 per month, but you will get one month free if you purchase a year’s worth of hosting in advance. For your money, you’ll get 2 gigs of disk space and 100 gigs of monthly data transfer, which is very reasonable. Unlimited email accounts, MySQL databases, FTP accounts and subdomains are also offered.

An unlimited amount of mailing lists are provided as well as the ability to have as many add-on domains as you’d like. Support is provided for Perl and PHP, and FrontPage extensions are also supported. CPanel is the control panel for this plan and provides a number of advanced options such as password protecting your directories, hot linking protection, and a lot more. ImageMagick is supported, and Fantastico is included free of charge with all of their shared hosting plans.

Support is provided for SSI/GD/Curl/NetPMB and a web statistic program is also included, although ScarabWeb doesn’t say which one is available. If you need SSH access to your server, this is available for an additional monthly fee. A dedicated IP address and an SSL certificate do not come with this plan, but you can add them on for an additional $75 per year.

Technical support is offered through a support ticket system, but unfortunately, no mention is made on whether or not it is available 24/7. If you need help right away, they also provide customer forums. There is a 30-day money back guarantee, which is nice to see, and overall this plan has a lot of nice features. They would have been ranked higher in our directory if they had noted what hours of operation their support team is available.