Recommended Web Hosting

I had been racking my brains over the best way to recommend the Ultimate Marketing Center (UMC) hosting package to everyone, when my friend Jane Smart, someone notorious for practicing due diligence, approached me about hosting for her new domain. She was strongly considering Hostgator at the time. That's when I suggested she check out UMC.

She later got back with me and after a series of back and forth discussion on the two hosting companies, I asked her permission to reprint my final reply because I felt it was the best way to endorse UMC. Below is my response:

---- Edward Gause wrote:

Ok, let's cut to the chase because that's how I know you want it. The only thing I saw that Hostgator offered over UMC was 50,000mb versus 1,000mb of web space and to be honest, unless your a banking institute or some other major company, we both couldn't even fill up the 1,000mb if we tried. Between honest-marketing.com and trinale.com (which I have a load of files on), I don't even use 125mb.

I posted snapshots of both UMC and Hostgator cpanels here: http://honest-marketing.com/test

Tell me what you see that's different. One thing I did notice is that Hostgator offers 20 sub-domains where UMC offers unlimited. If you take all the fluff out and get right down to what YOU really need, it comes down to FTP access and easy script configurations. Both UMC and Hostgator provide that for you.

So now we'll down to the wire and have to decide who offers the most for the value.

- Hostgator charges $9.95 if you pay 12 months in advance. That's $119.40 for a year. Not a bad price but if you change your mind after 30 days, no refund. If you pay Aweber for a year up front for autoresponder service, it will cost you another $179.40 up front. That's $298.80 for a year's worth of hosting and subscriber management. BTW, I noticed that Aweber allows you to have up to 10,000 subscribers and charges and additional $9.95 each additional 10,000. I wonder if that applies if you have, say 10,025 subscribers.

- UMC charges you $19.95 per month. That's $239.40 per year. It's pay as you go, so if you change your mind down the road, no problem, you haven't lost anything. Autoresponder service, along with affiliate and membership management is included in the monthly price. With the autoresponder service, UMC allows you have up to 35,000 subscribers. I don't know if there's an extra charge if you exceed that number. I can ask customer support if you like. Again, I'm going to be realistic here. Although I plan on being around for a very long time, as often as I purge my email list, I seriously doubt I will ever have 35,000 "ACTIVE" subscribers at one time.

So there you have it. You save $59.40 annually with UMC and get more value for the buck! More questions? Bring 'em on! I like doing the comparisons. If I'm wrong, I'll consider switching over myself.

Now I need to ask you for a favor. I've been racking my brains trying to figure out what to write on my hosting recommendation page. This email pretty much says it all. With your permission, I'd like to post it on my website. Please let me know if that's ok?

As I stated in the email above, so there you have it. Feel free to come back here and compare your web hosting candidate(s) with UMC and then decide who offers the most value for the dollar.