Best Website Hosing Companies: The Two Best Value Hosts

^{At spotcoolstuff.com we usually write about unusual hotels, great gadgets, cool music and things that make us go WOW. Recently, we've gotten a lot of questions about the more mundane stuff of starting a website. So we're taking a quick interlude from our usual topics to write a series of five articles on web hosting and website domain name procurement. The other four articles in the series:}

• The Best Companies For Buying Domain Names
• How To Buy (And Sell) Domain Names Through eBay
• The Best Places To Make Money Parking A Website Domain Name
• The Best Website Hosting Companies: The Top Two Hosts

_{And with that . . .}

Trying to find a reliable and inexpensive host for your website? Click here to read about the general criteria to look for when shopping for a host. The companies below are the ones we think have the best hosting bargains:

Pow Wow Web

Pow Wow Web is a great choice if you are hosting a personal site, especially if that site is a WordPress blog. Pow Wow has a very good system for automatically installing and upgrading WordPress on your site. That, combined with a very low price and a remarkably reliable record for up-time, makes Pow Wow Web a winner.

That said, Pow Wow Web has rather limited customer service, especially by phone. For an online business that's an unacceptable drawback but for a personal site you'll do OK. (They have customer service, it's just slow and done almost exclusively online). Also, if you host a site with Pow Wow you'll also be stuck using their slighly clunky proprietary system to administer it.

Mango Hosting

Don't be fooled by Mango's offer of unlimited disk space for your website. Like all other cheap hosting companies claiming to offer unlimited space, Mango covers themselves with an acceptable use policy that forbids "excessive use." Unlike many other cheap hosting companies, Mango is reputable and will allow you to host a reasonably large site. They also offer a few frills like search engine submittion and a program where you can see how much traffic your website it getting -- pretty amazing for a mere $9.99. Just make sure you are willing to put up with some down-time for your site before choosing Mango. And don't expect much in the way of customer service.

One note: While the above two options represent two good inexpensive hosting values that doesn't mean you should select either of them. These days website hosting is cheap. Why setting for a Hyndai when you can get a BMW for a few dollars more? Click here to see our selection of the two best hosting companies.

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