Web Host Ninja is a service to help you find the cheapest and best web hosting that fits your needs. We have collected information from several web hosting providers and made it easily searchable so you can compare which offer that is best for you. It can be confusing to find good hosting without paying too much, so let the ninja help you!
A web host is like a hotel for your web site, and each host provides different hosting plans, that is like different types of rooms in the hotel. If you are not technically savy you need to get a web host that provides good support (see here for all plans with phone support) and that are easy to use. Also make sure that the hosting plan you choose contains the technical features you need for your site to work, your web designer or web developer should be able to give you a list of these features. And, as with everything else, compare prices so you don't get ripped off. Here at webhostninja.com we have several good plans for under $5/month.
Just search for the features you need, for example Ruby On Rails, JSP or PHP & MySQL. That will give you a list of all the hosting plans that provides those features. Using Web Host Ninja should save you significant time and money and still let you have access to all the technical goodies you want from a host.
No, we do not provide any kind of web hosting services ourselves. Instead we help you find the best hosting for your needs by letting you compare the offers from several web hosting providers across the internet.
The featured plans on the WebHotNinja startpage have been chosen based on their price and feature set. They are what we think are very good deals for most people that are looking for hosting.
A web hosting provider (a.k.a. web host, a.k.a. host, a.k.a. hosting provider) is a company that rents out space on and access to web servers, this means that you can have all the files you need to run a web site on the hosting providers servers and access them from anywhere on the internet. The alternative is to set up and manage your own web server, something that is both complicated, time consuming and definitly not cost effective.
A hosting plan is a package of features for a specific price that one can buy from a hosting provider. Usually a hosting plan is made up of a certain amount of disk space (storage), a certain amount of bandwidth usage per month and a set of technical features, such as access to different data base types and programming languages. The most common is that one pays for a hosting plan for a year or two in advance (note that all prices on Web Host Ninja is per month based on signing up for a plan for a month, a year or two years).
Many hosting providers offer both shared and dedicated hosting plans. Shared hosting is when the same server is shared between several users, this is often enough since most sites are quite small and do not have that many visitors. If you are running a big site with loads of traffic you might want to consider dedicated hosting, this is when you rent a complete server from a hosting provider. You have full access to the decicated server and this gives you much more control over what technical environments are installed and running on the server. Having a decdicated server is quite a lot more expensive than a shared server, and also requires a much higher level of technical knowledge.
Storage is the amount of disk space you can use for your web site. It is specified in Gigabytes (GB) and most sites do not need very much space at all, a few GBs should do it. The exception to this is if your site has a lot of large files, such as images, photos, audio files etc. Another very important thing to consider is that you also need space for all the email you might store on the server, so if you are several people that are going to use the web hosting plan for email then you should probably take this into consideration when you think about how much storage you need.
Bandwidth is how much data (in Gigabytes) you can transfer back and forth from your host per month. Each visitor to your site needs to transfer the data from your host down to their browser to see your site and each time you get email to your hosted site you also need to use your alotted bandwidth to download it to your mail program. For most sites it is enough with a few GBs per month in available bandwidth, so there is no need to go overboard. Most hosting providers allow you to use more than your quota of bandwidth, but then you usually have to pay for all the extra bandwidth you use.
All hosting providers have different ways to price their offers, so at Web Host Ninja we have tried to take all those different ways and merge them into one easy view of the prices from different providers. That way it is easier for you to compare the prices from different hosts. Most prices on the site is what you would pay per month if you signed up with the hosting provider for two years, if you are intersted in only signing up for one year or one month you can find these prices on the individual plan pages. The reason we use the two year cost is that this is the best deal for 99% of the hosting plans, and we want to help you find the best deal!
Usually you would pay the complete amount for your sign up period up front, so if you sign up for one year for a plan that costs $10/month, you would be charged $120 up front for the full year. For details about payments and amounts please go to each individual hosting providers web sites.
A setup fee is a one time fee you pay to create your account at the hosting provider. Commonly this is only charged if you sign up for a month and not when you sign up for a year or two. This makes signing up for a year or two the best deal in most cases.