Web Hosting Review

Dinohost is a small Web hosting provider whose shared-server plan specializes in the small business Web hosting market. Aimed at new developers who may be somewhat inexperienced and who lack the time to build a Web site from the ground up by hand, Dinohost offers a number of features aimed at helping beginners in the field, while lacking the features that larger, and more advanced users would demand.

Dino offers all the server-side features you would expect from a Web hosting provider, including PHP(4&5), CGI-bin,  MySQL, cPanel with Fantastico scripts, FTP, email (includes POP3 and IMAP, virus scanning, spam filtering), domain forwarding, .htaccess, PHPMyadmin, backend support for multimedia streaming and processing (Flash, Shockwave, etc).

The Web site building support includes server-side Frontpage and Dreamweaver support, SiteBuilder, and round the clock tech support. The plan we looked at, Dino4, offered 4 GB HDD space, 80GB monthly bandwidth, unlimited domains and subdomains, no setup fee, unlimited email and FTP accounts. Their Web site hosting is on Linux servers (CentOS), running Apache, and with 99.9% uptime, they guarantee reliable web hosting. Backups are once daily.

While this may be a good place for learning developers to use for small business Web hosting, there are a number of things about Dinohost's plans which stick out. The first is the price. At $16 a month on a one year plan, it would be reasonable to expect a rather high level of support and features. Unfortunately, Dinohost offers only shared certificates for the included SSL support (a certificate can be purchased for $69.99/yr for private-SSL), they make no mention of any shell access (SSH), and it is lacking in many of the features that come with similarly priced plans from rivals also promoting their affordable Web hosting, such as a CMS, forum software, and shopping-cart support for online stores. The amount of bandwidth and disk space on offer is painfully low, especially for Web site hosting attracting such high fees. For this reason, it would be difficult to say Dinohost has affordable Web site hosting plans, even for their market. If you're looking for cheap web hosting... keep looking.

Dinohost Affortable Web Hosting