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AnHosting Review- Don't get Scammed

By: tom counts ANHosting Review

When preparing to write this ANHosting review, we visited the ANHosting website and bought the hosting plan we intended to review using exactly the same method as any other ANHosting customer. We did not notify ANHosting that we intended to write a review of their services and, to the best of our knowledge, we were treated exactly the same as any regular ANHosting customer.
About ANHosting

ANHosting was founded in 2001, which makes it a relative newcomer when compared to some other web hosts reviewed here at WebHostAnalysis.com. However, in its relatively short history ANHosting has grown to become one of the major players in shared web hosting, now boasting 30 full-time employees and thousands of customers in over 100 countries.

ANHosting have based their infrastructure around Dual-Core, Dual-CPU Opteron servers, Cisco network hardware and SCSI based RAID-5 storage technology. The data center power system is of-course fully protected by UPS with diesel generator backup.

Plan Features and Pricing

The ANHosting 'Mega Plan' offers an industry leading 250GB of disk space and 2500GB of data transfer/bandwidth per month and allows the hosting of up to 20 full domains and unlimited sub-domains, all for the low price of $6.95.

The table below shows the major features provided by the ANHosting 'Mega Plan', but of-course, for a full list of plan features you should visit the ANHosting web site.

Key features of ANHosting 'Mega Plan' (as reviewed)
250GB disk storage space
2500GB monthly data transfer / monthly bandwidth
Host up to 20 additional domains under the one account
Host unlimited sub-domains
Free domain registration for the life of the hosting
2000 FTP accounts
Unlimited MySQL databases
Unlimited POP3 and IMAP e-mail accounts
Unlimited e-mail auto-responders
SPAM-Assassin e-mail filtering
Easy to use cPanel based control panel
PHP, Python, CGI and Ruby / Ruby on Rails script support
SSI - Server Side Includes, fully supported
Full .htaccess control and CRON jobs
99.9% network uptime guarantee
30 day money back guarantee

Control Panel

ANHosting provides a customised version of cPanel for administration of your web sites. cPanel has become something of an industry standard, with the majority of web hosting companies offering it for administration. Those coming from other cPanel based hosts won't have too many problems completing tasks with the ANHosting panel. It was nice to see that the panel can be configured for a number of non-English languages, making life a little easier for those whose first language is not English.

A browser-based file manager is provided, as is an easy to use point-and-click site creator. This latter utility is great for those just starting out, as it allows the rapid creation of professional looking web pages without too much effort.

Scripting Support

The control panel offers Fantastico script support. For those who have not yet encountered Fantastico, it allows the easy installation of several dozen industry standard script packages. With Fantastico, installing a blog, forum, gallery or e-commerce solution only requires a few clicks; it really is a slick process.

Installing scripts manually is also relatively straightforward at ANHosting, with support provided for PHP, CGI, Python and Ruby / Ruby on Rails. Custom CRON jobs and .htaccess customization are also available.

Reliability

On the ANHosting web site, they boast, "Based on our historical uptime, we are proud to guarantee that our uptime will never drop below 99.9%", I am happy to report that our testing does tend to confirm this statement, with the uptime of our ANHosting test site exceeding the stated figure of 99.9%.

During our 3 month test period, our ANHosting test site only experienced one short (less than 15 minute) outage; we are still unsure whether this outage was due to an issue at ANHosting, or network problems somewhere between our testing site and the ANHosting network. Since this outage was a 'once-off' occurrence, we tend to think that it is worth giving ANHosting the benefit of the doubt.

Technical Support

A 24/7 phone support 'hotline' is provided for technical support, or, if you prefer, you can use email for support enquiries.

Our time at ANHosting was mostly without incident, so we did not have much of a chance to test their support facilities. However, the few email requests we did send were answered rapidly and provided the information we were seeking.

Conclusion

ANHosting offers a top-quality, reliable and highly affordable web hosting package. The 250GB disk space and 2500GB monthly data transfer/bandwidth offered by the 'Mega Plan' should prove to be enough for even the most demanding web site. During our testing period, reliability proved to be excellent. If you are currently shopping for a web host, we recommend you take a very close look at ANHosting.