1. JustHost
When it comes to selection of affordable shared hosting providers, JustHost has created a fantastic name in the shared hosting arena.Reliability & Up-time Guarantee : JustHost promises up to 99.9% uptime guarantee, and even as per my experience in past 2 years, they have turned out to be a pretty reliable shared hosting provider.
They have maintained 100% up time in the past 20 months, and there hasn't been any hiccup in terms of uptime, and reliability.
Goodies in Shared Hosting Package: One thing that I like a lot about JustHost is that they provide a free-for-lifetime domain with their shared hosting package, and a plethora of other goodies including cPanel, Free website builder, $50 Google AdWords advertising credits, $25 MySpace Advertising credits, $25 Yahoo! Coupon, and several other Advertising options (that I've still not tried out, so not too sure about them).
Customer Support: What's more, their customer support team usually replies back within couple of hours in most cases, if you shoot out a mail during regular working hours; even during weekends, I've never waited for over 12-18 hours personally, so I can say it's more than reasonable. At times, some of the support members are little lousy, and they don't answer all your queries, should you ask multiple questions in a single email. But, all in all, I must say they're better than most of the other hosting providers out there.
Security Issues: The only serious issue that I've faced is security; some of my websites and blogs hosted on JustHost's shared web server have suffered from malicious MySQL injections, and FTP injections multiple times, though it did not require too much of hard-work to get rid of that silly JavaScript code, which was forcefully inserted on index.php files.
Such incidences are pretty common, and the recent attack on In-Motion's web server by Bangladeshi hacker TiGER-M@TE is a fine example of the same.
2. HostGator
If you're not concerned about pricing, and don't mind shelling out little extra, HostGator is one of the best choices amongst the various shared hosting providers.Up-time Guarantee & Hosting Features: Just like JustHost, I've never faced any downtimes with HostGator, and they've definitely kept their word on maintaining 99.9% uptime, but personally I prefer JustHost due to the extra goodies that they offer, such as free-for-life domain, and occasional discounts on domain registration charges.
Customer Support: This hosting provider has been known for its customer support for years together, and personally even I have never had any issues with their services. Even their staff members are friendly, and technically sound enough to answer questions like why add-on domains aren't being added properly, how to upgrade Wordpress version, or other things that layman can't understand right away!
3. GoDaddy
The company has gained more fame with the nasty commercials than the quality of their shared web hosting services for sure, but still I've included GoDaddy in this list for one reason – the ability to transfer domain amongst GoDaddy users free of cost.On the other hand, if you do it with JustHost or HostGator, you'll have to waste one year domain renewal charges or some transfer fees ($14.95 in case of JustHost as of today).
Customer Support & Uptime Guarantee: The customer support is fairly good, but their team isn't as agile as that of JustHost, NetFirms, and HostGator; I've never faced any downtimes with GoDaddy either.
Another good aspect is that domain registration charges are slightly lesser in case of GoDaddy. But, the bad news is that you may be in danger of losing your domain, should you forget to pay the annual renewal charges until the domain expires.
There have been several complaints that GoDaddy has sold out the domain ownership to another customer just due to few minutes of negligence of existing domain owner. Many users, and reviewers consider GoDaddy to be one of the best shared hosting providers, but I tend to disagree on this fact!
So, there you have some of the top shared web hosting providers that can meet all your hosting needs, and offer the best deals in the market. Of course, this list isn't exhaustive by any means, and it was a quick round-up of three of the top hosting providers I've personally dealt with, and found to be really good.
