Well, in the past couple of weeks I have researched web hosters and tried out two that looked promising. I looked at the web hoster mentioned here (3essentials and PowerDNN) but found them to be out of my budget. I was interested in a hoster that was cheap, reliable, good support and knew something about DNN. The thing that strikes me the most about the various hosters is their Control Panel. Some are great and some really suck. The "plesk" control panel falls into the later catagory. The two hosters that I decided to take a closer look at are "DailyRazor" and "WebSecureStores". DailyRazor uses the PLESK Control Panel which I hate. I find it not very intuitive and a real pain in the butt to use. However, this is where my web site currently resides and where it's probably going to stay. Once you get things up and running, you don't have to spend much time in their control panel - at least, that' my train of thought right now. WebSecureStores has a pretty good Control Panel called HELM. I found it much more intuitive but I was not able to get my web site up and running on their site. That's the main reason I decided to stay with DailyRazor. I probably could have gotten my site to work on WebSecureStores but I got burned out trying to make things work and just gave up on it. Support from both of those hosters was very good - no complaints there. Now, my old web hoster, WebHost4Life, has a great control panel but I didn't find their support to be very helpful whenever I ran into performance problems with my site. They kept saying that it was an ASP.NET issue but it turns out that they had one client that was constantly tying up the back end database.
Anyway, to make a long story short:
WebHost4Life - Poor Performance - Great Control Panel - mediocre support - Good prices the first year ($9.95) but stinks after that ($11.95).
DailyRazor - Good Performance - Terrible Control Panel - Good Support - Great Prices ($5.95)
WebSecureStores - Good performance - Good Control Panel - Good Support - Great Prices ($6.95)
NOTE: The prices I quote here may not be the sites cheapest but are the cheapest that include MS SQL 2005 databases. Also, WebSecureStores only provides 100MB of storage with the prices quoted here, if I went with them I would probably have to upgrade to their next level which would put me at $9.95/mo.
I have yet to find a good site that maintains ratings for DNN hosters that would give you an apples to apples comparison.
Regards,
TC