Well actually, you may know this company as monsterhosting.ca, which was their previous name. However, another large corporation with the name “Monster” in their trademark threatened with a lawsuit, and they were forced to change their domain name. It’s a huge cost to try to defend such things in a lawsuit, so it’s cheaper to go this way.

Now, to overcome the loss of the trademark “monsterhosting.ca”, they have offered an incentive to bloggers - write a blog review about Bluefur.ca and they will give you a free domain to use! So, to help them out (because I love their service and their hosting plans!) I decided to jump into the game as well. So here is a review for bluefur.com web hosting.

I used to be with Aplus.net hosting, which wasn’t very satisfactory for me. They did not offer Cpanel, but instead, their own custom control panel. The menu items were too scattered, and it was often difficult to figure out where was where. Also they had some extra settings required to set up POP3 email on your Outlook and such, which was a hassle.

I found out about monsterhosting.ca, or, now, bluefur.com, through a business network group. Now, I’m not the type to jump onto a company and support them only because I met the guy, so I started reviewing their plans, packages, and other services that come along with it, and I really liked what they had. So. I moved my hosting account over to them recently, and I’ve been very very satisfied.

The Control Interface

They use Cpanel. It’s the best. I won’t say anymore.

The Hosting Service

They provide metered email accounts, unlimited number of MySQL databases, phpMyAdmin with their databases (you’d be surprised at how many companies don’t!) and they also provide a detailed statistic of your website, and also for each sub-domain! This helps me a lot because I’d like to track the results from jeffkee.com and blog.jeffkee.com separately!

The Price!!!

Their Mini Unix Hosting costs $6.95/yr. But if you sign up for 1 year, you get 15% off. And for a 2 year term, you get 20% off!!! AND. With the discount code “jeffkee”, you will get an additional 10% off the final price!

Reliability and Speed

I’ve seen no problems with this. My site was down once, and when I called they were already rebooting the server and on the balls. I was impressed at how fast they were. Also, the server load speed/processing speed is fast as well.

Other Services

There are many other bonuses you get with bluefur.com, and those are one of the crucial reasons why I like their services so much more than others.

• You get a free testor account with Fiz.ca for your email marketing needs! For more information on this, please read this post, and this post as well.
• They provide you with numerous search engine optimization tools such as meta tag generators, ranking checker, etc.
• They provide easy solutions for backing up your site and your database.

And there are many more small tools that will save you time and money!

Now, the DOWNSIDES.

I’ve seen 1 case where a friend of mine applied for an affiliate account just like myself, yet they had no answer back after 2 days. They wanted to get set up with bluefur.com but they wanted the discount affiliate code first, and their existing hosting company, GWD hosting, was crashing every single day if not more. But, this was during the time when they had to go through the recent trademark battle and the legal shenanegans, so it is excusable. I’d be ticked off and disoriented and running out of time if I got sued by a big company.

So all in all, I’ve been through at LEAST 10 different hosting companies in my life - whether they be my own, or my clients’. The worst one was Canada Web Hosting. Aplus, NetNations fall under the “They’re OK” category. Bluefur.com falls under the “Best” category!

Web hosting companies to STAY AWAY FROM are :

Canada Web Hosting, Radiant Network, GWD Hosting, NetNations. I still remember the two names because of my horrible experiences  with them that involve not having phpMyAdmin, no cPanel (“well if you really need a subdomain, email us and we can do it overnight…”), no backup function (I had to download all the files through the FTP over 2 hours), server going down, server’s PHP safety mode suddenly changing without notification, and much more.

So the solution? GO WITH BLUEFUR.COM!!!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Marketing and Media, Software, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.