At Hosting Alternative, we decided to give something special to our guests, follow us on twitter if you want to grab the most fresh coupons and discounts for hosting and domains.

These coupons will be available for a limited time only!

Hostgator coupon
This coupon will give new clients a 25% off. Simply type HOSTINGALT25 on the coupon field during an order on Hostgator and you will receive a direct discount of 25% on any of the hosting plans they offer:

Hatchling Plan ($3.96/month)

• Single Domain
• Unlimited Disk Space
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Unlimited MySQL Databases
• Unlimited Email Addresses
• Unlimited Sub Domains
• Unlimited FTP Accounts
• $100 credit on Google Adwords
• Latest cPanel

Baby Plan ($6.36/month)

• (All the same as Hatchling Plan but with:)
• Unlimited Domains
• Unlimited Add-on / Parked Domains
• Private SSL Allowed
• Dedicated IP Allowed

Business Plan ($10.36/month)

• All the same as Baby Plan but with:
• Your Own Toll-Free Number
• Free Dedicated IP
• Free Private SSL
• Anonymous FTP

Dreamhost coupon
This coupon will give new clients a $75 discount! Simply type HOSTINGALT75 on the coupon field during an order on Dreamhost, you will receive $75 discount directly on their hosting plan:

Dreamhost Plan ($9.95/month, now for only $5.95/month!)

• Free Domain Name
• Unlimited Storage
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Unlimited Email

Remember, this coupons will be available for a limited time only. We will update this post when we expire the coupons. If you have any problem with this coupons please contact us.

[THIS PROMOTION IS NOW OVER]

Hostgator just informed us of a new promotion. Starting next Tuesday, August 19th at 12am CST, Hostgator will be running a 24 hour, 45% off on all new hosting packages. The sale will continue until 11:59pm CST that evening.

That means you can have the following plan (Hatchling Plan) for $2.73/month:

• UNLIMITED Disk Space
• UNLIMITED Bandwidth
• Easy Control Panel
• 1-Click Script Installs
• $100 Google AdWords Offer
• 4,500 Free Website Templates
• 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
• 45 Day Money Back Guarantee
• 24/7/365 Technical Support.

Or the same as the Hatchling Plan, but with UNLIMITED Domains (Baby Plan) for $4.39/month.

Or, if you need a plan similar to the Baby Plan but with Private SSL & IP (and you will also get a Toll Free Number) you can grab it (Business Plan) for $7.14/month.

Also, you can grab the opportunity since the domains will be as low as $8/year.
Remember, the promotion will only be available for 24 hours, as stated in the beginning of this post, so set up a reminder!

To check them up simply click here.

[THIS PROMOTION IS NOW OVER]

If you are interested on buying a hosting plan from HostGator wait! We have great news for you!

Coming this Friday through Monday, HostGator will be celebrating Memorial Day by offering 50% off all New Hosting Packages! The sale will start at 12am CST on Friday, May 23rd and continue through the entire weekend. The promotion will end on Monday, May 26th at 11:59pm CST.

This 50% off means Hosting starting at $2.48/month!

Promo link here (the promotion will only be available from this Friday through Monday)

Bluehost, who’s powering over 2 million websites worldwide, cut down their prices, from $6.95 to $4.95 per month, a saving of $2.00 (almost 30% discount), making it even more affordable.

That’s right, now from $4.95/month you get unlimited domain hosting, unlimited hosting space, unlimited file transfers, unlimited email accounts, free domain name, free site builder with templates, free instant set-up, and over $200 in offers, covering advertising offers from Google, free credits from Facebook and other leading sites, all to help you grow your business.

All this is still covered by the excellent “anytime money-back guarantee” without any hidden fees of any kind.
There’s no reason why not to check them out and try their service. Go check them out!

Hostgator seemed like a good hosting company until they were bought by EIG (on June 2012).

They offered a decent service for a very small amount of money, which made them pretty popular and considered by many at the time as the hosting company of choice. Nowadays more and more people get into random problems with them which make some people to smell a scam all over it. Why did this happened?

Well, as said before, Hostgator seemed like a legit company, but they were bought by EIG (click on the link to read more about who and what EIG does), only after that did lots of complains kicked in, like the blackouts where their servers were down for hours without any response from the support team. Calls being redirected from a decent support team who actually got things fixed and knew what they were doing, to rude call centers in India who spoke barely English and simply repeated over and over that you had to email or open a ticked with the problem and hang off the phone on you.

People got mad when their websites were mysteriously turned offline and got their account banned for no apparent reason, some data estimative from this websites concluded that Hostgator seems to simply cut off the sites that are consuming more resources then the other ones, so they are able to fit more websites on less servers making more income and spending less, bringing a bigger profits.

Things get even worse, people can get their website offline and/or account blocked by simply a competitor of your website making a fake DMCA complain and sending it to Hostgator. This has happened already, Hostgator don’t seem to care about getting to the bottom of the issue, that simply takes too much time for them and they are so cheap that they prefer to lose a costumer then having a lawyer or someone with some kind of experience on this to actually look at the papers and conclude if they are fake, forged or actually the true thing.

Bottom line, Hostgator is not a scam, but they did fell pretty heavy on the quality of service they once gave to their clients. If you run some small blogs and have a very tight budget, then you have what you paid for, but if you run one, or some, websites that are very important or bring you a good revenue and you can spend a few more bucks on the hosting then avoid Hostgator! There are a lot of Hostgator alternatives out there, like Dreamhost (with unlimited plan, VPSs, etc) and MDDHosting (a very professional and FAST hosting company). Also avoid any EIG companies (click on the link for a list) because they basically share the same datacenter and have the same support system.

A lot of companies are offering unlimited hosting plans, usually include unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited domains and unlimited MySQL databases.

Unlimited is great! Why should I avoid them? You may ask.

Unlimited storage
Well… There is no such thing as unlimited storage. Unlimited is just a way of saying “don’t worry with the storage” or do you think they would really be putting up servers filled with hard drives over and over as your number of websites grown only to fit your needs? Of course not! That is even less possible since most of this “unlimited” hosting services are very affordable.

On some companies, there is a limit that most users don’t understand, the inode limit, it is a way of actually limiting your storage.

Unlimited bandwidth
Also, there is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth. Do you have an unlimited bandwidth internet connection? Did you read your ISP contract top to bottom? There is a “fair use” policy, they reserve the right to terminate the contract if they find you to be “abusive”. How they determine if you are an abusive user or not? They do as they wish (normally, they compare you to other users), they also use something called “traffic shaping” that among other things, they can “slow down” your connection on purpose in order to free bandwidth to another users. This also happens with unlimited bandwidth hosting, if they see you using too much traffic, you get either your account blocked or your contract terminated (without getting your money back) and in both of the cases, your precious websites will be down!

Unlimited MySQL databases
This one is tricky, if the database storage is shared with your storage, and your storage is “unlimited” then you will run into problems later, either by using too much space (as state before, on unlimited storage) or by using too much databases, tables, rows or some other reason. If on the other hand the database storage is shared with your storage, but your storage has a specific limit, you don’t need to worry too much, just keep an eye on how much storage you are using. If the database storage isn’t shared with your storage plan, then Huston, he have a problem, because if it is not using your storage, it is using storage elsewhere, and it sure isn’t unlimited even if they state so! Also, if they don’t state nothing about the number of concurrentconcurrent/active MySQL connections you can have, avoid them like hell!

Unlimited domains
About the Unlimited domains, this is no biggie, of course there is no such thing like unlimited domains, since they take up space and slow down the server, but only by a tiny little bit, so tinny that it is neglectable. Since domains are not free, you would have to spend an enormous fortune to create an impact on the server. So this “unlimited” is something more likely over 100, like 1,000 or even 10,000 domains. This is actually something that you don’t need to worry about.

Conclusion
If companies offer “unlimited everything”, they only want your money, and the cheaper they are, the worst they will be. On the other hand, companies that state how much storage and bandwidth they offer on a service, they are being honest and offering you a professional service. For some users who get confused if this limits are enough for their sites, some companies even state on average the number of visits your site or sites can take per day, but this is something that you need to get used to, measuring your bandwidth is something you should take in mind and optimize your website accordingly.

Note: If you are looking for companies that offer this kind of non-unlimited service, here is my favorite one: MDDHosting (this guys are great, they use LiteSpeed servers that are up to 9 times faster!).