IX Web Hosting is a web hosting service provider, who claims to host 350,000 domains. Unfortunately, their website suffers from a lack of meaningful information. You do get to know that they have three plans on offer, the Expert Plan, Business Plus and Unlimited Pro. While the Expert Plan is hosted on Linux servers, both the Business Plus and the Unlimited Pro may be hosted on Linux or Windows Servers. Obviously, for Windows hosting you have to pay a little more.

According to the website, the Expert Plan costs $4.95 per month, the Business Plus costs $7.95 per month and the Unlimited Pro costs $12.95 per month. All three plans offer unlimited domains, unlimited data transfer and unlimited web space. That sounds a bit unreal, but we shall take their word for it. The Expert Plan gives you 1 free domain for life, while the Business Plus gives you two, and the Unlimited Pro gives you three. Again the Expert Plan gives you 1 dedicated IP, the Business Plus gives you 8 and the Unlimited Pro gives you 16. Dedicated IP addresses help to get you better search engine rankings, so that is not a bad thing. All three plans are ecommerce ready. They all feature a free Site Builder, 24/7 support and Database support.

Let us look at the three plans individually. The Expert Plan offers 2500 email accounts. Both POP3 and IMAP support is available, as well as Catch all email addresses, webmail, email forwards, Mailbox aliases, email auto-responders, and mailing lists. The total mailbox quota is 1 GB. Scripting support is available in the form of PHP 5, Perl, CGI, CGI-BIN, JavaScript and DHTML, Server Side Includes (SSI). You can have 50 MySql databases, 50 PostgreSQL databases with a total databases quota of 1 GB. On the face of it, this is a pretty good plan for its price.

Coming to the Business Plus, we see that over and above the email facilities offered in the Expert Plan, you can have 5000 email accounts with an overall quota of 5 GB. Scripting support is also more or less the same except that with Windows hosting, you get CGI with FastCGI support, ASP/ASP.NET v2.0, and Coldfusion v7 MX. You can also have up to 100 MySql databases, 100 PostgreSQL databases, and with Windows hosting, 100 Microsoft SQL 2005 databases. With Windows hosting you also get OBDC/DSN support. Total databases quota is 5 GB. Again, this is a pretty decent plan.

With the Unlimited Pro you have unlimited email accounts, with an overall quota of 10 GB. Scripting support is similar to that of the Business Plus, and you can have unlimited number of MySql, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL 2005 databases. With the Unlimited Pro plan you get free AD coupons worth $425 from MIVA Networks, Google Adwords, Yahoo Search marketing, Bidvertiser, ABCsearch, Ingenio Pay Per Call, and Enhance Interactive. This in itself is pretty good value for money.

Overall, although you have to dig really deep in the site to find useful information, the packages offered by them are quite good and worth taking a look at.

Price: 8

Reliability: 10

Tech Support: 10

User Experience: 9

Overall: 9