The editorial team of Top11Hosting.com is happy to announce the overall winner of our Best Host Award for the first half of 2011...

and the winner is MochaHost!

We have performed a throughout analysis of the main players in all main hosting categories and have evaluated each of the companies listed in our directory by using the following criteria:

Features

Price

Support

Speed

Uptime

We used all of the above and have came up with an overall score for each host. Some of the notable factors we took into consideration are:

• Packages and Scalability - does the host offer more than 1 plan? Besides shared hosting does the host offer opportunities for growth such as VPS or Dedicated or Cloud Servers?
  • It is important for anyone to understand how critical is for a host to be able to offer scalable solutions with an easy to upgrade option.
  • We found that some of the main players in the business are limited to a single plan or just a shared hosting solution which at one time is out grown by most hosting clients
• Free tools - how many free tools are included across all hosting plans and packages.
  • Does the host offers easy scripts for installation of the most popular scripts such as Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, Magento, etc
  • Some hosts do - some hosts don't offer enough free tools. We took this into account in our evaluation
• Features and Flexibility - the overall features and application language can be a deal breaker for most clients.
  • For example some hosts offer limited application language support such as PHP only vs some hosts offering PHP, ASP.NET and on top of these Java support.
  • It is important to consider in a long run that the hosting client may need a broad set of applications and tools in the future that may not be supported by the host. The general rule of thumb and factor in our evaluation is "the more the better"
• Pricing and Discounts - we did take into serious consideration the current pricing of the offered hosting plans and their future discounts. One thing to consider when selecting a provider is the discounts offered for renewal of the hosting rather than just looking at the initial price. Even with the bigger and most popular hosting companies there is a significant difference between the current special prices vs the prices offered for renewal
• Support - we did pay close attention to the support options provided by all providers in our evaluation. We were very satisfied of the results of our evaluation in this category. All hosting providers evaluated offer fast and knowledgeable support. We could not find any significant differences or lack of support thus we have rated all hosting companies in our study with the highest score of "10"
• Speed & Uptime - the results in this category were very similar and very satisfactory. All of the hosting companies evaluated have shown 99.9% or higher uptime and availability as well as fast network connection speed. We did not consider in our evaluation providers who could not meet the 99.9% uptime mark.
  • It is important to be taken in consideration that we have tested only providers with data centers in the USA - all of our network speed and latency tests were performed to the hosting companies data centers from the USA as well as tests performed from Europe, Asia, South, America and Australia. Generally the providers with data centers in the midle (Mid-West) part of the USA offer the best average latency from/to various connection points.