Misk.com Domain Essentials - sponsored review

A good web-host is essential to anybody who is serious about their website. The checklist when looking for a hosting company is storage, bandwidth, reliability, technologies and, of course, price. Finding the right host for your website can save you a lot of hassle, headache and money.

What is Web Hosting?

There’s basically three levels of website hosting:

1. Co-location
   You provide the server, they provide the location and the bandwidth
2. Dedicated
   They provide the server, location and bandwidth. Your site lives on your machine(s).
3. Shared
   Your website shares server(s), location and bandwidth with a bunch of other websites.

The cheaper and more common method of hosting is in a shared environment. A shared hosting plan can usually provide more than enough resources for most websites. In fact, as of this writing, Photoshop Lab is using a shared hosting plan.

Shared Environments

A downfall of shared hosting has always been reliability. With so many different websites sharing the same resources, the likely-hood of something bad happening always increased. That’s where grid-style hosting comes in. Grid hosting is a new approach to a shared hosting environment. Instead of a few websites sharing one server, in the more classic shared environment, grid hosting is a bunch of websites all sharing a bunch of servers. With this architecture, any heavy loads or problems can be spread across a huge network of resources, lessening the more common negative effects.

Enter Misk.com Domain Essentials

Misk.com Domain Essentials web hosting plan is a grid-style architecture that is very, well, cheap. At $25 per year, it is a fraction of the cost of some of the other more popular grid hosting plans. Around since 1998, Misk.com lives on a popular Internap hosting facility.

A Unique Approach

Misk.com provides the basics at a basic price. Where most other hosting companies try to one-up each other in storage, bandwidth or extra features, all of which 99.5% of their users won’t use, Misk.com Domain Essentials just gives you the bare minimum. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

They don’t provide dynamic technologies like PHP, ColdFusion or ASP. They don’t provide massive database storage, or 10,000 email accounts. They provide reliable, static, simple hosting at a very simple price of $25 per year or $2.09 a month. Whoah!

A Perfect Fit?

As someone who builds websites for a living, I get a lot of requests for work from friends or family or friends of a friend of someone who knows a cousin in the family that just wants a “simple” website to show photos of their wedding/birthday/baptism/dog/real estate or maybe just a little information about their construction company. These are the type of people who would fit into the Domain Essentials hosting plan perfectly.

They don’t need a dynamic website with rotating banner ads. They don’t need a massive user registration database. They don’t need 10,000 gigabytes of bandwidth a month. And they definitely don’t need a $45 bill for hosting that they’re only using 10% of. They don’t need a $25 per month plan from Yahoo!, they need a $25 a year plan from Misk.com.

For anybody who is looking for cheap, basic hosting without all of the overhead and excess, Misk.com’s Domain Essentials is a perfect package.