Brilliant!

Normally, I am not given to spending time reviewing things just for the sake of it. Some things, however, are so good, you feel the whole world should know.

In a word, AwardSpace hosting is absolutely brilliant. I am a free user, using a sub-domain of AwardSpace. I hopped over at least five different free web hosts before settling on this one. Each of the ones I rejected had show stopping reasons for rejection: speed or reliability issues, lack of critical features, forced ads or something else. AwardSpace has no such problem.

My site is a personal blog - not at all mission critical. It's a self-installed WordPress platform, which comes with plenty of niggles on other services: missing PHP modules, misplaced CGI folders, draconic file size limits and some file format blocked altogether. On AwardSpace, it was a breeze.

AwardSpace offers excellent tech support. Replies are quick, to the point, and resolved more quickly than most companies even register a support request.

The feature offerings themselves are extremely generous: a fair amount of webspace and bandwidth. Even these are not set in stone - I remember going over my monthly bandwidth limit due to an influx, and AwardSpace admins very kindly reset my limit.

There are two slight blemishes on an otherwise perfect system: the hosting control panel does not feature very sophisticated file managers or back up methods, and they have a fancy (and un-published) list of 'bad words' which causes 404 errors to appear when present on a particular page. While I understand that the second of the two helps prevent abuse of the free hosting system, I do wish they would, sometimes in the near future, implement a system of 'trusted' users for whom they could waive that issue.

Conclusion: I've been on AwardSpace since July 2008. And I have yet to see a reason to persuade me to look elsewhere.

Biggest Pro: Brilliant support eco-system
Biggest Con: The 'bad words' filtering system

Service and support is fantastic

I am not some professional in building web sites. I just have my own site that has 2 domain names hosted at awardspace.com (the 2 different domains lead to the same site). The site I use is just for my hobby in fact my son helped me build the site and I maintain it during the last 9-10 months.

I've been with them for just under a year and only had 2 downtimes for about 5-10 mins each. If you know anything about hosting, you know that is AWSOME. I am really happy with AwardSpace hosting, costumer service very fast to solve the problem. I would recommend them to anyone.

The really go over and beyond the call of duty at all times. I already renewed my hosting for 3 years this instead of just the year I currently have. I even paid a discounted price on that.

Biggest Pro: Good service
Biggest Con: So far none

Until now, the best one I found

Since the beginning of June I'm a customer of AwardSpace. After having left my old host due to billing reasons I had to find a host that was fast, cheap, that had lots of space for my files and a considerable amount of bandwidth and, above all, reliable.

I had a free account in AwardSpace in which I kept files for back up etc And since I got to know AwardSpace I always found it a good host not only for the space in free accounts but also for the control panel's simplicty.

Now I'm very happy with the service and I hope that it'll continue like that. Just two small issues I cannot hide from the review. At the beginning I was surprised by a suden downtime of my website. I mailed the support and in ten minutes got the answer back telling me that the server had to be fixed due to some problem. I just think that they could have mailed all the customers that had websites hosted in that webserver instead of waitting for a "What's happening to my website?". The other problem is that the control penel is missing an extremly important feature - backup. When I want to back up my files or compress all of them for once in a zip file or something (like we can easily do on CPanel) I have to do it manually.

However, I'm very very happy. I would recommend it to anyone who asks me which host he/she should choose for any type of website.

(Sorry about the language. I'm not a native speaker).

Biggest Pro: Technical suport and price
Biggest Con: Lack of back up feature in control panel

Loudest bang for your buck!

I'm very pleased with awardspace. When I first heard of them, I kept thinking: "What's the catch? Maybe they're really slow, or have restricted CGI access;" etc. Turned out it was, in fact, none of the above: their servers are lightning fast, you get excellent database support, quick and easy shell access, plenty of Perl modules installed, good to high bandwidth, and a fabulous uptime. In fact, I'm sometimes 'worried' about their free accounts, as you get so much for the less than 9 bucks a month (Max Pack Plus), that you wonder why they even bother with the free accounts.

A webhost is as good as its support. Their sales reps aren't really all that technically knowledgeable (e,g. I first inquired about the availability of "Image::Magick" when deciding about webhost, and the sales rep referred me to some other image gallery software they have). Nor do they really need to have much technical know-how, actually, as long as they're willing to connect you to someone who has. And in that department awardspace also scores high with me: you get escalated to a Tier 2 admin (or Tier 3, even) pretty fast. And they are always quite willing to assist you with whatever issue you might be having. For instance, the other day I had a biggie: a spurious upload error when uploading files with a browser (which turned out to be a small misconfiguration on their end). It would have been a deal-breaker, as my client's entire site hinges on being able to upload files in that manner. At first they acknowledged the mishap, but told me they couldn't change it (yet), and that I'd basically had to wait for the outroll of the next Apache release (or get a much more expensive VPS). After I told them that was, of course, not an acceptable solution for me, they fixed the issue after all. The morale of this story? They really DO go out of their way to help you. And it really is golden to have admins behind the scenes waiting to help you. Even with that last issue, it was clear that -- while they can of course not revamp major parts of their infrastructure for just one customer -- the willingness to help me was nonetheless clearly present, and they did come thru for me with flying colors.

Although their shell hosts do not allow for running the 'uptime' command, their servers do nonetheless not appear to be overloaded (which one might suspect could be a reason for hiding uptime); and going only by 'feel' (the slugginess of the shell prompt; or lack thereof, rather), I'd say they give you a more than decent share of CPU time. Likewise on the reachability of the server: I have yet to experience any real slow-down.

All-in-all, you just get an incredibly good deal for less than 9 bucks a month. I can't tell, of course, how all of this compares to other hosting companies around the globe; but with a service this good, I have no need to find out, either.

Nice hosting

I am a free lance web designer that signed up for awardspace April 2008. At the beginning it took me some time to get familiar with the control panel but when I managed to do this I discovered that it has a number of great features that I currently enjoy. They recently added asp.NET which I intend to use in the near future, also there is a number of php version which is also an advantage for me. It is not that I use them all but you never know.

The support people are nice and fast in their response. It rarely takes more than an hour to get an issue resolved. Well, sometimes their predefined answers are not as exact as I wish them to be, but that is not a big deal.

In very rare occasions servers have been down. In fact if it was not for their MySQL issue last month I would have given them a 10.

I guess that this is what I could say about awardspace, if you are looking for a hosting provider or want to change your existing one I highly recommend them, for their great value and reasonable prices.

Biggest Pro: Great value
Biggest Con: none

Free the Best, Paid the Worse.

They are an excellent free service, I thought that could get a better service if I pay the very reasonable monthly service fee,, I was sadly mistaken.

The control panel is very limited and outdated. I had to spend hours doing simple tasks because they do NOT have a file manager that has simple functions as file upload, install, or uncompress.

Tech department was ok could get a respond in an average of 1 hour..

The server is real slow, that was all the time. There was no difference of speed with the free service.

There is a limit of 50 mb for a db.

Finally I got my account canceled for no real reason, I never did anything against TOS, they claimed that my account activity made their server crash. That was a big excuse to get rid of me because my site had increase traffic over the last months,

I could not get my money back the good thing is that my plan only had 2 months remaining so I did not loose too much...

This is why I DO NOT RECOMMEND AWARDHOST PREMIUM SERVICE

Biggest Pro: Free service
Biggest Con: Slow server and they close high bandwith sites with no warning

The best webhosting service

I've had AwardSpace for about 3 years now. After 2 years I upgraded too the 200 GB hosting plan (which is the biggest).

Their customer service is really great. They have helped me alot and I got free domain names even I didn't signup for a new account when that offer was. (Really helpful and friendly customer service)

I've recommended AwardSpace to alot of my friends.

There are some cons with the free hosting plan, but the paid is awesome! You can change your php.ini file and set your own settings and everything. I'm impressed how well everything is, it's even easy to set up your own email accounts and alot of features.

The Best Hosting Service Ever

I've been with awardspace for almost two years now (and surely for many more years to come)and in this two years I couldn't find another hosting provider on the net that offers the same level of service like awardspace. I've used the support ticket a couple of times and the guys there were great. The uptime is great, and also all the other services. My site never down and also I can truly recommend the paid or free account on awardspace to anyone out there who wants a reliable and excellent website hosting service.

Than You

Pieter Coetzee

Biggest Pro: Uptime, MySQL DB, Everything Else...
Biggest Con: Certain file types not allowed in free account, custom error 404 page only in paid hosting accounts.

Great free web hosting service.

I have researched many web hosting services since I first created my web presence back in 1999 and so far AwardSpace is the best free web host I have seen. They offer a moderate amount of space, an exorbitant amount of traffic, and are one of the few to offer any database services on their free access accounts. The only reason I didn't give them a perfect 10 score on all categories is because the free account doesn't allow uploading of any files that are not ascii files. All archive files (zip, rar, tar, etc...) are not allowed. This isn't too big of a deal due to the fact that there are a number of free file hosting services out there that can be used.

Biggest Pro: MySQL DB on free account
Biggest Con: Free account doesn't allow archive (zip, rar, tar, etc...) files.

The best free webhost

I have been with AwardSpace for over a year and have found them to be the best hosting provider I've tried. The free hosting plan looks too good to be true with no forced ads or complicated set up steps. The file manager is good, it includes multiple file uploading and moving files to other (sub)domains and I've had no problems with the connection speed. I transferred my domain last year, and AwardSpace handled it perfectly. There is also great support for PHP, MySQL etc. and the control panel is very easy and simple to use. The only slightly annoying thing for me is that custom 404 pages can only be added with paid hosting packages, although that (and much more) can be accessible for $3.99/month. If anyone needs web hosting, whether for their first website or an advanced one, AwardSpace is ideal.

Biggest Pro: Great free hosting package
Biggest Con: No custom 404 pages in with free hosting