Homestead Hosting: Serving the Online Community Since 1997

Homestead was founded in 1997. Their web hosting packages are ideal for individuals looking to create a web presence for themselves, as well as for new and small businesses. They make it possible for those with no web design experience to have professional web sites and they have so far helped over 12 million people accomplish these goals. Homestead’s mission is “to revolutionize the way people learn, create, and live with technology.”

They have three main plans to choose from for your web hosting needs: Starter, Gold, and Platinum. These plans are part of their QuickSites service that provides a gallery of professionally designed web sites. This services allows you to choose from a pre-made webpage template, so that you can create a great looking website by yourself -- even if you have zero web design knowledge. All three plans have a one-time setup fee of $20.

The Starter Plan starts at $4.99 and $9.99, depending on options. It offers up to 5 web pages for your website, one domain, 25MB of disk space, 5GB of allowable file transfers, and toll-free phone support for the first 30 days. The Starter Plan is best for novices in the online arena.

The Gold Plan starts at $19.99 a month and includes 5 mailboxes, an unlimited number of web pages, 100MB of disk space, 15GB of allowable file transfers, and toll-free phone support for the first 90 days. The Gold Plan is best for anyone who plans on doing anything more than just displaying a small, personal website.

The Platinum plan starts at $49.99 a month and includes 3 personalized domains, 50 mailboxes, unlimited web pages, 300MB of disk space, 25GB of allowable file transfers, unlimited toll-free telephone support, and $30 search advertising credit (a $360/year value).

Some of the options that are available on all three plans include: QuickSite Design Gallery, SiteBuilder Tools, and site statistics. Also available are Storefront ecommerce plans. If you’re looking to sell products online, Homestead will help you accomplish this. There are three ecommerce plans to take advantage of: Enhanced, Professional, and Enterprise. Each plan helps you save money by not charging transaction fees.

The Enhanced Storefront offers the best deal available. With their merchandising and marketing services for $24.99 a month, you can create unlimited pages and sell an unlimited number of products, and you can submit your products to shopping sites, to name a few benefits.

The Professional Storefront package is best for small to medium retail or service businesses. For $59.99 a month, you can issue store credits, take advantage of various promotional capabilities, automate inventory management functions, add invoices for orders taken by phone, in person, or via email, and have a shopping cart with secure and SSL enabled checkout, among many other features.

The Enterprise Plan is the most sophisticated ecommerce solution that Homestead offers. This plan is suitable for medium or large businesses who need to have ‘the works’ in order for their customers to shop securely, pay with major credit cards directly on the website, and allow customers to order recurring subscriptions for newsletters, updates, or anything else. For $229.99 a month, you receive web hosting with 20 GB disk space, up to 200 unique email addresses, and 400GB data transfer -- enough for a business of almost any size.

Other products and services include design services, SearchLight, and Hmail. SearchLight is an affordable way for you to deliver search engine advertising. Homestead writes the copy and places the ad on more than 30 popular search engines. They’ll track the results and perform a review to see if further changes are required.

Hmail is Homestead’s full-featured email service. Hmail helps you organize your emails, easily access a calendar or Yahoo! map from within a message, sync with your Blackberry or Palm device, is equipped with anti-spam and anti-virus protection, and offers workgroup efficiency through group calendaring.