Sponsored Review: Misk Domain Essentials
As I mentioned a few days ago, the best way to get your name out there is by having an online presence and setting up a website for yourself. So you’ve bought a domain for yourself, now what? Now you need to go on a quest to find reliable web hosting. If it’s your first time with a website and you just want to test the water, there is no reason to go all out with an expensive monthly hosting plan that claims it’s digg-proof.
That’s where Misk’s Domain Essentials package comes in. For $25/year you receive 100MB of storage space and 10GB of bandwidth for static content. Misk is able to provide such cheap hosting with the fact that it is a basic webhost, meaning you can’t run dynamic files such as PHP on them.
Misk.com’s Hosting supports all static content. This includes html files, all types of images, javascript, flash, zip, pdf, and anything else you can think of! There are NO restrictions on the type of files you can upload. You won’t find a better service for hosting static content.
However, if what you need is static hosting this might be the service for you. In addition, Misk gets its bandwidth from the reliable Internap which might sound familiar is you use SourceForge a lot, they are a main host for that. Your site will be hosted on a clustered grid of servers with RAID-6 disk storage. Continuing with server details, data is dynamically compressed on the server side to speed up page loads on every request. Users can upload and download files from the server with SSL FTP support.
As part of the $25/year you also receive 100 email addresses and unlimited email forwarding. This Domain Essentials package is an add-on to the price of your domain name, which Misk can control for you as they are an ICANN accredited registrar and have been around since 1998.
Now that you know the details, I do have a few criticisms. While reading their hosting page I found the following quote which made me chuckle quite a bit:
This is more than enough storage space for most web sites. Most web sites hardly use more than one megabyte (1 MB) of space. You get a full one hundred megabytes!
Also, I can’t believe that they only offer static hosting. Nowadays, throwing PHP support in Apache is a trivial process. I guess it’s more of an issue of CPU strain on the shared servers. But then again, I can see the ideal user for Misk’s hosting being someone that doesn’t even know what PHP is. As for Misk’s real, not-claimed uptime and actual support I can’t comment as I have never personally used their offerings. However, if you keep track of Kyle Neath’s latest creation, The Hostr, a site dedicated to web hosting reviews, you might see a review from an actual Misk user in the future.
DISCLOSURE: I received two Benjamins for this post and have never heard of Misk until this. I do not have any experience with Misk’s hosting and am personally hosted with Media Temple and utilize GoDaddy for the dozens of domains I own.
I don’t see much use, personally, for a host without scripting. If you want cheap, ASO has a $32/year plan with decent space, but also with top-tier support and, of course, PHP scripting.
Robin, cool to see another ASO user around! Also, ASO has ASO extreme which is the same thing getting reviewed here, better storage and bandwidth minus the scripting and email. It’s a great plan to say throw your download files on and then host your site on a shared plan or something. But granted the ASO extreme plans are a bit pricier and thus target a different group.
Love the disclaimer Paul.
I don’t know, personally I feel like the only way to go is some kind of “CMS” or what have you, be it Textpattern or Wordpress or whatever. Then if you aren’t interested to all the features those have to offer, you should just sign up for a free wordpress.com or Blogger account and be done with it. I simply can’t imagine wasting my time setting up a website with static html pages in this day and age. But, if it’s a profitable business, more power to Misk!
BTW, I’m also on ASO! “Small” account here.
A web host specialising in static hosting in an increasingly Web 2.0 (dynamic) world? Doesn’t sound like commercial sense to me! But congratulations on putting together such an objective review, Paul!
I’ve been using hostmonster.com for a while now, I bought a 2 year package with them while it was 3.95/month (now its 5.95) but still pretty good.
Anyways 96 bucks for 2 years, 300 gigs space, and 3TB of bandwidth, + all the goodies, and site has not had any downtime since then, I’m pretty happy :-)
Man, paid reviews without actually trying/using the product just seem cheezy to me. I mean, I can go to a website and read up on how a service advertises themselves too, as can pretty much anyone else. Next time, I’d consider trying to dig up some dirt on the service or at least interviewing someone who does use it about their experiences. Otherwise it really seems like empty garbage publicity, which is not what I want out of blogs on my reading list. C’mon Paul, dig deeper. :)
I can’t wrap my head around how you can review something when you have “never personally used their offerings”. But hey, for $200, I’d do it too :)
For me, static hosting would be useless, but I can certainly see a few people who would be more than happy with it. It would be kinda like the websites you get with the dotmac service. Fine for publishing photos of your wedding or trip around the world or something.
@Sean - when I write these paid posts, I don’t really expect you guys to take them too seriously. I have student loans to pay, so money is money. =) Plus, this is dead week at school so I can’t really be bothered to put too much effort in a post that I was only required to write 200 words about.
@Andreas: Better to use Picasa Web Albums for publishing your photos. It’s so easy my Dad did it by himself, and he has a hard time with the concept of right-clicking and selecting things by clicking and dragging.
Paul - Yeah, i definitely understand the money issue. One part of me says “take the money if they’re stupid enough to give it to me.” After all, they are getting their name on a popular blog, which is publicity and gets awareness for their service out there. On the other hand, it just seems kinda ethically grey, and you’re also essentially trading on your blog’s reputation. I also definitely hear you on “crunch week.” Can’t wait for this semester to be over!