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.