ITTreats.com

I’ve recently had a chance to review the most popular web design resources. Ranking factors that were used are listed below each resource. The categories include hosting companies, domain registrars, twitter marketing tools, freelancing websites, and icon resources.

Hosting Resources:

Ranking factors: i) reliability; ii) speed; iii) cost; iv) technical support.

#1. HostGator – 9.98

. From my personal experience, this is the most reliable hosting company out there. With more than 12,000 servers under their management, including servers for Fortune 500 companies, it is no wonder they are #1. You don’t have to wonder whether they will lose your data and go out of business, because unlike most other newcomers, they have been in business for 9 years. They have notch customer support that are willing to do anything (believe me, I’ve asked them to install things that other hosting companies wouldn’t touch). I use their hosting for many websites.

#2. FatCow – 9.92

#3. iPage – 9.88

#4. BlueHost – 9.74

#5. HostNine – 5.2.  Stay away from this “web host”. Their technical support and reliability are the worst we’ve ever seen. I had to wait 1 week for a response!

Domain Resources:

Ranking factors: i) cost; ii) reliability; iii) customer support.

#1. GoDaddy – 9.97

This registrar giant is the oldest and most reliable. Reliability is super important for your domain registrar because in 99.9% of the cases you let them handle DNS forwarding to your hosting company. If you use a cheap host, they can easily do something wrong with the DNS, which will make your website down despite your hosting company being up. Scary isn’t it? In addition to being very reliable, you can get cheap .com’s at only $7.49 each from GoDaddy. I use GoDaddy as the registrar for all of my domains.

#2. Domain.com – 9.79

#3. NameCheap – 9.77

#4. Moniker – 9.69

#5. 1&1 – 9.54

Twitter Resources:

Ranking factors: i) quality; ii) cost; iii) customer support.

#1. MarketMeSuite – 9.93

Highlights: best Twitter marketing tool to push your business forward. Allows for url branding, finding followers and more. Very inexpensive for the features you get. I use it daily on WebDesignDev’s Twitter account (http://twitter.com/webdesigndev)

#2. TweetAdder – 9.75

#3. SocialOomph – 9.42

#4. TweetDeck – 9.1

#5. TweetWhistle – 8.72

Icon Resources:

Ranking factors: i) quality; ii) cost; iii) customer support.

#1. IconFinder – 9.96

Highlights: more than 188,000 icons, very easy to use. This is the top icon site for web designers.

#2. IconShock – 9.75

#3. IconSeeker – 9.72

#4. IconsPedia – 9.34

#5. FreeIconsWeb – 9.20

Freelancing Resources:

Ranking factors: i) number of projects; ii) cost; iii) customer support.

#1. Elance – 9.98

You can get as much as 30% of your clients from this Freelancing site. Very easy to use.

#2. Freelancer – 9.89

#3. oDesk – 9.42

#4. Guru – 9.45

#5. iFreelance – 8.80