3iX is a provider of cheap web-hosting solution. Their basic hosting package costs only $1/month. Like all cheap solutions, it is not without it’s fails. It maybe a good solution for those who are looking to only create basic web-presence and can live with a little downtime. Though 3iX servers may go down from time to time, I have not been defrauded by them yet and they have managed to survive where other hosting providers in this class have bitten the dust.

One of my client’s website is hosted at 3iX and since I had a feeling that our website was down a little too many times, I set-up a free website monitor using Montastic. The free account at Montastic attempts to pull a specific page from the website every 30 minutes. Every time it fails, I get an email. When the site responds again, I get another mail.

I manually feed the data into a Google Spreadsheet and chart it out for visual inspection.

The free montastic monitor can only check once every 30 minutes. Hence even if a site goes down for 10 minutes, it will appear to me that the site was down for 30 minutes. At the same time, if the site went down and came back in 25 minutes just a second after the Montastic monitor checked it, montastic will miss the downtime completely.

Nevertheless, between the limitations of 3iX and Montastic, this post presents the ground reality of hosting on super-economic hosting providers. Here’s hoping that 3iX does a little better in the coming months.

Other cheap hosting providers (some of which may have slightly better up-times):

• WebHostingWorld.Net
• www.Dollar2Host.in
• www.CyberUltra.net
• www.HostSo.com/Web_Hosting