Offer Details:
Sign up with iHostVM and receive a free domain name* with your new hosting account (a $14.95 value). Just sign up for a hosting account and register a new domain name with your account, we will refund your credit card for the purchase price of the domain name ($14.95) within a week.

*Offer only good for .com, .net, .org, and .biz domain names.

It seems that we have two options now - iHost and Jumpline. At first glance Jumpline looked like it had the edge, so I thought I'd give them a try.

According to what's on the VM site, if you're an existing customer you have to click a link, which I did. It takes you to a VM problem reporting form, which I filled out but never heard anything back. (That's unusual for VM, so maybe I mistyped my email address or something.)

At any rate my questions are;

1. Has anybody compared iHost and Jumpline in areas such as speed, tech support and the prices and billing options that apply after the free year?

2. What do I, as an existing VM customer, need to do to take advantage of the free year of hosting?

3. Are we limited to either Jumpline or iHost, or can we activate both, compare them, and decide which we prefer when our year is up?

1. I have signed up for a Jumpline account but have not used their tech support, so I cannot say how good (or bad) it is. Speed is relative; the user's connection to the site is the real determining factor. Unless you mean speed as in service response time. In this case, I was very satisfied how quickly changes I wanted applied to my site configuration were applied, usually within 30 min.

You should be able to go to both provider's web site and get details about their plans so you can compare costs and capabilities. The free Jumpline offer is for their basic VDS service, so use this as a baseline when comparing features and price. Just remember that after the 1st free year, the full monthly price applies (although you can get a discount for a yearly contract).

2. I would imagine that after starting this thread, someone at VM will be in contact with you. You should have gotten a reply to your email containing a registration code to use when signing up for Jumpline. Make sure your mail spam filter did not junk the VM reply.

3. You can only use one domain name per hosting service. If you want to do a live compare between 2 sites, you will need 2 domain names, one being hosted with each service.

Thanks, Larry -

I actually do have two domain names - one for the paranormal site and another for a business, so unless there's some kind of restriction by VM I may just try out both sites.

I did check my spam folder just to be safe, but found nothing. VM is on my "good list" so none of their replies has ever been redirected as spam.

I'm sure that the registration code you spoke will be along fairly quickly. VM has always been good at getting back to its customers on a timely basis.

Just in case your email was deleted by our spam filter, send it to: contactvm@virtualmechanics.com

they will forward it on. We try to reply to all emails within 24 hours, if you havet received a reply by 48 hours the email most likly has landed in a spam filter somewhere along the line

Goldie