Labs

PayAsYouHost is the web-hosting arm of broadband service provider PlusNet. Its Standard web-hosting package comes with just 250MB of storage space for your website, the least of all the packages on test, and a 1.5GB monthly data transfer limit, which is also among the lowest. Luckily for PayAsYouHost, there's more to hosting than raw data specifications. The Standard package enables you to create an unlimited number of email addresses, which are accessible through webmail or a POP3/IMAP mail client such as Outlook. This provides enormous flexibility, as does the uncapped number of subdomains, and makes this service ideal for large clubs or organisations.

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manage your domain and hosting account through a Plesk-based control panel. This clean, straightforward interface makes the daily housekeeping tasks easy. It includes an online file manager for uploading your files, but you can also use FTP. No site-building tools or significant extras are provided, but there is a good range of scripting support, including PHP, Perl and CGI, and this is one of only two Linux-based packages here that supports ASP.

One of the most impressive aspects of this package is its level of database implementation. Although ultimately restricted in size by the relatively small allocation of web space, there's no limit to the number of MySQL databases you can establish. This is a real bonus if you need to serve a lot of unrelated data from different parts of your site.

Although this is an inexpensive package, the price doesn't include domain registration, so you will have to budget for that separately (this should be between £5 and £10 per year). If you plan to host a lot of media files, the 250MB web space will quickly fill up and you could easily reach your bandwidth limit, but the combination of unlimited email accounts, SQL databases and subdomains will make this a good choice for some.