Since I wrote my first CF Host post, I signed up for an account with HostFolio. So far they have been fantastic. I have spoken personally with support and they were very accommodating and helpful which gave me a nice feeling right from the start. Then, to reinforce my positive experience even further, they upgraded to CF 8 in August. Performance has not been an issue and the one time there was downtime it was for scheduled maintenance which I was notified of well in advance. In addition, the only tags that HostFolio disables are CFREGISTER and CFEXECUTE. I can’t speak personally for any of the other hosts on this list but I will give HostFolio a big thumbs up.

Removed from the list are IX Web Hosting and Host Department. If they choose to upgrade from CF5/6.1 they may make it back on the list but for now, being that far behind is simply unacceptable.

Added, thanks to user comments, are two new hosts: Canwebhost.com and HostNexus. Canwebhost offers an $8/month plan. At 50mb disk space and 2G Bandwidth I wouldn’t call the plan robust, but at least they’re offering CF7. HostNexus offers a 300M/10G plan for $9.95/month.

Hosting-ColdFusion just misses the list because of an extra $2/month charge for a real database.

So, here they are for September ’07:

[table=3]

That isn’t to say that hosts like HostMySite aren’t worth the money. HostMySite is a fantastic option for clients who don’t mind spending a little more every month for a proven record of service, support, and uptime.

In my experience as a developer, however, I find that many clients can be…”frugal”. Some see hosting prices and want to know why their quote for hosting is so much higher than other prices they’ve seen online. Or they simply don’t need the level of service and performance provided by a HostMySite or CrystalTech. It’s those clients that I compiled this list for.

To qualify for the list, hosts had to offer deals that broke down to $10/month or less (US dollars) in a maximum of one year installments. All listed hosting packages include at least 1 non-Access database. Hosts are listed in alphabetical order. I make no claims as to the service, support, or reliability of any of the providers, though any comments offering insight into their track records are certainly appreciated and encouraged.

So, without further rambling, I present to you 10 hosting providers offering ColdFusion hosting for under $10 a month.

[table=2]

An Honorable Mention goes to CQHost who offers ColdFusion MX 7 hosting with 500MB disk space for $9.50 per month when you pay for 2 years of service.

I’d also like to mention a site that is attempting to offer free ColdFusion MX 7 hosting in the near(?) future: freecoldfusionhosting.com. This site is the project of Pablo Varando who owns easycfm.com. Pablo aims to provide 1G disk/5GB Traffic with 1 MS SQL Database/Unlimited Access Databases.

Before anyone points it out, I am aware of the fact that GoDaddy offers cheap CF hosting, however, I had such a miserable experience setting up a site there that I couldn’t bring myself to place them in the table, which brings me to my closing advice….

Before signing up for any of these hosts, I urge you to contact them to discuss custom tags and disabled tags. Some of the hosts provide this information online but most do not. For example, Host Department, like GoDaddy, disables COCONTENT, CFOBJECT, CFREGISTRY, CFADMINSECURITY, CFEXECUTE, and CFDIRECTORY. If you just need a place to host some basic dynamic pages, that may be acceptable; but if you’re planning on building out a real-world application, using a host that disables CFOBJECT can be like buying a car with a weed wacker engine. Sure, you’ll eventually get to where you’re going, but the time it’s going to take to get there just isn’t worth the savings.

-rG