Aplus.net provides web hosting services, among various other web solutions. The industry veteran, established in 1992, currently has more than 250 employees worldwide and more than 100,000 customers. While its goal is to be a one-stop shop for web services, in this review we will examine how Aplus.net’s web hosting service compares to that of competitors.

Features and Pricing

Aplus.net offers four different web hosting plans:

• Business
• Professional
• eCommerce
• Personal

Several features are not available on the Personal plan, but for some this might not be a deal-breaker. The Business, Professional, and eCommerce hosting plans more or less offer the same features, but vary in the amounts provided.

Either the Personal or Business plan should work well for most individuals, and both are priced fairly competitively at $5.95 and $9.95 per month, respectively. Some may find the 15 GB of disk space and 250 GB of bandwidth limiting with the Personal plan, but for many individuals this may very well be sufficient.

Unlike some hosts, Aplus.net offers a choice between Unix and Windows hosting. While most web applications are Unix-based, there are some that are dependent on Windows. The average customer is probably safe picking the Unix operating system, but those who specifically know that a script they wish to use requires Windows (those programmed in ASP for example), will definitely want to select Windows.

Aplus.net hosting guarantees 99.9% uptime on their shared hosting plans. They state that “if your shared hosting website is ever down for more than one hour due to our network failure we will refund up to 100% of your next month’s bill” (subject to any restrictions within the Service Level Agreement). This is a very competitive guarantee.

For this review, we are testing the Personal plan. This plan includes 50 email addresses and 10 MySQL databases, which are plenty for most customers. The plan is limited to one domain and some features, such as easy installations of WordPress, are not offered. These features are offered with the more expensive Business plan, but not with the least expensive Personal plan.

Terms of Service

Aplus.net has a “Legal” section that includes an Acceptable Use policy, as well as separate agreements of Shared Hosting and other services. Each of the policies is fairly straightforward and easy to understand.

The Acceptable Use Policy that Aplus.net has in place is fairly standard, but note that it does forbid adult content and even content that my not strictly be considered “adult” by other hosts (such as profanity).

The company’s Shared Hosting Agreement is also standard, but does give Aplus.net the right to charge a “heavy traffic fee” and/or an “excessive space fee.” The Shared Hosting Agreement also states that there are no refunds (pro-rated or otherwise) offered to customers. Aplus.net also imposes a $10 plus 6% late fee per month for delayed payments and a bizarre clause about non-solicitation of Aplus.net’s employees. If a customer were to hire an Aplus.net employee, they’d be responsible for paying three years salary for that employee to Aplus.net or $200,000 (whichever is greater).

Aplus.net Control Panel

Aplus.net uses a custom control panel that seems to get the job done without any problems. It includes standard features such as a file manager, database administration tool, email management tools, and more. The control panel was quick and easy to navigate. While there were a few ads in the control panel for other Aplus.net services, they were not distracting and were not in the way of actual features.

Testing Aplus

After signing up, I did not receive a traditional welcome email from Aplus.net. My first email correspondence from them was a billing statement that did not include enough information to login to my account. To figure out what information I needed, I had to try logging in and then find a link to the forgot password icon. I also had to figure out that a registration number is the same as an account number. The information I was emailed did not seem to work, so I called Aplus.net to try and figure out how to login to my account. They were able to help and I was able to get logged into my account (see Customer Support section below).

Once I was logged in, I had no trouble using my website and getting things to work. The application installer that Aplus.net uses is not as straightforward as other installers like Fantastico because it requires that users create databases before using the installer. However, it did seem to work once a database was created and a proper installation location was chosen.

Aplus.net offers a variety of Windows services that you would not otherwise get to use with a standard shared web hosting account at most hosts. Aplus.net supports ASP.NET, as well as Standard ASP, both of which can be enabled from the control panel. Once those are enabled, customers can use IIS applications within their regular web hosting account. Aplus.net also has a nice tool for managing PHP settings right from the control panel, as well as a tool that lets customers restore certain files from regular backups.

Aplus.net Customer Support

Since I was unable to login to my account, I had to contact support for help. I chose to contact live support via live chat. I was connected to a representative within 15 seconds after starting a chat session.

The representative’s answers were short and borderline rude. When I said that I was unable to login, I was told to “use fire fox browser” (I was). After a minute or two, the representative was able to help me (apparently the information that Aplus.net emails is not enough to login).

I then did another live chat to ask if my hosting was Windows or Linux. The representative quickly provided me with a seemingly canned, but still useful response letting me know that Aplus.net uses a hybrid system that routes requests based on file extensions.

When I decided to test the company’s phone support, my experience was similar. I called the company’s 800 number, went through a few phone menus, and waited about 30 seconds before being connected to a representative. The representative I spoke to was friendly and helpful, but in the end, was unable to help me install WordPess on my account. The representative told me that my account was supposed to have a WordPress installer within the control panel, but the company’s plan page said WordPress was not included on my Personal package. To remedy that situation, I had to talk to the sales team, which was closed after 10 PM. I asked if there were other ways to install WordPress and he said I could do a manual installation, but that would require “custom coding” (not technically true) and was therefore outside of the company’s scope of support.

Conclusion

Aplus.net provides a solid service at a low price and is relatively unique in that it provides inexpensive shared hosting that is relatively powerful on flexible billing terms. Unlike many hosts, Aplus.net does not force its customers into a contract.

Pros: Variety of tech-friendly features for developers, especially those who need Windows hosting; affordable

Cons: Not all departments are 24/7, inconsistent support quality

Bottomline: If you have specific technical needs and a low budget, Aplus.net is a good choice for you.

Rating:

Reviewer: Kyle J. Summers

www.Aplus.net

Features and Pricing

InMotion Hosting offers a few different “Value Plans.” These plans are at the very bottom of the price range, and while they do provide very generous amounts of disk space and bandwidth for the cost, there are some limitations to consider depending on one’s needs. There are three different value hosting plans:

• Starter
• Basic
• Max

For this review, we are testing the Basic plan.

Often times the differences between a host’s plans in the same category are minimal, yet with InMotion Hosting it is very important to consider what you specifically need. One doesn’t really need to consider the amount of disk space and bandwidth as the amounts provided far exceed what the average hosting customer will use. InMotion Hosting has created hosting plans that selectively impose limitations.

For customers who might be new to hosting and are looking for a built-in website builder, it is important to notice that InMotion Hosting does not include this feature on their Starter plan, but it is available on the Basic and Max hosting plans.

For those interested in dynamic, database-driven websites, which would be any content management system (WordPress or Drupal, for example), it is important to note that the Starter plan does not offer any MySQL databases. Most websites today require databases to function, unless they are simply composed of static pages. The Starter plan also does not support Flash, so not only must pages be static, but it is also not possible to provide Flash content.

There aren’t many differences between the Basic and Max plans. The additional features offered in the Max plan include the ability to host additional domains, another database, additional FTP accounts, email SPAM protection, additional e-commerce features including the availability of a merchant account, website statistics, and access to raw log files. None of the value plans support subdomains, so it’s not possible to have something like help.example.com. All three plans permit PHP, Perl, and CGI scripting. For the average customer, the Basic plan would probably work well.

The monthly pricing for the three plans is $3, $4, and $5, respectively. The only billing cycle available for the Value plans is 24 months, so two years of hosting must be paid up-front. Most hosts offer more flexible billing terms than this, but this hosting is quite inexpensive.

InMotion Hosting provides a 30 day money back guarantee, which is comparable to many hosts. With the two-year billing cycle, if a customer cancels after that guarantee period they are not refunded for the remaining time. For example, if a customer cancels on day 31, they would still be paying between $69 and $115 for the other 23 months of hosting. Some hosts are willing to provide a pro-rated refund for unused hosting.

Although not reviewed here, InMotion Hosting also has other services including “business class” hosting, virtual private server (VPS) hosting, dedicated hosting, and web design.

Terms of Service

InMotion Hosting’s terms of service are quite standard. As I read through them, there were no terms that stood out or were in anyway abnormal; the content was pretty straight-forward. Like many hosts, InMotion Hosting does not permit pornographic material, IRC chats, torrent software, proxies, etc. to be hosted.

The 30 day money-back guarantee was not listed on their terms of service, yet it is expressed on the website. Generally hosts add this to the formal agreement, yet it for some reason is not present in the terms of use. The guarantee is detailed elsewhere as being limited to the first 30 days of service and no refund will be provided thereafter. There are certain things that are non-refundable, as usual, such as domain name registration fees.

Another thing to note is that there is no stated uptime guarantee. Many hosts will provide about a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Control Panel

InMotion hosting, like many web hosting companies, provides the industry-standard cPanel control panel. Upon logging in, the instance of cPanel provided looks similar to most any other. There are areas for managing preferences, mail, files, logs, security, domains, databases, software/services, and advanced features. Pingdom, an uptime monitoring service, was used to obtain these statistics. Many hosts guarantee 99.9% uptime, and InMotion Hosting does not demonstrate the ability to provide this, though their uptime is likely acceptable for most customers.

Using cPanel’s graphical interface makes it quite simple to manage everything including email accounts, files, website statistics, and databases.

Testing

After signing up, I received a handful of emails along with a phone call. Within about 10-15 minutes after placing the order for my hosting account, I received a phone call confirming my account. Since the domain I signed up with had the word “blogging” in it, the representative calling recommended that I consider upgrading to the business-level hosting as the Value plans were “about 50% slower” and he also noted that my plan only provides one MySQL database. I asked if it was possible to later upgrade and I was assured that I could.

The first email I received stated that my order was being processed and that I should expect an email or phone call to confirm it, which I did receive, as noted above. After confirming my account, I then received a welcome email with my account details and steps to get started along with another email serving as a receipt of my order. The welcome email was full of helpful information providing all account details, how to get started, and where I could go to find support. This information is invaluable for those who might be unfamiliar with hosting, and is useful for any hosting customer.

After setting up my domain name to point to my hosting account, I was able to begin using the service. InMotion Hosting, like many web hosting companies, provides a placeholder homepage before content is added. Luckily they leave the page ad-free with just a handful of links to their services along with the InMotion logo and a message stating “Website Coming Soon! Stay Tuned.”

The first thing I wanted to do was to set up a blog on my website. The Fantastico auto-installer is often available in cPanel. Using this interface, it is simple and fast to install various online applications including systems to facilitate blogs, classifieds, content management, discussion boards, and more. I selected WordPress and the option for a new installation. On the next page I only had to fill in a handful of fields and then I clicked to install my blog. After confirming my selections, my blog was instantly created.

Since InMotion Hosting does not explicitly imply a statement or guarantee of uptime, it is important to consider what customers can expect to get if they sign on. During the month before writing this review, my InMotion Hosting account experienced 99.12% uptime with about 6.75 hours of downtime over six different occasions. The longest instance of downtime was about 4.5 hours. This might be atypical since the uptime across five months was 99.78% and that same 4.5 hour instance was the longest during that period.

Here's what uptime looked like during the last month

6 months of uptime monitoring

Customer Support

InMotion Hosting provides 24/7 technical support. There are a handful of support channels available including phone, email, live chat, knowledge base, help desk, and forum.

Effective phone support can often be a very defining factor for a host. Just after noon on a weekday I called InMotion Hosting customer support. Immediately after dialing the number I was connected to an automated gateway informing me that I had reached InMotion Hosting and that my satisfaction was guaranteed. I pressed 2 for technical support and within less than 30 seconds I was connected to a representative.

The representative simply asked how he could help me, and didn’t require any upfront information regarding my account, which is convenient when you simply have a general question as I did. The representative was very easy to understand and I was very confident that he was in-house, or at least within the United States.

I told him that I had just set up a WordPress blog and was interested to know if I could redirect my domain name to point directly to the directory that my blog was in, as I had placed my blog in /blog. So I wanted it to redirect from example.com to example.com/blog, for example. He instructed me that what I wanted was found by clicking “Redirects” under the “Domains” section in cPanel and he then guided me through setting up the redirect. At the end of the call he asked for my primary domain name for “documentation purposes.” The call time was about 3 minutes and 30 seconds. I was quite satisfied with the phone support I received.

I decided to test out their live chat next. At about 12:30 PM the same day, I initiated a live chat with an InMotion Hosting representative. After inputting my name, email address, and question I was informed that there were three chat requests before me. I figured I would probably need to wait a few minutes, but it was only a minute later when I was connected to a representative.

I was first asked for my primary domain name. About a minute later the representative thanked me and then took another 30 seconds or so to inform me that I was describing what is known as “hotlink protection.” He then provided me with a link to a page listing the video tutorial for setting up hotlink protection in cPanel. The total length of the chat was approximately five minutes.

I watched the video tutorial and it guided me through enabling the hotlink protection. Although it might be frustrating to some customers to be sent to a tutorial instead of being instructed by the representative, the video tutorials are effective in showing exactly how to work with cPanel, and are likely much easier to follow than written instructions.

Conclusion

InMotion Hosting’s Value plans do indeed provide good service at a value. Ideally the required billing cycle would not be as long as 24 months as that is quite a long-term payment. It would also be nice if they provided an uptime guarantee, but they do provide about 99% uptime. With the industry-standard cPanel control panel and quality customer service, InMotion Hosting seems quite solid.

Pros: Good value, quality customer support via several channels?

Cons: Long billing cycle, no uptime guarantee

Bottomline: Solid host providing quality service at a good value

Rating:

Reviewer: Kyle J. Summers

http://www.inmotionhosting.com

Features and Pricing

Just Host offers two hosting plans: the JustPlan and JustPlan Premium. It appears that the only difference between the two plans is the number of free domains that are offered. JustPlan offers 1 and JustPlan Premium offers 3. The $4 extra per month (when billed monthly) hardly seems to be worth the extra two free domain names (in effect paying $24/year for each of those two extra domain names).

I wanted to confirm that this was the only difference between the two plans. Therefore, at about 6:30 PM one night, I initiated a chat conversation. The individual I chatted with was able to instantly concur with me that the only difference was the extra two free domain names.

Just Host offers a pretty standard feature-set including Linux-based servers running Apache, with the industry-standard cPanel control panel software.

For the JustPlan, they list the price available at their longest billing cycle. In order to keep the cheapest price per month, one would have to sign up for four years of hosting. So the $3.45/month turns into $7.95/month if billed monthly. Many hosts advertise the lowest price, but explain the billing cycles on their hosting pages. Just Host doesn’t disclose what the price is until a customer selects the hosting on the purchase page.

Free setup is advertised, yet those selecting a monthly billing cycle will be billed a $20 setup fee.

Unlike many hosts who simply offer a 30 day money-back guarantee, Just Host provides their guarantee at any time. Their policy seems very fair, as they refund the remainder of a customer’s term. Understandably, they cannot provide refunds on setup fees and domain name registrations, but they do release the domain name to the customer.

They also provide other nice guarantees such as 99.9% uptime. If that is not maintained, then they are willing to credit one’s account with the cost of a full month of hosting.

Just Host also offers a generous amount of free ad credits (about $150 worth at the time of writing).

Terms of Service

When I clicked to view the Just Host terms of service I was greeted by a message stating that their “terms of service are designed to be read by the average Joe” and that I could contact them if I had any questions.

For perhaps the first time, I discovered terms that were actually manageable to go through, and they were nice enough to compile them into one page. Many hosts have several documents that are tens of thousands of words each, while Just Host’s are entirely described in about five thousands words; which, if printed, would be about ten pages.

The terms seem pretty standard. Some things to note are as follows:

• Although Just Host backs up files in case of server failure, files over 40 MB are not backed up
• Backups are not necessarily maintained and it is the responsibility of the customer to keep sufficient backups
• Like other hosts, data must be linked to one’s hosting account, so the service may not be used for file storage purposes
• Any types of websites that are very resource intensive are generally not permitted; there is a list available of types deemed as such
• Making video/audio streaming and/or downloads available is not permitted
• No more than 50,000 inodes may be used (every file is an inode)
• For the money-back guarantee, account upgrades are non-refundable
• Just Host reserves the right to cancel an account with 72 hours notice if “a customer [is] exceptionally rude or vulgar in communications with [their] staff”
• If a customer becomes 60 days behind on payments, their data will be deleted

Through their terms of service, it is evident that Just Host is being quite fair. Unlike some hosts, there were no terms that stood out to me as being illogical or extreme.

Control Panel

Just Host utilizes the industry-standard cPanel control panel to allow customers to manage their web hosting. When logging into the control panel I was presented with a page trying to sell me various upgrades. It was almost as if I had found myself presented with one of those interstitial ad pages, something I wouldn’t expect to find on a service I was paying for. They were legitimate, relevant offers related to their hosting, but I didn’t think it was necessary for them to try to up-sell in this way. It may be enticing to some as they state that is in “today only.” Then I clicked to go straight to my control panel and was faced with an overlay box with an offer to submit my site to search engines. I didn’t really appreciate that much marketing; yet luckily I was only faced with it the first time I logged in.

Testing

cPanel includes the Fantastico library of applications that can easily be installed through its automatic installer. I was able to use this to easily install a WordPress blog within seconds on my site. The installation was just like I would get if I went through the process of manually downloading the WordPress package, uploading it to my site, and configuring the database, only a lot quicker to do.

Through my testing, I also noted that Just Host offers a “Priority Support” option for $20/year that provides customers with a guaranteed 30 minute response time on emails and an assigned personal representative. This added assurance might be worth it to some, but one would hope that their standard level of service would be satisfactory enough without having to pay extra.

In order to verify Just Host’s uptime guarantee, I utilized a service called Pingdom which checks a website’s availability and response time at set intervals and provides reports analyzing this data. It allows those who manage websites to effectively track the downtime of their sites from multiple locations around the world. Pingdom gives you nice looking reports displaying uptime and response time for any type of service: HTTP, FTP, Email, etc.

Within about the first 12 hours of monitoring, Pingdom recorded one instance of downtime: 10 minutes around 9:30 AM. The monitoring was performed at a resolution of 5 minutes, so the downtime could have lasted between five and ten minutes. During my time monitoring the service, it did seem to violate their 99.9% uptime guarantee, yet I didn’t run enough monitoring to see how the uptime was over the course of an entire month. They are willing to credit a full month’s worth of hosting, so one can imagine that downtime does not occur very often.

Customer Support

Just Host offers a few different channels for support. Just Host support is available via live chat, a ticketing system, and the phone. They also have a knowledge base system which I found to be fairly useful.

I decided to test all three. I first submitted a ticket acting like I was new to web hosting and wondering what the easiest way to track website statistics is. The ticket form stated that the average response time was 18 minutes. I submitted a ticket at 11:22 PM EST. At 11:50 PM (28 minutes later) I received a reply indicating an application that I could use (Awstats) and how to access it within cPanel.

I then wanted to know what the best way to maintain my own backups would be. I therefore initiated a live chat conversation to test out that medium of support. I started at position two in the chat queue. Within a few minutes, I was chatting with a representative.

The representative responded with a couple of minutes mentioning a Daily Back Up solution that costs $19.95 per year. I then asked if there were any other solutions, as I know there are functions built-in to cPanel for website backup. I then received a response a minute later requesting that I please wait while the representative researched the information for me.

A few minutes later I received a response with a link to a video in their tutorial series demonstrating the backup features available through cPanel. I then asked the chat representative where he was based and he informed me that he was in Chicago.

Then I decided to test out their phone support. It took me a couple of minutes to find their phone number (see why below). I had to search for it in their knowledge base system. So then at about 5 PM on a weekday I called their general phone number. This time I was going to ask about preventing others from stealing images by directly linking to them (hotlinking).

When calling Just Host customer support, I was presented with clear phone options. After selecting the third option for support, I waited for a few minutes as I listened to xylophonic music and a periodic voice reminding me that my call was very important to them (with intervals of about 45 seconds). After six minutes of this, a representative answered the call.

I presented my question and the representative understood what I wanted without hesitation. Unlike other hosts, he did not request my name and domain name before assisting me. This was helpful to save time with my general question. The individual did seem to have a rather thick accent, and this may be evidence of outsourced phone support, yet I was able to sufficiently understand his English; although, I can understand that some individuals may not have been able to.

At the end of my first month of hosting I received an email indicating that my account would be suspended if I did not pay it soon. I therefore paid it, but discovered that their system automatically charged me for it. I learned I had been double-billed. I contacted their billing department and I received a reply within 20 minutes indicating that I had been refunded for the extra payment. I was pretty satisfied with that.

One thing I noticed after searching for their phone number on the site was that it was at the top of the site originally, and then after I logged in as a customer this was replaced with a live chat link (they use a cookie to track this). I found this to be very interesting as I had never seen such a tactic before. I’m not sure if it is for a marketing purpose having customers sign up thinking phone support is readily accessible only to be presented with live chat later, or if they simply prefer that customers use the live chat functionality. I chatted with a live chat representative regarding this issue; they were willing to provide the number, but they were not able to provide a conclusive answer as to why this was.

Conclusion

Just Host is a reliable web hosting company providing good service with fast-responding support. They are backed by uptime guarantees and the freedom to cancel at anytime and be refunded for unused hosting. Their pricing is very competitive, especially when signing up for long-term billing cycles.

The only thing that I didn’t like was the extent of marketing for upgrades and extra services throughout the site. This can easily be annoying to some individuals. It also would have been nice if they had phone support that did not seem outsourced.

One more thing: as I was reading along the bottom of the page, I discovered a link called “(Secret Link)” that provides a 20% discount on the first term of hosting for those who find it.

Pros: Full-featured, fairly good support response time, fair and easy to read terms of service
Cons: Annoying marketing tactics, seemingly outsourced phone support, pricing is not explicitly clear prior to sign-up
Bottomline: Just Host is a solid web hosting company that should provide worry-free service
Rating:

Just Host 20% Discount Coupon Code: JHSL20

Features and Pricing
Since SiteGround provides “unlimited” web space and bandwidth, like some other hosts, they have chosen to provide a single, all-inclusive web hosting package with various billing cycles ranging from 1 month to 36 months.

They include all of the features that one would expect from a web host. Any features beyond the standard package can be added at extra cost. These add-ons include private SSL (for having a dedicated security certificate), the ability to host more than one website under the one account, a dedicated IP address, SSH access, among other things.

They provide certain e-commerce specific features including free shopping cart software, a shared SSL certificate, the ability to accept PayPal payments, and merchant accounts. This offering is very convenient. Sometimes it is necessary to obtain these services individually. This offering is consistent with many hosts, yet it is nice nonetheless.

SiteGround does provide a free domain name with their hosting. Also included is the allowance for the hosting of unlimited parked domains and subdomains, while add-on domains require an extra fee.

Like many hosts, SiteGround also provides numerous open-source scripts that can easily be installed for free.

At the time of writing, SiteGround was offering a 40% discount, reducing their “regular” price of $9.95/month to $5.95. This deal may very well be a consistent offering.

Terms of Service
There are several things that stand out within the SiteGround terms. One thing that presents itself after initial review is that legal actions must be handled within the court system of the Republic of Panama.

Like many web hosting companies, SiteGround maintains very large legal documents to govern the use of their services. This includes a 13,000 word Terms of Service document; a nearly 13,000 word Reseller Hosting Program terms of use document, and then several smaller documents covering their Acceptable Use Policy, promotions, affiliate program, templates, etc.

Like many web hosts, SiteGround does qualify the unlimited nature of their service. Similar to others, SiteGround specifies that “Unlimited use applies to your use of web pages only” and not the storage of other files (specifically movies, pictures, or mp3 files). Whether or not the use of the space and bandwidth is acceptable is really at the discretion of SiteGround. They are able to provide it as unlimited as they are well aware that webpages specifically do not require many resources. If your site’s purpose is to serve photos (likely in the range of several thousand) or video content, you very well may not be able to benefit from this “unlimited” nature. In that case, it may be necessary to purchase a dedicated hosting plan.

SiteGround states that although they back up data themselves once per week, this is for internal purposes (in case something were to happen on their end). It also appears that any movie, music, zip, among other file types, are not backed up. Therefore, even if something does happen with the SiteGround service, these files might not be restored. It is therefore important to maintain regular backups as a customer. They may provide backups to the customer as a service, but there may be a charge for this.

Regarding payment, it is stated that “invoice are due immediately upon receipt” and that an interest fee of 1.5% will be assessed on unpaid invoices, yet it is not explained how often this interest will be applied.

Renewal of shared hosted automatically takes place 15 days prior to the expiration date for terms of one year or longer, or on the date for terms less than one year.

If the credit card on file expires, SiteGround is no longer responsible for a customer’s data or domain name. If a card is declined, there will be a $1.00 service fee.

Customers should be very careful with a dedicated IP address in regards to spam email. If an IP address is blocked due to spam coming from that address, a $100 “block removal fee for each affected block” and an hourly fee of $100 will be assessed to this issue.

Billing disputes must be made in writing and must be received by SiteGround no later than five days after the invoice due date. There are also provisions in place that if a customer issues a chargeback against SiteGround before notifying them and after the “Dispute Deadline,” two $50 fees will be assessed, and a customer’s domain may be locked during this until the fees are paid.

For shared hosting there is a money back guarantee that allows customers to submit requests in writing to terminate hosting and be refunded all prepaid fees (except setup and domain fees).

SiteGround is willing to issue credits due to service interruptions, yet there are some limitations, including that a customer must request the credit within 3 days, can receive one credit per disruption, and can only receive it if the account is not past due.

If a customer chooses not to re-register their domain name, SiteGround reserves the right to register it for themselves and then sell it. SiteGround can also take ownership of unpaid domain names.

If SiteGround believes that a customer does not have “sufficient technical expertise” and requires “excessive ongoing technical support”, they reserve the right to terminate the account.

It is possible to terminate services through their website, and a customer must acknowledge an email verification for the termination to occur. It will then take five days to process and for any refund to be issued. Customers are apparently responsible for fees during this five day period.

Then they go on to state that termination of shared hosting must be requested within 30 days prior to the expiration of the current term and “before a renewal invoice is due.’ Otherwise there will be a $24.95 “Early Termination Fee”.

There may very well be more issues with their terms, yet these are some that stood out.

Control Panel
SiteGround has a Customer Area component to their site that serves as a gateway for managing services. The presentation is very user-friendly and it links to areas providing account management, billing access, support, and the addition of services.

The industry standard cPanel is utilized by SiteGround to allow customers to effectively manage their websites. It is easily accessible via the My Account section of the Customer Area.

For those new to hosting, cPanel provides a setup wizard that guides individuals through the setup of their account settings (e.g. email account).

Testing
I noticed that within cPanel, SiteGround links to a site builder application. It provides some very generic looking templates, almost tacky in nature. There are some site builders that generate very appealing pages, but this was not one of them.

Also integrated into the cPanel control panel interface is a “Google Apps Manager” allowing customers to easily setup a component of Google Apps under their domain name.

Customer Support
Upon signing up, I didn’t receive a welcome email. Often this includes important information regarding the account. I needed to setup my domain to point to the hosting so I needed to find out the nameservers.

There is no support number stated, but I thought perhaps that their sales number might have support options, which it does.

SiteGround has a very clear phone menu system that guided me through finding this information on the website.

I then wanted to obtain some information that may not have been so readily available, so I decided to ask about how to set up custom error pages (available through cPanel).

I placed another call around 2 PM on a Saturday. After dialing the option for Technical Support I waited as the subsequent options did not match my issue. The system then played some music as if it might be transferring me to a representative, but it just repeated the options and then disconnected me after I did not select one.

I tried calling again and dialing 0 to speak with a representative but that disconnected my call.

It appears that SiteGround does not offer technical support (other than guided prompts) by phone. That can be quite frustrating, especially when other options aren’t effective.

I went to the Contact Us page on the site, clicked to “Contact the Technical Support Team through our HelpDesk” only to be directed to the knowledge base system with no real option to contact the support team. The “HelpDesk” (self-serve knowledge base) provided me with several categories of issues. I tried searching for “custom error page” and I received no results. I tried picking the “Other Technical Issues” category and it didn’t provide me the option of contacting the support, even though issue specific categories did.

I ultimately found the SiteGround customer support to be completely inaccessible for my issue. I couldn’t even find an email option, let alone a live chat system.

In order to cancel an account, it appears as easy as clicking a button in the billing system. Upon doing so, it informed me that I would receive an email with a link to confirm this. The link then took me to a live sales chat (as there do not appear to be support chats) in which the representative questioned why I was canceling and if there was anything he could do for me.

The chat operator’s name appeared to be Eastern European. I have replaced it with “John” here. That may be evidence of outsourcing the live chat.

[START CHAT]

Kyle Summers: ?Question: Hosting account cancellation for example.com account?OID 123456?Immediate cancellation?Refund Due: No?Reason: I am not happy with the quality of service you offer.: Support is rather inaccessible.??———————
John: Hello Kyle
John: Welcome to SiteGround.com Hosting Services!
John: Allow me a moment to check your account please and I will gladly assist you further
John: As we strive to keep long-term relationships with all our customers and their feedback is of much importance to us, may I please ask for the difficulties you have encountered with our services and I will gladly assist you and find the best solution for you
Kyle Summers: I find support to be rather inaccessible and we have obtained a solution elsewhere. I would like to cancel the account please.
John: Fully understand you sir, and if you are still willing to elaborate your issues I will gladly give you a step-by-step walk to the correct category in the ticketing area to reach the Support Team
Kyle Summers: No, that is okay. Please cancel the account.
John: Sure, allow me just a moment
John: I can confirm that your account is fully canceled now
John: We are very sorry to lose you as a customer
John: Goodbye for now and I wish you all the best

[END CHAT]

I didn’t consider this to be a terrible hassle, but depending on the level of frustration the customer has gone through before this step, it may very well be pushing their tolerance.

Conclusion
SiteGround offers hosting for a very cost-effective price, yet they don’t support it very well. For any customer that is not 100% confident, they will never need to place a support call, it is likely the wrong choice.

The legal terms set forth in their myriad of documents seem a bit discouraging as well.

Pros: Cost-effective, functional service
Cons: No real customer support other than an ineffective knowledge base
Bottomline: Cost-effective, functional, yet with shady terms and lack of customer support, it’s likely not worth it.
Rating:

www.siteground.com

• “create a website”
• “get a web address”
• “attract new customers”

Although they provide domain registration and marketing services, in this review we will be focusing primarily on the company’s web hosting services.

Features and Pricing

Web hosting with Network Solutions is broken down into four categories, each designed to serve a different purpose. There is nsHosting, nsSpace, nsBusinessSpace, and nsCommerceSpace. The services are presented in a way that makes them comprehensible for individuals who are unfamiliar with web hosting. There are various feature differences between the four hosting plans. Some features, such as FTP (file transfer protocol) seem like they should be standard across all of the plans, as is the case with most web hosts, yet this is not the case. The plans appear to be designed to strictly fit the specific purpose from which their name is derived.

For the purpose of our review, we will be examining the nsHosting category, which appears to be for general purpose web hosting, for those who want “a reliable place to upload and manage [their] website.”

Today many hosts offer unlimited disk space and bandwidth. Network Solutions does offer a plan like this under their nsHosting category, yet it is the most expensive plan and is priced far higher than comparable offerings from competitors. As with most unlimited shared plans, the unlimited nature of this plan is also restricted as it is dependent upon the resources issued to the account, and in a shared environment these boundaries can be reached when the space and bandwidth is heavily utilized.

The lowest priced plan (“small”) offers a relatively competitive amount of disk space and bandwidth for the money.

At least one free domain name is available with the annual purchase of any of the nsHosting plans. A generous number of email mailboxes is provided with each plan, with 1,000 mailboxes being offered on the “small” plan, 2,500 on the “large,” and unlimited email accounts with the unlimited plan. There is a limit of 25 FTP accounts on small, 50 on large, and as you may guess, unlimited on the unlimited plan.

For website statistics, AWStats is offered, which is a popular solution for tracking information related to the traffic visiting your website. A variety of scripting language support is available including Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python, ASP and .NET, with Java available starting with the large plan, and the unlimited plan adding support for JSP. This covers support for the majority of web applications available, so compatibility of a piece of software should be of little concern. Support for Cold Fusion is also present on the Windows unlimited nsHosting plan.

Network Solutions also provides support for three different types of databases: MySQL, MS Access, and MS SQL, with the second two being exclusive to Windows-based plans. Software is included to administer the databases. A nice feature that Network Solutions offers is automatic database backup. Real audio/video streaming, and Windows Media streaming is also included, which is helpful if a customer has any intention of presenting media on their site in the form of streams, though few likely require this.

Terms of Service

Network Solutions may very well possess the king of all Terms of Service documents. As large as their company is, I still found it surprising that they deemed it necessary to have a 58,000 word legal document. This document (the “Service Agreement”) does appear to cover all of their services, but they also have other supporting documents including a separate Acceptable Use Policy.

There does appear to be a 30 day money-back guarantee available customers with a nsHosting shared plan. When calling to cancel a customer must request a refund. For annual and multi-year billing cycles processing fees will be imposed on cancellations. These range from $29.95 per year for an annual billing cycle, to $9.95 per year for a ten-year billing cycle. Therefore, for plans ordered with billing cycles greater than one month, the guarantee is not really a complete refund.

Other than what is presented in the 30 day money-back guarantee, Network Solutions does not appear to refund any fees that have already been paid. Therefore, if a customer signs up for the longest billing cycle (three years) providing the greatest value, and decides to cancel after thirty days, they may very well lose the money they paid long in advance. It also appears that one or more domain names that are included with the plan for free will be canceled if the plan is canceled. This may cause a customer to lose their domain name; for example, it may be purchased by a domain harvester, as it “may thereafter be available for registration by another party.” Network Solutions may also terminate services without any notice to the customer if the terms are violated.

Like other web hosting companies, Network Solutions does display “Under Construction” pages for web addresses on a hosted site that otherwise do not resolve to any content, yet they take it to the extreme. For any site that does not resolve, or any webpage on a site, Network Solutions by default returns a page that may contain promotional items for Network Solutions as well as third parties. If this is not wanted, Network Solutions offers the option of showing a page containing only Network Solutions branding and a domain registration search. So, it appears by default Network Solutions may drive traffic away from a customer’s site to a third party for any page that does not resolve, and if the customer doesn’t like this they can have a page with only Network Solutions-related promotion. Of course, a customer can place their own error pages on a site, and therefore rectify this issue, at least for the most part.

Network Solutions has had controversy in the past with this policy in regard to subdomains (as subdomains generally don’t provide error pages, but rather present errors that the server cannot be found). This would be more difficult for a customer to fix, but they do offer the ability to opt-out of these imposed pages.

Network Solutions specifies that there are scheduled outages every Saturday night for two hours from 12:01 AM to 2:00 AM (Sunday morning). For most this may not be an inconvenience, yet for those mission critical users who depend on email availability, or for international customers, this scheduled downtime may be a concern. Most hosts offer 99.9% uptime across their services; therefore this downtime is generally not the standard, and may be unacceptable for some.

For customers with the nsSpace, nsBusinessSpace, and the website builder plans, the terms of service limit the individual size permitted for images, documents, and other media. This may be a concern for some individuals wishing to host extra-large files for use with those services.

Included in Network Solutions’ terms is a clause providing the company with the right to cache all site content. This may allow them to increase efficiency within their systems, yet the caching of content may not be desired by all customers.

As with most hosts, the “unlimited” shared plans are only virtually unlimited. If an account adversely affects other customers by consuming an extensive amount of space and bandwidth, Network Solutions may suspend or terminate the services provided.

The Network Solutions terms are largely generic, yet the aforementioned components do stand out.

Control Panel

Since Network Solutions is such a large provider of web hosting services, it should come as no surprise that they provide their own proprietary control panel. cPanel is generally the industry standard when it comes to control panels, yet Network Solutions provides a very useful alternative. The control panel is both intuitive and functional in its offerings. The presentation is clear and simple with all of the core functionality present.

Testing

I was curious to see how quick and easy it is to install applications automatically through the control panel. This is functionality that many web hosts now provide, often called “one-click” installation. A customer can find Network Solution’s offering of applications under the “Open-Source Library” category within their control panel.

I wanted to install a blog, so I opted for the popular WordPress application. After a few steps in which I was required to select where I wanted to host the blog, input my username, password, etc. and agree to the terms, the blog setup process was complete. I was then instructed that it could take up to ten minutes to process. Yet it was only a couple minutes before it was ready. I then had a functional WordPress blog like any other. Some web hosting companies have been known to impose their own branding upon these applications like WordPress. Luckily, Network Solutions does not do this and the WordPress installation is void of any reference to them.

I also tested out the administration of databases. I found that only databases I manually created could be administered through phpMyAdmin. Therefore, I could not go into the WordPress database and modify the contents after creating it. It is likely that only advanced users would wish to do this, and that the majority would never need to. I also noted that database names must be unique to not only a customer’s account, but to the system as a whole. It appears that Network Solutions may, like other large hosts, centralize their database hosting. This is not necessarily good or bad, but it does mean that the database is likely hosted on a server other than the one which hosts the site utilizing the database.

Customer Support

Network Solutions won awards through J.D. Power and Associates for the quality of their customer service in 2006, 2007, and 2008. Given that, I was looking forward to an excellent customer service experience.

At 8:20 PM on a Wednesday evening, I placed a call to their customer support. The message informed me that I had reached the sales team. It appears that the number presented at the top of the site changes depending on what content you are looking at.

Within seconds I was connected to a representative who sounded like they were based in the United States. Even though I had a general question, the representative did request my account information, so it appears that they did process it as a support call. I asked the representative to clarify if the size limitations on email and database were overall limits or limits per each mailbox and database. He explained that it was the latter, which made sense.

Some representatives struggle with even the most basic of questions at times and have to reference information, yet this representative knew the answer off-hand and was very helpful.

I was on and off the phone within a matter of a couple of minutes with my question resolved. Network Solutions also has one of the fastest connection times to a representative that I have experienced.

Other than phone support, the only other alternative is email support which is available via a web-based form. This is acceptable as the phone support is extremely responsive.

Conclusion

Network Solutions provides services that are full-featured and which are easy to use for the newcomer, while still providing a good service for customers who are veterans to the industry. They provide excellent customer service as well. They charge about the same amount as other large web hosting conglomerates serving general users, although a bit more than some of the smaller shared hosts. Their unlimited plan seems to be a bit overpriced for what it offers, unless the servers are really able to support quite a lot of use for that plan, which likely isn’t the case.

Components of their lengthy terms may also cause some individuals to question their practices.

Overall, Network Solutions seems to be a good host and since the services are backed by such a large company, long-term stability is unlikely to be a concern.

Pros: Ease of use; excellent, responsive, customer service; good feature set
Cons: Can be pricey with some plans; terms are questionable in parts
Bottomline: Network Solutions is a solid hosting company providing effective services, backed by helpful, reliable customer support
Rating:

Official Site: http://www.networksolutions.com

Web.com is a host providing a wide range of solutions for individuals looking to begin a web presence with simplicity in mind.

Features and Pricing
Web.com provides web hosting, email hosting, as well as domain name registration services.

Their web hosting selection consists of both Linux and Windows web hosting, along with a separate eCommerce distinction. All hosting includes unlimited storage space and bandwidth; a free domain for the first year; site statistics; a control panel; unlimited email accounts; site builder tools; support for PERL, Python, and PHP; FTP access; and an unlimited number of MySQL databases for Linux or MS SQL for Windows.

Like many other hosts, Web.com also offers free Google AdWords and Yahoo Certificate advertising credits. A $50 credit is given for each service, resulting in a total of $100 that can be used to promote one’s website with these two ad services.

Web.com does also offer some eCommerce features available as ad-ons to one’s standard hosting account.

The Linux and Windows hosting are priced equally at $11.95/month.

While many hosts only limit their email and database storage by the total storage space, Web.com restricts email storage to 10 GB and database storage to 1 GB overall. For most individuals, this is unlikely to impose a problem, but for some it very well may. If an email account receives a high volume of large attachments, if there are many email accounts, or if databases contain thousands of entries collectively it may very well be possible to reach these limits.

Terms of Service
Web.com’s terms of service, for the most part, are largely generic. Yet there are a few things to keep in mind. For one, domain names registered through Web.com are automatically renewed unless this renewal is deactivated at least thirty days before. It is often possible to decide not to renew up until the renewal date, but not with Web.com. Web.com also states in their terms that they “bear no responsibility or obligation to notify” an individual of the date their domain name will expire. The registrar may still notify the customer, but if they do not, then the customer may very well be left unaware if they do not acknowledge the renewal date. This may result in paying for the renewal of a domain they no longer wish to have.

Like various other hosts, Web.com forces a default page upon customers before their site is active with content. This contains advertising of products and services related to the domain name and promotion of their hosting service through a link to their website. To many, this may be greatly unwanted as it can initially drive traffic from the domain to third-parties and even competitors. This is a standard practice, and can be disabled through the control panel.

Their cancellation policy is not made explicitly clear in their terms of service. I did find some record of the procedure in a knowledge base article though. The article informed me that cancellation must be made by phone, yet the instructions for entering the prompts were likely outdated as they were incorrect with my experience. I did happen upon a prompt connecting me to the billing department for cancellations.

Although the article stated that requests for cancellation must be made “at least 30 days prior to the renewal date on the account” (in effect prohibiting someone from canceling a new account), I faced no problem. Luckily the representative I spoke to appeared to be in-house and was therefore straightforward and easy to understand. I received a ticket confirming my request and my account was cancelled without any issues.

Control Panel
When I logged into the control panel, the first thing I noticed was a giant banner ad down the right side of the page for a company selling business cards. Generally individuals don’t appreciate seeing advertisements within a service that they pay for and I surely did not. Along the bottom of the control panel homepage I was greeted by “Special Offers!”, a.k.a. more ads! This ad-ridden mentality exists across every page of the control panel that I saw.

The control panel is not the industry-standard cPanel, but rather a proprietary, or simply less common, piece of software that to me seemed sparse in functionality, only covering the absolute basics. This includes pages for domain administration, password protection, user creation, database management, site statistics, and email.

Testing
The sign-up process was guided, quick, and easy. At the end, I was informed that “within one business day” I would receive an email with instructions. Within minutes I had received the email and it provided me with information for getting started.

After that I was required to agree to the terms. I then proceeded to test out the control panel.

I visited the email section. I discovered through setting up an email address that it appears the email username must be unique to the entire hosting base, not just the individual account, although the email address itself does not have this limitation.

I then wanted to upload a homepage for my site to replace the Web.com default ad-covered page. I had to dig a bit and then discovered the information was in another email. Web.com sent me three different emails in all for my account setup. I was able to log-in to FTP without any issues using the information provided. My site responded quickly when I tested it for the new homepage.

Customer Support
While I was looking at the Web.com hosting plans page, I had a question so I decided to engage in the online chat.

I found the chat to be rather unprofessional, with an automated response initially when you first open the online chat window. It as if you are getting one of those spontaneous chat windows when a website doesn’t want you to leave, especially given the title of the window: “Wait before you go!” It’s as if they are using a bit of software designed for proactive marketing to handle their site support.

The representative in the chat was unnamed, and the one I chatted with was very short with their responses.

The representative responded within 30 seconds or so initially, although their answers thereafter were not very constructive.

When asking what PayPal gateway they specifically used (PayPal has two “Payflow” gateway plans, “Pro” and “Link”) they told me “PayPal” and that I would have to ask PayPal for more information.

This didn’t actually answer my question. I then proceeded to sit for several minutes while the agent did who knows what. After I clarified my question, they didn’t inform me they whether or not they were researching it for me. Five minutes went by and I gave up on their online chat.

Most individuals don’t wish to sign up and then find out later about the true specifics of a feature. Yet this seems to be the case for Web.com.

I also asked the representative a question regarding the 1 GB limit on databases and 10 GB on email and asked if this was total or per database and account, respectively. He informed me it was per database, yet it turns out it is in total, which makes a significant difference in the offering. That can be quite limiting. Unfortunately, I was also misinformed about the email accounts as the 10 GB is the overall limit, and not per email account.

I attempted to call customer support at 10 PM on a Thursday night and discovered that their support services are only available from 8 AM to 8 PM. After being funneled through several prompts, I was greeted by a message stating this and asking that I leave a voicemail to which they would respond within one business day. A 12 hour time-span of service is a reasonable amount of time to be available, but in an industry where 24/7 support is often the standard, especially at their price point, it is a bit discouraging. What is a bit frustrating is that these hours are not made explicitly clear across their website, so one may very well only discover it when calling.

Besides the misinforming online chat and the twelve-hour phone support, a customer is left to submit a ticket. The ticket form has a very comprehensive slew of options to narrow down the topic. I decided to test out the ticket support, so at 10:18 PM on that Thursday night I sent a ticket in regards to the question I had involving the PayPal payment gateway. I was informed that I would receive an email when there was an update.

At around 9:30 AM the next day I received a reply back to my ticket, with it being marked as “resolved.” The response stated “Thank you for contacting Web.com Sales Department regarding your account. Please contact me directly so that I can explain the service.” I didn’t understand how the service offering could not be explained in writing, and I preferred not to have to call them in regards to it, even though there appeared no other way to actually answer my question.

At around noon the next day, I decided to call their customer support to see if they could clarify the online chat representative’s misinformation for me in regards to the storage limitation.

When calling I was presented with a myriad of options. I went through three or four prompts before it began ringing through, only for me to be presented with another prompt. It seems like Web.com has consolidated several services and is attempting to provide support for all of them together, though lacking cohesion in doing so. I was provided prompts for services I wasn’t aware of, and which may have left some callers confused.

Once I was connected to a representative, I had a simple question that was not specific to my account, yet they had to look up the account. They required the phone number, which then required me to check which number I used to sign up.

The representative was somewhat hard to understand and did not seem to fully grasp what I was asking. I had a feeling they were outsourced, yet I initially gave them the benefit of the doubt since the accent wasn’t too extreme.

At the end of the call I asked where the phone support was located and the representative informed me that it was in the Philippines. I had to confirm this because the pronunciation was not very clear. Unfortunately, like with many outsourced support options, the quality of Web.com’s phone support can suffer due to the communication difficulties inherent to such outsourcing. Also, if I understood him correctly, the representative said his name was Phil. So I was speaking with Phil from the Philippines, which I highly doubted was correct.

The representative’s answer in regards to the database storage limit appeared to be consistent with the service, yet their consideration of my email question seemed misunderstood and the answer therefore inconsistent. They kept reiterating that the size of email attachments should be lower than 10 MB when I kept asking about the 10 GB limit imposed on email storage, not attachment size. At the end of the call, I was still left without a clear answer and it was one of the longest support calls I have made for such a simple support issue. It took ten minutes of going back and forth, trying to make myself clear while gathering some sort of understanding from the representative.

Conclusion
Customer support can really make or break a web hosting company as customers can often turn to a live person for help with their issues. Unfortunately with Web.com, their support isn’t at a competitive standard for the price they charge. It really does impose a disadvantage, and although outsourcing can be successfully implemented for some companies, Web.com simply isn’t one of them.

If their support was of a high quality, it may have justified the price given their only adequate service; yet, it really was not.

Web.com, although providing a functional service, does not stand as a competitive entity in the web hosting industry.

Pros: The service works, there is at least the chance of potentially receiving support
Cons: Answers provided to questions are inconsistent with what the service actually provides; outsourced support that is difficult to understand; limits on both overall database and email storage
Bottomline: Web.com is a company providing a functional service that is poorly supported and largely uncompetitive in its offerings.
Reviewer Rating:

Features and Pricing

Yahoo Small Business hosting really only offers one plan. The only real option upon sign-up is what billing term one wishes to enter into. One may either choose to be billed monthly, every three months, or annually. The pricing is $12.95, $11.95, and $9.95, respectively; so there is a considerable discount available for the longer term (the annual plan being $36 less per year than the monthly plan).

Like many web hosts, Yahoo has adopted the concept of unlimited disk space and bandwidth. It does so under the common condition that these resources must be used for legitimate purposes to benefit the website. This means that the purpose can’t be for file storage or providing a file sharing solution. This is a standard practice and for the customer with normal intentions, this should not be limiting in any way.

Yahoo web hosting is geared towards those with little or no knowledge of hosting services. They feature such benefits as site builder software, templates, and small applications such as forms, maps, photo galleries, among others.

Yahoo witnesses a 99.9% uptime on sites, but this does not include scheduled maintenance. They provide for site backups and shared SSL.

Yahoo web hosting provides up to 1,000 email addresses and provides for unlimited storage for these.

Like many hosts, Yahoo provides provides ad credits. They offer a $100 credit towards ads in their search results, and $50 for ads in Google’s results. These amounts are quite competitive in comparison to others.

With the default setup, users are limited to one database. Those individuals requiring more than one database will need to manually download and install phpMyAdmin on their account, which is a popular database administration tool. This will require some configuration and technical knowledge in order to do so. The limitation imposed without phpMyAdmin may be a concern for some, but for the new user, it likely is not.

Terms of Service

Yahoo’s web hosting Terms of Service are extremely comprehensive. In printed form they would span 27 pages. This legal behemoth is not surprising given the size of the company.

One thing to take note of is while other hosts will suspend an account for being past due with payments, Yahoo may permanently delete the entire account and all information contained therein when this occurs, even without notice. Reactivating afterwards requires the payment of additional setup fees. Failure to pay can result in Yahoo using a collection agency to pursue the unpaid balance. In the case of a legal recovery, the customer is responsible for all legal fees incurred by Yahoo in order to obtain the payment.

When changing from an annual service to a non-annual service no refund will be issued. There may also be an upgrade or downgrade fee when making changes to an account. Refunds are not issued for cancellations, and for terms that are longer than one month an “early termination fee” may apply. If a customer cancels before paying for the second month of hosting, and registered a new domain name when they initially signed up, they may lose that domain name as it may either be deleted or Yahoo may take ownership of it.

Personal or financial information regarding anyone must be handled in a manner compliant with certain security practices that are set forth. There are certain procedures that must be followed when storing such information from customers on a site hosted by Yahoo. This information must only be stored when required for facilitating certain transactions. Yahoo is more specific in regards to these conditions than many hosts are.

The web pages that are generated by the Yahoo service for your site cannot be used elsewhere. The terms state that a customer has a right to his/her content, but not to transfer the generated pages (without written permission). So this seems to signify that when using the site builder there likely is not a way to later transfer this generated site to another host.

Yahoo defines the scope of their services explicitly in their terms by stating: “Yahoo! Web Hosting is designed to serve the web hosting needs of small, independently owned and operated businesses in the United States.” So it appears larger businesses and those residing outside of the U.S. may want to look elsewhere as the service is designed for this demographic.

The other terms in the roughly 21,000 word document do not especially stand out for any reason.

Control Panel

When first logging into Yahoo Small Business web hosting, the customer is presented with a brief message about how to get started and then three different avenues of action. These are to set up email, design the site, and promote the site.

The Yahoo Site Solution service provides its own extremely functional user interface, including ways to add/delete pages, change the layouts, and modify the designs. Other than this tool the main control panel is very concise, straightforward, and simplistic overall.

Yahoo even provides a System Status page including recent technical issues that have been logged. Even within the last few days of my use of the service, there were problems experienced including FTP and responsiveness issues. This conveys that Yahoo does have issues every few days, but they are transparent about them and work to fix them “in a timely manner.”

Testing

Until a customer begins using the service, Yahoo, like many web hosts will use the domain name to serve ads. This is common and the solution is to simply add content to the site, or you may contact Yahoo to have them discontinue the ads. The page that was placed on my domain before I posted anything consisted of links to “searches” that were all sponsored links, half of which were based on keywords related to the domain name.

Prior to my domain name resolving to Yahoo, it was listed on the start page as “pending” with a link to an explanation. This is useful to customers who aren’t familiar with the domain name propagation process and are wondering why their domain isn’t pointing where it should go.

On the “Getting Started” page, I elected to “design my site” and I was then presented with a guided process on how to go about this. I was encouraged to try “Yahoo! Site Solution” as it is “Designed for busy professionals.” I was also presented with the options of using FTP to upload files to create my site, create a store with a merchant account, or setup a blog (merchant accounts are available for an additional fee). There were also other options if the aforementioned features didn’t fit what I was looking for.

I decided to check out the recommended Site Solution service, as this is specific to Yahoo. I was then presented with an overlay containing form fields in which I was asked to provide a category for my site and a name for my business to be used as the site title.

After submitting this information, I could see my site update in the background. Yahoo automatically picked a starter theme that was appropriate to the category I had chosen. I was then asked to enter in some contact information that was used to generate the contact page on the site. The wizard then informed me that some pages were automatically created for me.

I was then able to truly customize the site. I could change the look to one of 65 different themed designs. I decided to change it to a more generic theme.

By simply clicking any block of text I was able to edit the contents with some general formatting options. For someone looking to be guided through the entire site creation process who requires intuitive, straightforward tools, Yahoo provides some great functionality.

The three buttons at the top of the Site Solution interface are “Site Pages,” “Change Layout,” and “Change Design.” Each provide their own tabbed functionality. The design tab allowed me to pick from the available designs. The layout tab provided me with three layout options that positioned the text contents in different fashions.

The “Site Pages” function allowed me to add pages, delete pages, and rearrange their order which influenced the navigation. When adding a page I was required to select a category, which was then used to generate an appropriate layout. For example, the FAQ layout provided a page in which questions could be added, along with guided blocks of filler text.

When I was ready to publish it informed me that I hadn’t completed everything that was part of the wizard process, i.e. customize some more pages. A nice thing to note is that filler text that has not been edited will not display on the site.

After customizing the last few pages, I decided to publish my site and after clicking the Publish button, it was only a few seconds later before I was presented with the published version. Be aware that when the site is published, Yahoo will automatically submit it to search engines. This is convenient for most, but if you’re not ready to go public, one may not want to be quick to publish it as it could begin propagating in results.

Another nice thing about the Yahoo Site Solution system is that it generates friendly URLs to the site’s pages. These are search-engine friendly addresses, unlike some content management systems that utilize page and category ids in the address.

Through my testing the Yahoo Site Solution site creation wizard was a great way for someone who is unfamiliar with how to create a website to do just that. Granted, since it is so simple to use it does have many limitations. It’s not possible to insert completely custom forms of content. Yet Yahoo does provide numerous applications that can be embedded that streamline entirely with the site. These include contact forms, photo, audio, and video galleries, even generated PayPal sale buttons for products to handle transactions.

If I had chosen otherwise I could have easily setup a blog as well with either the choice of WordPress or Movable Type. I decided to test out WordPress and was able to create the blog as a subsection of my site without having to replace all of the other content.

Yahoo does throw on some extra plugins that are specific to them like a “hosted by Yahoo” badge and a Yahoo RSS feed button. These can easily be disabled to remove any reference to Yahoo. Yet Yahoo does impose their logo at the top of the admin interface and unfortunately the version of WordPress that is provided is not the the most recent release and has limits some of WordPress’ functionality.

Customer Support

I searched through Yahoo’s FAQs to see about upgrading WordPress. I couldn’t seem to find anything about it there. So I decided to contact customer support to ask whether or not Yahoo would eventually upgrade the version of WordPress available or if I would manually have to do this.

When I visited the Contact Us page on the site I was asked to select from a few select boxes to provide me with some “Immediate Help” which was in the form of more frequently asked questions. Yet I was also provided with their toll-free phone number and a nice tool that allowed me to be called instead of waiting on hold. It said such a wait would be about three minutes, and it provided me with a “Schedule a Call” button, but I just decided to call and see what the wait was like for myself.

I called at about 10:30 AM on a Friday. My ear instantly rang with the signature “Yahoooo!” trademark sound recording, after which I was presented with clear and straightforward prompts. I selected 1 for web hosting and within a minute I was connected with a “customer care associate” who asked me for my name, whether it was okay to call me by my first name, the domain name, and the Yahoo account used. He spoke with great clarity and there was no doubt in my mind that I was speaking to someone in the United States.

It just took a moment for him to look my account up and then I presented him with my question regarding the WordPress upgrade. Without hesitation, he informed me that the Yahoo system administrators make periodic updates to the WordPress system that will be automatic, but that I could manually upgrade the software from the WordPress site if I so chose to. That satisfied my question and he asked if I would like a reference ID for the call to which I declined. I was extremely impressed by the overall experience and the professionalism of the representative and I was off the phone in a matter of three minutes.

Conclusion

Yahoo Small Business Web Hosting is a great solution for anyone who is new or unfamiliar to setting up a website and who is looking for a quick, simple, out-of-the-box solution.

If a customer is familiar with setting up a website and doesn’t require a site builder, Yahoo would still seemingly be an okay solution as FTP access is provided, yet most of the benefit is found in the simplicity of the service. It doesn’t offer the fancy, full-featured control panel like cPanel but rather a concise straightforward guide to setting up a site.

Yahoo has geared their service towards a niche market, as they defined in their terms. In this way they work very well to serve that niche demographic, while still providing an accessible service to the veterans.

Pros: Easy, super simple site builder, guided process, excellent customer support
Cons: Some limits in its simplicity, but most users likely won’t care; Presence of some iffy terms like account deletion, but these shouldn’t pose an issue
Bottomline: Yahoo presents a great solution for their specific market: small business customers who are unfamiliar with setting up a site and who are looking for a quick, simple solution.
Rating:

www.yahoo.com

Features and Pricing

As is the case with many hosts, IX Web Hosting quotes the absolute lowest price on their hosting plans page. In order to determine the actual price, one must proceed through the sign up process. The lowest price is provided with a 24 month billing cycle.

The shortest billing cycle is $4 more than the 24 month price, and comes with a hefty $30 setup fee. There is an even greater difference on the most expensive of their three plans with a $6 a month price hike. Therefore the unlimited nature of their $3.95/month plan may look great at first, but if you’re not interested in making a long-term commitment this price can be $7.95. Yet, this is still on par with, and in some cases slightly less than the competition.

IX Web Hosting also provides free domain registration with their hosting. If you ever leave IX Web Hosting, you retain ownership of the domain name.

IX provides some advantages that set them apart. These include their “own data center,” being in business since 1999, and a U.S.-based call center.

One’s own data center can be both good and bad for the same reason: it provides them with complete control. This control can be assumed to be good as it allows the company to maintain their servers and architecture directly, but this is also an extended responsibility that they must manage well. With as much experience as IX Web Hosting appears to have, they should possess a pretty good handle on this.

Ten years of hosting experience conveys some fiscal stability, so it doesn’t look like IX Web Hosting is going anywhere soon. It also shows that they have remained competitive with the myriad of hosting companies in the industry.

A call center located in the United States is also no doubt a great advantage as technology companies are infamous for having outsourced support. It is worth noting that although domestic support representatives are a substantial benefit, it is not exclusive to IX Web Hosting as other web hosts maintain in-house support channels.

IX Web Hosting also provides dedicated SSL certificates for $50 when purchased with web hosting, which is a good deal compared to other hosts. Like other hosts, a shared SSL certificate is provided for free with their hosting.

If design services are required, IX provides solutions that deliver results that are largely professional looking. This is convenient if one is interested in finding hosting and design services with the same company.

As is the trend with many hosts, IX provides free ad coupons, with up to $75 in Google AdWords credits for instance. These can be useful if maintaining a commercial website where the main purpose of the site is to advertise or sell a product or service. There is also a Merchant Service that is available on a quoted basis.

Terms of Service

IX Web Hosting’s terms of service are comprehensive and are composed of 25 different sections. If there is a question of technicality, one is sure to find the answer in these terms as nothing is left ambiguous.

Like many good hosts, IX provides a 30 day money-back guarantee in which they will refund all payments made. Yet they go far beyond this to offer a money-back guarantee at any time if one is not satisfied with their services. In this case they will refund the current month’s fees along with any fees already paid for future months. They only ask that a customer provides a brief explanation to help them understand why the cancellation is being made, but this isn’t required and there is no hassle.

They also provide for a 99.9% Uptime Guarantee where if uptime is not maintained to that level in a 12-month period the customer may request a service credit. A 12-month period is unusual for the web hosting industry and further shows that IX favors longer subscription periods.

The terms of use are mostly straightforward and reasonable. The unlimited nature of services provided are, like with many hosts, restricted by the physical space on a server and the capacity of resources. Resources must be used for legitimate purposes, as with any host.

Control Panel

Some individuals may be saddened to find that IX does not use the industry-standard cPanel control panel for Linux web hosting, but rather a version of Psoft’s H-Sphere platform (now owned by Parallels). The control panel appears to utilize a theme that is years old with tacky clipart-based icons. Yet the essential functionality is present throughout.

MySQL databases, unlike with many hosts, are disabled by default. Therefore they must be enabled in the control panel before any databases can be created. This is as simple as clicking a link to enable it, yet it seems like an unnecessary task given the nature of the service.

The control panel provides a collection of “EasyApps,” which are applications that can be easily installed in a “one click” fashion.

Testing

Upon first signing up I received a welcome email. In this, it informed me there was an issue with the automatic creation of my account and there would be a delay. Fortunately it was only nine minutes later before I received a confirmation that my account was created.

The service provides a customer with a randomly assigned username. This is used to log into FTP and is used to preface the names of databases.

IX requires customers to use their email as their username and a password to login to the account administration panel. Yet when I initially attempted to do so, using the FTP password provided for the account, I could not. I did not receive any other record of a password so I was forced to reset my password before I could start using the account.

I also tested out their EasyApps solution in the control panel. I was able to install a WordPress blog within seconds. I was only required to enter some information specific to WordPress such as an admin username, password, email, and blog title and description and it was instantly setup. This is a very convenient feature if one is looking to setup their site quickly without much knowledge in regards to uploading files and configuring databases.

Customer Support

I connected to their web-based live chat system on a Monday at 2:45 PM. IX Web Hosting utilizes the popular Live Person chat system. I was promptly connected to a representative within thirty seconds and they quickly responded to my question about using their one-click application installation system.

Their response was straightforward and satisfactory, yet some of their grammar seemed slightly-off and their name caused me to question their physical location. They responded that their live chat operations are based in the Ukraine.

IX Web Hosting is being truthful when they state that their call center is in the U.S., yet they can’t say the same for their live chat. This is no doubt in an attempt to cut costs, but in some instances this could pose a problem. In my case the representative’s ability to communicate in English was at the level that they understood my question and responded clearly, but the possibility remains that not every representative is like this.

At 3:05 PM on that Monday I called their toll-free customer service line, pressed two for the technical support option, and was connected to a representative within thirty seconds who just asked for my domain name. I proceeded to question him about the one-click install applications that are provided and he guided me through finding the location of this in the control panel. I was off the phone within a couple minutes and was very satisfied with my support experience. The phone representative was definitely based in the U.S., as the IX Web Hosting website promises.

They also provide ticket support for issues that may be more technical in nature, or require more information to be provided on the part of the customer. In this case the customer is guided through a process of identifying their issue and providing the appropriate information.

Overall support is quick to respond and very helpful. IX Web Hosting seems to have compromised when it comes to live chat by outsourcing this support channel, yet they have understood the advantage of maintaining domestic phone representatives.

Conclusion

Doing this review convinced me that IX Web Hosting is overall a very good host leveraging many years of experience and responsive support. If for any reason a customer is unsatisfied they are able to cancel at anytime without any sort of termination fee. This conveys a commitment to good service and a solid hosting solution.

Pros: Slightly less expensive than competition; quick, responsive support; ability to cancel at anytime; phone support is based in U.S.
Cons: Overseas live chat support
Bottomline: Solid host with quick support and a good feature offering
Rating:
www.ixwebhosting.com

Coupon Code for 20% off on all 3 plans: secretlink20

Godaddy Hosting Features and Pricing

For the purpose of this web host review, we utilized a Linux server with their Deluxe Hosting plan (priced at $6.99/month). This provided us with 150 GB of disk space and 1,500 GB of transfer. In this review, we will focus on GoDaddy’s shared hosting plans, although it is important to note that they also offer virtual dedicated, dedicated, as well as grid hosting.

With GoDaddy, both Linux and Windows hosting is available for the same price. Just like many other popular web hosts, GoDaddy’s billing is available in increasing discounts, ranging from 5 to 15%, depending on what billing period you select. All costs and billing options are presented up front so you’re not left guessing whether or not the cheapest price comes tagged with a longer billing period as with some hosts. While GoDaddy does offer discounts for longer terms of billing, they do not require customers to enter into a long-term contract to take advantage of this.

The Economy plan can be quite affordable at $4.99/month (for the minimum three month billing cycle). The shared unlimited plan offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth and is on par with the price points of the competition, and like other hosts, this must be used legitimately and the disk space cannot exceed the space “on a single server.” Therefore this space may very well be dependent on the other accounts occupying the same server.

GoDaddy Hosting provides “Dozens of FREE Add-on Applications” through their Hosting Connection platform, yet it is worth understanding that these free add-ons are free anywhere else as well, including popular software such as WordPress and Drupal. The advantage that GoDaddy presents is that they offer automated installation of these applications, which does provide added convenience and ease of use.

Though GoDaddy does support many scripting languages, not all are included in all plans. ColdFusion support is $1.99/month extra. Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and Perl are not supported on the Linux Economy plan either, so if you have a script that requires support for one of these languages, you will need at least a Deluxe plan.

While many hosts provide unlimited databases, GoDaddy is one that does limit the number and size, yet for the average user this does not impose a problem. It is also important to understand that while many hosts offer the popular cPanel control panel (or Plesk for Windows hosting), GoDaddy provides its own proprietary control panel for Linux shared hosting.

Since GoDaddy is such a large company offering numerous services, they are able to leverage this to provide their customers with some free credits including up to $25 for Google AdWords, $50 for Microsoft adCenter, and $50 for Facebook Ads. If you plan to capitalize on your website by selling products or services, these can all be very powerful tools to reach your target audience. There are other web hosts who also provide such credits, and this is not unique to GoDaddy, though they provide an especially good value.

GoDaddy’s dedicated plans are competitively priced and offer generous disk space and a fair amount of bandwidth and memory for what they charge. The Windows dedicated server plans run between $13 and $30 more a month than the Linux ones, yet they offer the industry-standard Plesk control panel instead of the generic Simple Control Panel offered with Linux. cPanel can be added for an extra cost for Linux plans. A nice feature of GoDaddy’s virtual dedicated and dedicated hosting services is that they can both be completely customized through the individual selection of features such as operating system, control panel, disk space, bandwidth, memory, among other features. This can be advantageous to someone who wants to really customize hosting to fit their needs.

Again, like the shared hosting, GoDaddy offers some valuable ad credits ranging from $175 to $375 depending on the dedicated plan selected, and between $125 and $225 on the virtual dedicated plans. These can be very nice for marketing and present a value-added component to the hosting. It is important to note that these ad credit offerings may change at any time, but it is also likely that the offers will continue.

Terms of Service

When proceeding through the account setup process, GoDaddy will present a set of terms that are specific to their hosting services. These terms are, for the most part, the usual jargon. Yet one thing to definitely take note of is their uptime guarantee. It comes with several exceptions. They guarantee 99.9% uptime and you may request a 5% credit if you find that they have not provided this level of service. This credit may only be used towards the purchase of other products and services they offer, so it apparently does not come off of your bill.

Not only is it limited in this way, but you will also not be receiving a credit if the downtime is caused by scheduled maintenance, your own errors (fair enough), “outages that do not affect the appearance of the website but merely affect access to the web site such as FTP and email,” “causes beyond the control of Go Daddy or that are not reasonably foreseeably by Go Daddy,” and issues involving “programming environments.” Errors caused by the user and issues with programming environments are reasonably exempted, yet when one’s email and FTP are inaccessible, this can pose quite the problem.

So these provisions are telling that if you’re interested in mission critical operation, the accessibility of email communications, and the ability to make changes to your site, there may be interruptions which GoDaddy has made themselves non-liable for and therefore they might not be the best choice for you in that case. Since their uptime is at their discretion you might not always be able to argue the 5% credit out of them. Many other hosts provide better money-back promises, including some that provide an entire month credit applied to your account.

There is another side to the uptime issue and that is realistic scenarios as opposed to the legal stipulations. When I called support and asked about a money-back guarantee I was informed that their cancellation policy is quite liberal and that GoDaddy will refund a customer for unused portions of their bill. So although they may hold themselves explicitly non-liable for many instances of downtime, it is apparently possible to cancel and receive a pro-rated refund. The support representative also mentioned that downtime is rare and they don’t really have issues with it, though this of course has to be taken at face value.

Control Panel

cPanel is the industry-standard control panel for Linux web hosting. Yet GoDaddy Hosting provides its own control panel. The functionality is very similar, and GoDaddy can pass the savings on to the customer through their use of their proprietary control panel. With GoDaddy’s virtual dedicated or dedicated services, if you are used to using cPanel and would like to utilize it, the option is there for an additional charge, while Plesk is available by default for those services.

A customer should have no issues in general administrating their hosting account with GoDaddy’s own control panel. It is quite user-friendly and offers a good amount of functionality.

Testing

The installation of an application through Hosting Connection is not quite one-click, yet it is a very guided process that walks you step-by-step through the necessary information. This can make such things as a blog or forum something that can be setup within minutes with little technical ability. Although the process is simple, it still presents you with valuable options to customize the installation.

I wanted to place WordPress on my site. The latest version was available through their system. Through a simple search I was able to find it, along with useful information like a description, rating, and reviews by other users. The page informed me that my hosting plan was compatible with the software; I assume that if it wasn’t that it would instruct me what I needed to make it compatible, whether it be an upgrade or a settings change. I clicked “Install Now!” and was then presented with a disclaimer informing me that GoDaddy was not liable for any third-party applications, very understandably. I then preceded to a four step setup process where I began by selecting my domain name. If my hosting was not compatible, I would have been presented with the second step of purchasing new hosting. I was then required to enter a database description and password, as the username was automatically generated. I then specified the directory into which I wanted it installed, and was then presented with some WordPress specific options for my admin username and password. In those few steps, I had my WordPress installation setup.

I then had to wait afterwards for the request to process with such status items as “Creating database.” Normally database creation is a near-instant process with many hosts, but not with GoDaddy. It took a good five minutes or so to create that one database and then it proceeded to the status of “Installing Application.” At this point it appears that these requests must be going into some giant queue for actions to be performed on them. It should be a fairly quick process for the server as it is simply creating a database and putting some customized files in place. It ended up taking about ten minutes for the two-step installation process to take place. Yet in the end, there it was, my shiny WordPress blog, with little effort on my part besides thirty seconds of entering data into a simple form and some patience for the server to process the request. For the ease of use, the small wait is no doubt worth it, especially since this process is free of charge and simply included as part of the hosting.

When creating databases in general it appears that with shared hosting that the database name must not only be unique to the one hosting account, but unique to the entire system. I therefore had to throw some numbers on the end of my database name to make it unique. It seems as if GoDaddy is really capitalizing on their size by scaling servers to accommodate specific needs. They may very well have a large database cluster to handle many customers. It then sat “Pending Setup” and after 10-15 minutes, it was finally setup. With our shared account it was not possible to setup more than one user for use with the database. For most individuals this likely is not an issue, but for some with specific needs it could be.

Godaddy Customer Support

I contacted customer support at 6:30 PM on a Saturday and after some very straightforward selection prompts I was connected to a representative within seconds thereafter. They asked me for my customer account number, which I didn’t have immediately accessible, so they accepted my username and call-in pin. I presented the representative with a question regarding their terms of use, seeking some clarification and they were able to quickly answer. I was off the phone in a matter of minutes. With other hosts it is possible to wait for many minutes for a representative to pick up the phone. Yet with GoDaddy the phone response time in this particular instance was extremely quick.

If an issue would be better handled in writing they do have an easy to use browser-based email form on their site that allows for questions to be submitted. Unlike other hosts that may offer a myriad of support options via channels such as live chat, ticketing, forums, instant messenger, among others, GoDaddy provides their phone and email options. Since customer service is seemingly quick to respond, these seem to be very suitable mediums for support.

Conclusion

GoDaddy provides a wide range of shared hosting services at competitive price points with some value-added services and features. Their customer service is easily accessible, quick to respond, and helpful. The one downfall noticed here is that the servers are slow to process requests made on the hosting account including the “quick-install” of applications and database setup. The services are quite easy to use, yet some patience can be required at times.

For those looking for turn-key solutions who don’t mind that they might not have total control over every element of configuring their services, and that they may have to wait at times for services to take effect, GoDaddy is a great solution at a reasonable price.

Pros: Ease of use, responsive customer service
Cons: Account actions can be relatively slow to process and functionality over control can be somewhat restrictive compared to other hosts
Bottomline: GoDaddy is overall a good host with valuable services and responsive support that is based on a solid company.
Rating:

Visit GoDaddy (www.GoDaddy.com)

Both HostGator and HostICan offer shared and dedicated hosting. HostGator also provides reseller hosting and HostICan provides Virtual Private hosting. The offerings of each host are summarized below:

HostGator
Shared: Linux (and Windows was coming soon at time of writing)
Reseller: Linux
Dedicated: Linux (Red Hat and CentOS) and Windows
Control Panel: cPanel for Linux, Plesk for Windows

HostICan
Shared: Linux
Virtual Private Servers: Linux and Windows
Dedicated: Linux and Windows
Control Panel: cPanel for Linux, Plesk for Windows
Merchant Accounts

If you are in need of a specific type of hosting the above information is helpful in deciding which host to choose. For example, if there is an interest in reseller hosting, the choice must be HostGator because HostICan does not provide this service.

Bandwidth

One of the main things that sets HostICan apart from their competition is that they offer unlimited bandwidth on their second tier plans. They offer two tiers of hosting plans in each hosting category: The first tier is limited bandwidth, and the second is the unlimited. HostGator only offers unlimited bandwidth on their highest shared hosting plan, but not on any other plans. Therefore if unlimited bandwidth is of value on VPS or dedicated plans, HostICan may be the choice to make. Unlimited bandwidth from HostICan can only be used for website related content, so the bandwidth cannot be used to host a download site. HostGator does not allow torrents.

Support

Support provided can often set two hosts apart. In the case of HostGator and HostICan, both hosts provide 24/7 support via toll-free numbers and email. Live chat is available from HostGator around the clock, but is provided by HostICan only during certain hours. Take a look at each host’s respective reviews individually for more information regarding the quality of support each host provides.

Money Back Guarantees

There are other important concerns when comparing hosts such as uptime and money-back guarantees. Both HostGator and HostICan guarantee 99.9% uptime. HostGator “eats up” the competition with their money-back guarantee of 45 days while HostICan provides the industry standard of 30 days. Both hosts also offer rewarding affiliate programs.

Conclusion

When choosing between HostGator and HostICan it will likely come down to what services each offers as they are both quality hosts. The specific numbers for price, disk space and bandwidth change often so check them out right before you are about to buy and see where each hosts stands for what you are looking for. If you need virtual private hosting, the choice has to be HostICan, but if you need reseller hosting you have to go with HostGator. Although you are bound to be satisfied with either host, the details can often be the difference between simply being satisfied and being happy with a host.

WWW.HOSTGATOR.COM vs WWW.HOSTICAN.COM