ThinkHost Review
Who would think that you could do the planet a favor by purchasing web hosting? Well, that’s the premise that ThinkHost, an Oregon-based web hosting, has based its business on. The company touts three core values:
honest, integrity, and trust, with environmentalism thrown in for good measure and good marketing.
The story of ThinkHost is simple; the company realized that web hosting is bad for the environment (data centers take up a lot of energy) and decided to do something about it. Their solution? Run all services on 100% renewable energy. They also plant a tree for every new customer. The result? A “green” hosting company that actually helps, instead of devastates, the
environment.
Putting the aspect of green hosting aside, though, ThinkHost offers competitive plans and quality service. Their standard plan offers 100 GB of disk space and 1000 GB of bandwidth, along with some nice features like PHP 5 and Ruby on Rails, for $7.95 a month (assuming you pre-pay for two years). If you only want to pay for a six month period, the cost will ramp up to $19.95 a month.
In addition to providing standard hosting features (unlimited databases, unlimited email, etc.), the company includes a variety of software and services with its hosting plans, ranging from a call with a business consultant to discounts on environmentally friendly paper products.
ThinkHost customers are offered a custom control panel. The control panel isn’t as powerful as cPanel, but it gets the job done. It’ll work for a vast majority of web sites and allows for fairly complete management of a particular web site. Those use to cPanel may experience a bit of a learning curve, but again, it is a manageable change.
Those seeking phone or IM support should look elsewhere – ThinkHost offers neither. To test their email support, I submitted a simple question to their support team using the company’s online helpdesk at 2:30 PM on a Sunday. I received a response 20 minutes later. The answer to my exact question was actually available in the company’s knowledge base and that’s what the company sent me. However, the answer was appropriate and did answer my question.
The company offers a 120 day money back guarantee and a 100% uptime guarantee. The 100% uptime guarantee isn’t exactly “no strings attached, though. It only applies if you submit a ticket to their support team to report the problem and it doesn’t provide you with a full refund if your web site goes down for a few minutes. However, the offer is unique and the money back guarantee period is one of the longest ones in the industry.
ThinkHost prides itself on being a “green” host. If that is of value to you, the company is a great choice. The company offers relatively competitive hosting plans with enough space, bandwidth, and technology to
keep any webmaster happy.
Summary
Pros: Environmentally friendly hosting, lots of extras included with signups, long money-back guarantee period.
Cons: Expensive if you don’t want to pre-pay for a year or two, no phone support.
Bottom line: If having environmentally friendly hosting and a socially responsible web hosting company is important to you, ThinkHost is a solid choice. If the environmental impact of hosting is not of concern to you, you’re better off taking your dollars elsewhere.
Rating: 
Review by: Douglas Hanna
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August 8th, 2008
[...] another large “green hosting” company. The company’s plans are 100% wind and solar [...]
October 1st, 2008
Totally unreliable host, extremely slow, buggy and is totally not worth it!! Their 120 day money back guarantee was not honored. It’s good to hide behind such ethical thing as green hosting, but ethics don’t seem to really exists with thinkhost when it comes to an unsatisfied customer.
October 18th, 2008
Thinkhost advertises a moneyback guarantee which they do not honour. Their service is terrible, the lack of customer support is frustrating. Fraudsters of the nth degree. It’s a good scam they have got going, but they are certainly not ethical!
October 20th, 2008
Terrible performance. Actual upload / download speed limits from their “technical support:”
Downloads: after 4MB, limits to 48KB/s
Uploads: after 1MB limits to 16KB/s
So a 15MB file takes more than 30 minutes to upload!