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.
If you’re looking for the $50 Thinkhost coupon, it is redwood_5095015b
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.
Update: ThinkHost now has 24/7 Phone Support.
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
Coupon Code: “redwood_5095015b“ - $50 off account creation
http://www.thinkhost.com
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!
November 27th, 2008
STAY AWAY FROM THINKHOST!!!!! THEY WILL RIP YOU OFF!!!!
Boy, how I wish I had read some of the reviews for Thinkhost out there before being ripped off… I also wanted a socially responsible company to host my sites and found Thinkhost. I signed up for an account, even though I thought it was weird to have an automatic script following and pestering me with coupons and offers right from the first visit to their web site. So, anyway, I signed up for an account and quickly realized it was not a good company when their admin panel turned out to be so unfriendly. I couldn’t even set up a database without submitting a ticket for tech support!
I immediately requested a cancellation and they never sent me an email acknowledging the cancellation or anything to the email address I had posted as my email address. I realized they never canceled and refunded charges after a month, when I got my credit card statement, and when I contacted them they claimed they would not refund charges because they sent me an email in their “internal email system” with the cancellation form I needed to fill out!!! Of course, this is an email I would never get unless I went looking for it somewhere in the hostingoperations.com support site… I guess that is just one of their dirty tricks. I am still fighting this issue with my credit card.
Now that I think about it, Thinkhost is probably not even solar powered, it must be a couple resellers with $$$ in their eyes, trying to rip people off and doing everything they can to avoid dealing with their customers, and not a solid company trying to build its reputation and customer service. Their tech support email address is no-reply@thinkhost.com, so you know what that means…
I learned my lesson: NEVER TRUST A COMPANY THAT DOES NOT HAVE A PHONE NUMBER ON THEIR SITE. Of course, now I can see that I am not the only one being ripped off, so check other people’s reviews and stay away from them. I have dealt with many web hosts over the years, but THINKHOST IS THE WORST EVER!!!
November 28th, 2008
Yol, I feel for you. But, I’m puzzled by your account. My experience was very different. I kept our account open for about 6 months after Doug finished the review for Clickfire. I didn’t have any trouble cancelling the service or corresponding with ThinkHost customer support.
January 22nd, 2009
I had high hopes for a Green host, but I guess windmills just don’t provide enough power to keep the servers up. My site was frequently down and Thinkhost support kept promising me they were making improvements, I finally gave up on them and moved my sites 21 days after signing up and they would not refund my fees quoting their 14 day policy. But the only reason I hung around beyond 14 days was their ongoing promises to get things right. Alas, they never did, and then stiffed me on the fee. Green does not equal high integrity.
February 13th, 2009
thieves, polished scam artists, terrible interface, bermuda triangle of customer care, they will take you money then ‘terms of service’ you to death in order to avoid a refund
thinkhost think ponzi scam
February 24th, 2009
bad. really really bad.
I am in the environmental field and I’ve had a renewable-energy Thinkhost as my hosts for about 2 years. I have put up with a lot of downtime and poor customer support because I value their stated mission and the hassle of switching over my 8 little websites has been too much.
Last year my sites were down for what seemed like weeks. things got better, but in 2009 thinkhost seems to be back to its old ways. today, I opened a trouble ticket when my sites were down, which was promptly closed without notification or resolution. DO NOT HOST WITH THINKHOST.
March 12th, 2009
Worst performance of about a dozen web hosts I’ve worked with. My site was down at least 10 minutes a day for the last 9 months and had severe (over 4 hours) outages several times.
AVOID THINKHOST AT ALL COST. Whatever the cost, it will be too much.