• Features and Pricing
• Terms of Service
• Testing
• Customer Support

Features and Pricing

The GreenGeeks.com website at first glance seems a little out-of-place. It isn’t messy, there’s just too much on display. It seems they need to figure out a proper placement strategy so important content is easier to find. They are throwing too much content in the way of their potential customers and that may well throw them off guard and make them simply move on to someone else.

Design aspects aside, GreenGeeks do not offer plans of any kind. They are purely an ‘unlimited’ host. Like every other unlimited host, you get unlimited disk space and bandwidth, databases, FTP accounts and everything else. The only thing they allow their potential customers to do is choose how long they want to be hosted with them. Of course, you need to pick the longest-term plan to receive the cheapest monthly plan. So how much of those green bills in your pocket does GreenGeeks want? The terms are as follows:

• Monthly – $14.95/mo with a $15 set-up fee
• Yearly – $7.95/mo
• 2 Years – $6.95/mo
• 3 Years – $4.95/mo

A free domain is included with every pricing term except the monthly payment plan, therefore it may make more sense to stick with them for at least a year if you don’t mind long-term commitments.

If you don’t like what you see for the first 30 days, then you can request a full refund. They offer a no-questions-asked guaranteed refund. They also state that you get to keep full ownership of your domain name regardless of whether they are your hosting provider or not.

If you’re un-knowledgeable about site transfers, they claim to transfer your website over for absolutely free.  In the case that you are creating a new website and you do not know where to start, they also offer free website builders too.

A nice offering from GreenGeeks is nightly back-ups. You don’t have to pay any additional costs for this feature, as it comes included with the plan. This ensures the protection of your data.

Terms of Service

GreenGeeks have a fairly small terms of service agreement which is always beneficial as it does not force you to read mass amounts of legal jargon. The terms themselves are fairly easy to comprehend so you don’t have to worry about not being to understand what you are agreeing too.

It states the usual: no spamming or exploiting the services, no illegal content and reselling. It also comes packed with the 99.99% uptime guarantee and the genuine 30-day money-back guarantee.

The agreement doesn’t stray too far away from what you would usually agree to when choosing a web host, it’s pretty much textbook.

Testing

After initial sign-up, I was up like a flash on the internet. They instantly sent me an order confirmation e-mail and an invoice acting as my receipt. Then under two minutes later, I received an e-mail containing my account information. The e-mail contained information such as my FTP details and control panel logins. They also supplied me with their nameservers. I can’t stress enough how important it is for a web hosting company to include their nameservers in welcome e-mails. It saves new customers a lot of time as they won’t have to spend ages digging for them. GreenGeeks really won me over by including that small, but vital piece of information.

I logged into the FTP account with no issues. In the welcome e-mail, I was given login details to the FTP account, as well as the direct server IP in case I faced any problems, which is always handy. The account posed no issues and worked flawlessly.

GreenGeeks, much like several other webhosts, use one of the industry’s best control panel’s cPanel. I logged into the control panel without any issues and everything looked fine from within. They also didn’t lack any specific control panel features such as the ability to create error pages, or uses services such as Cron Jobs. I installed a handful of services from the Fantastico script installer including Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, SMF and more and they all worked seamlessly without a hitch. As far as installing software goes, everything should work fine. There are no bugs and issues to report on that side.

Within cPanel, I also noticed another script installer by the name of Softaculous. I decided to see if there was any difference between this and Fantastico yet there is no difference. They both work flawlessly however Softaculous offers a wider range of scripts such as polls, calendars, and media tools and so on.

I also monitored the uptime of the website using a service called Pingdom. GreenGeeks are similar to most other webhosts by guaranteeing 99.99% uptime, but they sure beat their guarantee, that’s for sure. According to the results, in the first hosting week, there was 100% uptime. I guess this goes to show that being green helps solidify servers.

Customer Support

GreenGeeks offer a wide support system ranging from e-mail support to live-chat services. Both are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They also offer technical phone support during their business hours. The number is also toll-free.

I decided to look into their live chat service to review the quality of information provided and the time in which I received a valid response.

Once clicking on to the live chat service, I was prompted to enter my full name, the department I required assistance from, and my domain name. I was connected in a few seconds to a support representative. A few seconds had passed and I was greeted by a friendly member of staff asking for my name and why I require assistance. I felt it unnecessary to state my name twice, nevertheless complied and asked a question regarding using custom e-mail addresses with Google Apps. I specifically asked this question as I could verify if the information given was accurate and helpful.

Around one minute had passed and suddenly a vast amount of information filled up the live-chat dialog box. The representative responded saying in order to do what I wanted, I was required to change the MX records within my cPanel interface. I was given very concise and accurate step-by-step instructions.

He continued by saying the instructions he had given were in full compliance with Google’s instructions and had been adapted to work with their services.

They’re live chat service carries small response times, typically 45 seconds to one minute, dependant on the issue, and the amount of information given.

The only way GreenGeeks could make their support channels better are by supporting their customers worldwide by phone, such as webhosts like MyHosting.

Conclusion

GreenGeeks is a ‘green’ company promoting the safety of the environment through their services. They give more back to the environment than what they use. This does not affect the stability of their servers however, as they provide a very reliable service with no downtime at all. They offer an unlimited features plan designed to suit the requirements of the common website structure. They offer quick and accurate support along with a toll-free U.S. support number. I guess being green can really have its advantages, as GreenGeeks is one of most reliable unlimited webhosts I have certainly ever come across.

Pros: Reliable and stable servers, quick support times, great features, easy-to-use control panel.

Cons: Potentially expensive if paying monthly.

Bottom line: An extremely solid ‘green’ company providing unlimited hosting features, strengthened by reliable and friendly support.

Rating: 

Coupon code “clickfire” saves you $30 on annual packages.

www.greengeeks.com

This ClickHOST review will be broken down into sections consisting of:

• Hosting Features and Pricing Structure
• Terms of Service
• Testing of Services/Uptime
• Customer Support

Features and Pricing

When you take your first look at the homepage, you are shown a set pricing structure of three plans:

• BASIC
• BETTER
• BEST

The Basic plan is suited for individuals looking to run a small website that does not need many features such as the use of databases or additional domains. It also comes with a limit of 500 megabytes worth of disk space which is plenty for a basic website.

The Better plan has it all; and by all, I of course mean ‘unlimited’ everything. From disk space, to databases, there is no limit. If you’ve read my previous review, you’ll understand why the word unlimited is in inverted commas. I believe there is no such thing as unlimited and fortunately ClickHOST proves my point. Below the pricing table on the ‘Compare Plans’ page, there is a small notice stating that the Better and Best plans are limited to 10GB disk space and a terabyte of bandwidth. It also states that this limit can be increased if you so desire. However, If you’re already sold, you can go ahead and add a Static IP for an extra 3$ a month, or a Dedicated SSL certificate for 99$ a year. The only feature this plan lacks is their so-called “website maintenance.”

The final plan, considered the ‘Best’ plan to purchase is essentially a mirror of the ‘Better’ plan. So, I bet you’re wondering: “Hey, what am I paying an extra 18 dollars for?” It’s an understandable question to ask, but quite simply, you get the Dedicated SSL certificate and the Static IP thrown in for free, as well as 2 hours worth of website maintenance. Is it worth the price? Personally, I’d say no, but that’s for you, the potential customer to decide.

Initial set-up of your website is free which is always a bonus, as well as transfers. They claim to support WordPress as one of their main applications by offering to even install it for you and offer you tools to integrate your current WordPress website seamlessly.

As far as support goes, they offer a 24/7 e-mail system. They unfortunately do not offer phone support of any kind however; they do state that if for whatever reason you are in need of phone support, they request you open a ticket stating why and they will call you during business hours. Their live chat system is only open during the business hours of Monday to Friday at 9am – 5pm.

If you’re at all dissatisfied with the service, you are given the opportunity to request a refund for the lengthy term of forty-five days, which is extremely generous.

Terms of Service

The thing I love most about ClickHOST is its exceedingly small terms of service agreement. They use simple grammar to extend their points across to their potentially weary customers. Although, the fact that it is short does not mean is it not concise or straight to the point.

The agreement is as straight-forward as one could ever be. It states their services are not designed for large enterprises, more so for smaller independent ventures. It also contains an acceptable use policy which states you may not host illegal content, proxies, pornographic content and other content in a similar nature. It also prohibits using your site to host serials, cracks and warez content as well as unsolicited and bulk emailing and spamming.

They also claim that they provide a 99.99% uptime guarantee, as most other hosts do.

Testing: Clicking ClickHOST

After signing-up, I received a welcome e-mail stating my account was in the process of being set-up and I will be informed shortly when set-up is complete. The e-mail also contained my login information to login to the webhosts client area. I received another two emails; one confirming my order and another was an invoice stating it was my official receipt.

Around fifty minutes to an hour later, I received an e-mail stating my new web hosting account had been successfully set-up. The e-mail contained all kinds of useful information such as login details to the control panel, FTP account logins and webmail/e-mail settings. The bottom of the e-mail showed a small note thanking me for my decision to host with them.

As far as testing is concerned, I decided to take a look at their control panel. I was hardly surprised to see that ClickHOST makes use of the cPanel control panel, as several other webhosts such as GreenGeeks and InMotion do. However, the control panel felt very limited. They do not offer all of the cPanel features available such as the Fantastico script installer. They instead make use of a ‘site software’ resource. This resource is very limited as they do not offer the ability to install Drupal or Joomla (Sorry guys, looks like you’ll have to install it manually).

I decided to install a few random services they have on offer. I started off with an e-commerce shopping cart called OSCommerce. Installation was straight-forward, as I inputted my login details and where I wanted the software to be installed. It installed it seamlessly and gave me an administration link afterwards. I tested a few other services to see if they behaved similarly. I tried out phpBB3, it was similar however I did not receive a link to an administration link. This is bad news for newbies who wouldn’t know how to find the administration panel. I also couldn’t login to the forum at all. Issues like this will most likely deter customers to continue using the service if certain bugs are found here and there.

I decided to test up-time as well by using an up-time monitoring service called Pingdom. As previously stated, ClickHOST claims to have 99.99% guaranteed up-time. Well, it seems they’ve exceeded their claims as Pingdom states they have an amazing 100% up-time for the first hosting week. It is beyond impressive to have this amount of up-time and no downtime at all in the first week.

Customer Support

As ClickHOST do not primarily offer phone support, I decided to start a live chat with one of their support representatives. They currently offer a 24/7 e-mail support service and they offer live-chat technical support during their business hours. (9am to 5pm from Monday – Friday).

I decided to open a live chat conversation with one of their representatives concerning the fact that I did not receive an administration link to my phpBB3 forum board and that I could not log-in. A very friendly representative responded quickly and asked what problems I was facing. I explained my problems and the staff-member pulled up all the information required to help solve the problem. Whilst doing this, the member of staff also engaged in a friendly conversation with me about sports. It is always a nice perk to get a friendly support representative that likes to talk to you in a friendly and courteous manner.

The representative was able to give me an administration link which solved half of the problem and then set about helping me fix my login issues. In the end, we were unable to determine the root of my problem; therefore the staff member gave me all the available resources he could so that I could attempt to fix the problem myself.

Before I left the live-chat conversation, the representative provided me with additional contact details in-case I could not solve my issues, stating that if the issue cannot be resolved, they will work in a close manner with me to ensure this problem is fixed.

My Conclusion

ClickHOST provides quality plans for individuals and independent business owners offering a wide array of services and features that’s sure to get you on the band wagon. They show consistently good up-time results as well as extremely friendly customer support agents. Their support services could be much better by extending their live-chat hours and offering phone support and maybe one day that could become a reality. They offer a somewhat small list of online software due to their relatively unknown software installer and by not offering industry common online content management systems such as Joomla may lose them many potential customers.

Pros: Good value, several features, brilliant support and up-time.

Cons: Not enough support mediums, lack of installable software.

Bottom Line: Reliable host offering great quality services.

Rating: 

Get 25% off any ClickHOST plan with promo code: CLAIM25

Disclosure: Leverable, the company that owns clickfire.com has a CPA agreement with ClickHOST and may receive compensation for sales referred from this site. Also, Leverable later undertook SEO services for ClickHOST. The writer of the review was not aware of or influenced by either of the above. Details about our awesome web hosting review process are outlined here.

Features and Pricing

MyHosting give you the choice of three different hosting plans, however the structure of the plans themselves are considerably odd. I find this to be the case as their cheapest plan offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth, so what could the other plans possibly offer?

There are three plans in total, they are as follows:

• Personal
• Business
• E-Commerce

The personal plan, as mentioned earlier, offers you unlimited disk space and bandwidth, unlimited hosting of domains and a free domain packed with it. What I find odd about this plan in particular is that even though they offer unlimited space and bandwidth, they do not offer unlimited features, much like other webhosts such as Web Hosting Hub. Instead they offer:

• 3 MySQL and PostgreSQL databases
•  1 FTP account
• 10 e-mail mailboxes

It also garners the ability to install certain blog platforms and content management systems. In my opinion, it doesn’t make sense to offer all that space if you’re not getting all of the essential features to back it up. I guess we’ll find more about their pricing strategy as we move on to their other plans.

The business plan costs five dollars more than the personal plan. It essentially mirrors the personal plan but with a few extra features. You get access to the Microsoft Windows 2008 platform, and the Linux CentOS platform and a free dedicated IP address. That’s pretty much it, however instead of three databases, you get five, and you get double the amount of e-mail mailboxes you get in the Personal plan. You are still limited to one FTP user account. I am unable to understand why they offer such a small amount of additional resources. If they have the ability to offer such a large amount of disk space and bandwidth, surely they can offer you a few more databases and more than at least one FTP user account. I am unaware if they thought this pricing strategy would gain them many potential customers, but it can certainly deter several due to the excessively small amount of features.

Now we’ll take a look at the final and most expensive plan: The E-Commerce plan. The use is in the title; it’s designed specifically for shopping cart websites. The price of this plan is $18.95 per month. It states you are given everything in the Business plan as well as a free SSL certificate, e-commerce add-ons, SMTP services and 6 website builder tools. Instead of the aforementioned 10 SQL databases, you are given 20 and an additional 2 MS SQL databases. You are also given 50 mailboxes and surprisingly 5 FTP user accounts.

If you’re thinking you need more additional features than they offer, then you’re in luck. They give you the ability to add additional resources. For example, if you’d like an additional FTP user account, it would cost you an extra 5 dollars per month. Need a few extra mailboxes? That would cost you an additional $3.55 per month. You’ll start to understand the pattern they have adopted here. If you need additional resources, it will cost you. I personally consider this to be a cheap tactic produced by companies and it really impacts my opinion on their services.

It seems as though these plans don’t stray too far from each other as they all offer similar features, with the exception that each plan contains a few additional resources such as a dedicated IP, or a SSL certificate.

Typically from most webhosts, the majority of the features they offer are unlimited to an extent, and the amount is far larger than the offerings from MyHosting. If you find the amount of features sufficient for you or your company, then by all means purchase an account.

Terms of Service

I found it a little bothersome that they didn’t have a direct link to their terms of service agreement on their homepage. They instead had it buried in their about section as an Acceptable Use Policy.

The policy itself is in 23 sections. I found it to be quite a tedious read as they made no effort to re-define their terms in a manner that was understandable by the public. I found myself reading through paragraphs and paragraphs of legal jargon which was clear, yet poorly constructed. I found myself finding information about refunds and cancellation policies below the ‘Billing’ section, and while both subjects are relatable to each other, I find it common to see such information under its own heading.

Those of you who have a good grasp on English vocabulary and grammar will have no problem reading this, however if you’ve never read an Acceptable Use Policy before, you may find yourself struggling every now and again trying to understand exactly what you are agreeing too.

They also sport a 100% up-time guarantee.

Control Panel

MyHosting have decided to create a custom control panel for their customers. This could be construed as an attempt to stray away from the industry’s standard control panel cPanel. The main page of the control panel is littered with help pages and documents for beginners to help them get started with their new website. Underneath, there is a list of resources that lets you control every aspect of your website.

Testing

I was up and online within five minutes with MyHosting.com. I received an order confirmation e-mail which contained a receipt and a few hyperlinks to the control panel and their phone support service. The e-mail was extremely lacking in information and did not contain any of the vital information required for beginners to get started on their website. Five minutes later, I received virtually the exact same e-mail, yet acting as an invoice, which was essentially unnecessary.

I proceeded to look on their website for their nameservers, however could not find them. I eventually found them buried in the webhosts main wiki. One day later, I checked the status of my new website to find it was not online. It seemed as though the nameservers had not propagated. I decided to wait a few extra days to see if it was mainly a time issue, but that was not the case. The website was not online, so after some researching, I found some alternative nameservers and a few hours later my website was online. This was an unbelievable nuisance, as webhosts should include their nameservers in welcome e-mails or direct help files situated on their website.

I navigated through the custom control panel for a little while attempting to find the one-click script installer mentioned on their features page. I eventually found it under the heading ‘Application Vault’. It was split in to 5 different sections. The scripts themselves were situated in these 5 sections dependant on what the script was used for. The sections were as follows: Blogging, CMS, Community, E-Commerce, Photos. I proceeded to click on the Blogging section and there was only one blogging platform in there, which of course was WordPress.

I clicked on to the WordPress icon and was displayed a summary and description of the platform and the option to install it. I proceeded to click install and a dialog box popped up that stated it was loading a page. The page produced was a list of websites and I was prompted to choose which one I wanted to install WordPress on. I chose my website and followed the ‘next’ buttons accordingly. I was then prompted to enter some basic information such as login details. Finally, I was displayed a green dialog box telling me WordPress was ready to be installed. After clicking the ‘finish’ button, I was told that WordPress had officially been scheduled for installation.

This was irritating, as after completing several unnecessary steps, I wasn’t told that WordPress had been installed, I was told it had been scheduled for installation. I couldn’t understand why I was unable to instantly install a blogging platform. It made me wonder if MyHosting has technical support staff manually install applications for their customers which is not needed at all. I also wasn’t told when it would be installed either which was the not-so-sweet cherry on top of this mediocre cake.

I tested the uptime of the website for one week with a service called Pingdom. It shows a fair amount of downtime, most likely due to the nameserver fiasco I had experienced upon sign-up. Despite the issue, I would have assumed the amount of downtime shown would have been considerably lower.

Customer Support

MyHosting carry a wide range of support services. They offer 24/7 live-chat, e-mail and phone support service. I find it excellent for a company to offer 24/7 support for all three of the above mentioned support channels. Phone support is also available in 8 different countries around the world which is also extremely helpful in some cases.

As MyHosting provide technical phone support services in the UK, I decided to give a try. I called their toll-free support number and I instantly received an automated message informing me I would be connected to a representative shortly. Within 10 seconds, I was connected to a technical support staff member. She stated her name, and what she could assist with. I responded by asking how I would go about creating a sub-domain, and how I could point this sub-domain to the domain itself.

At first, I was told to attempt to create the sub domain. However, I was not given any instructions on how to do this. Luckily, it was easy enough to find. I attempted to create the sub-domain; however it was not shown on the list. She then told me to re-login to my control panel as she would create the sub-domain for me. Once logged back in, the sub-domain was listed. She then asked what else it was that I needed help with, and I responded by asking her how to redirect the sub-domain to the domain itself. Around 30 seconds later, she responded by saying she had completed this for me. She asked me if there was anything else I needed help with and hung up the phone in a friendly manner.

I found the quality of the support line to be fairly bad as I could barely hear the representative. I found myself asking her to repeat herself often as I couldn’t hear her properly. Generally, the staff member was helpful and wasn’t rude in any manner.

I was eager to try their live chat service also, to see if it would match up with the quality of the phone support I was engaged in earlier. However, when clicking onto their live chat service, a dialog box appeared, when clicking to select a department, only the Sales department was online. This struck me as odd as the MyHosting website states live chat support is 24/7.

Conclusion

MyHosting provide somewhat mediocre plans and features at an unsatisfactory price. They have a custom control panel created just for users, yet it seems somewhat limited in features and resources. The reliability of the service itself is fair, despite having initial issues with nameservers, however, they make up for what they lack with their fantastic support services. For experienced customers, this service is not for you, but beginners may be happy with what they have to offer. Their cheapest plan offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth without a fair amount of features, but if all you need is space and not databases, then MyHosting is for you.

Pros: Great customer support, somewhat reliable service.

Cons: Lack of effective features, poorly structured information, bad pricing strategy, additional resources can be expensive.

Bottom line: A fairly reliable service with great customer support brought down by their lack of features, pricing strategies and additional costs and misconstrued information.

Rating:

“The Easiest Way to Get Online” states the Web Hosting Hub website at first glance. The website has a sleek, professional design and the homepage, of course, is very informative. The most appealing item of the homepage itself is the attractive woman they have representing their company. Unfortunately, it seems they would have been better off recruiting an ‘official mascot’ to represent their website as those images don’t fool anybody. In this Web Hosting Hub review, I’ll look at these four areas:

• Features/Prices
• Company terms of service
• Control panel login and testing
• Customer support checkin

Let’s get started.

Features and Pricing

It seems Web Hosting Hub doesn’t believe in using packages, as signing up to their one and only web hosting plan allows you to receive a pre-defined set of features at a set price for a specific amount of time. You have three payment options:

• 12 months
• 24 months
• 36 months

To receive the cheapest monthly cost for their web hosting, you would obviously have to sign-up for the longest period. Web hosting companies that do not allow monthly or even semi-annually payments annoy me to such an extent that it deters me from wanting to even look at their features, so I simply just move on.

The word ‘unlimited’ is littered across their website. They claim to provide unlimited disk space and bandwidth. This immediately makes up my mind about a particular host as these two features can essentially never be ‘unlimited’. I tend to feel more comfortable with a host that has well defined packages and genuine features to accompany those packages, however, this is their marketing strategy and I’m guessing that having the word ‘unlimited’ must really appeal to their client base who don’t have much experience with web hosting in general.

As far as features go, they offer a website builder for those who are inexperienced at building websites. They also make use of the cPanel control panel, as well as the Fantastico script installer. To make things easier for WordPress users, within the control panel they have a preferences module that contains an ‘Install WordPress’ item.

A nice perk is that they offer unlimited standard features, such as e-mail addresses, MySQL databases and FTP accounts so you won’t need to worry about running out any time soon.

They offer automated secure backups of up to 10GB for an extra dollar a month. This add-on is already pre-checked on the sign-up page.

They also offer a 90-day money back guarantee. I find this to be an amazing offering from Web Hosting Hub due to the fact that nowadays, you’ll commonly see that you’ll only have around two weeks to claim a refund, however this company allows you to test the waters for three whole months before you decide to stay or jump ship!

If you’re creating a website for the first time and do not own a domain name, they throw that in as well for free, which is a nice cherry on top of the cake. If you do already own a domain name, they also claim to transfer your domain for free too.

Transferring your website can be a daunting task; however Web Hosting Hub states that they have a transfer process that promises no downtime at all. They give you a temporary URL where you have the ability to upload all of your files, create e-mail accounts and make sure everything is in working order before transferring the domain.

Terms of Service

Web Hosting Hub’s terms of service is fairly easy to comprehend. It begins by stating some average ground rules, such as no hosting of adult content and no e-mail spamming. It also states that their hosting is not to be used for intensive software or as a backup system.

The page itself is in 17 sections; therefore it is not tediously long. It is very well written as there are no mistakes in grammar and vocabulary to be seen. This is an indication that they did not skimp on this process and are professional with every aspect of their company as a whole.

I’d mentioned earlier that Web Hosting Hub has a very generous 90-day full money back guarantee. However, this guarantee does not cover the purchase of any additional items, including domain names, domain privacy, dedicated IP’s and SSL certificates.

Testing

After signing up, I instantly received an e-mail thanking me for choosing to host with their company and that for security purposes, they manually review purchases prior to activation. It also stated that my account was currently in the process of being reviewed and I would receive a phone call shortly.

Within five minutes of signing up, I received a friendly phone call from a representative confirming my details and domain. A few minutes later, I received an e-mail containing my login information and instructions to create a password for the account. I also received another email containing the receipt.

I proceeded to login to my account control panel, where I have the ability to add any additional services, manage domains and log-in to the cPanel control panel.

As you can see above, Web Hosting Hub has created a custom module to assist beginners with their new website. The preferences module contains many useful items such as tutorials, the ability to update billing/contact details, the ability to change your password and language and a quick-link to install WordPress from the Fantastico script installer.

From within the control panel, you can manage e-mail accounts, FTP accounts, sub-domains and add-on domains and MySQL databases. For more experienced users, you have the use of items such as phpMyAdmin, Cron jobs and the ability to create custom error pages.

As Web Hosting Hub does not have any guarantee on uptime, I decided to monitor the uptime of the website for one week to give an idea of how reliable the service is. Within one week of uptime monitoring, the website experienced 99.96% uptime. The website only experienced 4 minutes of downtime on three separate occasions, the longest of which was only 2 minutes.

Thanks to Pingdom for the insight into uptime!

Customer Support

Web Hosting Hub carry a 24/7 technical support service, as well as a toll-free phone support service for customers based in the United States. As I am not based within the US, I decided to test out their online technical support system by asking a few standard questions. The chat log went as follows:

Christi N.: Hello Smair. How may I assist you?
Smair: Hi there.
Smair: I was wondering how I would alter the media upload limit in WordPress, apparently you have to create a php.ini file?
Christi N.: Hello Smair. I am more than happy to help. Please hold a moment while I pull up your account.
Smair: Okay, Thank you!
Christi N.: Thank you Smair. Yes.
Christi N.: We have an article with information on that too:
http://www.webhostinghub.com/support/website/how-to/update-local-php-settings
Smair: Oh that is great!
Smair: I have one more question
Christi N.: I am more than happy to help Smair. Please, go ahead.
Smair: Thank you. How would I go about making specific directories, for example: “http://example.com/images/personal/”, private?
Christi N.: You can password protect directories from within cPanel.
Christi N.: I have step-by-step instructions for that as well:
http://www.webhostinghub.com/support/edu/cpanel/304-password-protect-directory
Smair: Okay. That’s great. Thank you for your assistance, you’ve been very helpful!
Christi N.: Thank you Smair! Is there anything else I can assist you with at this time?
Smair: No, thank you.
Christi N.: We are available 24/7 and we’re always happy to help!

I found this chat session to be very friendly and extremely helpful as this company makes full use of their knowledgebase. Having a well-structured knowledgebase can easily eliminate the need for calling their support line or using the live-chat system which is very impressive.

Conclusion

To wrap up my review, I’d say that Web Hosting Hub’s pre-defined hosting plan is great for those who are looking to host a personal website, or host a website for a small business on a shared environment. They offer unlimited features, and use the industry’s common control panel: cPanel. Unfortunately, they do not offer monthly and semi-annually payments which requires you to sign-up for at least a year, however if you don’t mind committing to a web host for that long, then they’ll do just fine. With very friendly customer support and company representatives alongside hundreds of useful features, Web Hosting Hub seems like a reliable host.

Pros: Reliable and friendly support, several features, useful control panel

Cons: No short-term billing cycles, no guarantee of uptime, no pre-defined packages.

Bottom-line: A good value, and reliable host providing a good quality service.

Rating:

Website: http://www.webhostinghub.com/

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

FatCow is one of the many hosting companies out there going green: they’re completely powered by wind energy (via Renewable Energy Certificates). They provide a single hosting plan — pretty cheap unlimited hosting at $5.50 a month — and include a free one-year domain name registration with hosting. They take pride in providing this simplicity to the customer, and call hosts that use pricing tiers “confusing.”

The HeiferCratic Oath is FatCow’s promise to customers that they will provide great customer service. If you feel like the “Moo Crew” hasn’t kept this promise to you, you could even get a month of hosting free! Among the promises made in the HeiferCratic Oath: FatCow will do their best to answer any calls within two minutes, and they’ll do that without outsourcing any call centers outside of North America. You’ll also get a (somewhat) personalized phone call within a week of registration welcoming you to their service!

As far as the Terms of Service go, FatCow falls into standard territory. Don’t distribute viruses. No copyright infringement or pornography. One section of the Terms of Service mentions advertising on sites with a free web hosting plan. Something that will see the light of day in the future perhaps?

Site Management

FatCow members use a custom control panel that is very similar in functionality and layout to cPanel. For those used to cPanel, it’s primarily  a matter of figuring out a different name (i.e. InstallCentral is FatCow’s Fantastico) to find what you want. The actual modules themselves, though, while doing much the same things as their cPanel counterparts, may take a bit of getting used to, especially the file manager and MySQL manager.

A pet peeve of mine with the control panel was that I got full-page ads (the variety with the skip this ad and continue link at the top of the page) while logging into it twice.  Ads like that should be reserved for non-paid services.

I used InstallCentral to install a WordPress blog, and it was just as easy as using Fantastico. The install loaded pretty slowly (with default settings and only the welcome post) compared to another WordPress blog I tested it against.

One big concern for those who may be moving a website rather than starting a new one is being able to transfer your site. Many hosts offer the feature of moving your site for you, but FatCow does not.

Unfortunately, the only FTP address you are given is ftp.yourdomain.com, and FatCow’s file manager doesn’t allow you to upload directories, so in most cases you’ll be stuck waiting until your domain has propagated to move your files.

FatCow Support

It’s very easy to open up support tickets if you don’t mind a bit of a wait. I submitted a mid-day support request asking a few simple questions (what PHP version they have installed, if Ruby on Rails is supported, and whether localhost is the MySQL hostname) and got a response in just under two hours. They also offer 24/7 phone support and a live chat option on their website. Since I was wondering about the aforementioned site transfer and couldn’t find any information about it on FatCow’s website, I used the live chat to ask about it.

Godson Davis: Hi Grace. My name is Godson, how are you today?
grace: hi i was wondering if you guys offered website transfers
grace: like not domain names
grace: but a whole site like some other places do
Godson Davis: Okay.
grace: i didn’t see any info about it looking around the site so figured i’d ask
Godson Davis: Could you please provide me with the URL from where you entered this Chat interface?
grace: fatcow.com/fatcow/fatcow.bml
Godson Davis: Thank you!
grace: sure thing
Godson Davis: Yes, you can transfer the Web site from other server to our servers using FTP.
grace: okay but so you guys don’t offer the service where you’ll do it for me?
Godson Davis: In order to transfer it to our server, please downloadit to your local computer, then upload it to our server.
Godson Davis: Please install the FTP client on your computer.
grace: okay i’m guessing that’s a no
grace: thanks!

I never did get a straight answer, and I gave him a couple of minutes to see if he was going to say anything else each time I responded back. I’m sure they have scripted support answers, as many live chats do, but in this case, the scripted answers were not helpful.

FatCow’s knowledgebase is pretty extensive as well, though some of the information on it seemed to be outdated. For instance, the instructions on taking a MySQL database backup did not seem to correspond to the current MySQL manager at all.

Pros: Cheap, eco-friendly, 24/7 North American phone support

Cons: Ads logging in, site loads slowly, no site transfer

Bottomline: If cost and the environment are both huge issues to you, go for it. Otherwise, you can probably find something better.

Rating:

Get 40% off FatCow web hosting