Pronet Hosting Review

Until the end of July 2009, Pronet Hosting is offering a pretty amazing deal.  If you click the banner above, you can get a full year of hosting for $4.95.

Consider this a preliminary review.  I’ve only been with Pronet Hosting for about a week, as of July 19, 2009, so this review may be subject to change.  I sped the process up a little because of the current hosting sale they are running.  So far, I’m really surprised at how happy I am with them.  I’m not the easiest webmaster to please.  However, it should be noted that my test site only has an empty shell, Wordpress installation running.  Still, I’ve seen some hosting companies who couldn’t even handle that properly.

Please note: if you have been to other website hosting review sites, you should realize that I rate based on personal experience (rather than hosting company marketing) and am usually a tough grader. Please read the review to see the explanations and reasoning behind the ratings.

Hosting Plans and Scalability:
Pricing:
Speed and Uptime:
Bandwidth and Storage:
Power Rating:
Customer Service:
Ease of Use:
Overall:

Hosting Plans and Scalability:  

Pronet Hosting offers both Windows and Linux shared hosting solutions, dedicated servers and a reseller plan.  According to the “terms of service,” you aren’t allowed to use “extremely high amount of server resources” or you will be contacted to pay additional fees.  To the uninitiated, this probably sounds a little vague and harsh, but while I won’t argue about the vagary, I’ll argue that this is a very positive, and unusually good, response to sites that use too many resources.  Many shared hosting companies just shut you down.  At Pronet Hosting, they seem willing to work with you.  And this creates added scalability.  Either you pay more or you can go to their dedicated servers, which are well-managed and reasonably priced.  Overall, I would say this is very solid.  You have a chance to start on the cheap and move up if you ever need to.  Can’t beat that.

Pricing:  

  If I were only rating their prices as of right now, their pricing can’t be beat.  At $4.95 per year for their least expensive plan, you aren’t going to be able to find better than that no matter how hard you try.  Once the sale is over, I assume that their pricing will go back to $4.95 for the lowest priced plan, on up to $99 for their dedicated servers.  Considering the price to value quotient and class of hosting, I would say that Pronet Hosting offers a very reasonable price.

Speed and Uptime:  

  I have only been with Pronet for about a week (as of July 19, 2009), so I can’t give any more than the simplest estimate here, but I will say that their servers seem to be well designed and very responsive.  I’m running a dynamic Wordpress site there and the speed has been consistently exceptional, even when factoring in the very low traffic loads.  Some shared hosts start slow, not Pronet.  As of yet, my site hasn’t gone down, and they offer a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee.

Bandwidth and Storage:  

  I give them a higher rating than your average shared hosting company because of their seeming willingness to work with you on your server usage and the availability of dedicated servers.  Again, I will have to come back and address this issue more knowledgably as I continue to use them.

Power Rating:  

  Because of the speed of their servers and the availability of the dedicated servers, Pronet Hosting comes in very well here.  The vast majority of websites could not outgrow Pronet Hosting.

Customer Service:  

  I had made a mental note that I was going to give their customer service a 1 star out of 5.  After all, you don’t have the option to call them, which will drive some users crazy, but after trying their ticket customer service, I have to say that I was pleased with the result, and that is what is most important.

Essentially, I created a ticket at 4:36 pm on a Sunday afternoon, labeling it as “low priority,” and I recieved a knowledgeable response in under half-an-hour.  For me, this kind of customer service is great.  I’d rather submit a ticket and get a good response back in half-an-hour than to call a phone number and get someone who is clueless, but you do need to be aware that calling clueless people is not an option with Pronet Hosting.

Ease of Use:  

  cPanel with Fantastico De Luxe is as easy as it gets.  You can easily install, to the root directory, over 50 popular software platforms, from blogging and forum software to ecommerce and photo gallery solutions.  The only thing you don’t get is FTP within the cPanel, but that is easily handled by downloading a free program like Filezilla.  If you are going to run your own site, you need to be able to run FTP programs, anyway, and Filezilla makes it easy enough for nearly everyone.  They also offer instant backup and restore, which is a great feature, and a number of other nice touches.

Overall:  

I’m shocked, really.  I’m such a grumpy hosting user that I was certain this company, because of the cost, would drive me batty.  I’ve already, after all, skewered Bluehost and PowWeb.  How could I like a much smaller hosting company like Pronet Hosting?  Well, they are working hard to create a great solution and seem to be pulling it off, that’s how.  Very, very good so far.

You can’t get a better price anywhere.  If this honest review was helpful to you and you are interested in more information, please click below to take a look at Pronet Hosting: