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Pronet Hosting Review

Paul Zannucci — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:25:41 +0000

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:	★★★★½
Bandwidth and Storage:	★★★★☆
Power Rating:	★★★★¼
Customer Service:	★★★☆☆
Ease of Use:	★★★★¾
Overall:	★★★★¼

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: ★★★★½

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: ★★★★½

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: ★★★★¼

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: ★★★★¾

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: ★★★★¼

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:

Netfirms Review

Paul Zannucci — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:50:52 +0000

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 a tough grader. Please read the review to see the explanations and reasoning behind the ratings.

Hosting Plans and Scalability:	★★★½☆
Pricing:	★★★½☆
Speed and Uptime:	★★★½☆
Bandwidth and Storage:	★★★★☆
Power Rating:	★★★½☆
Customer Service:	★★☆☆☆
Ease of Use:	★★★☆☆
Overall:	★★★★☆

Pleast Note #2: So much has changed recently at Netfirms that I’m no longer completely comfortable with this review because I don’t have a current account with them. I will have to try them out again, but I don’t have a timetable for this. I am working with their general manager to get more specific information on how their grid works and will update on that soon.

Cick Here to Read my Q/A with Dan Kershaw of Netfirms

Overview: Netfirms is a shared and grid website hosting company. I hang out with site owners all the time and no company has as wide a range of opinions about them as Netfirms. From “the last and only host you’ll ever need” to “the most oversold host on the Internet,” the spectrum of opinions is wide and contradictory. The reality, of course, is somewhere in between and is based upon user expectations going in. Netfirms is not a super-fast grid host. The reality is that Netfirms is actually a good, mid-power choice.

Hosting Plans and Scalability: ★★★½☆

Netfirms has three hosting plans. Ignore the cheapest one (Plus), the $4.99 per month shared plan, if all you think you will ever need is shared hosting. If $4.99 is the price range you are looking for, go somewhere that does the low-end hosting a little better, like US Hosts. However, if you are just starting out and don’t need more than shared hosting for a time, then this plan gives Netfirms some decent scalability. You can start here and then move up to the grid hosting when you need it. For new sites, that is usually a prudent plan.

The next step up is where Netfirms begins earning their pay. The “Advantage” plan includes grid service (a very good thing) and 2000 GB of transfer, more than almost anyone will ever need. You get 2 free domain names and a variety of nice extras, plus up to 30 MySQL databases. If I were starting one of my notoriously hair-brained projects at Netfirms today, this is the plan I would choose.

The biggest grid plan, netfirms business, I would ignore initially unless you are looking to transfer existing business to them and already know that you will need more than 2 TB of transfer. However, I’m not sure I would do that. Netfirms business plan, at $14.99 per month, is great as added scalability to sites already hosted by Netfirms, but sites that need that much power to begin with may be better served going to a power host. This is merely speculation, however, as I’ve never used 2 TB of transfer.

They also have “clustered” enterprise plans that start at $49.95 per month. This is where we begin to get a little cloudy and into the problems that people talk about regarding Netfirms. I’ve never used their enterprise plans, but from reading through them, one thing is abundantly clear. The purpose of the enterprise plans is not to give you more transfer, which is actually lower on these plans, but more power and speed. This is where you begin to realize that Netfirms grid isn’t what you would normally expect.

Pricing: ★★★½☆

This is a “for what you get” sort of deal: pricing compared to similar service elsewhere. Pricing is good, considering netfirms to be a grid host, so long as you don’t mind paying for 1 or 2 years at once. Monthly payments are not an option. The cost per month for the Advantage plan comes out to $9.95 for one year plus a set-up fee that brings you to $119.40 to get started. If you are willing to pay for 2 years up front (I really wouldn’t pay that far in advance unless you’ve used them before and know you are going to like them), the monthly price drops to $8.95 and your total start-up costs go to $214.80. They offer a 30 day, money-back guarantee. With the Advantage plan, you get 2 free domain names.

Speed and Uptime: ★★★½☆

This is where the arguments among website owners begin. You don’t get the consistent speed you would normally expect from a grid host. I don’t know why this is. What you do get is a strange sort of performance that isn’t always related to your site’s complexity or traffic. If you are reasonably pleased with how your site loads when no one is there, then you should also be reasonably pleased when you get a few hits. To me it was fine; for others, it wasn’t. I think it depends upon your expectations going in. You aren’t getting world-class grid for $10 per month. You are getting, well, starter-grid. It’s kind of like the difference between a Ford Focus and a Ford Mustang. They are both reliable and okay cars, but if you get into the Focus and punch the gas pedal expecting Mustang performance, you are going to be very disappointed. I got into netfirms expecting Focus performance and got what I expected.

As for reliability, they are right up there, nearing 100%. I’ve clocked it at 99.98 percent.

Bandwidth and Storage: ★★★★☆

They don’t do “unlimited” bandwidth and storage, which is a good thing. Those companies that promise such things know that they can’t come close to delivering on those promises. Instead, the Advantage plan offers 250 GB of space and 2000 GB of transfer. That’s very good, and you may be able to get closer to actually using it here, rather than at standard, shared hosting companies. Here is the problem, though. I have tried repeatedly to pin netfirms down on how many compute cycles or CPU usage that you have, which will be the determining factor on how much bandwidth you can use, and they are unable to give me an answer. That’s not good.

Power Rating: ★★★½☆

This factor combines speed and uptime with bandwidth and storage. The highest a shared host can receive is a 3. Per their marketing material, you would expect netfirms to get a great score here, but I cannot get any solid answers from netfirms on how they regulate compute cycles, which leaves me speculating that they are very close to shared hosting here.

Customer Service: ★★☆☆☆

They have live-chat for sales customer service, though it is next to useless. The sales reps have no idea about the products they are charged with selling. In theory, they have telephone support for existing customers. Twice I tried to call their 24/7 toll free customer support line and just gave up, hanging up the phone in frustration after what seemed to be a wait without end. There was a message up at the site that they were upgrading their phone service in order to provide faster support. I have not tried to call in since then, so I don’t know if they have improved or not. You do have the option of email support, which might be okay. Some day I’ll try to call them and see if they’ve improved. I don’t know what I’ll ask since I don’t have an account there anymore; maybe, “Do you you have Prince Albert in a can?”

Ease of Use: ★★★☆☆

Unfortunately for me, they have upgraded their control panel since I used them, so I can’t speak with great accuracy here. I will say that they were pretty easy to use before, and I doubt that they’ve made it more difficult. They do have installation programs for things like WordPress, but their list of software installs is not nearly as robust as it is most places.

Overall and Bottom Line: ★★★★☆

This sounds like a less than positive review, but there is a market out there for netfirms, in my opinion. I would recommend, with a reasonable level of confidence, netfirms for a single scenario, but that scenario probably fits a lot of people. You have one or more sites, business or otherwise, and they have outgrown shared hosting, and you don’t want to pay $20 per month or more for top-tier hosting. For example, say that you have a blog that doesn’t earn money (as most don’t), and you are getting into trouble with your shared host because you are getting too much traffic. For that person, this would be a good place. You’ll get a bit of added power without forking out a ton of money. The price is going to be similar to shared hosting, but now your traffic concerns are reduced. Netfirms offers a great mid-range solution.

Click the banner for the best prices from netfirms:

Ultrahosting Review

Paul Zannucci — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 05:43:04 +0000

Overview: Outgrown your shared hosting? Is it time to go with VPS or dedicated managed hosting? You sound like you may want to take a look at UltraHosting because that is all they do, and they do it well. Not only that, but they set the bar for graduated scalability and pricing.

Rarely do I do reviews where I seem like a “fan” of the hosting company, but this is going to be one of them.

Hosting Plans and Scalability:	★★★★★
Pricing:	★★★★★
Speed and Uptime:	★★★★★
Bandwidth and Storage:	★★★★★
Power Rating:	★★★★★
Customer Service:	★★★★½
Ease of Use:	★★★★☆
Overall:	★★★★¼

Disclaimer:UltraHosting offers a very powerful product, but if you are a first-time website owner and don’t have a great deal of knowledge and experience, you may want to start somewhere else, like with shared hosting. That’s not to say that UltraHosting would be a poor choice. It may just be overkill.

That said, if you are confident that you have a good product and are dedicated to making it work, then you could do far worse than to begin your hosting with UltraHosting because of their flexibility, power and price-points. Unlike shared hosting companies, you will never have to worry about outgrowing UltraHosting or going bankrupt due to bandwidth overages.

If this disclaimer is scaring you, go away quickly. If not, welcome to the magical world of UltraHosting.

Hosting Plans and Scalability: ★★★★★

You can never outgrow Ultrahosting. From VPS to huge banks of servers, they can take care of anything. Among VPS and dedicated hosting companies, Ultrahosting sets the bar, and very high, for the variety of plans, flexibility and scalability they offer. The range is just about staggering, and yet it is easy enough to go through and pick exactly what you need. For instance, let’s say you want to go with VPS to begin with and plan to move up as needed, a very reasonable plan. So you click on VPS and are provided with three options, clearly explained, from $19.99 to $39.99. After you pick the option that is best for you, you go to a page that further breaks down the capabilities in this category. Select the one you need and click “configure and order.” For VPS, you simply have the option of adding extra bandwidth and additional dedicated IP addresses. Pick what you want and go from there. On dedicated plans, you have the option, once you get to the configurations pages, to select just about all features of your server.

The scalability is what is staggering here. Because of the vast options available, you can literally work your way up in a very orderly fashion from $19.99 per month to whatever you would need, taking leaps by only about $10 a month.

Aslo available are private racks, or colocation hosting and fully managed hosting.

Moving from one plan to another is a breeze, and they even help you.

Pricing: ★★★★★

From everywhere I’ve checked, and I’ve checked a lot of places, UltraHosting’s pricing leads the industry. Actually, they make such a point of it that they offer a 110% price guarantee.

Speed and Uptime: ★★★★★

A lot of time, people will assume that all their hosting problems will end once they finally make the jump to VPS or dedicated hosting. Many times they are sorely disappointed. What you get at Ultrahosting, however, is what you would expect and what you are paying for. They are fast so long as you pick the right plan and put the right site on it. Because of their scalability and the number of plans that they offer, it is possible to go the wrong route and bog a very complex, traffic intensive site down. That’s not their fault; that’s your fault. Make sure you pick the right plan for your needs.

They offer a 100% uptime guarantee. I can’t imagine that they absolutely NEVER go down. Everyone goes down eventually. I tried to find out what would happen if your site went down, but couldn’t. I’m sure they would issue a credit or something.

Bandwidth and Storage: ★★★★★

This is the rarest of rankings. Ultrahost joins Media Temple as the only site you can’t outgrow. You can literally order a 10,000 foot bank of servers, assuming you are quite wealthy. If you ever buy that 10,000 foot bank of servers, let me know. You’ll be one of the true “big boys” of the Internet, and I’ll post your picture on this site as a famous person who read this review ; )

Power Rating: ★★★★★

Yep.

Customer Service: ★★★★½

Giving out all fives on the ratings has made me grumpy, so I’m going with a 4.5 here. Plus, their live-chat is down this morning. Outside of that, you can call their toll free number. One thing to note here is that the product that Ultrahosting has is more complex than the products offered by shared hosting companies, so the level of support has increased. The people you talk to at Ultrahosting are real IT professionals, not just people answering a telephone.

Ease of Use: ★★★★½

I gave very serious consideration to this rating, and decided I would mostly compare Ultrahosting to other VPS or dedicated hosting providers. This is a different type of beast here, and you should be aware of that. VPS and dedicated hosting is not as easy as shared hosting. But Ultrahosting does their best to make the process of setting up your accounts and getting you running as easy as they can, and they really do have helpful technicians. If ease-of-use is a great concern to you because you aren’t comfortable with with the IT side of things, you should consider choosing their fully managed plan.

Overall: ★★★★¼

Obviously, I’ve very high on Ultrahosting. Uncomfortably high for me, but there is no doubting that they do this part of the market better than anyone. I can’t imagine even recommending anyone else for people who are shopping for VPS or above hosting.

Was this review helpful for you? You can’t get Ultrahosting any cheaper anywhere else, so if you decide to check them out, please follow the link below and enter the coupon code “July09″ to save 50% on set-up and 10% on your dedicated server (VPS has no set-up fee)

Media Temple Review

Paul Zannucci — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:56:22 +0000

So these are the big boys, the really, really big boys. They do hosting for some of the largest companies in the world, like ABC, NBC, Sony and Starbucks. Whether you want to fun one huge site, or a bunch of sites on one account and have immense power behind them, Media Temple is your spot.

Hosting Plans and Scalability:	★★★★★
Pricing:	★★★★★
Speed and Uptime:	★★★★½
Bandwidth and Storage:	★★★★★
Power Rating:	★★★★★
Customer Service:	★★★★☆
Ease of Use:	★★★★☆
Overall:	★★★★¼

Hosting Plans and Scalability: ★★★★★

Media Temple offers full grid hosting, along with dedicated and reseller hosting, but it is the grid hosting where they truly shine and the only thing you should consider outside of the reseller hosting. For this one, infinitely scalable plan alone, I would give them a 5. Using distributed hosting across their vast network of servers, your sites stay up and fast. You are given a generous portion of CPU units, storage, and bandwidth, and if you exceed your amount? Well, you just get charged a tiny bit extra.

Generally speaking, I’m not reviewing reseller programs at this point, but I should mention that you cannot resell, or cannot officially resell, grid hosting.

Pricing: ★★★★★

To be able to get this type of cloud hosting for $20 per month is unbelievable. You essentially get the most powerful solution available for less than $1 per day.

Speed and Uptime: ★★★★½

At the basic grid level, it’s not what I would consider blazing fast, just fast. But in some ways it is better than blazing fast. By that I mean that your performance is unrelated to the amount of traffic you are getting. That’s special. Obviously, you can put a stupid site design up that takes forever to load no matter where you go, but if you are looking for consistent performance that can handle incredible traffic, Media Temple is what you are looking for.

As for uptime, I run a bunch of sites there and am constantly on them. In the last six months, I went down briefly for a scheduled maintenance (middle of the night on a weekend), and had one other time when I was down for about 2 seconds. That’s pretty darn good.

Bandwidth and Storage: ★★★★★

Unlike shared hosting companies that promise “unlimited” bandwidth, Media Temple puts a limit up, though you are unlikely to ever use it. But what happens if you do? They don’t shut you down, they just contact you and tell you that you will pay, for instance, 10 cents per extra GPU, which is very good.

Power Rating: ★★★★★

It doesn’t get better anywhere.

Customer Service: ★★★★½

A lot of people mistake customer service for the people who fix all their problems, and they become bitter when customer service only does the thing they are really supposed to do. Like most power hosts, however, Media Temple has people who really know what is going on. I’ve called them twice and used the support ticket once and had very fast resolutions to my problems. They have toll free customer support 24/7.

Ease of Use: ★★★★☆

You get automated installation of three software platforms, WordPress, Drupal and ZenCart. It is very easy to manage your domains and databases with their custom control panel. Overall, they are very easy to use, and this rating would be higher if they had more software installations available.

Overall: ★★★★¼

Media Temple grid service is truly the end all solution for people looking for brute strength. You simply can’t outgrow them, and their pricing is fantastic at this level.

100 GBs of premium storage
1 TB of short-path bandwidth
100 unique sites / alternate domains
64MB Ruby on Rails (RoR) GridContainer (for accounts opened on or before September 1, 2008)
A free 30-day trial for any entry-level sized GridContainer. (RoR, Django, MySQL)
1,000 GPUs (that’s a good number)
100 databases
1,000 email addresses

If you would like to check out a site hosted on Media Temple, you may go here: Funny Emails (very high traffic and relatively complex site) or here Web Hosting

GoDaddy Review

Paul Zannucci — Sat, 02 May 2009 16:22:22 +0000

Was this honest review helpful for you? You can’t get GoDaddy any cheaper anywhere else, so if you decide to check them out, please follow the link above:

(Note: Before I distract you with everything else, I just want to mention that the very best grid-hosting plan available on the web right now is at GoDaddy, who is offering grid-hosting at just $4.99 per month. That comes with something completely unprecedented: Unlimited Compute Cycles. If you don’t know what that means, just know that it is incredible. The only downside to GoDaddy grid is that you can currently only host one site per account. Also, you should be aware that the price will increase at some point to about $20 per month. At that time, I have been told that you will be able to host multiple sites on the same grid account.)

Many moons ago, I hosted my first site on GoDaddy. I hopped on and registered a domain and used their free hosting credit to put up a website. They ran a few ads on there, but I was happy with it. I was on the web!

I’ve since moved on from those free hosting days, but I still have accounts with GoDaddy. Why? Well, there are some great reasons to go with GoDaddy, now more than ever.

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 a tough grader (that also means that if you see a really good rating you know I meant it). Please read the review to see the explanations and reasoning behind the ratings.

Hosting Plans and Scalability:	★★★★☆
Pricing:	★★★★½
Speed and Uptime:	★★★★☆
Bandwidth and Storage:	★★★★½
Power Rating:	★★★★½
Customer Service:	★★★★☆
Ease of Use:	★★★½☆
Overall:	★★★★¼

Hosting Plans and Scalability: ★★★★☆

I always put this rating first because it is so important and GoDaddy has the potential to eventually reach a 5 star here once they finishe up the beta of their grid service. If you go with a standard shared hosting company and grow your site significantly, chances are you are going to have to change your type of hosting, which many times means moving your site to another host, which can be either very time-consuming or very costly just depending upon whether you decide to move the site yourself or have someone else move it. At GoDaddy, there are a wide variety of ways to incrementally improve the power behind your site as it grows. The lowest price plan starts at just $4.99 per month, and the options incrementally go up from there all the way to grid hosting. VPS and dedicated hosting is also available, but that shouldn’t be necessary once the grid hosting comes out of beta stage.

Two other types of hosting they offer are a plan that is specifically designed for WordPress users. From their marketing information: “Harness the combined power of WordPress® and Go Daddy Web Hosting to create your own personal, state-of-the-art Internet blog. The WordPress publishing platform has thousands of free plugins, hundreds of free themes and is completely customizable. WordPress and Go Daddy Web Hosting – the winning combination for your blog.”

The other type of plan that they offer is reselling. You can read my review of this here: GoDaddy Reseller Review.

One other thing of note here, regarding scalability, is that if you end up going to grid computing, you will have to move your site yourself, although I was assured by a customer representative that they will help in the transfer.

Pricing: ★★★★½

Pricing is very competitive. You can, of course, get cheaper hosting if you really want cheap hosting (not recommended). While the grid is in beta, that’s only $4.99 per month, which can’t be beaten. You can do slightly better at Ultrahosting if your needs are for VPS or dedicated hosting. Domain name pricing is great. And if you buy a domain name, you get free hosting. I haven’t tried that, and it may come with GoDaddy ads. Overall, I would say their pricing is exellent.

Speed and Uptime: ★★★★☆

If I’ve said it before, I’ve said it a thousand times, ALL HOSTS GO DOWN and experience slow times. That is simply the way it is. That said, GoDaddy is very good. I have their uptime at 99.98% for 2009, and their servers are quite fast, pretty much competitive with the few top-of-the-line hosts out there. Their grid service is not as fast as I expect from grid, but that probably has something to do with why it is still in beta stage.

Bandwidth and Storage: ★★★★½

I hate this one because people tend to want to emphasize their “unlimited” packages. Remember that with shared hosting you can’t get “unlimited” bandwidth no matter how many times the hosting companies advertise it. You only get so many resources allocated for your site. On the other hand, there is one rare exception to this rule. With the beta GoDaddy grid, you get unlimited use of resources, unlimited compute cycles. I have to think they’ll limit that once the product goes to its new status. Otherwise, the bandwidth and storage offered by GoDaddy is near the top.

Power Rating: ★★★★½

Because of their great flexibility and scaling, you are much more likely to get all your “bandwidth” at GoDaddy than you are at most hosts. They are one of three companies, along with Media Temple and Ultrahosting, that I now put into the true, power hosting category.

Customer Service: ★★★★½

Customer support is 24/7 by both telephone and email ticket. I’ve called GoDaddy customer support several times, and the wait time has always been minimal, and the people I talk to are friendly and knowledgeable. I was never transferred around. At one point when I had a site go down for no apparent reason (beta grid), I was placed on hold while my representative conferred with a technician. When the rep came back, he said, “Try it again.” and sure enough it worked. I would give GoDaddy a 5 here except that their customer service line is not toll free. While that has no impact on me because of my cell phone plan, it could cause problems for others.

Ease of Use: ★★★½☆

Whenever I go around and read about people’s experiences with GoDaddy, there are two things that stand out beyond everything else: One, that they are confusing to use; and two, that they are confusing to use.

There is some truth to this. The last time I signed up a GoDaddy account for a client, which was in April of 2009, I went to the site and registered the requested domain and navigated the ads they throw up for “add-ons” and thought I had declined everything. When I got to the check out page, I was presented with over $3000 in charges–FOR REGISTERING A DOMAIN NAME!

It was easy enough just to deselect all the extras, and I found it pretty funny, actually, but for a new website owner, that would probably be pretty scary. And I do think that the sales process is intentionally tricky, but I think it is probably a little trickier than they imagine that it is. I don’t think they really wanted to trick me into paying $3000 for a domain.

Once you have properly purchased what you need (and only what you need), users still complain about confusing control panels, but I haven’t seen a problem there. You may have to get used to their set-up, but that is the same with any host. I don’t find their panels difficult at all. To be sure, they are different from everyone else, but you just have to look around a little bit, and you’ll find your way pretty quickly.

Really, they get a bad rep here where I don’t think it is fully deserved. They simply are not that hard to use, and they have plenty of one-click installations of the stuff you are likely wanting to run. If I were rating this just for me, I’d give them 5 out of 5 stars, but since other people seem to find them confusing, I’ll go ahead and hedge downward.

Overall: ★★★★¼

I think that GoDaddy is a host that I would recommend for pretty much any of their hosting plans, from shared and reseller to grid and dedicated. And if you are looking to host one site (for the time being) that needs a lot of power, I would make GoDaddy’s grid service your top selection. In any event, the incredible ability to scale your hosting to almost any need you could ever imagine having makes GoDaddy a very smart choice.

You can check out a site that is actually run on the GoDaddy grid here: Tee Shirts

Was this review helpful for you? You can’t get GoDaddy any cheaper anywhere else, so if you decide to check them out, please follow the link below:

Host Gator Review

Paul Zannucci — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:24:17 +0000

Finally Updated! I’ve had enough time now with HostGator to fully review them.

Hosting Plans and Scalability:	★★★★½
Pricing:	★★★★½
Speed and Uptime:	★★★★★
Bandwidth and Storage:	★★★★☆
Power Rating:	★★★★☆
Customer Service:	★★★★★
Ease of Use:	★★★★¾
Overall:	★★★★¼

Hosting Plans and Scalability: ★★★★½

For a company that has made its name as a shared hosting provider, HostGator actually has a tremendous amount of flexibility and scalability, particularly if you are a bit creative.

Shared hosting begins with “Hatchling” then goes to “Baby” then to “Business.” From the bottom to the top, the Hatchling package is a tremendous value for those who would like to put up a single site. Baby gives you the option for more sites. Business goes as far as to give you your own toll free number. It should be known that ll three of these are still shared hosting, and your compute cycles, or the amount of your server’s CPU that you can use, it the same at all three levels.

If you run out of room with shared hosting, you have a couple of options, one of which might not occur to most people, which is to purchase a reseller account from HostGator. They have five different levels of reseller packages, starting at $24.95 per month.

The other option is their dedicated servers. They are more expensive, here, than most places, but they offer a fully-managed solution, which means that running your own servers at HostGator will be a whole lot easier than at most places.

By the way, HostGator’s reseller plan seems, on the face of it, to be a great thing, although it wouldn’t be right for me because I have no intentions of running my own Customer Service. Still, to be able to offer your customers HostGator’s speedy servers for whatever price you like would be great if you were into such things.

Pricing: ★★★★★

HostGator, with plans starting as low as $4.95 per month, is very affordable, and for what you get in terms of service, reliability, speed, etc. HostGator is great. And you don’t have to pay for a year or more if you don’t want to. The price does go down for paying in bulk, so to speak, but you can also pay monthly if that is easier for you.

Speed and Uptime: ★★★★★

Comparing with other shared hosting companies, HostGator is at the top of the mountain. All shared hosts will eventually have down time and periods where they are slow, but I have been running this site on HostGator for about three months as of this writing, and I have yet to have the site go down, and I only noticed one small time, in the middle of the night on a weekend, when the site got a bit sluggish. Overall, HostGator is the fastest, most reliable host I’ve ever used for running one average site–and that’s even in comparison with the big boys of power hosting, like Media Temple.

Bandwidth and Storage: ★★★★☆

For me, the best that a shared hosting company can do is 3 stars out of 5, regardless of how much “unlimited” bandwidth they promise. The reality is that you only get a certain amount of CPU usage, or computing cycles, with a shared host, and once you start to get close to that, you can’t transfer anymore bandwidth, even if you haven’t used that much for the month. This is why scalability is so important, and I list if first. With HostGator, you have the normal amount of bandwidth and storage that you would expect with a shared host, but you can also scale up. That’s great.

Power Rating: ★★★★☆

This would be the overall ability of a host to handle all you can throw at it. Compared to other shared hosting companies, HostGator is clearly superior. Compared with companies that specialize in dedicated, grid and cloud hosting, obviously they can’t quite get there. Still, for most users, HostGator is going to be much more than sufficient.

Customer Service: ★★★★★

Honestly, you can’t get any better than HostGator without going to fully managed hosting, which most people never will, so I’m going with 5 out of 5 stars here. Why? First of all, they have everything. You can get in touch with HostGator 24/7 by toll free number, by live chat, and by submitting tickets.

HostGator has the best live chat support I’ve tried. Unlike most companies that offer this, when I have contacted them via live chat, I have been the only customer that support employee was talking to. I didn’t have to wait for minutes in between questions. He was right there reading and responding as I typed.

Not only that, but they are honest, too. When I contacted them for setting up a site and gave them an idea that I was going to need maximum power (I greatly exaggerated my needs), they went through my plans with me and recommended, sadly, that I would probably be better off going elsewhere. The only other place that has been that honest (that I’ve tried that trick with) has been GoDaddy.

These folks are just awesome, sincerely.

Ease of Use: ★★★★¾

If you are having a hard time deciphering those stars, it’s because I gave them 4.75 out of 5. Why so harsh? Well, the only thing that HostGator doesn’t do is provide FTP within cPanel, although they explain how to use FTP very well. Everything else is fantastic.

cPanel itself is very easy to use, and HostGator also supplies Fantastico De Luxe, which offers easy installation of tons of free software, like WordPress.

HostGator also has one of the easiest free site builder software programs out there. You can even take it for a test drive before signing up.

HostGator also offers flash tutorials, a support forum and an extensive knowledgebase area. If you can’t figure it out with HostGator, you can’t figure it out anywhere.

Overall: ★★★★¼

It should be evident by now that I’m completely smitten with HostGator. They are my favorite spot for shared hosting.

I initially became interested in HostGator after reading a lot of honest reviews out there from users that seemed strangely positive. Usually, you will find that most people have unreasonable expectations for their hosting companies, and so you will see a lot of complaints. HostGator’s reviews were different. Their customers actually seemed committed to the company. That is quite unusual, to say the least.

This site is run on HostGator, which gives my a great chance to continue to evaluate them. If you are reading this post, and I’m not complaining bitterly, you will know that things continue to go swimmingly.

You can’t get a better price anywhere than through the link below. Whenever they offer specials, I’ll put that information here.