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Hosting Reviews

EIG Introduction

EIG (endurance International Group), the name is from a boat by Sir Ernest Shackleton for sea venture. The name shows their business development process. After learn and experience from failure, they finally found a way to success. Their main goal is to offer IT solutions to all small to medium size business at affordable costs. EIG – probably known to every webmaster from hosting industry as its operating almost 100 hosting brands and they have been the focus by many reports and events.

EIG Story & Business Growth

Endurance International Group, Inc. (EIG), formerly BizLand, is one of the world's largest website hosting companies. The company was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, managing over 2.9 million customers and 10 million domains. It achieved its size by acquiring a large number of smaller hosts, which it continues to operate under the original names. In 2011, Endurance was bought from Accel-KKR by Warburg Pincus and GS Capital Partners, for around $975 million, and is believed to be preparing for an initial public offering in late 2013. As of powerful financial support, EIG is actually operating the largest hosting business now.

How is EIG doing from hosting?

Since EIG is so big, how're they doing? Yes I have to say they do have advanced technologies to manage such amount clients with different hosting requirement and even developped their own hosting control panel – Vdeck. This control panel is powering multiple famous names like iPage & fatCow. Because lots of hosting companies got merged into endurance, there're too many services to handle. In order to simplify the management under a standard platform, their tech team programmed lots of automation tools to ensure everything can be handled via this control panel system.

EIG is doing great on linux support as most their programs are designed on this platform. Everything can be up to date either service feature or support etc. However, they're pretty lazy on windows from the past few years. They migrated all windows hosting account to 2008 system and keeps no change after that. If we need to host newer tech applications on server 2012, it's not supported.

How about EIG hosting support?

Endurance itself manages around 2000 support staff. Because their system is high rate automation, there's no much manual operation on many services. Their core support is from backend ticket system where all technicians are working together for manual solutions. For live support, especially web chat support, they outsourced to third party provider in India.

With our personal experience, if you contact support through web chats, mostly they will guide you to ticket or phone support because they mostly handle sales questions. If you need tech support they can not help much because they don't have further access. If you have been interested in any of their service brand and need real tech support, remember to use ticket or phone instead the basic chat window.

What're the hosting brands under EIG?

The fastest way to determine if the hosting managed by EIG is to check domain whois record, if you find the domain owner contact address is **@maileig.com then it is. Since there're over 80 companies under EIG name, we just list out some well-know brands:

FatCow, iPowerWeb, iPower, dot5hosting, Startlogic, Globat, Easycgi, Webhost4life, iPage, Hostgator, bluehost.. and more.

We have to admit, more and more brands will get merged into endurance based their business plan. From industry report, they're migrating lots of small brands to same data center for central management. They're trying to use different systems to make all their service standard. For example, cpanel being used for those major hosts and keeps no change. For smaller brands, they will be moved to Vdeck. In this way they can reduce costs of platform investment because many services are devlopped by their own.

For more about EIG company, visit endurance.com for details

Hostgator Overview

A inc500 web hosting company. Founded in 2002 with powerful Data center support (the Softlayer Data center). Hostgator.com and its name are honored names from hosting industry. Their huge business is creating approximate 1% of the world's Internet traffic. HostGator is also operating the largest reseller hosting service with rich feature plans and affordable prices.

HostGator Review – Hosting Plans

Hostgator provides multiple solutions for different web requirements. There're shared, VPS, reseller and dedicated server hosting plans. Either shared or dedicated server are full managed with standard softwares.

Shared Hosting: Hostgator provides 3 shared linux plans with different offers on allowed domain names & ssl support. While hatchling plan support a single website and baby plan support unlimited, the business plan provides a free SSL/static IP plus toll free number for support. Such features are solely belong to exact plan and couldn't purchase additionally from lower plans. What we should note is hostgator does not provide free domain registration, though they do have domain registration service.

• Unlimited storage space/bandwidth
• 24/7 support on chat/phone/ticket.
• Free domain/site transfer. 4500 web templates.
• Softaculous installer of hundreds of scripts
• Price from $3.96/mo

VPS Server: Hostgator provides 5 classes vps service starting from 0.5 ~ 4 server cores and different offers of RAM/Disk space etc. Except for the starter VPS plan, all other plans are cpanel supported. For all class VPS solutions, hostgator provides 40% discount for initial payment and price will return to normal for renewal. The longest term we can register is 36 months, so if we need to use the server for long time, it's highly recommended to sign up longer time.

Reseller Hosting: The most reputable service from hostgator company. Before 2010, hostgator had reached top of this business. Their hosting resellers are located in each corner on the earth. By offering total of 5 class plans, people can start their own hosting business easily by just a simple sign up. All required tools are included and pre-configured upon sign up. The service setup is based high rate automation from management center. What we have to do is to get hosting site prepared then you can sell! The backend services like server setup and security etc are fully handled by hostgator team, we just focus on business.

Dedicated Server: Affordable and powerful dadicated servers are provided in 4 plans. Each type server come with full managed service including control panel and billing softwares. Client have choice over linux/windows by same price rate. Based all specifications, we can use the server not only for application service but also capable of processing live business at low cost. Especially for people who want to launch their own hosting business, the rich feature configuration will simplify your success greatly.

Same as VPS service, the hostgator dedicated server service is also offered at 40% discount rate with up to 36 months pre-payment. Recurring price will be charged on regular rate.

HostGator Review – Support

Hostgator provides customer support in various ways except traditional chat, phone and email. Their people created FAQ and video tutorials for all their service and most problem fixes. In this way we can actually learn on how to use/fix the service by our own. Their people are also very active in blog updates and social communities such as twitter, facebook etc. They also support from data center directly because they have almost half space from softlayer. Each channel support is available 24*7*365 for fast and professional response.

HostGator Review – Networking

The hostgator server space and bandwidth support are from one of the largest data center – Softlayer, before the planet data center got merged into softlayer, most their services are dedicated to hostgator company. Some events show hostgator is migrating part of their servers to new data centers in Utah which is for bluehost server base. In fact, no matter which data center their people put servers to, their fully redundant network has NO single point of failure guarantee.

In order to ensure the best connectivity, Hostgator network backbones are all from famous providers like AboveNet, ATT, Comcast, Global Crossing, Level(3), NTT etc. Each data center come with backup power generators and HVAC units with multiple layers security protection.

HostGator Review – Price

Hostgator provides affordable and rich feature hosting plans for all class services. Their shared hosting starts with $3.96/mo and official 20% discount is provided for money saving. With our partnership with their service, we can have extra 5% discount via coupon code "review25off". Means you can get total of 25% discount with us! If you are satisfied with their offer and ready to register, don't forget this great promotion!

What might be the weakness of Hostgator?

Via editorial experience, there're two points we need pay attention to when using hostgator. Point one is they don't offer free domain name for any hosting plan. Means we need to register seperately. Although it's good to have hosting service and domain registration from different places, we have to pay few more bucks for domain.

Another point is about windows hosting service. Hostgator has been worked on windows server 2008 from very beginning. There's no news showing they're going to move to newer platform yet. Thus if we prefer to newer server system like windows server 2012, it's not available with them.

How do we think about HostGator?

Hostgator is absolutely doing great hosting from any side view. A lot of hosting services were setup by following their standards. Being rule maker, any change on hostgator site will result in big changes on other hosting sites. Hostgator provides pretty standard billing & control panel systems for professional management. Without too many bells and whistles, or anything of the sort, what you see is what you get. You won't be regreted to host your websites with them as there will be nice customer support whenever you have any problem using their services.

Visit HostGator and Claim 25% discount www.HostGator.com

Webhost4Life Introduction

Since 1999, webhost4life is known as excellent windows hosting provider with more than 200,000 websites hosted. Powered by 3 of world class datacenters, webhost4life is capable of offering fantastic hosting solutions with full support for Asp, asp.net, SQL server and PHP Mysql at $9.95 rate! They managed 3 support centers in US, China mainland & Hongkong for real 24*7 support.

Webhost4Life Review – Hosting Features

Webhost4life provides 3 grades windows hosting plans, one MS power hosting and one linux hosting solution. Since from the very beginning to 2008, webhost4life had been focusing on windows solutions with rich feature hosting plan. Their "advanced plan" is most popular offer for ms developers for it's affordable and powerful configuration. Whenever any new release from microsoft, webhost4life be able to test quickly then apply to production server.

For very a long time, this plan is standard choice for multiple .net project such as dotnetnuke, nopcommerce and asp.net starterkits applications. Webhost4life have installer for all of these popular app from control panel center.

There's an outstanding feature of webhost4life service – plesk sitebuilder wizard. With hundreds built-in templates and friendly GUI interface, we can create a professional site easily by following its guidance. It's a free add-on service for every hosting accounts.

At the meanwhile, they don't provide everything unlimited like many competitors. Instead, they have exact limits on different plans such as number of supported websites, storage and database etc.

Webhost4life also provides a super low cost linux hosting plan since 2008. With only $1.99/mo we get unlimited support for account services. Although this price is in history, their new plan offer keeps no change of technical features.

Webhost4life Review – Control panel

We put this in review because it's the first hosting control panel that we worked beyond plesk or cpanel control panel. The webhost4life people programmed everything for this panel for easy and professional management over website services. Although they migrated to Vdeck, the old system is still accessable on http://controlpanel.mysite4now.com/wcp/. If you had been webhost4life fans, try if your old account is still kept there.

Webhost4Life Review – Performance

Because the company had been dedicated to provide windows hosting service and their support staff are most microsoft developers, the webhost4life windows hosting is super nice with high performance. They provide windows server 2008 with standard DELL production. They setup SAN and RAID 10 disk for fast transfer. Their Los Angeles data centers are simply the best on west coast.

Their new servers are based in Huston data center for central management. Because of the geography difference, people from west coast line might see some slowness in connecting to website. But in general comparison, the minor difference is nothing because of their powerful data center technologies and advanced server structures.

Webhost4Life Review – Support

Webhost4life is supported by 3 support centers as mentioned from beginning introduction. They're well trained to handle different requests. Either level 1 or level 3 staff, there're always people online for direct communication. Especially when you need urgent assistance, their live chat people is extremely helpful. When we say helpful, not only because they response professionally, they try to fix problems directly but not to forward to higher level person directly.

For new support team, they're located in US & India. Live support are mainly from India and US tech team are quiet in background such as ticket. For most tech problems, we have to seek help from ticket support because their live person is more about sales now.

Webhost4Life Hosting transition

endurance, the new owner of webhost4life. The transition to new platform is not so smooth though. Because the old webhost4life have cross platform support with different technologies. When moving to new server, everything has to be re-configured. Especially during migration, the websites are looking for data on both systems and caused confusion. For those ecommerce based applications, the migration brought some unrecoverable problems. However, everything seems to be normal after migration done.

Webhost4Life New team summary

Honestly speaking, the new team has advanced technologies in hosting field. They have secured client data with new layer support than old server. There's high rate automation from new platform, everything is central managed for less human error. What bad is there's no news update of their windows support like before, thus we can not find new great features even it's actually applied on server level. What make us feel happier is their linux hosting solution, much more stable and faster than the old server.

How do we think of Webhost4Life?

Webhost4life is one of our very first hosting partner for web development. We have worked with their service since 2006. For very a long time, it's our sole hosting provider for windows hosting because they served us well from side to side. It's great pleasure to work with their support guys. Although the old team disappeared, we still keep good memories of them and looking for future partnership if possible. From editorial point of view, the new platform is just kept the same as before but they're no longer that active in offering new features.

Find out WH4L features on www.Webhost4Life.com

Lunarpages Hosting Overview

Lunarpages Founded in 1998 by Maximillian Andersen and Ron Riddle. Lunarpages has tailored each web hosting solution to fit the unique needs of clientele, ensuring every level webmaster can find the hosting solution to start their projects.

Unlike many traditional web hosting providers who's trying to provide super cheap service, Lunarpages focus on high-spec business web hosting with a strong commitment to uptime and reliability. Lunarpages group setup all their products via enterprise level solutions.

Lunarpages Review – Hosting Features

Lunarpages offers multiple class hosting solutions including shared, business, managed, dedicated server and private cloud hosting. The company also provides web design, seo and payment processing service.

Shared Hosting Plan: multiple grades plans are offered to meet with different website requirement. There's a starter plan for blog purpose and a basic linux hosting plan with standard hosting offer. One windows hosting plan is also provided on up to date platform with unlimited service support.

For people who have not visited their website, the plan structure might be a little complicated as too many choice available. But it's good for people who knows exactly what they need, because the plans are designed specificly for different website purpose. General features of lunarpages hosting includes

• Free Domain name (one)
• Linux & Windows hosting
• DDoS Protection
• Unlimited MySQL databases
• Quicksite™ for site building
• Support: Perl, Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP
• Facebook Ads credits + Google Adwords credits
• Starts from $3.95/Mo

Managed Hosting Plan: via this hosting solution, we're hosted on dedicated resource for guaranteed performance and global failover support. Ms exchange server is also available for this plan.

Dedicated Server Plan: For heavy resource users who need side by side control of server resources. Instead a basic configuration for selling, lunarpages dedicated servers can be fully customized upon client requests at very promotional offer. Both linux & windows system available to work with.

Cloud Hosting Plan: The lunarpages private cloud ensures the best security of your online data. Clients have full control over their resources and performance. The scalable cloud service be able to power your business at no extra costs and ensure it's always online. Their cloud specialist is always standby to support.

Lunarpages Review – Performance

Unlike any other hosting company on price competition, lunarpages created everything based enterprise purpose no matter if the plan is configured on $3.5/mo or $99.5/mo, they're on same facility. Based ourselves testing and other webmasters' feedbacks, service is loading within 200ms either from ping or download tests. Lunarpages operates multiple state-of-the-art SAS 70 Type II compliant data centers in Irvine, California, Denver, Colorado, Chicago, Illinois and Ashburn,Virginia. These data centers are all configured with modern technologies and new hardware production. Lunarpages tech team are monitoring insde for 24*7 and any outage will be notified for urgent fix. The data center details can be found on this page.

Lunarpages Review – Support

For guaranteed performance and service quality, lunarpages provides around the clock support for all support channels by 100+ top tier staff members with friendly professionalism and award-winning efficiency. Support staff are ready to call on each level position. They're well trained to handle different inquiries in using their service. Instead of closing your working panel to find chat options, the call action is added everywhere for convienient contacting.

Extra Bonus in Using Lunarpages Hosting

A notable feature of lunarpages service is DDoS Protection that allows to prevent website down by traffic attacking. It's charged additionally from other hosts because it requires powerful hardware setup and bandwidth supply. Lunarpages managed to offer it for each hosting plan at no extra costs based their high tech setup.

Any lunarpages promotional offer available?

Lunarpages provides different coupon codes and special offers at times. Especially on those national holidays, up to 50% discount can be reached. For windows hosting plan, they provide an offical code "windows25" to reduce 25% cost of your total paying. We have also a special link available for cost saving. Just Visit www.lunarpages.com to proceed the order for any hosting plan, from coupon code section, enter "happy" and it will generate 15% discount automatically.

More about Lunarpages hosting

Lunarpages is a famous hosting brand with a bunch of offers. In 2012, Lunarpages changed their website domain to lpwebhosting.com with its current design & offers, a few months later, they named back to old address again. Regardless of any small change, their service quality has been improving with newest technologies. From any side review, lunarpages can be trusted for either personal blog or big enterprise applications.

Claim the best offer on www.Lunarpages.com >>

1and1 Overview

Headquartered in Montabaur, Germany, since 1988, 1&1 has been one of the largest hosting providers with more than 19 million global sites served. Their huge business is powered by over 10 support ceners in multiple continents with over 7000 staffs. 1and1 is known as super cheap hosting service and domain with a wide range of Web hosting solutions. 1&1 offers users every available resource to easily and affordably create and maintain an optimal Web presence.

1and1 Review – Hosting Features

1&1 provides a wide range hosting solutions from shared to cloud platforms. Each level service are divided into multiple grades with different features. For most users, they will need to spend some time to understand the structures and choose the service they need. Briefly, the 1and1 hosting service are provided in following categories:

Domain registration: 1&1 is one of the very first ICANN certified domain registrar with a bunch of available domain extensions to select from. 1&1 is probably offering the cheapest domain registration service starts at $0.99/year for top extensions like .com and .net

Web Hosting: There're 3 classes windows & 4 linux hosting plans being offered on shared server environment. Disk space and monthly traffic are all provided for unlimited. Main difference between hosting plans are CDN support, number of databases, FREE ssl & dedicated IP. Each plan provides a free domain registration. General features including:

• Free domain registration
• Free sitebuilder
• 24×7 technical support
• Price from $0.99/mo!
• 90 day money back guarantee!

Managed Hosting: A server service with no server management. Your site is hosted on dedicated platform and fully isolated from other clients. It's ideal choice for people who have limited time or skills in managing a server, everything is handled by 1&1 tech team and we just focus on business.

Website builder: A seperate service aside from web hosting. No programming or design skill required, this drag/drop sitebuilder automatically optimize the site to be compatible on different devices. This plan provides a free domain name with up to 30 days free trial.

VPS Hosting: Total of 4 class plans, the virtual server is configured at very powerful setup & good prices. Each server has Plesk installed for professional management at low cost. The purpose of 1and1 vps service is to make sure everybody is capable of paying for server management.

Dedicated Server: A bunch of solutions for different management purpose. The 1&1 dedicated servers are configured for basic to advanced structures at very promotional prices. Client get mobile monitoring of server performance and troubleshooting tools when server got into problems.

Cloud Server Hosting: Fully custom setup based your exact requirement. Pay as you use and up to 6 months file storage under "sleep mode" when server is not in use. The biggest advantage of 1and1 cloud platform is their huge data center service on multiple locations. They have full management over such equipment for real hardware solution other than simple virtualization.

1and1 Review – Control panel

1and1 use inhouse developped hosting control panel other than popular choice of available solutions. The control panel concept is based central control of all services so we can manage all stuff via a single login. We can also manage service upgrade directly in control panel center but not to contact support seperately. The system will handle the request automatically. There's a feature called "messaging" – SMS as Fax, Fax as EMail, EMail as voice message, in this way we can manage business in modern style for less costs.

1and1 Review – Performance & Support

1and1 Manages total of 4 different datacenters with over 70,000 servers, 1and1 announced to provide 99.9% server uptime with 24×7 technical support and unlimited email support. Their support staff are all over the world and working around the clock. In this way, they have sufficient technician at any time point to make sure your requests are handled efficiently.

Being a hosting company with long history, 1and1 collect great experience in managing their service well and how to low down the service costs while keeping or improving its quality. The monitoring report shows the 1and1 server uptime and connectivity is between 97~98.5% which is pretty fair based their price.

What might go wrong with 1and1 hosting?

We analized 150 complaints and concluded following points:

Lack of support
Although they manage a huge support team and running 24*7, sometimes it's hard to get updates on problem solving. It's reasonable for their huge business but they can definitely do better.

High cancellation fee
1and1 offers up to 5 free domain names registration and considered a big spotlight with their service. However, if you have taken the domains in account and want to transfer to somewhere else, they will charge you pretty high registration fees plus account setup fees. The overal fee amount is even higher than initial payment.

Plan Confusion
Navigation among hosting plans are not so direct and many people signed wrong service than expected. For example, we need to host sql server database but we signed linux service because the layouts are exactly the same.

How do we think about 1and1 Hosting?

Being one of the largest hosting provider, 1and1 definitely doing something great such as their super cheap domain service. Whil we get it at $0.99/year, it costs ten times more from every other registrars even on promotional offer. Especially when they proud to offer super cheap hosting service with free domain included, we can not get this offer from other hosting providers. There might be some issues from client end, but it's absolutely common for its huge business. If we have very tight budget in hosting investment, 1and1 is simply the one you can trust mostly.

Check out 1and1 cheap hosting offer on www.1And1.com

Greengeeks Overview

The company was founded in 2006 by Trey Gardner with more than 150,000 websites hosted from its white paper. Greengeeks has the most devoted and the friendliest staff in the web hosting business to support client request efficiently and friendly. Just like what their website says, 300% wind power supply for your website. Their Chicago datacenter is one of the most environment-friendly datacenter in north America.

Greengeeks Reivew on Hosting Plans

Greengeeks provides full linux hosting solutions including shared, VPS, Dedicated server and reseller hosting plans. Each hosting provides popular offers with its own advantages

Shared Hosting: Only a single plan offered with unlimited features on most service such as disk and number of allowed websites. Greengeeks shared servers are RAID 10 SSD powered with 32GB RAM installed. With this service, client get one free domain name registration. As long as the hosting service is active, the domain will be kept free.

• Unlimited space & bandwidthHost
• unlimited websites & emails
• Free website migration
• Free domain name for Life
• Free sitebuilder wizard
• Eco friendly green energy hosting

VPS Server: Currently there're 5 class VPS server plans being offered, basic configuration begin with 1GB RAM/25GB SSD/4 Cores/2 IPs/1000GB Bandwidth at $39.95/mo price. Free cpanel/whm license will be provided and free migration service is included. Your VPS server will be ready within 60 seconds upon order verification.

Dedicated Server Hosting: Fully customizable service from greengeeks company. Other than a basic hardware assembly, greengeeks configured everything upfront to make sure you can use it directly for live service. Each server provides free cpanel/whm and billing system plus a eNom domain reseller account. If you want to change the server configuration such as hardware specs etc, just contact their support people for quick assistance. Based all server specs, it's quite worthy to power the business.

Greengeeks Reivew on Performance

Greengeeks hosting is mostly featured for it's clean power supply. This not only requires no carbon footprint from data center, server hardware optimization and installation is crucial for power saving. In order to produce less heat, their technicians applied advanced cooling solutions from both server setup and environment detection. From continous monitoring and testing, a single server problem will be isolated from server farm but not affecting neighbours. Overloading is something they're trying to avoid for problem free service.

In the past 5 years, there're several important upgrades in greengeeks data center. This ensures their servers and other hardware specs are up to date. That's why we got very few complaint from monthly or weekly reporting.

Greengeeks Reivew on Support

It's expensive to offer clean service. Hardware equipment is only the basic requirement, powerful tech support shows the real service. Greengeeks has the friendliest support people from industry. They are active in every support channels and webmaster forums to answer questions even not belong to their service. Trey gardner, also communicate with client directly often to solve problems and provide useful suggestions. His personal email and blog is public to everybody. If we're not satisfied with any support response, send him message directly and he will reply in warm words till problem fixed.

Trey also works on various hosting forums to track their service quality and communicate with people directly. We can always see his personal reply in WHT for most greengeeks related questions. It's rare for other hosting leaders who can spend so much time to learn how customers think about their services. Choosing greengeeks service means another level support for nowadays hosting.

More about Greengeeks

Greengeeks has been trying to catch up with latest technologies such as cloud computing. There's no official announcement if greengeeks is cloud based but their founder managed another hosting brand "Sitecloud" which is dedicated for cloud hosting plan with affordable price. Although that brand is close for some problems. But the leading concepts and technologies are completely used by greengeeks service. By setting up cloud servers, greengeeks proudly to offer unlimited disk space and data transfer to clients.

Extra Hosting Benefits at Greengeeks

• Super Green Hosting It's just hard to find another green hosting provider who pay so much attention for environment protection. They take daily actions to reduce pollusion such as take food from home cooking.
• Affordable Service GreenGeeks spend lots of money in order to make their service green. However they still offer pretty affordable service plans to reduce your web hosting costs. Greengeeks decreased the price to $3.96/mo.
• Free upgrade If your current service is no longer engough to support web requirements, submit a request to support and they will handle upgrade process free of charge.

What might be the weakness with Greengeeks?

The only weakness might be price. Although the price on home page is advertised at $3.96/mo but we have to sign up 3 years upfront and yearly deal is $7.95/mo which will be very high comparing to the promotional one. However, we fixed price problem by greengeeks coupon "TODAYOFFER" which generates the latest promotional price. Normally, it provides 20~30% discount so the price will be quite good.

How do we think about greengeeks hosting?

Being the leading hosting provider, greengeeks not only cares about environment but also service quality. If would like to vote their spirit and leaves no carbon footprint on website, then Greengeeks is recommended on top because they're doing the best for eco friendly business. Based their performance in hosting industry and clients feedbacks, it's 100% safe to go. Anything we should note? Yes, don't take their unlimit advantages for storage purpose, they don't limit your account size but file storage purpose is strictly prohibited because it will interrupt daily backup schedules.

Go to www.Greengeeks.com for green hosting Promo!