Web Hosting Reviews: BlueHost, Hostnine

Web Hosting Reviews: BlueHost, Hostnine

I am going to be reviewing a couple of web hosts today. I will look at BlueHost (who also owns Hostmonster) and Hostnine. We will look at the service, some user experiences, how quickly they respond to their users, and how easy it is to use and navigate around the control panel.

Most reviews of web hosts contain a section describing the web hosts’ website. I will not mention anything about a hosts’ website unless I either have trouble finding something or I find a particularly interesting feature. I am not reviewing their websites (most have pretty cookie cutter websites anyway). I will start off with BlueHost.

Why am I not reviewing each web host separately? Web hosting is fast becoming a commodity, and apart from tiny differences in features, most web hosts are pretty similar. The only one that has bothered to differentiate itself is Go Daddy; they are the only “brand name” web host. This article just reviews the rest of the pack.

BlueHost

If you like variety, BlueHost is not for you. If you like simplicity and ease in setting up your account (and love inflexibility), BlueHost is for you. They have one plan and one plan only: 300 GB of disk space, 3000 GB of bandwidth, and 2500 e-mail addresses. The price varies depending on how long you sign up for in the program.

Obviously, the package drops its monthly charges the longer you sign up with BlueHost. A lot of neat features are offered, such as an unlimited number of add-on domains, parked domains, and sub-domains. It supports FTP and databases (50 each for MySQL and PostgreSQL – not much, but you can work with it). The strength of BlueHost has been their pushing of a single package at a competitive price.  They had slightly more than 250,000 domain names under their control as of January 2007. This has made them a force to be reckoned with in the web hosting business.

Web Hosting Reviews: BlueHost, Hostnine – Under The Hood, Ruby On Rails And Multiple Domain Management

I really liked the way BlueHost packaged their log on section. However, most of them require extra payments, so it seems kind of weird seeing promotional material on the cpanel page. Cpanel is normally quite cluttered (with tons of useful stuff), but BlueHost tweaked their cpanel in a couple of ways by providing additional services, such as an integrated billing profile manager, a direct link to the support center, a website creation tool, an additional webmail client, and a domain manager. Some other really neat features include Ruby on Rails support and the ability to support multiple accounts within one account. All of this makes life really convenient for any website administrator.

However, multiple domain name management opens a whole new kettle of fish, with problems arising if the name server is not on BlueHost. You have to switch name servers if you want to use it. This can lead to some down time on the site that is being transferred.

Support

Support is quick, and according to all users surveyed, you will get same day response on emails, including weekends. As a former user of enom and registerfly, that is a blessing. On registerfly, if I had a problem over the weekend, I had to wait through the weekend (bummer). There is toll-free telephone support from 8:00 AM to midnight eastern time and there is a forum for all BlueHost users.

However, support replying to your requests does not mean they will solve your problems. BlueHost has a reputation for being unreliable; see this post here for some user experiences. Most of the users complain that BlueHost refuses to take responsibility when things go wrong and only replies to emails if there are no serious problems. An associate of mine that runs on BlueHost has not had severe problems and swears by their helpful support staff. Nonetheless they do not have many fans. Here are some statistics that show BlueHost’s uptime (97%), new clients daily, and amount of customers they generate.

Terms Of Service

BlueHost has clearly stuck this little codicil into its terms of service: ”All activities may be monitored, recorded, and examined by any authorized person, including law enforcement.” This comes with this semi-shady comment: ”Any violation found or fraudulent activity that system personnel deem inappropriate may have your account immediately terminated without notice and any recorded evidence reported to authorized persons.” Add this to the fact that for more advanced features, you have to show photo identification (yes, photo identification) and you begin to wonder if Big Brother is always watching. More advanced features include taking advantage of the Ruby on Rails support.

An isolated case does not necessarily mean that a web host is bad – as long as it’s isolated.

Web Hosting Reviews: BlueHost, Hostnine – HostNine

I do not use HostNine, however, I have been part of a forum (here) that has had some people who use HostNine and who have posted comments concerning it. I will endeavor to give as balanced a review as possible (considering that it is increasingly hard to get positive feedback from a majority of users who submit reviews). HostNine offers the set of services shown below.

HostNine Plans Listed:

HostNine Basic Plan
$3.95/mo., 5,000 MB, 100 GB

HostNine Standard Plan
$6.95/mo., 10 GB, 150 GB

HostNine Entry Reseller
$19.95/mo., 15 GB, 150 GB

Unlike Hostgator, who enter into pretty much every niche, and have something for everybody, HostNine has three basic plans. The packages are competitively priced, but it seems price is not everything. To make sure that these forum members were not simply out to destroy HostNine, I sampled other user forums. Generally, HostNine users do not report high levels of satisfaction with the web host. Check here for some user experiences. Before we take a look at how all this grief started, we will look at what HostNine has to offer its users.

HostNine has a great package for entry resellers. It is not a lot of space, but it gives you options to resell unlimited domains and the power to host ecommerce sites conveniently. With WHMCS for their resellers, this website allows computer users with intermediate skills to become resellers and manage the billing and support of their clients. Combine HostNine’s relative user friendliness (and a package that is attractively priced) and you get a lot of people jumping on the web host to become resellers or single users hosting multiple sites, especially with HostNine’s use of software, which allows customers to build web pages on the fly. And this is where it gets ugly; good business does not necessarily translate into good service.

The Guarantees

HostNine runs on Dell PowerEdge servers with no less than a Dual Xeon 2.8GHz processor along with a 100% Network Uptime guarantee by HostNine’s data center. Their terms and conditions clearly state that there will be daily back ups of all data. They run an aggressive marketing campaign (just Google a bit and you will have up to 50 percent free on the first month). HostNine’s support is said to be fastservers.net. HostNine’s biggest problem with its users is simply that they know a little too much about their web host.

Web Hosting Reviews: BlueHost, Hostnine – The Invisible Man

My current relationship with Hostgator is an extremely mundane one. I pay my bills on time and everybody ignores everybody else; I don’t worry about traffic overloads because if a site I run is down, I just buy a few extra GBs that month.  I have little or no relationship with anybody at Hostgator and I am not on a first (or last) name basis with anyone on their support staff.

The same cannot be said of HostNine. Even those that have “good” relations with the hosting company seem to have dropped a support ticket up to five or six times. That said, their servers are fast and they respond well to tickets. But again, the number of bad reviews on this company is simply exhausting! Most of the good reviews were written in the company’s first few months. It pretty much went downhill from there.

“I think HostNine are terrible for customer service. Everything before a sale is great, but after it’s a whole new story. The staff are liars, blatantly.”

Sohan

Rude Support?

A lot of the complaints listed on the web state that support for HostNine is lazy, lying, or rude. Lest this becomes a crucifixion of HostNine (heck, it already has), I looked up some of the support comments and it has actually improved. A few months ago, representatives of the company actually owned up to ignoring a customer because he cursed them! (Ignoring the customer?) The fellow proceeded to start a scathing thread on webhostingtalk.

Now, I am not saying its okay for a customer to curse (and I am sure he must have really run up a tab on soap), but an angry customer who is web savvy and who is respected on a large forum or online community will (and has) cost them thousands of dollars. The support were not exactly rude… but you know what? You be the judge. Below is a comment made to the user after he complained that his site went down before he surpassed his bandwidth limit.

“Actually it is your fault, and you will continue to have problems at future hosts, guaranteed. Best of luck to you.“– Joshua Brown

This was a reply to an email I sent telling them how its not my fault your servers can’t handle what you promise they can!

So far, I have had 0 problems at innohosting. So much for that guarantee!

Now that’s a bit cold. I understand that the user may have been giving them problems, but “the customer is always right,” or shall we say, “the customer is king.”

Web Hosting Reviews: BlueHost, Hostnine – Uptime

HostNine promises 99 percent uptime on their website. Now that’s pretty cool. But here are some user experiences that point to the contrary:

“I also wanted to add that their uptime is terrible an impressive 70.8% for January. Another thing there guarantee doesn’t live up to. Site says 99.9% uptime and daily backups none of which have been done. Something needs to be done to them.”

This is from the same thread as above. It actually is so bad that another (totally separate) fellow set up another thread on webhostingtalk complaining about uptime (here). The HostNine representative actually replied to this thread and stated their willingness to resolve the issue to the user’s satisfaction. But nobody seems to be willing to give the representative the time of day. His/her comments were dissected to see if s/he had made any false or misleading statements; fortunately, s/he did not.

What is the Problem?

Could HostNine be over extended? Is this just a run of bad luck or is something really wrong with support? The majority of web hosts are honest and keep thousands of people in work. It is not in the interest of anybody in the industry for any web host to be maligned and lose business. But if there is a high level of complaints about service, it is the task of peer reviewers to bring these complaints to light and examine them.It kind of hurts me to write all the things that have been said about HostNine because I know that every bad review is bad for business (and I own a reseller service myself). Nonetheless, I am reviewing web hosts and this one just had very little going for it.

In the next part, we will look at Hostgator, Go Daddy, and a few other web hosts. Thanks for reading.

Article Source :

Web Hosting Reviews: BlueHost, Hostnine

May 1, 2008 | Filed Under Web Hosting Articles 


Comments


26 ‘queries’