MidPhase, founded in 1998 and located in Chicago Illinois, is a web hosting provider which mainly deals with shared, dedicated servers and reseller hosting. However, the company is still in a small size although it has been developed for so many years.
MidPhase hosting plans cover the demands of personal and small businesses from Linux shared hosting to dedicated servers and reseller hosting. For the price, we will mainly review the most affordable and common MidPhase shared hosting in this post. The ratings we made for the company’s service are as follows.
MidPhase Review > Price
There are a total of four shared hosting plans offered by MidPhase. Among all the plans, the Personal Website Hosting includes 4 different terms of subscription – 3 years, 2 years, 1 year and 1 month, priced at $2.95/mo, $3.95/mo, $4.95/mo and $5.95/mo respectively. With the officially-offered coupon code SAVEME40, you can redeem an extra discount for 40% off the regular price, starting with MidPhase at only $1.77/mo.
However, we do not recommend you to go with this budget plan, giving considerations to the risk of the purchase. And reality tells the truth. With the most budget Personal web hosting plan, you are only allowed to have one website and use one database. In this case, it is not an appropriate option for people who are serious about the expansion of business.
Even when going with the higher level – Professional hosting plan which is priced at $2.97/mo at present, you should keep an eye on it. In this plan, you are required to pay for more $2/mo, $29.99/yr and $2/mo for the availability of the dedicated IP address, SSL certificate and stars2 web analytics. Adding up all fees, MidPhase is not as cheap as it has advertised at all. Not to mention its business web hosting plan, which is really expensive.
MidPhase Review
The MidPhase Linux-based shared hosting plan called “Personal Web Hosting” is said to be the most popular website solution for personal users or small businesses, which provides basic features needed for hosting a personal website or blog.
However, this plan is restricted to host only 1 domain and create a single database on one account. If you’re starting a new website for the first time, it can be a choice for you to get experience and learn how to deal with basic site building and management issues, but it is never a good option in the case that you want to get a business growing.
As the plans from MidPhase include different features, we make out the following feature-comparison table to have an overall view on the detailed differences.
Features | Personal Web Hosting Plan | Professional Hosting | Business Web Hosting |
---|---|---|---|
Disk Space | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Monthly Bandwidth | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Domain | 1 | 3 | Not Known |
Databases | 1 | 3 | Unlimited |
Allowed Websites | 1 | 3 | Unlimited |
Sub-Domains | 1 | 5 | Unlimited |
Email Accounts | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Dedicated IP(s) | N/A | $2/mo | Free |
Dedicated SSL | N/A | $29.99/yr | Free |
Stats2 Web Analytics | N/A | $2/mo | Free |
Price | $1.77/mo | $2.97/mo | $4.77/mo |
Recommended | Not Recommended | Not Recommended | Not Recommended |
Some customers point out that the tagged “unlimited” service is indeed a promotion trial. In fact, MidPhase sets strict limitations on the disk space and monthly data transfer. That means, you have to pay additional fees for the overgrowth. Thus, think twice before you making the final decision.
Reliability & Performance
Reliability is the most important factor when considering a new web host, because anything else will be non-sense if your website always suffers from downtime or slowness. Although MidPhase guarantees 99.9% server and network uptime for all customers, some users point out that it is just a scam. Over the Internet, many webmasters denounce it that they have suffered an average of 1-3 hour downtime without any prediction.
To test the real network condition of MidPhase, we have monitored its system and network during the past 3 months. It is a pity that this company fails to accomplish its promise of 99.9% uptime, and even cannot catch up with the standard uptime level. Furthermore, its server response time has also been criticized many times.
Support
MidPhase offers 24×7 US based customer support through live chat, email and toll-free phone. It claims to give a responsive reaction for any hosting issue. However, many innocent people say that all phone support guys are extremely terrible. And they have never expecting to call the so-called “friendly” guys over the phone, because every time they are required to email the support center at length. At this point, MidPhase does a really bad job.
Conclusion
From the side-by-side review on the web hosting service from MidPhase, it is not recommended for you to purchase this company’s service. For people who are in search for a reliable and affordable web hosting provider, we have the following cordial recommendations.