Network Solutions Hosting Review - Is Network Solutions a Trustworthy Web Host?

This article mainly discusses the web hosting solution offered by Network Solutions, which is well-known for its domain registration and website building services. However, just because its devotion into the 2 services, many customers have doubted that whether it is a trustworthy company offering quality web hosting. While bearing this question in mind, we have fully reviewed the price, features, uptime, speed, and customer service of Network Solutions.

The result of this review comes into two parts: feedbacks from hundreds of verified customers, and the real hosting experiences from our specialized editors.

Overall Rating

According to the official site of Network Solutions, this company was established in 1979 for registering domain names initially, and began to launch the web hosting packages since 2005. At present, it has powered more than 350,000 websites and over 7 million domain names.

Customer Voice

According to our investigations, customers mainly worry about the price, page loading speed, and uptime of Network Solutions. In this circumstance, we sincerely recommend another worry-free web host with a high customer satisfaction rate – InMotion Hosting.

Pricing

The service of Network Solutions is very expensive. While the average price of web hosting in the market is around $7/mo, Network Solutions costs $12.95 each month. Customers may find that it claims to charge only $0.99/mo for the Essential Web Hosting on its official site, but the truth is that the extremely cheap pricing is only valid for the first month. After the first month, if customers forget to cancel the account, the recurring fee billed to their credit cards automatically changes to the current rate of $12.95.

InMotion Hosting, however, prices its Business Class Hosting starting at $7.99/mo regularly, already 50% cheaper than that of Network Solutions. Besides, to offer more benefits to customers, this company even launches a special 56% discount, allowing customers to pay for $3.49/mo only by going through this promotional link.

Besides, although this web host offers money back guarantee, the policy does not ensure full money refund. Instead, it deducts fees for some non-refundable terms that are not clearly explained on the official website. Besides, the service does not include extra bonuses and free marketing credits.

Features

Network Solutions has only one web hosting package called Essential Web Hosting-Unix, which offers 1 free domain name, 1000 Email boxes, 300 GB disk space, unlimited data transfer, hassle-free FTP, a huge library of open source CMSs like WordPress, and some programming languages like PHP and Python.

To be frank, as compared with InMotion Hosting, Network Solutions is not rich featured. Below is a feature comparison table between the 2 companies.

Without utilizing cPanel, this web host develops the Hosting Control Panel by itself as its control panel. To be frank, the custom tool stops people from creating sites in a systematic manner, as comparing with the commonly acknowledged and easy-to-use cPanel. In this case, for some newbies, Network Solutions may not be the a good option for website management.

Reliability

High uptime rate is at the heart of a perfect web hosting service, so the next factor we have reviewed is the reliability. Network Solutions has a 99.99% uptime guarantee, promising that customers can expect their websites to be available online 24/7 with almost no downtime.

However, as the uptime is largely influenced by data center infrastructure, we only find some limited information about the company’s data center on a FAQ from 2005, which is probably too old to rely on. Also, in Terms of Service, we haven’t found any details on the compensation provided if it fails to meet its 99.99% uptime promise.

Since nothing speaks louder than real statistics, we have launched a real-time monitoring by hosting tested website with this company and recorded its uptime during the past 3 months. Consequently, we found that the service delivers 99.95% uptime on average during our monitoring period.

Page Loading Speed

As there is little theoretical information available for data centers, servers, and speeding up tools to certify whether Network Solutions is fast or not, we have carried out a performance testing by hosting a WordPress site on its web hosting service. The result shows that this site takes approximately 2.3 seconds to load a webpage. To be honest, its hosting speed is not bad, but is not as fast as InMotion Hosting.

InMotion Hosting is famous for its super-blazing page loading speed, which is less than 1 second averagely. It achieves this by leveraging the power of world-class data centers in the East Coast and West Coast of US, exclusive Max Speed Zone technology, solid state drives and efficient network connections.

Technical Support

Network Solutions has an extensive list of phone lines consisting of 10 different topics including domain names, websites, web hosting, email, and SSL certificates, so customers can phone their support staffs based on the explicit problems. However, not all the hotlines are available 24/7. For instance, customers who have problems with online marketing services can only get help from 9 am to 6 pm during weekdays.

In addition to the phone support, this company also offers e-mail support and a large collection of guides and articles on common issues. However, it does not support online chat, so non-native customers who cannot speak English fluently or those who need immediate help to fix their problems may feel disappointed.

Summary

Considering the unfair price, a little bit slow server response time and drawbacks in technical support, Network Solutions is not a terrific choice. If you are striving to search a better provider, we objectively think the companies in the following table deserve a shot because they offer cost-effective and feature-rich hosting services with remarkable performance and responsive technical support.