Founded in 1994, Register.com has become one of the largest domain registration companies and received positive reviews and awards for its hosting products and customer service. However, is it as good as reputed? Many readers raise the question and write to us requesting detailed information about its WordPress hosting service.
To help people solve the riddle, our editors have been collecting the feedbacks from real customers and keeping monitoring the WordPress site hosted with its service. Lately, we worked out this overall rating chart below which displays a rough information about this company.
Price & Packages & Promotions
Register.com web hosting packages include Essential, Professional, and Premium, which are priced at $5.95/mo, $7.95/mo and $9.95/mo respectively. This promotion is only valid for the first month, after which the recurring fee billed to customers’ credit cards will automatically change to then-current rates which are $14.95/mo, $18.95/mo and $36.95/mo for the three packages.
Additionally, the then-current rate is subject to the change at the sole discretion of the company. Customers need to consider cautiously about purchasing the service because there is no money-back guarantee ensuring people to put money in safe.
Apart from the lack of money-back guarantee, this host doesn’t offer advertising credits for every plan. People who value these bonuses ought to make a balanced budget.
Features
All web hosting packages are packed with features containing plenty of disk space, bandwidth, email addresses, domain names and MySQL databases, but most of the offers are with a limited amount. Details are listed in the following table.
Feature | Essential Hosting | Professional Hosting | Premium Hosting |
---|---|---|---|
Disk Space | 300 GB | 500GB | Unlimited |
Data Transfer | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Free Domain | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Domain Pointers | 100 | 100 | 100 |
Directory Pointers | 3 | 5 | 10 |
Number of Mailboxes | 10 | 25 | 25 |
Email Storage | 50GB | 125GB | 125GB |
FTP Accounts | 25 | 50 | Ulimited |
MySQL Databases | 25(300 MB) | 50(300 MB) | Ulimited |
IMAP | |||
1-Click Installer | |||
Regular Price | $14.95/mo | $18.95/mo | $36.95/mo |
Discount | 60% | 58% | 73% |
Current Price | $5.95/mo | $7.95/mo | $9.95/mo |
In addition to the basic features, there are some advanced ones including PHP 5, Perl, Python, SSI, Ruby on Rails, phpMyAdmin and Cron Jobs. Unfortunately, the important ingredients like SSH, suPHP, .htaccess are missed.
Uptime & Speed
On April 1, 2009, Register.com suffered a major DDoS attack, downing thousands of websites. With counter-measures taken into action, the situation was finally fixed in a couple of days. Still, the company claims 99.99% uptime to UNIX customers and 99.9% to Window users.
We have been closely observing the site for about 6 months. The statistics we have recorded show 99.92% uptime in the current 30 days, which mainly results from the entire first-class customers base across all hosting systems and the maintenance to network infrastructures. Technically speaking, this figure is already satisfactory although the company doesn’t fulfill its commitment.
In terms of speed, the company goes a little behind other leading hosts. According to the average figure of approximately 600ms of server response time in the market, an average of 732ms we have tested is out of excellence.
Technical Support
Technical support accounts for an important part in judging a certain service is good or not. Register.com holds the belief to deliver a responsible service, so it spares no efforts in answering questions raised by customers and helping resolve problems.
The dedicated staff consist of hundreds of professional experts with unparallel technical knowledge. They offer outstanding customer support on all the services including domain manes, email, web hosting, web site builders, digital certificates and more by FAQs and toll-free call.
There exists a deficiency, despite the technical staff are really nice and patient, that the company doesn’t allow the fast and convenient channels via live chat and email. Thus many non-English-speaking people are stopped from describing encountered issues clearly over phone.
Is Register.com WordPress hosting service cost-effective?
Not really. From what we have comprehensively reviewed, this company is not an ideal choice for serving WordPress sites. Although the uptime is satisfactory, yet the given packages are not integrated with favorable price offer, rich features, high performance and prompt technical support. For better choices, we come out the following list of reliable hosts.