Site5 Review - Is It A Good Hosting Company?

So many positive and negative comments about Site5 web hosting are available on the Internet, making people confused. Therefore, to figure out whether this company is a good option, we have come out a solution by reviewing its price, features, uptime, speed and technical support.

Besides reviewing the mentioned aspects thoroughly, we also started to host a medium-sized WordPress website on the shared platform of Site5 and kept monitoring the site every 5 minutes for performance testing. Moreover, we have collected a large number of feedbacks of real users for the analysis of its customer satisfaction level.

Overall Rating

Founded in 1999 by Matt Lightner and Rod Armstrong, Site5 has been offering web hosting services for individual blogs as well as large companies.

The Pros of Site5 Web Hosting

Site5 offers rich features and a responsive support team. At present, the company hosts almost 200,000 domains, and the number is still growing rapidly. Check the detailed advantages as below.

Reliable Hosting Environment

Making sure the 99.9% uptime guarantee can be well accomplished in the real practice, the company lays much emphasis on optimizing Internet infrastructure and server maintenance. According to what we have observed in the past years with Site5, there is no big downtime happens.

Various Plans

To meet various demands, the company has released 3 shared web hosting packages named as hostBasic, hostPro and hostPro+Turbo. The subscription term determines different charges. Check the detailed pricing for each plan.

It is worth noting that the company really does well with the hostBasic plans. It is the cheapest hosting package, but comes with rich features like unlimited disk space & bandwidth, the last version of PHP, Ruby on Rails and Python. The information of other plans is listed as below.

Money Back Guarantee

Having much confidence in hosting quality, the host claims 45 days full money back guarantee to customers. In any event of dissatisfying with the service, customers are entitled to ask for a full refund within the first 45 days. Therefore, both worry and risk are reduced.

Top Customer Support

Technicians have developed knowledge base including in-depth articles and video tutorials where answers to some common issues are available. The Q&A categories are clearly arranged so that customers are able to find answers very quickly. If the related answers do not exist, they can post them on the “Ask a Question” column.

Meanwhile, the company allows customers to reach the support center teams through live chat, email and phone call. Note that there is a time limitation: the onsite service is only valid within 8 hours from 10 AM to 6 PM EST in weekdays.

The Cons of Site5 Web Hosting

In addition to the strong points, there are still some shortages on Site5 that make this company not good enough for the customer to choose.

Page Loading Speed

After testing its page loading speed for more than three months, we have found that the average server response time is 683ms, which is a little bit disappointing because the speed in hosting market averages 597ms.

Extra Domain Costs

It’s pretty customary to get one free domain name, but different from other hosting providers, the company charges $12 a year for each domain registered, which isn’t as competitive as what other companies are willing to do for the customer.

Control Panel

In terms of the control panel, the web host adopts SiteAdmin, with which people are able to manage every aspect of websites including email accounts, add-on domains, web statistics and more. In fact, the underlying technology comes from that of the industry-standard cPanel, and there are more optional tools and features are provided.

However,we have tested the ease of use of SiteAdmin and found that this custom control panel does not display detailed information about the server, including the versions and the path to the installed scripting languages, so customers have to consult technician staffs before installing the software.

Better Alternatives

To some degree, this host is reliable in offering rich features and good uptime. However, it has some limitations when it comes to price, performance and control panel. For better alternatives, we suggest website owners go to the following listed companies, offering cost-effective service with the maximum allocation of server resources, user-friendly control panel, advanced technologies and responsive support service.

All of them are highly recommended by many hosting review sites, and have been supplying excellent hosting service for more than 10 years. Check the detailed information in the following table: