benetleong.com

Here’s a review of my current web hosting company… I’ve written a couple before (not on my blog but elsewhere) but this time is different cause they’re having a Winter Give Away competition!

So, I’ve decided to pen a little review of my current provider - WebHostingBuzz.com (WHB).

WHB has been my webhosting provider since I started this blog of mine. Back at that time, I was really just looking out for the cheapest, most affordable web hosting package available since I don’t wanna spend too much money plus I’m doing this as a hobby. After scouring around the Internet and reading lots of reviews at WebHostingTalk.com (which btw is an excellent source of information for any web hosting related stuffs); i decided to settle for a mini 3GB plan at USD 3/month with WHB.

Well, after being with them for 2 years plus… and having experienced many other providers; I must say WHB has a few qualities that makes it great.

1. Plan and Pricing
When I first signed up, WHB had one of the most competitive pricing plans and until today; they still have one of the most competitive plans out there. I pay a mere USD 3/month for a 3GB plan which basically has everything and at the price I’m paying… it’s worth every penny. WHB current lowest plan offers 375GB of space!!! Now, before you say it… yes, these days most hosting providers just throw out insane numbers of web hosting space trying to lure new customers and WHB is no exception. This unfortunately is caused by strong competitions and to the new customers; numbers seems to mean everything.

Well, I can tell you for certain… it’ll be really hard to use up ALL the space allocated to your account without breaking / violating most of the hosting providers Acceptable Use Policy. So, go with a good plan with a price that you’re comfortable with and don’t get caught up with the numbers (space + bandwidth).

2. Support
A very IMPORTANT aspect of a hosting provider is the level of support they provide. This is where I personally feel that WHB shines best. WHB has 3 types of support - they got their live chat, a typical ticketing system and a web forum. I’ve never used their live chat system but they’re there to provide the usual low level tech support and to ensure that there is someone to take your complains/problems down. I’ve used their ticketing system on multiple accounts and I personally find it very efficient. I’ve never had a ticket go unanswered for more than 24 hours. Replies were always prompt, knowledgeable and efficient. Their web forum is great as the CEO, the COO and many of their team members frequently stop by to answer any questions and provide advice to their customers. The forum is also serves as their one-stop status update for all their servers.

Since there are so many channels that you can go to when in need of support, you know there’s always someone there to listen and that IMHO - is very crucial.

3. Service
There’s no point to it if you pay for a really cheap plan but ended up with crappy service and non-existent support right? Well, that was what went through my mind in my first 2-3 months with WHB… I must say it started off pretty shaky as their servers were constantly having intermittent downtimes and being all psyched up to get my blog up and running didn’t help the situation at all. But I decided to stick around and true enough… their service improved over time. First, they upgraded all their servers so we now had more processing power. Secondly, their tech guys are more responsive towards monitoring the servers uptime and rogue sites that is killing the servers so there was no real long downtime generally.

At the end of the day… I’m on a budget hosting servers and like all servers in this category - it is plagued with this thing called overselling. Overselling causes a lot of other issues but the difference between one provider and the next is how efficient are they in handling these issues. WHB has been very good in this sense.

To sum it all up… I would say that WebHostingBuzz is definitely a great web hosting provider… perhaps not the greatest; but it definitely meets my demand and satisfaction. Cheers~

[tags]WebHostingBuzz, web hosting, review[/tags]

Tags: review, web hosting, WebHostingBuzz

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 12:40 am and is filed under IT stuffs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.