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Hosting Reviews

Brief introduction of green hosting

Green Hosting or Eco-friendly web hosting is addition to the field of website hosting which involves a given website hosting company attempting to prove that they are not having any negative impact on the environment in an attempt to attract consumers. The term green put into consideration is meant to reduce atmosphere pollution by traditional power station and change to use clean power supply such as wind or solar energy.

How to become green hosting provider?

There're many many things a company needs to do in order to be green hosting provider. Several essential points to determine if the hosting is green:

1. Purchase green tags or carbon credits
2. use more energy friendly servers & products
3. virtualization and data center layout.

In order to attract more customers, many web hosting companies launched green hosting advertising everywhere on internet but you do not have any idea if they're actually green or blue. Generally, If the hosting states to be green, you should see a dedicated page on their site explaining how they're green and their efforts. It's huge investment to become green hosting provider.

Top Green Hosting provider

Hostgator – Green hosting since 2002 and it's one of the largest green hosting provider, serving over 1% of the internet traffic. Hostgator ultilize the biggest green datacenter – softlayer. Only $3.96/mo plus 25% discount via coupon "review25off" you get unlimited disk space & unlimited databases.

Greengeeks – Proud to be 300% Wind Powered Green Hosting, it's the world's NO.1 green energy hosting provider who has donated so much for environment protection. Greengeeks $3.95/mo plan comes with $30 discount with coupon "todayoffer". With this price you get  free domain name and almost all other services for unlimited. Furthermore, they will plant a tree for you!

Ipage – a wind-energy leader, their hosting prevents the release of 2,660 metric tons of carbon fuel each year. iPage is now offering $1.99/mo promotional price. This makes ipage the most affordable green hosting provider. If you have limited budget and looking for reliable green hosting service, ipage is definitely the best choice today!

How do we rate the Best green hosting?

With up to date hosting technologies, many hosting grow up green. However, it doesn't mean all they are good. A good green hosting provider is not only rated by power supply but also service quality and many other strict rules such as server performance, uptime statistics, client satisfaction and technical skills, etc

Who's the best green hosting? The best Awards goes to greengeeks! Greengeeks strictly follows the rules to prepare server products as well as network backbones. Either from electricity supply & or server optimization for less energy consumption, their people did lots of research to ensure everything is setup on top standards.

Plus, GreenGeeks has a team of experienced people in handling troubles. Their support team including CEO are pretty active in various forums to communicate with people directly. Their people are truely the best who cares about what users really need.

What really makes greengeeks outstanding is their company policies. They use energy saving offices to reduce electricity usage and eat home cooking food instead buying fast food outside. In this way they reduced plastic pollution with their own effort. As we see, they put the green idea to daily life not just their service!

More About Green Hosting

Actually, no matter if we like or not, the hosting industry is going green step by step. Because the datacenters consume too much energy and many countries have issued laws to reduce carbon emmission to atmosphere. Leading web hosting services already setup their own green datacenters or rent the space from quality green datacenter providers. The best doing is from US service providers where nuclear and wind energy being used most efficiently. That's why US is primary consideration for website hosting.

So basically, if we're looking for high quality green hosting service, US is direction to leading hosting providers because most of them are green.

Green hosting resource:

• Green hosting wikipedia definition
• Green hosting technologies

Sitecloud Review

Sitecloud is pretty new in the web hosting industry. Their CEO "Trey Gardner" also founded greengeeks. Sitecloud is one of the very few well-known cpanel cloud hosting provider. Sitecloud's Load-Balanced Cloud Architecture provides more scalability and reliability to hosted customers.

What's good of sitecloud hosting?

I think no much people even heard about sitecloud this name for the newness and the technologies they used. Till last year, cloud computing is almost a theory and hardly to find a hosting service provider who can offer something clouding, but the story is opposite from sitecloud and it's doing extremely well in cloud hosting. Below are some outstanding features from sitecloud service.

Scalability
This should be the main advantage of cloud hosting, the resources between servers such as cpu & memory are all pooled. when your site reaches the maximum potential such as a Digg, Slashdot etc, the cloud infrastructure automatically put additional resources to deal with the spike and your site never experience slow downs, outages.

Free Site Migration
SiteCloud's Free Site Migration policy will be a huge help if you're new with website migration stuff, their support will help move everything to sitecloud server with no cost.

Green
The same as GreenGeeks which is under the same green technologies and all other stuff, you would be proud the site hosted by sitecloud has no carbon footprint.

What might be the disadvantage of sitecloud hosting?

As the point of view, there're two clear weakness of sitecloud.

One, price is relatively high – No matter what kind of technologies applied, price is always an important point when users search for a hosting provider. There're many other excellent hosting providers who has lower price.

Two, newness – sitecloud is pretty new as well as their hosting technologies. There're not too much feedbacks on this hosting yet on the internet. Although the "clouding" might be a potential prosperous stuff in the future, it's relative new to most people and not so many service providers like the traditional business.

Is there any coupon code in order to use sitecloud?

Unfortunately no, but we do have some methods to get $30 off your total order, please follow steps below:

1. Go to sitecloud official page http://www.sitecloud.com
2. Click sign up button
3. Close the order page, yes! close it
4. A prompt up window with display with $30 off order page
5. Follow it and sign up. Enjoy!

UPDATE: Sitecloud already closed and not recommended anymore for hosting choice. All sitecloud data/clients have migrated to greengeeks hosting where cloud hosting service not available yet. If you're need affordable cloud hosting services, we highly recommend siteground

Aplus.net overview

A deluxe company, Aplus business was Founded in 1992 as Abacus America and began offering hosting services in 1998. Aplus provides enterprise grade hosting solutions for over 100,000 global clients with more than 800,000 websites hosted. Aplus.net is more than a web hosting provider but a fully functional IT group, their service covers domain registration, website design, shopping cart and email. Generally speaking they have everything prepared for your internet business needs.

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Aplus.net Review – Hosting features

At Aplus service, we're served by three shared hosting plans – Basic, Business and Professional plans. As they advertised – our mission is to provide everything for your business online. Aplus provides rich feature windows server plans to support your web requirement side by side.

Aplus hosting plans provide the exact limits instead of "unlimit" for everything and the offer is mostly the amount you will use on website. They just offer what we really need but not blow off something useless.

The Aplus servers are windows server platform and fully compatible with .net & php mysql technologies. This is how they their service is developer friendly because people don't have to use different platforms for different websites development.

Besides regular hosting support, the aplus company also provides various web solutions like SSL certificate, Logo design, Web design, Business email and Fax to email service etc. Web design is one of their major business.

Control panel, aplus uses inhouse developped hosting control panel software with full control of billing and website services. One outstanding feature is we can login via dedicated user id/password or even social site services such as twitter, facebook and linkedin etc as long as it's associated with the account.

Aplus.net Review – Server Performance

Aplus servers are configured on up to date windows server with enterprise grade hardware setup. They have multiple state-of-the-art data centers in Miami, Toronto and Dublin. The multiple storage sub-systems use Network Appliances (NetApp), Blades (HP), RAID4. Load balancers and servers network is built on Cisco 6500 switches using the latest Supervisor 720 engine. The sole purpose of all efforts is to provide all web services with ultimate performance and high availability.

Aplus.net Review – Hosting Support

Aplus tech support team is working 24 x 7, and… only for tech support. We called in for some sales inquiries and they are not so responsive. Their customer service people are only available during 9am PST – 9pm PST. Means we have to contact in other ways beyond this period. Our editorial experience with aplus support is not so good because the chat is always cut off for no reason, we have to call in again and again. It's not good at all if we want to fix some urgent problems.

Aplus.net Review – Price

I have to say, the aplus hosting price is quite expensive than lots of popular providers. Their starter plan is offered at $9.99/mo and professional plan is $29.99/mo. Although they focus on developers, the price is still a little high because we can always find competitive hosting plans from somewhere else.

What would be weakness of aplus.net hosting?

The first thing is their relatively high price. While every provider is trying to decrease the price to get more orders, there's no change for years from aplus site. It's ok if they just want to maintain existing business but not good for better success. Another weakness is about support. They're not always online and not so responsive to client inquiries. Maybe they have focus on other products other than hosting but they should handle it well as long as the hosting service is offered.

How do we think about Aplus.net?

Aplus is old brand IT service provider, they offer side by side IT solutions and hosting plans with great features. However they're not mentioned too much by webmasters because everybody like cheap solutions. There're many 2 bucks per month service and almost conquered the market, people will also recommend to check out such service because of pricing.

Comparing to other leading hosting providers, Aplus is advanced service provider who has gave up the traditional service logic and started with advanced hybrid server hosting. They target to offer service to business groups who need professional support and IT solutions.

Is there any promotion from aplus?

They currently offer 20% Off promotion for their hosting service. If we want to save money with this host, go yearly deal then apply the following code for extra 29% discount. In this way, the final price can be reduced a lot!

Site5 Hosting Quick view

Site5 founded their business in California in 1998. Site5 is certified reliable Linux Cloud hosting provider. Site5 company provides a list of different hosting plans which will handle requirements from personal to large business websites. With over 200 dedicated servers and nearly 300,000 domains hosted, Site5 knows how to bring their vision to life.

Site5 Review – Hosting Plans

Site5 offers a wide range hosting plans to work with different hosting requirements. From traditional shared hosting to cloud platform with many plans to choose from. No matter if we just want to host a simple website or need a development space, site5 provides full solutions

Shared Server: With a total of 3 shared plans, you will know exactly which one works the best because site5 people tells you exactly how much you can use, especially the amount of visits. With this plan, we can select data center locations from multiple continents such as US, EU, AU and Asia etc. Local connection is extremely useful when we have targeted market promotion. There's a long list of available data center locations, we can pick up the best one for fast connection from client side.

VPS Server: Xen server based VPS are full managed service with custom selection of setup such as CPU/RAM and amount of dedicated IP address etc. Customer also have choice of all available data center locations. VPS is based RAID 10 disk array with dedicated resource guarantee, up to 30 days recovery from snapshot is optional choice. In order to make the purchase worry free, site5 people proudly to offer $1 for 30 day trial.

Cloud Server: Unlike any other cloud providers who setup dedicated like cloud hosting plans, site5 has cloud web hosting, managed/unmanaged VPS and cloud reseller hosting plans. The difference among different hosting plans are management level and amount of server resources. Each plan is setup to catch up with enterprise grade hardware and uptime.

Site5 Review – Networking

Site5 has multiple operational centers and data center services on the planet. Based their huge networks, site5 configured their own CDN service and cloud platform. Let's see this map

As we see, their data center service is setup on most major internet providers. Because of this, site5 offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee so that if they don't hit this mark you get your money back. Because of this, customer be able to select the best line to ensure the best connection for guaranteed performance. No matter if your visitors are from US or Europe or China, you can always choose the best connection tunnel for fast response!

Site5 Review – Customer Support

Site5 guarantees the response time of tech support to ensure you always get a fast response to your problems. Management Team is accessible to all customers if you ever have any complaint. Every morning the CEO, COO, and DTO review every ticket or chat that receives a low rating and contacts the customer to make sure the issue was fixed and to correct any mistakes support might have made.

Their people guarantee all support channels are online for 24*7 and each request will be handled professionally. No matter if your problem is big/small, site5 support will answer you fastly in a good manner

Site5 Review – Price

Either shared hosting or cloud hosting plans, the prices are pretty affordable. To make sure your payment is worry free, site5 offers a 30 day free trial so you can take a look around with no risk! This offer is valid on shared web hosting and reseller hosting plans. Additionally, the company offer a 45 Day Money Back Guarantee just in case that is not enough.

What would be the weakness of site5 hosting?

The actualy bad from user expereince would be their support irregularity. Their support staff being online with different class and mixed together. It might be good for their internal communication but pretty bad for fast problem fixing online. Every time you contact support you might receive different response for different solutions. For live support, they will just tell you someone is working and ask customer to wait until problem fixed. They definitely need to improve their live support for better communication.

How do we think of Site5 hosting?

Site5 offers quality and affordable hosting plans and worth each penny you paid, they constantly upgrade their server & services to generate best service to clients. In order to give people 100% confidence with their service, they proudly offer 30 days free trial before you send out money! We even be able to select locations that's most close to website audience. Till present, only few leading hosts managed doing so because multiple datacenters on different locations required for this sevice.

Back to hosting control panel, site5 used a customized control panel named SiteAdmin – a deeply revised cpanel. From in here, you can manage all services of your account including billing, website files,  databases, emails etc. You are allowed to have unlimited services with pre-configured administration tools for professional use. In a word, you won't go wrong with site5 hosting, site5 means quality and success!

Visit www.Site5.com for promos now!

Siteground Overview

Siteground was setup in 2003 with two offices in the US: Humble, Texas and in New York City. It also manage operation centers in Europe: Sofia and Bulgaria. SiteGround manages multiple datacenters in US, Europe as well as Singapore. Siteground offers multiple hosting and website solutions to personal and enterprise groups.

Cheapest hosting plan offered by siteground

SiteGround Review – Hosting Features

Siteground offers shared, Cloud, Dedicated and Reseller hosting plans. Beside these general hosting solutions, siteground also provides a seperate wordpress hosting & wordpress theme design, Joomla hosting & Joomla templates design. Step by step guidance/tutorials of the two softwares are included.

Shared web hosting: Total of three shared plans – Startup, Growbig and Gogeek. Each plan has different limits on disk storage and other premium features like super cache service, number of supported websites and free ssl certificate etc. Each class plan comes a free domain name and free website migration, cpanel and ssh support.

Cloud Hosting: One of the very first cloud hosting providers. Server is fully customizable during registration and using, we can add more resources on the fly with no interruption of existing services. With this cloud platform, each account is daily backed up with free CDN support. We can choose among 3 data centers for better geographical accessibility and local speed.

Dedicated Server:There're total of 3 server plans from Intel i3-540 3.06GHz – Intel Xeon E5-2620 with up to 16GB ram as default configuration. People have 3 data center options – USA, Europe and Asia. All servers are fully managed with up-to-date setup.

Reseller Hosting:The reseller hosting from siteground is a bit different from any other hosting provider. Siteground sells this service based "credit", one credit equals to one year hosting = $49. If we purchase 11 or more credits, price can be decreased to $42/yr per credit. The thing is we have to order 5 credits to start which results in $225/yr. With this price we can give out 5 hosting accounts under 10GB space.

Besides above, siteground also provides another two special hosting services – WordPress Hosting ＆ Joomla hosting. Although the actual hosting service is configured on same regular shared plans, they have special service for the two applications such as server end optimization and template service etc.  From editorial review, all their servers are optimized for the two softwares purpose. They just added extra explanation to it.

SiteGround Review － Performance

Regarding to performance, siteground operates multiple data center services in USA，EU and Asia pacific. They have multiple CDN network to speed up your local performance. Especially for cloud and dedicated server, clients be able to select a perfect network to get the best loading.

On server hardware level, siteground setup all platform based Intel technologies by DELL server production. Either CPU or RAM or hard disk etc are all followed enterprise IT requirements.

SiteGround Review － Price

Siteground shared plan starts from $3.95/mo promotional price while it's originally offered at $9.95/mo. Cloud hosting starts from $54/mo and fully scalable based the real usage. Pay as you go and no extra penny to be wasted. No matter if you just from shared service or choose dedicated one, the facility and quality equal the pay.

Prices are pretty fare for regular hosting services as shown. However the reseller service is not so good to go and a little complex for novice. While it's $42 per credit and 5 credits go get started, we pay a lot considering the limited resources. The truth is we are just reselling their hosting plans at small discounts.

SiteGround Review － Customer Service

Siteground group operates multiple support centers in US and Europe. Their people are working 24*7*365 on each station to ensure every request can be handled efficiently. What really makes their support outstanding is detailed online tutorials. Especially for those popular softwares like wordpress & joomla, they created a plenty of articles with guidance on many ways of using the software. The company itself provides template development service and understand how to optimize it based their server environment.

As suggested by their people, they evaluate each employee's speed, as well as the team performance as a whole, on a regular basis. Clients don't have to wait more than a few seconds for the next available operator.

Is Siteground SEO Friendly Hosting?

Absolutely, with their stable and reliable server, your website is surely under the safe way to get high ranking with search engine. Moreover, if you check their main site you could found, within the shortest period they promote siteground to Google rank 9 which is almost the highest google rank, no other hosting website have got this rank number till present.

Siteground knows a stable server is quite important for search engine friendly and monitored the server 24×7 for 99.9% uptime gurantee. Their tech team optimized hosting server specially for popular scripts like wordpress, joomla and other open source apps. For SEO hosting consideration, siteground is in top consideration with affordable plans.

How Do We Think About Siteground?

definitely A+. siteground can be trusted by any kind of website with linux hosting and it's the most recommended budget hosting for reasonable low price. Their ultra-cheap pricing and the brilliant host of features that come with it leave very little to be desired. Furthermore, if you're going to host a CMS website like joomla, drupal or wordpress, siteground optimized their servers side by side for such scripts and offered great documentaionsl on how to use/optimize the app. You can't find anywhere else for such great resources.

More about Siteground

Besides all above, siteground provides a lot of other bonus that we could benefit such as the following:

Scalability & Excessive Resource Usage – All siteground server resources are managed seperately which will significantely reduce down time and ensure the website performance.

Environment Friendly – Siteground is 100% eco-friendly hosting and saves a huge carbon footprint every year. Siteground has been working with environment groups like the Bonneville Environmental Foundation to purchase wind energy credits to offset our energy consumption.

Easy to use – You don't have to be skillful in order to use siteground services. All stuff is managed under the standard Cpanel with the most popular third party script libraries like Joomla, wordpress, drupal and many other open source CMS. Simply few clicks away to get a professional website online.

Multiple Datacenters choice – In order to serve Asia Pacific clients with best effort, siteground launched datacenters in Singapore. The setup reduced network latency between US and Asia. If you need US level hosting & want to be located in Asia, the siteground SG datacenter is best choice. No additional fees included or any other limits to host there!