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Review: Site5

Site5 has been around since 1999 and is pretty well known in the web hosting industry. For as long as I can remember they have been offering competitive rates that are bundled with good features and account limits. Today, in 2007, they seem to be following that tradition by offering incredible hosting packages at great prices.

Initial Impression One thing I have noticed is that the website has become a lot less formal. The layout and overall design is still good, but the feel of the site is much more casual. A lot of people (myself included) will find this inviting and it may even promote more sales. I imagine that some people, however, might be turned off by the casual approach and may be inclined not to purchase hosting.

The web site boasts a big banner right at the top that's advertising their current promotions. At the time of this writing their current promotion is $5 a month for 55 gigabytes of storage, 5 terabytes of data transfer, and up to 55 hosted domains. Pretty snazzy.

We decided to give it a shot and purchased the $5 a month plan.

Value Factor It's pretty hard to beat $5 a month. There are some other hosts that offer rates as low as $3 a month, but you are really starting to lose included features at that price. The market standard seems to be right around $7 a month for personal or light business hosting, so $5 fits right into that price range.

$5 for 55 gigabytes of storage is pretty darn good no matter how you slice it. If you aren't really aware of how much space that is, 55 gigabytes of storage is enough room to store 25,000 MP3's, 500,000 photos, etc. It's more than enough space for your website.

Reliability and Performance We never experienced a problem during our evaluation, and like all of the other major web hosts out there, Site5 advertises a 99.9% uptime guarantee. To be completely honest, we don't have the time to run an evaluative test for a prolonged period, but our research has shown our results to be consistent with the experiences of other clients.

Our testers from three different geographic locations (Canada, the United States, and England) were all able to access our test page (now offline) without any problems. For all three testers the page loaded quickly and was not garbled. As well, our website responded well to ping requests from all over the globe.

We are confident in Site5's ability to perform and our experience has backed up our suspicions. I doubt that a new customer would ever have a problem with their website being down without reason.

Conclusion In the sub-$10 a month market for web hosting there are a lot of players. Many are offering cut rates but, as a result, cutting available web space or flexibility in their hosting programs. Site5 doesn't do any of that- your price gets you lots of space, lots of bandwidth, and lots of options.

Sounds like a winner to me.