Summary
Site5 is based in San Ramon, California and after 10 years of experience is highly acclaimed. Founded in 1999 by Matt Lightner and Rod Armstrong. Site5’s believes that “web hosting should be easy, fun, accessible, reliable and generally not painful to use.” With over 200 dedicated servers and nearly 200,000 domains hosted with them, Site5 stays true to their vision.
Site5 Plans and Features
Their shared hosting plan comes with a massive 750 GB of webspace and 7.5 TB of monthly bandwidth (data transfer). Prices used to start at $7.95/mo for the basic hosting plan, but now you can get their basic package at only $5/mo. Not many hosting companies offer this, but Site5 provides hosting of unlimited websites, unlimited email accounts and unlimited MySQL databases at no extra charge. Your website will be hosted on a server along with very few others. Other hosts will squish as many people as they can onto a server. Site5 guarantees a 99.5% uptime offers a 60-day unconditional money-back guarantee.
Site5's Hosting Environment
You will use Backstageas the user control panel at Site5. From there you access a user-friendly custom designed version of cPanel, named SiteAdmin. From in here, you can manage all aspects of your website including files (through File Manager), databases, emails etc. You have the ability to create unlimited MySQL databases and manage them through a pre-configured version of phpMyAdmin. Another very helpful feature is the ‘DNS Zone File Editor’ which allows for modification of DNS information. The AwStats module allows you to view statistics of you site and gives you an overview of your website analytics. AwStats is not the most intricate analytics software, and for a better analytics view, consider Google Analytics
Joomla Specific Features
If a Content Management System (CMS) is absolutely vital to your website, you will find Fantastico within your SiteAdmin, which allows you to install many scripts including Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, etc...
Tech Support
Site5 has a reputation has a great reputation for quick response being very approachable. In order to receive tech support you have to open a support ticket which they will respond to. Site5 employs full-time, salaried tech associates. All being top level skill. The support forums for members can be found at forums.site5.com. There are around 2000 active members participating. Toll-free telephone support and live online chat are also available for sales queries.
Conclusion
Site5 spends time and care putting together a great service. Not only are the prices highly competitive, but they know how to help you and provide easy means of getting what you need. Thanks to their dedication and support, refund and bounce rates are not common. This means you’ll probably never switch hosts if you only try Site5 out.
