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  • Network Solutions Hosting As Well As Domain Review

    Network Solutions Hosting As Well As Domain Review

    If you’re looking for a feature-rich Web hosting provider, you might want to consider Network Solutions (starting at $2.99 per month, or $35.88 per year). Network Solutions offers excellent tools to register and manage a domain, and its Web hosting service is jam-packed with options. It has easy-to-use website creation tools, varied email-marketing capabilities, and a wide array of ecommerce features. That said, Network Solutions’s confusing interface, constant upselling, and other ills keep it from contending with the likes of Arvixe and Dreamhost, the Bestschemes Editors’ Choice winners for Web hosting services.

    Network Solutions offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, which is pretty standard. That said, Dreamhost offers an impressive 97-day money-back guarantee.

    Network Solutions offers a suite of products, including all things related to domain name registration, web development, web hosting, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates, custom email solutions, and online marketing.

    Here is a list of some of the services offered by Network Solutions:

    • Domain Name Registration
    • Dome Name Transfer
    • Website Forwarding
    • DIY Websites
    • Website Design
    • E-Commerce Websites
    • Web Hosting
    • VPS Hosting
    • SSL Certificates
    • Email Services
    • Marketing Services

    While many other web hosting companies focus strictly on providing the infrastructure you need to serve your site to your visitors, Network Solutions is experienced in supporting its customers along the gamut of online success, from the creation of your first site to driving growth.

    Pros:

    • Offers web design and development solutions
    • Affordable cloud hosting plans
    • 24/7 live support via telephone

    Cons:

    • Limited hosting types
    • No live chat or support ticketing options

    Features

    A Decent Range of Features But Very Basic
    To say that Network Solutions lack features would be unfair, what they actually lack is depth to the features they offer. For example, they offer SEO and social media integration but they offer it in its basic form with room to take it further if they wanted to.You can integrate PayPal into the site, check on visitor stats, and you can also add custom domains and email addresses to your admin interface. The biggest drawback is that any site you create won’t be mobile ready, to enable this you will need to create additional HTML and CSS files – which most people won’t know how to do.

    Fairly Priced

    Priced

    Network Solutions prices their web editor reasonably, packaging it with a full web hosting plan and a custom domain.  They offer two main packages, but most sites will find that they can make do with the “Small” package.  The “Large” package offers a much greater value though, providing much more storage space than typical hosting packages.

    Shared Web Hosting Packages

    Hosting Packages
    Network Solutions, like competing services 1&1, Arvixe, and GoDaddy, offers standard monthly Web hosting, and it provides additional features at an extra cost. If you don’t need a lot of fancy features, Network Solutions can be wallet-friendly. For example, if all you want is a WordPress blog, you can look at the WordPress Blog Hosting package ($3.85 per month). If you want just a SharePoint site, there is a SharePoint Hosting plan ($7.74 per month), too.

    The basic shared Web hosting plan, Essential Hosting ($2.99 per month), is designed for small businesses that just want a basic online presence. It offers 300GB of storage, 1,000 email mailboxes, and unlimited monthly data transfers. The Professional Hosting ($3.99 per month) package offers 500GB of data storage and 2,500 email mailboxes. The Premium Hosting package ($36.95 per month) is designed for businesses interested in managing multiple high-traffic sites, and it offers unlimited storage and email mailboxes.

    The basic Web hosting plan comes with a website builder with built-in collection of templates, FTP access to upload files and images, a catalog of stock images, file-sharing capabilities, and an extensive library of open source tools such as PHP, Joomla, and Drupal. If you sign up for a year commitment, the domain registration is waived. Since we signed up on a monthly plan, we were charged $15 to register a new domain.

    Network Solutions also offers a basic Web hosting and marketing package ($3.99 per month) which submits the site to local search engine results and to Google, Bing, and Yahoo. If you don’t get this marketing package, you can purchase the add-on ($9.95 per month) to your basic account. The Hosting, Marketing, and Store package ($4.99 per month) adds the ability to sell products on the site, create offers and promotions, and accept payment cards online. You can also purchase the ecommerce add-on ($7.89 per month) separately.

    Virtual Private Server Packages

    The shared Web hosting plans offer enough storage, bandwidth, and email addresses to meet the average user’s needs, but businesses that require more hosting muscle should consider virtual private server (VPS) hosting, which starts at $40. VPS provides some of the benefits of dedicated Web hosting, but at a fraction of the cost.

    VPS Essential ($40 per month) offers a virtual CentOS Linux server with a paltry 512MB of RAM, 10GB disk space, 500GB of monhly data transfers, and server management and virtualization tools Parallels Plesk and Virtuozzo. VPS Professional ($80 per month) builds upon VPS Essential with a skimpy 1GB of RAM, 50GB of disk space and 2TB of monthly data transfers. Network Solutions also limits you to just 200 email accounts. These numbers are far from impressive.

    If you want to go the VPS route, we recommend checking out Arvixe, the bestschemes’ Choice for virtual private servers. Arvixe has a choice of Linux and Windows servers, and those servers can be outfitted with up to 4GB of RAM and 100GB of storage. Arvixe also offers unlimited email and monthly data transfers.

    Setting Up a Network Solutions Hosted Site

    The Account Manager is the main interface for your Web hosting account. When you log in, you have the option to go straight into the website’s edit mode, open up email, check the domain and account settings, or go to the Account Manager. This screen shows warning messages (such as site outages, orders in progress, and so on) as well as all the components you can access with your package. The basic hosting package includes My Domain Names for managing DNS and domain settings, My Hosting Packages for managing the website and other applications, and My Email for configuring email mailboxes. After we added the ecommerce option, we saw My Ecommerce Package on this screen. We spent a bulk of our time on the Web Hosting Dashboard (from My Hosting Packages).

    A Network Solutions subscription comes with access to the built-in website builder, which let me build a snazzy-looking site very quickly. The builder opens up in a pop-up window, so make sure your browser allows pop-up windows.

    Designing superfuntechnetsol.com was quite simple with the website builder, since we just dragged and dropped elements from the menu on the left navigation bar into the page. We uploaded images, entered text, embedded YouTube, and changed the color of pretty much every element on the page. You can also drop in forms, social media links, Google Maps, and even an image gallery. You can even put in code for JavaScript and basic HTML animation on the page. Considering companies like 1&1 charge extra for custom-HTML, it was nice to have this capability available for free.

    We have one complaint with my website. Even though we registered superfuntechnetsol.com during the signup process, the website we created doesn’t point to my domain. Unlike Arvixe, Network Solutions didn’t ask what my website’s address should be, and it defaulted to a sub-domain under netsolhost.com. This wasn’t a big deal, since we just switched to My Domain Name and used the drop-down menu to point the URL to the website directory. That’s simple, but users who aren’t used to website administration would need better instructions.

    Setting Up a WordPress Blog

    WordPress Blog
    Network Solutions lets you install a little over two dozen open-source applications, including WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Owl, SugarCRM, Magento, phpBB, WebCalendar, PHPWiki, and Tikiwiki. The basic package comes with a MySQL installation, so installing these applications is quite simple. All the applications are available under the “Web Hosting Toolbox” option on the Web Hosting Dashboard.

    The actual process for setting up WordPress (or any other application) is fairly easy. You click the Add button for the application and step through the setup wizard to define the blog URL, and the administrator username and password. It’s simple, but the option to create the blog is buried in the interface.

    This is actually a recurring complaint. Because there are so many capabilities and features available, everything is hard to find. While there are multiple ways to access options, it’s still a lot of clicking. Because WordPress is listed as a “top application,” it took only two clicks from Account Manager to get to the installer, but for every other application, we needed four clicks just to get to the Open Source Applications library before we could install anything. We had to go through some of the help pages and FAQ to just find the library, and we aren’t the type to read the manual.

    Email

    Network Solutions includes email in the hosting package, and the basic plan comes with a generous 1,000 mailboxes with 1GB storage capacity each. Email accounts can be configured to use POP (so that you can use Outlook or Thunderbird) or read via a Webmail interface.

    We clicked on My Email and saw a summary of my email plan, as well as information about add-ons we could buy, such as LOQMail, an email encryption tool. When I clicked on the link to create mailboxes, I saw a form which let me define multiple users and passwords.

    Confusingly, we didn’t see the new users show up in my list of mailboxes even though the form said my setup process had completed. In fact, those users didn’t show up in my list until about 90 minutes later. There was an order summary on the main Account Manager screen but the message did not explain clearly what was going on. While clicking around the interface, we stumbled across an older-looking mailbox creation form which let me create a mailbox instantly. Even though we managed to configure that one mailbox to be a catch-all address, all the email summary screens except one showed we had not yet created any mailboxes—very odd. It was nice to not have to muck around with MX records, but we never knew what was actually happening.

    Unlike 1&1 and a few other services, Network Solutions doesn’t seem to offer any anti-spam or antivirus options, nor any applications to install. Email security would be a pain with this setup.

    Emarketing and Ecommerce

    Network Solutions provides email marketing ($5.95 per month) as an add-on. We received a one-month free trial. The add-on provides over 400 ready-made email templates to use in newsletters and email blasts, and real-time tracking and reporting on who clicked on the links and opened messages.

    The Ecommerce package ($7.89 per month) comes with a control panel to manage the catalog, customers, orders, and shipping options. You can also create a merchant account with Bank Card Services Worldwide in order to be able to accept payment cards, or use PayPal, Google Checkout, or other options.

    There is also a separate site builder to design the storefront, but it’s not as friendly as the website builder. We couldn’t really customize the site, and other than a Facebook marketing tool, an SEO optimization add-on, and a customer relationship management platform, there weren’t a lot of applications to install.

    Again, we had to manually go back into the domain settings to point the storefront to my URL, as it defaulted to the netsolhost.com domain. It would have been nice to build this step right into the storefront process, because as it is this adds needless bit of complexity to correctly setting up the store domain.

    Security Features

    Network Solutions does offers a SSL certificate to secure the site (starting at $69.99 per year) and TRUSTe ($3.71 per month) to create a privacy policy. You can lock your domain registration information so that people can’t collect your address or phone number.

    We kept running afoul of the password policy. The password for the account has to be between 8-20 characters, but you also have to have a mix of upper and lower case letters and no special characters. The email passwords, on the other hand, have to be between 8-16 characters, lower case and uppercase letters, numbers, and special characters. Additionally, there are two error messages, one for having too simple a password, and another for not having all the required elements. It would be far simpler to have a consistent password policy and a single error message explaining it. In this day and age, if the company is doing passwords correctly (hashing, SHA1, and so on), there is no reason for the site to be so erratic about its password requirements.

    Customer Service

    If you need help, you can look through the FAQs (although we managed to stumble upon a few 404 pages, which is not a good sign), or use 24/7 email and telephone support. The ecommerce technical support is only available weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST. We tested customer service by placing an 8:30 p.m. Eastern weeknight call to find out the difference between regular Web hosting and WordPress hosting. I held for 5 minutes before a customer service rep fielded my call.

    The representative explained we couldn’t install other applications on the WordPress hosting plan, but assured us that we could always switch plans if we wanted to. We spent about 3 minutes discussing updates—Network Solutions would download, but not install them—and storage requirements. We thought we saw the option for live customer support Web chat at one point, but couldn’t find it again later. It was also tricky to find an email form to submit a question. We asked how to import a WordPress blog into my account around 9:30 p.m. on a weeknight, and received a detailed answer by the morning. Not a shabby costumer service experience.

    Get Security and Technical Details Handled for You

    While you could easily host your WordPress site using the shared or VPS hosting plan, here are the WordPress-specific security features that come standard with your package and don’t require manual configuration from you:

    • Automatic update of the WordPress core
    • Automatic update of all plugins and themes used by your site
    • Whitelisting of plugins and themes
    • Malware scanning and automatic removal
    • Datacenter-class firewall
    • On-Demand Cloud Backup
    • Daily backups
    • SSL certificates.

    Also, your package comes with unlimited storage and bandwidth, set-up assistance, consultation services, and 24/7 support.

    Is This Your Solution?

    Network Solutions starts out cheap, but all the add-ons and upsells add up quickly. Everything is on auto-renew, and it’s hard to tell what you’ve bought unless you look at the detailed billing screen. Domain management is easy, but it’s not well-integrated with Web hosting. The overall interface makes everything harder than it needs to be. Experienced website administrators will love the advanced features, but less savvy administrators would be overwhelmed, especially if all they want is a quick and easy online presence.

  • Namecheap Web Hosting Review

    Namecheap Web Hosting Review

    Cheap Web Hosting UK – NameCheap Review

    Finding cheap web hosting UK side can be challenging, that is why web hosting reviews like this for Namecheap web hosting is done literally for anyone to understand without using so much term to complicate things.

    NameCheap web hosting is autonomous which means it’s not owned by a major holding company, an ICANN-licensed domain name enlistment centre established in 2000. Notwithstanding domain registration, they offer an integral range of hosting services.

    The Good Side of Using NameCheap Hosting As Cheap Web Hosting UK Alternative

    Here are the aces (points of interest) for considering NameCheap Hosting. There is a great deal of NameCheap Hosting surveys online more often than not with client created audits in light of stories and individual experience.

    Cheap Web Hosting UK – NameCheap Pricing

    NameCheap’s essential favourable position is their pricing/valuing for cheap web hosting UK offers. In any case, cheap is not really the same as great esteem. To make sense of that, we need to perceive how hosting evaluating is organized.

    Web hosting organizations are for the most part offering a similar thing home for your website yet they all have diverse plans with various tops, distinctive rewards and distinctive restoration costs. For most, making sense of their actual esteem requires a breakdown of various parts.

    To look at “one type to its logical counterpart” among hosting organizations, I separate things into Core hosting components and Bonus hosting highlights.

    Web Hosting

    NameCheap Web Hosting Pricing

    • NameCheap Shared Hosting
    • NameCheap has four pricing levels.
    • Esteem recharges at $38.88/yr;
    • Professional renewal at $78.88/yr;
    • Ultimate renewal at $129.88/yr;
    • Business Pro recharges at 17.98/mo.

    Every one of the plans accompanies a low introduction pricing as low as $9.88/yr for the Value plan. The catch is that every one of the plans is topped on two of the three “D’s” notwithstanding different tops.

    Here’s the way the plans work out.

    Value/Esteem: Limited to 3 domains, 20GB in disk space, 50 databases and 50 email accounts.

    Proficient/Professional: Limited to 10 domains, 50GB in circle space, 100 databases and 100 email accounts.

    Extreme/Ultimate: Limited to 50 domains.

    Business Pro: Limited to 20GB in circle space and 5000GB in transmission capacity.

    Regardless, NameCheap’s plans have such a variety of limits that it’s truly difficult to contrast them straightforwardly with other organization’s hosting plans.

    Be that as it may, here are the means by which it finishes up. If you anticipated remaining under those caps, NameCheap hosting is quite often less expensive than the plan you would pick at another hosting organization.

    In any case, NameCheap’s estimating/pricing is a strongly preferred standpoint.

    Organization Brand and Values

    NameCheap is an exclusive autonomous hosting organization. That is an irregularity in our current reality where a bunch of companies claim about all hosting brands. Being private and free is not really something to be thankful for, and being claimed by a substantial partnership is not really a terrible thing.

    In any case, where NameCheap exceeds expectations as an autonomous organization is characterizing their image esteems and going for straightforwardness in a famously befuddling industry.

    NameCheap has reliably given cash and assets to Internet flexibility and security.

    They are corporate accomplices with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and FightForTheFuture.org the two associations battling for the essential framework of the Internet.

    NameCheap web hosting is likewise straightforward about every one of their services and evaluating. They have an expandable rundown of all their hosting elements, and how they unmistakably show recharging/renewal rates.

    Generally speaking, they are an organization that is dependable with a strong culture.

    Account Management

    Much the same as any new item agreeing to accept another web host can be both overwhelming and energizing. The way toward getting another client up and running is a basic piece of evacuating/pricing is the overwhelming part and adding to the fervour. In business language, the procedure is called “onboarding.” And nothing will make the lament like a confounding onboarding process.

    In a perfect world, accepting a hosting plan, you’d promptly get your sign in certifications and have the capacity to either go to a guided instructional exercise or have the capacity to sign in specifically to your new dashboard.

    NameCheap does precisely that. They convey an appreciated email where you can log in specifically to your services or take control of assets.

    Their record backends are spotless and moderate. There are no blazing flags or hard upsells. Their WordPress install programming introduces a spotless adaptation of WordPress with no extra modules or subjects.

    Also, a basic, moderate backend.

    NameCheap Hosting Account-Management

    It’s an administration all around custom fitted amateurs searching for a super-modest yet clear web hosting organization.

    Choices and Reinforcements/Backup and Datacenter

    At joining, they offer between their US server or UK server. It settles on them an extraordinary decision for non-US clients who are serving web guests nearer to the UK than the US.

    NameCheap additionally does 2x week after week backup of your hosting account. While you ought to do reinforcements/backups yourself. Also, reinforcements/backups are incorporated for nothing with NameCheap.

    Generally, it’s a paid or constrained reward highlight at other contenders.

    The bad side of Using NameCheap Hosting

    As any web has, NameCheap Hosting has weaknesses. Here are the cons that found while utilizing NameCheap for hosting.

    Plan Limitations

    namecheap

    NameCheap places tops/caps crosswise over domains, disk space, databases and email addresses. On the off chance that you have 1 to 2 website that you know will remain little, NameCheap can be incredible. Be that as it may, for some website proprietors the issue isn’t in the tops themselves, however in how NameCheap has a few covering tops.

    Many hosting organizations level out their plans, however, they, for the most part, concentrate on maybe a couple caps to isolate the plans. For instance, HostGator’s Hatchling Plan permits 1 domain while the Baby Plan permits boundless domains. The distinction is exceptionally clear. When you need to add on another site, at that point your overhaul.

    With NameCheap, you have a few update triggers. In the event that you have a solitary site with a bunch of pictures and video, you could hit the overhaul trigger. If you are running a few little ventures on various domains, you could hit the overhaul trigger.

    Also, amusingly, if you pay for NameCheap’s best plans, you could even get constrained by the measure of disk space. They offer the plans for web-based business websites that need a ton of memory despite the fact that the arrangement itself intensely tops disk space, which online business sites require more than they require various domains.

    In any case, NameCheap’s constraints are an inconvenience in light of the fact that there are also a number of them that requires extra arranging when obtaining.

    Distributions and Performance

    The main occupation of a web has is to serve website records when somebody writes in your domain name, however, most concur that there’s a missing qualifier. It ought to serve website records rapidly.

    To state website speed is critically is a buzzword, particularly at the time of portability. While server speed is not by any means the only factor in general website speed, it is a critical factor.

    Furthermore, basically, it’s likewise a “bottleneck” factor. As such, regardless of how quick you pack or accelerate your website, you can just go as quickly as your server can react.

    Measuring server speed and reaction time is a confounding issue. Just the system engineers at NameCheap can conclusively say what’s new with server speed however they do guarantee “much of the time, our Shared Hosting is half speedier than alternate folks.”

    Be that as it may, anybody can gauge a ballpark metric of server execution. It’s called Time To First Byte (TTFB) and indicates how rapidly a server conveys the primary byte of data after it gets a demand.

    Presently, TTFB is best measured as a pattern. However, essentially taking a gander at NameCheap’s server data makes it seem as though they don’t just top their plans, they additionally top the real servers the websites keep running on.

    Presently like the plan caps/tops server allocation are not really a terrible thing. If you have a little site with few pictures, at that point you’ll probably never know the distinction.

    Client Support

    Client bolster is famously difficult to judge. It’s difficult to recognize what is truly going ahead off camera and whether an organization will be useful when you get in touch with them.

    Such a large number of client provided online audits of any organization are either gullibly positive or overstated negative encounters. Also, with accounts, you never know whether you are perusing around an erratic or a genuine pattern.

    Rather, you should search for markers of whether an organization regards client benefit as a cost or a venture. At the end of the day, would they say they are attempting to minimize expenses and amplify benefit for here and now or would they say they are attempting to create glad, long haul clients?

    The two best pointers I’ve found are accessibility over the scope of help directs and interest in DIY client bolster.

    For accessibility, they have visit and helpdesk. Also, it’s typically great administration for me. Be that as it may, in some cases content based help can get monotonous when you have a convoluted issue.

    To the extent DIY client bolster assets, they have an average knowledge base, however, it’s centred principally on domains not hosting.

    NameCheap Specialty Is Not Hosting

    NameCheap is a matter of first importance a domain registration centre. Indeed, one reason to utilize them for domain registration is that they make it so natural to buy a domain and direct it toward hosting or email services somewhere else.

    In the more extensive Internet services industry, domains and hosting are common supplements. Hosting organizations that offer domain registration, for the most part, finished value them and make domain administration an agony. Domain organizations ordinarily don’t have the ability or assets to run a world-class hosting framework.

    Saying this doesn’t imply that it isn’t possible or that a few organizations don’t approach. Be that as it may, it appears like hosting and domains resemble espresso and breakfast.

    They ought to be sold together, however, it’s normally not a perfect circumstance. Regardless of the possibility that NameCheap’s hosting was fantastic despite everything, be reluctant basically in light of the fact that it puts all Internet presence with one organization.

    Extra Features Of NameCheap web hosting

    While NameCheap has a genuinely total list of capabilities for each plan, they do reject some extra components.

    To start with, their money back promise is short. NameCheap does 14 days. In any case, corporate hosting contenders offer 45 days.

    They overrate some of their overhauls/upgrades like dedicated IP addresses generally fundamental for introducing SSL authentications. They charge $24/yr when most organizations charge $2 or package it for nothing.

    Neither of those focuses is an immense weakness, yet together they frame yet another hindrance to knowing about.

    Conclusion

    Generally, NameCheap web hosting is a decent spending plan hosting alternative. On the off chance that you are beginning a little website, concerned more about cost than plan constraints, NameCheap will function admirably.