Upperhost is an independent business web hosting review web site. We rate hosting companies based on past user feedbacks, lab benchmark testing, and our usage with each website hosting company. If you would like to submit your company for review, please select the submit button located on top of this page.

Performance 7 Reliability 7 Customer Relations   7 Features 5 Control Panel 3 65%

Introduction

Netfirms is a Canadian web hosting company that has a huge presence in the United States. They connect to some of the largest fiber optic networks which enables them to own one of the largest internet infrastructures in the United States. Thanks to its offering of free web hosting and its catering towards the business crowd, they grew exponentially in the past few years to become one of the largest internet hosting companies.

Pricing and Value

Netfirms web hosting starts at $9.99 per month. They provide 500 MB of disk space and 10 GB of traffic. Although the features are weak compared to other web hosting companies, they are most than sufficient to be used for online businesses. For the price, you also get a free CD sent to your home with web development software. They provide twenty four hour live support and many advanced features for higher level web hosting clients. Unfortunately, at their price, the amount of traffic and disk space is very weak compared to our top ten web hosting companies.

Reliability

Netfirms operates one of the largest internet infrastructure, however, they still go down from time to time. Our test sites showed they went down at least twice per month, mostly due to network connectivity problems. Unfortunately, because of their size, when there were problems customer service representatives always told us to wait, because they didn’t have power to contact anyone to reboot a server or such. We also were disappointed that we were never compensated for all the downtime we experienced, which was a few hours when we last had a downtime.

Data Center

Netfirms operate one of the largest data centers. However, they seem to pack as much users to each server as possible. For instance, the server were were on seem to host thousands and thousands of users and we were the 200^th user connected to the ftp server at the time of connection. Unless they are using powerful state-of-the-art servers, it’s never recommended to hold so many users onto one server because of security and performance issues.  

Customer Service

Netfirms provide customer service when needed, however, the representatives sometimes had problems communicating with us and often times they have no power in assisting with downtime or server issues. They did assist us when we asked basic questions regarding our software, but for more complex questions, their answers were usually not in par with we were would expect for a web hosting company.  

Conclusion

Overall, Netfirms is a satisfactory web hosting company if you need to use with your business. They provide all the basic tools and features to host a better website. However, you can find better value and more competent customer service elsewhere.