http://www.netfirms.com
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Performance |
7 | | Reliability |
7 | |
Customer Relations |
7 | | Features |
5 | |
Control Panel | 3 |
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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 didnt 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 200th user
connected to the ftp server at the time
of connection. Unless they are using
powerful state-of-the-art servers, its
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.
Other
Web Hosting Companieses
Infinology | Lunarpages | Ipowerweb | Midphase | Jumpline | Your-Site | Powweb | Websitesource | Apollo Web Hosting
| Easy CGI
http://www.netfirms.com
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