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Intuit Websites Review: Web Hosting |
| Sign up for Intuit Websites | ||||||||||||||||
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| Pricey and limited plan aimed at small businesses, includes full-featured site builder, good uptime | ||||||||||||||||
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Intuit, better known for their popular accounting software Quickbooks, launched Intuit Websites, Powered by Homestead a few years ago. There's currently no substantial difference in service between Homestead and Intuit.
Pricing Intuit aims its hosting at the small business market with three packages: the Starter Package at $7.99 per month, the Business Package at $19.99 per month and the Business Plus Package at $59.99 per month. The Starter Package isn't really worth talking about, as it lacks email addresses and domain registration. The Business Package is more to the tune of the services we've reviewed here, though we have a major gripe with how Intuit presents these offerings. While they sell you on the $7.99 plan and their free trial, they aren't up-front about the plan's limitations. Most users will find Intuit's Starter Package too anemic and, like us, upgrade. At $19.99 per month, the Business package doesn't come cheap, and there are a number of limitations. You do get a domain for that price, though domain privacy will cost you an additional $12 per year. Unlike most web hosts, you'll find a limit to bandwidth and disk space. It'll still be enough for most users. The more disappointing limitation is the cap at five email addresses. This is for truly small businesses, indeed. Basic Features Intuit's big sell is its site builder, which you can either use online or download as a Windows application (sorry, Mac users). It contains a number of templates, which really vary in quality. You also have access to 250,000 royalty-free images, a useful bonus for non-photographers. The site builders are full-featured and easy enough to use, but don't necessarily surpass the offerings from some of our site building champs like Yahoo! or HostGator. Still, it's easy to add PayPal buy-links, but there seems to be no way to add a blog. Advanced Features Intuit's web hosting service is very clearly not intended for advanced users. The trade-off for the heavy focus on easy setup for beginners is that Intuit completely lacks a number of very important advanced features, including access to MySQL databases, the ability to host more than one domain, support for scripting and shell access (SSH) for advanced commands. Intuit also limits users to just five email addresses and does not provide 24 hour support of any kind. Usability We give Intuit some credit for usability. The system has a simple interface and control panel, and the sitebuilder is also easy to use. That said, Intuit is no easier to use than some of our other favorite hosts. Performance For all its expense, Intuit's performance is mixed, with better than average reliability but a slow response time. See the chart below for details. For uptime, higher percentages are better. For all others, lower numbers indicate better performance. However, note that we haven't been testing Intuit as long as most of the other web hosting companies. Intuit Web Hosting test data:
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| Cheapest Price: | $19.99/mo |
| Storage/Data Transfer: | 5GB storage 100GB transfer |
| Money-Back Guarantee: | 30 days |
| Domain: | Free for 1 year |
| Support: | Phone (first 90 days) |
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When comparing Intuit's business and business plus packages there are a few distinct advantages that that the business plus package holds. ... - Difference between Intuit business and business plus package
what is the difference between business package and business plus package? - Intuit Web Hosting Review
Here is NextAdvisor's review of Intuit Web Hosting: http://www.nextadvisor.com/web_hosting/intuit_web_hosting_review.php
