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IX Review: Web Hosting Review |
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| Affordable web host for intermediate users, though installation problems; no domain privacy and advertising on error pages are drawbacks | |
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IX Web Hosting is a cheaper web host, its Expert Plan falling in at $4.95 per month for a year for "unlimited" storage and data transfer, and free lifetime domain registration for one domain. IX Webhosting claims not to offer domain privacy, though you can change your registration details to anything you want. Still, we would prefer to see an option for legitimate domain privacy.
IX Web Hosting offers Wordpress and other popular options, unfortunately the Wordpress installation was not as smooth as we'd hoped. While it installed without issue, the follow-up was unsatisfactory; we were not told where to go to administer the blog, something that may not be obvious to users who are unfamiliar with the program Ecommerce solutions include the popular Zen Cart, osCommerce, and CubeCart trio. These are big ecommerce solutions, and not terribly intuitive, though they are rather robust. Installation of the popular CubeCart program yielded some inexplicable errors and we had to use the toll-free 24/7 phone support. The first call did not solve our problem, though the staff was friendly. We tested out the bundled SiteStudio website builder. It was easy enough to use, but did not offer the most attractive templates. It's not a true WYSIWYG editor, but is not too difficult to learn. We were able to see our changes immediately after hitting the "publish" button. In our performance tests, this web host did ok, but was not stellar. Uptime during our testing period was 99.80%. While that only means a downtime of 5 hours and 43 minutes over four months, the server response time wasn't particularly impressive. At .608 seconds, it came in quite a bit worse than average (which was .518 seconds for the group). The download of our 77MB test movie came in at 30 seconds faster than the average time of 1 minute 47 seconds, so it's not all bad news, but it's still not one of the fastest. By default, IX Web Hosting puts advertising-supported directories on your site's error pages. This gives the site the look of spam and it also drives traffic away from your domain. Even though we were glad to be able to turn these off and create our own error pages, it feels sneaky as it wasn't immediately obvious. It's something that, combined with a lack of domain privacy and the slow response times would push us towards other similarly priced hosts instead. |
| Cheapest Plan: | $3.95/mo 3 years |
| 1 Year Plan: | $59.40/yr; $4.95/mo |
| $ Back Guarantee: | 30-day full refund, prorated after; Unknown fee for registered domain; 24/hr registration refund |
| Domain: | Free for life |
| Support: | Email, Phone, Chat |
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