Just Host Web Hosting Review

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Rating:
Bottom Line:	A reasonably priced option for beginning users with non-media sites; exclusive discount code: SPECIAL20OFF
Full Review:	[Editor's note: JustHost is offering Next Advisor visitors 20% discounts on all plans except for the 3-year plan. Just enter SPECIAL20OFF at checkout.] Just Host comes in pretty cheap at $3.95 per month for three years without any set-up or registration fees, with the exception of an optional $9.95 annual domain privacy charge (something we recommend and some web hosts offer for free). Registration is free for the lifetime you have hosting with Just Host, a nice but somewhat standard offer. Also standard is "unlimited" storage and data transfer. You may also opt for a single year at $5.95 per month. A current 20% discount brings that down to $4.95, and applies to their 6-month and 24-month plans. We created a site with the included Sitebuilder which has some of the nicest looking templates we've seen. Adding our own text to them was fairly easy though not as intuitive as with a true WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. Still, it handily creates the structure and layout for a basic website. Our Wordpress blog was installed easily and instantly, which was nice though fairly standard. Likewise the shopping carts were easily installed, though Zen Cart and Cube Cart, while popular, are fairly complex to start using. These seem like good solutions for users who want to sell and manage a fairly extensive inventory. If you have fewer items, and don't want to spend a lot of time on your online catalog, you should look elsewhere. Our 83MB file took around 9 minutes to upload and we saw our upload immediately. Our unoptimized 78MB video played fine, just behind the download bar, so there were no stalls. Although it should be noted that the terms of service specify that you can't use the service for audio or video streaming, nor can it be used to distribute software. While we're not sure how serious they are about that, musicians and filmmakers should probably look elsewhere if they plan on hosting their own media content. Where Just Host really falls down is in areas related to the customer experience. There are numerous up-sell offers throughout the initial transaction. Although one of the options is a .97-a-month green hosting option, which is worth looking into if reducing your carbon footprint is important to you. Support is also limited to a trouble-ticket system, which had a 7-hour turn-around time when we tried it. Strangely enough, a toll-free number appears on a few pages. Go to Site \| View Full Comparison Chart