Just Host Review: Web Hosting

Rating:

Bottom Line:

A mid-priced option with solid performance but poor customer support and policies

Full Review:

Just Host is reasonably-priced and does have some cool features, but its limitations and confusing customer support keep it from being a top-rated web hosting service.

Pricing

Just Host falls in the middle of the range price-wise at $3.25 per month for 4 years without any set-up or registration fees. If you want domain privacy (something we generally recommend and which some web hosts offer for free), you'll pay an optional $9.95 annual charge. Registration is free for the first year with Just Host, a nice but somewhat standard offer. Also standard is "unlimited" storage and data transfer. If four years is too long for you, Just Host offers a range of plans from 3 years down to a single month, that run from $4.95 to $8.95 per month respectively.

Basic Features

JustHost Control Panel - Click to enlarge

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 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 to a host with simpler tools, like HostGator or FatCow.

JustHost Site Builder - Click to enlarge

Advanced Features

For advanced users, Just Host offers unlimited MySQL databases and support for SSI, Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby on Rails and CGI. Shared hosting accounts use servers running on the Linux operating system, and users do have shell access (SSH). This makes them a fairly average choice for the advanced web hosting user.

Usability

JustHost is pretty average when it comes to usability, pairing the fairly-standard cPanel control panel with a few innovations of its own. We weren't big fans of the popups that appeared over the interface periodically, but had no trouble finding most features in their standard locations. We did have some difficulty getting our domain privacy set up correctly at first

Performance

In the specs department, Just Host is a decent performer with fast data transfer speeds. See the chart below for details. For uptime, higher percentages are better. For all others, lower numbers indicate better performance.

Just Host test data:

	Justhost	Group Avg.	Group Best	Group Worst
44-Mo. Uptime Score	99.86%	99.84%	99.98%	99.30%
44-Mo. Avg. Response Time:	0.863s	0.618s	0.151s	0.1463s

Despite these impressive stats, 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.

Customer Support

Where Just Host does fall down is its customer experience. When checking out, we were constantly hit with offers for various add-ons. There's no shopping cart, no checkout system that allows you to review your purchase before you're charged, so when we inadvertently added a $50.00 search engine submission product, it was ours. Even when we immediately contacted customer service to notify them of the error, we could not get a refund. Also, as we noted above, a request for domain privacy also didn't work the first time we signed up for it.

The support is primarily limited to online chat and a trouble-ticket system. You may also find a number for telephone support, but our experience with that support system was not great. After a long hold time we had a disappointing call; we were advised to just send an email support ticket. The trouble ticket had a 7-hour turnaround time when we tried it the first time. Subsequent tries were within the hour turnaround time promised, but the policies are not customer friendly. That being said, we think that their pro-rated refund policy is pretty decent. If you're unhappy with them, they'll refund the remainder of your term (minus $20.00 for the domain registration).

Conclusion

Though JustHost was fairly good in many areas, lots of add-on charges, pop-up windows and unsatisfying customer support give us pause.

Service Details:

Cheapest Price:	$3.25/mo
Storage/Data Transfer:	Unlimited
Money-Back Guarantee:	Prorated refund
Domain:	Free for 1 year
Support:	Email, Chat

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Just Host Review
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