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Register.com Review: Web Hosting Review |
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| Discounted first year; frustrating limitations for advanced users but very fast; counter-intuitive for beginners | |
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Register.com, which is probably the most well-known domain registrar site, is also the most expensive hosting option. While a discounted first year is only $4.95 per month, the price shifts to $11.95 per month for twelve months after that. Alternately, you can move to a three-year contract which brings the price to $8.95 per month. Domain registration is free for life, but you'll need to pay an additional $11.00 a year for domain privacy (something we recommend for individuals).
Register.com is one of the few web hosts to set concrete limits for storage (5GB) and data transfer (20GB). What does that mean? For example, Next Advisor's site is about 25 megabytes. On this plan, roughly 51,200 people could view the entire site every month and fall within the traffic limits. While not enough for our site, it'll probably be ok for individuals. Register.com does not offer anything above and beyond in terms of bundled design applications. It uses the Fantastico brand of scripts which provides shopping cart solutions like Zen Cart, osCommerce, and CubeCart along with blogging solutions that include Wordpress. The shopping cart solutions are better suited to users with a pretty substantial inventory to sell. Those looking to sell only a few products will want to look into another solution. We installed the popular blogging application Wordpress without issue. Unfortunately, we found we couldn't simultaneously install the ZenCart ecommerce package (or a photo gallery for that matter), since Register.com only allows you have one MySQL database. This is an unfortunate limitation, and should be a deal breaker for most. You can upgrade to a more expensive $17.95/mo plan, which seems excessively high. The site construction tools mentioned above are the same you'll find with HostPapa and other cheaper hosts. Via Step is one option, and it requires you to choose a template, download that template, edit it on your computer, and then upload it again. This feels cumbersome. SoHo Launch is the preferable option, but is still not one of the best editors we've seen. It lacks true WYSIWYG functionality, and may be confusing to first-time users. Register does offer some nice piece-of-mind features. First, there's a virus scan, a feature not seen with many other web host we reviewed. This will scan your site for any infected files. It also offers automated site backups, so you can revert to an old version of your site if you need to. Register.com also guarantees 100% uptime, whereas most guarantee 99.99%. The service may still go down, you'll just be compensated for any time that it does. Uptime guarantees are a bit of a shell game, however. There are half a dozen exceptions, including planned maintenance and things beyond their control. It was difficult to find our way to the control panel from the account information screen, so a support call was necessary. Support is provided by phone, email and chat. A telephone operator picked up our call right away, but told us we could expect a 15-minute hold time for tech support. That's a long time to listen to their excruciating muzak. To avoid that, there's an online chat option as well. For all of our complaints, Register.com made a good showing in our tests, with 99.91% uptime and an average server-response time of .397 seconds. It was no slouch when it came to handling our 77MB download either. At 47 seconds it showed remarkable speed with big files. All-in-all these stats demonstrate a solid web host when it comes to data infrastructure. It had held a steady 100% uptime for three months before hitting a few bad patches in February that caused two and a half hours of downtime. Register.com offers a fairly standard 30-day money-back guarantee, but no pro-rated guarantee afterwards. As usual, you will not receive a refund for the domain, which they will charge you $35 for. All-in-all Register.com is an expensive hosting solution that is not terribly intuitive. The virus scan and automated site backups are potentially nice features, but it's hard to say if that justifies the high price tag, particularly when they come at the expense of the number of databases, and therefore modules, that you can run. |
| Cheapest Plan: | $4.95/mo 1 year (first year discount); $8.95/mo 3 years |
| 1 Year Plan: | $59.40/yr; $4.95/mo (first year only); $143.40/yr; $11.95/mo (regular price) |
| $ Back Guarantee: | 30-day full refund, not prorated after; $35 domain charge |
| Domain: | Free for life |
| Support: | Email, Phone, Chat |
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