Apollo Hosting Review

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Support:
Features:
Reliability:
Value:

IP Address	Service	Status	Response Time	Last Monitored
66.242.28.50	HTTP		0.023 secs	05-13-2008 22:20:00pm
66.242.28.50	HTTP		0.04 secs	05-13-2008 22:10:00pm
66.242.28.50	HTTP		0.059 secs	05-13-2008 22:00:01pm
66.242.28.50	HTTP		0.025 secs	05-13-2008 21:50:00pm

ApolloHosting.com Profile and Background

Since November 1999, Apollo Hosting has been offering web hosting services and competing fiercely with other web hosting companies. The company is privately held and headquartered in the city of Austin, Texas. According to its website, the company has over 30 000 customers worldwide.

Apollo’s network operations center is multi-homed to multiple tier-1 bandwidth providers with direct fiber optic connections from Frontier GlobalCenter, Level 3 Communications, Qwest Communications, and Genuity.

Like Powweb, Apollo Hosting is a member of the Better Business Bureau.

Services and Products

The web hosting services and products offered by Apollo Hosting is basically categorized into three main market segments: shared web hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated server hosting. Such a diverse range of offerings from Apollo will lessen the churn rate of customers and the hassle of moving web host when they outgrown their existing web hosting service type.

For this review, we purchased the Value shared web hosting package on an annual term.

Value for Money

The Value web hosting plan from Apollo Hosting set us back $7.96/month on a one year contract. It offers 1GB of disk space, 50GB, 50 POP3 e-mail accounts and the ability to host up to four domain names. You will need to pre-purchase the plan for two years if you wish to pay the advertised $6.96/month.

The real disappointment with this plan compared to other similar priced offerings from its competitors is the lack of database and e-commerce features like shopping carts and Miva merchant tools. So don’t expect tool much from its Value web hosting plan.

Apollo Hosting have moved away from Psoft’s H-Sphere and switched to SwSoft’s Plesk control panel to let end-users self-manage their own web hosting accounts. As we have reiterated in the past, Plesk is a very user-friendly and easy to navigate with its Windows style icons. Coupled with the ‘traffic toolbox’ and site builder program, this is great value if you knew what to look for!

Customer Support

There are several methods to gain customer support with Apollo Hosting including online helpdesk, live chat and phone support. We decided to test their phone support as many web hosting companies seem to struggle in this area. We made several attempts during their business hours to contact them but were unable to reach either a sales or support representative. So, we decided to use their call back feature and filled out the appropriate form through the website. It stated that call backs are usually dealt within 2 hours. Unfortunately, we waited for 3 days and no call from Apollo Hosting was received. So back to step one and we tried their phone number again, and was immediately put on hold.

We waited for 7 minutes and then simply hung up.

We finally turned to its helpdesk system and sent in a support ticket. After about an hour later, we received a response from the company. As you can imagine, Apollo’s phone support really disappointed us. If you need support, try the live chat tool or the helpdesk – it seems to only meaningful way to get support.

Network Reliability and Performance

Network/Server reliability seems to another area of concern for Apollo Hosting. Our monitoring tool, from multiple locations around the globe, detected over 90 minutes of downtime in total over a two month period. This seems particularly high for a large web hosting company but it still falls with the company’s 99.9% uptime guarantee. We queried about the downtimes from its technical support department but were only given brief answers when we asked for details.

Final Words

Overall, Apollo Hosting is a genuine contender in the industry with its web hosting products and services. However, it really needs to pick up its game in the support and network performance departments since they are the defining pillars of any web hosting company.

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