Easy CGI Web Hosting Review

Visit Easy CGI Website

Support:
Features:
Reliability:
Value:

IP Address	Service	Status	Response Time	Last Monitored
66.245.184.4	HTTP		0.698 secs	05-13-2008 22:10:00pm
66.245.184.4	HTTP		0.651 secs	05-13-2008 22:00:01pm
66.245.184.4	HTTP		0.629 secs	05-13-2008 21:50:00pm
66.245.184.4	HTTP		0.943 secs	05-13-2008 21:40:00pm

EasyCGI.com Profile and Background

From a regional Internet Service Provider (ISP) established in 1994, Easy CGI has now become a global web hosting company that competes for both small business and corporate clients. The company is headquartered in Nyack, NY, and operates its own data center in the same location. However, very little information is released regarding the facility and its network providers. From our investigation, we know the company utilizes Internap as one of its network/bandwidth providers. This is a great sign as Internap is a very reliable and premium network.

Services and Product

Easy CGI offers a compact but good range of web hosting services and related products including shared and server co-location packages. The company also offer web site design and development, domain name registration and secure certificate products that would compliment businesses wanting to accept payments or other sensitive data over an Internet connection.

Its shared web hosting services is Windows only so it doesn’t allow consumers to have a choice in what platform they can use and for web designers to select the development tools of their choice. The price starts from $9.95/month on a monthly term contract.

Server co-location plans is priced from $99.95/month but only has a fairly limited specifications for the cost. The “Basic Co-Located Server” package is the lowest priced plan offering just 10GB of monthly data transfer, 16 IP addresses, and housing space of between 1U – 4U. This isn’t the great value for money but on a premium Internap network, it really is about quality and what your web hosting requirements are.

Value for Money

For our web hosting review on Easy CGI, we decided to try its basic web hosting plan that we purchased on a yearly contract that was discounted from $9.95 to $7.96/month. The package came with very limited features, such as, 3GB disk storage space, 50GB monthly data transfer, and 50 e-mail accounts. What made it even more disappointing, which we found after a few days after the purchase, was the lack of Microsoft Frontpage support, limited MySQL/SQL databases and no daily webtrend statistic updates. These are very much in demand tools and features nowadays for the ever growing sophisticated consumers. They may never use it but it’s always good to have it when the need arise.

The control panel employed by Easy CGI certainly needs an update in our opinion. It was only able to manage the basic web hosting account functions, for instance, e-mails and billing. If you are used to feature rich control panels like CPanel, Plesk, H-Sphere or Ensim, you’re in for a bit of shock.

Customer Support

The support offered by CGI Easy is either through the phone, support form or e-mail address. When we attempted to contact the support department using the phone number published on the web site, and during business hours, we was redirected to the voice mail three times. We got through on the fourth attempt. The support form/e-mail will also average around 24-48 hours response time from our experience with it. Customer service and support really need to be addressed by Easy CGI since it is really letting it down. We would like a support ticketing system or even a live chat tool that added to its support arsenal since it provides greater response or better tracking of support queries.

Network Reliability and Performance

Our in-house monitoring tool detected no down time over the two month period. This was expected by us since Internap is well regarded to be a premium network in terms of not only reliability but also performance. It constantly monitors network congestion and redirect data packets to the most efficient routes. This is one aspect of the web hosting company that we are pleased with.

The website, hosted on industry proved Dell Edge servers, was constantly responsive and every site request was delivered quickly.

Conclusion

There are certainly areas where Easy CGI can improve on as described in this hosting review to better compete with other major web hosting companies. Improved customer support, more generous package specification, and an advanced, featured, intuitive control panel is a good start since they have, in our opinion, did not meet our expectations. However, if you are looking for a rock-solid web hosting, in terms of network reliability and uptime, and require little customer support then Easy CGI web hosting is for you.

Visit Easy CGI Website

More Web Hosting Companies