Globat Web Hosting Review

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Support:
Features:
Reliability:
Value:

IP Address	Service	Status	Response Time	Last Monitored
216.193.201.138	HTTP		0.55 secs	05-13-2008 22:20:00pm
216.193.201.162	HTTP		0.683 secs	05-13-2008 22:10:00pm
216.193.201.138	HTTP		0.547 secs	05-13-2008 22:00:01pm
216.193.201.162	HTTP		0.673 secs	05-13-2008 21:50:00pm

Globat.com Profile and Background

Globat is a young web hosting company founded by Ben R. Neumann in late 2001. Neumann serves as both the chief executive officer and president of Globat, who also founded another low cost web hosting business Chief Executive Officer of Internet Communications (http://www.icom.com) in 1995 and was later acquired by Sage Networks in 1998.

The world renowned data center facility housing Globat’s network infrastructure and operations is located in Los Angeles, California. It is the same data center used by giants Google, IBM and Yahoo. Level 3, Verio and Mzima Networks are the tier-1 bandwidth providers for the facility.

The company employs clustering technology for its web hosting services where key services, such as, mail, database and web servers are spread over multiple hardware platforms. This reduces the likelihood of your web site going down since when one server fails, another takes over its place. Globat has labeled this technology under the name “B2”.

Services and Product

Since Globat has targeted the budget to mid-end demographic, it makes sense to offer only services based on the cost efficient shared virtual platform. These services comprise of three primary web hosting plans with a price range from $7.95/month to $24.95/month (prices based on annual term basis), and coupled with value adding services such as e-commerce and marketing services.

Although the product lines maybe limited, it does have cost and management advantages. The business can focus on a particular market with aggressive growth, as it has done in the past, and do what it knows best. Web hosting companies that offer too many different services and products can often thin itself out and have difficulties responding to both changes in the marketplace and customer support.

For our web hosting review purposes, we purchased the “Gigabyte Package” plan on a quarterly contract for $9.95/month. If you are willing to pre-pay for two years, then this falls to $7.95/month.

Value for Money

The “Gigabyte Package” was very generous in terms of disk space and bandwidth allowances. It came standard with 5GB storage space, 5000 e-mail accounts, and 75GB of monthly data transfer. It was also the lowest price plan and so did not include a shopping cart or a shared digital certificate (used to establish secure connections between your site and the customer to gather sensitive and confidential data). We were disappointed with this restriction as other similar priced web hosting companies included it in its packages.

However, when it comes to upgrades or purchasing additional domains or bandwidth, it can start to get fairly expensive. For example, an additional 50MB storage space will set you back $5/month and $4-6 for extra GIG of data transfer. From our perspective, both charges seem rather high considering the monthly cost of the web hosting plan itself. Just be careful if you have a high traffic web site, you may live to regret it.

Customer Support

The customer support methodology of Globat consists of a ticketing system, live chat application and a toll-free number.

First, we tested the response times of the live chat tool, and a chat was initialized within 40 seconds. Our general questions were answered promptly and in detail when we asked the representative to clarify certain points.

Second, we sent in a ticket 8:20pm EST and received a reply 16.43pm the next day. The ticket included general and technical queries but the answers seem very broad and often referred us to its FAQs and Flash tutorials. We expected answers not the run around.

Lastly, we rang its toll-free support line when we found out the domain was down one afternoon. After attempting for over an hour get through to a sales/support representative, we simply gave up. To us, this doesn’t seem to the response we expected from a large web hosting business, and hope it was a one-off situation. The website came back online 40 minutes later.

Network Reliability and Performance

Over the two month period with Globat, our in-house monitoring application detected over a total of 2 hours and 45 minutes of down time. Although, this may not seem much, some web hosting companies in our top list kept a clean sheet in this area that cost less and offered better customer support.

During peak periods, we also noticed very sluggish response on our domain and sometimes inaccessible but would return to normal the next day. It may seem the web servers need an upgrade or more network capacity is required.

We expected Globat to at least be competitive with its network but are left slightly disappointed.

Conclusion

If you are a small traffic web hosting user, require little technical support and want plenty of features then Globat are the company for you. The additional space and bandwidth is expensive if you ever need it but the default specification is high, and it will take a lot of data transfer to go over the limit. However, customer support and network reliability do need some work unfortunately.

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