Infinology Web Hosting Review

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Support:
Features:
Reliability:
Value:

IP Address	Service	Status	Response Time	Last Monitored
66.118.43.162	HTTP		0.391 secs	05-13-2008 22:20:00pm
66.118.43.162	HTTP		0.072 secs	05-13-2008 22:10:00pm
66.118.43.162	HTTP		0.081 secs	05-13-2008 22:00:01pm
66.118.43.162	HTTP		0.075 secs	05-13-2008 21:50:00pm

Infinology.com Profile and Background

Infinology is a major web hosting company that came about from their merger with Primemaster back in 2000. This strategic move removed one of their competitors and offered the company new access to more profitable market segments, such as managed web hosting and content distribution services.

Similar to other major web hosting companies they manage and operate their own data center, which is based in Los Angeles. The building contains a diesel-fueled powered backup generator, air conditioning and is monitored onsite by security personnel. As such, this makes it ideal for businesses or users hosting mission-critical or sensitive data.

The core business of Infinology is web hosting – from shared to managed platforms – but they have a presence in other service areas as well. These include e-commerce development and services, recovery services, networking, storage, content distribution and caching, security, performance measurements, monitoring and testing, and professional consulting.

Signup Response

Before making the purchase of their web hosting service, we sent an e-mail with a few elementary questions regarding their business hosting plans. We promptly received a reply within four hours, outside the usual business hours, and we were quite pleased with this. Some of the questions were answered in detail and others were referred to the ‘customer support’ section of their website.

After scrolling through their web hosting plans, we purchased two plans that the Infinology was running specials for. It was the Starter Plans that we purchased for $49.95/month (UNIX) and $54.95/month (Windows). Since we only signed up for a month, we had to pay the $25 setup for each plan. This was wavered if buyers signed purchased the higher end plans. The whole process was very straight forward and was done over a valid secure connection. We then received the account information but waited as our anonymous domains were transferred over to their DNS.

Value for Money

Although in terms of disk storage and monthly data transfer wasn’t exactly ‘bang for the buck’, the inclusion of virtual private server technology sweetens the deal. Unlike normal web hosting plans, you have control over your own OS file system and resources similar to a dedicated server. This allows greater security and scalability since you have exclusive access to an allocated amount of system memory and processing power.

With our packages, it came standard with 500MB of storage space, 5GB of monthly data transfer, 30 e-mail accounts, and access to a host of web development tools such as ASP, PHP and database servers. The most impressive feature we liked was the Infinology Web Site Studio – a web site building program. It gave us an impressive selection of templates to choose from and we use it as many times as we liked. In addition, the control panel was user-friendly – although a little slow at times, and you could update you contact and billing information through it.

Customer Support

After settling in for more than a week after signing up with Infinology, we began contacting its support department with various questions. Firstly, there are several methods to contact the company for support. The two main methods are either by phone or e-mail. According to their website, the Infinology technical support department is supposedly manned 24 hours a day, and which we found to be true.

For our first support issue, we “accidentally” deleted a HTML file in half and rang their phone support line around 10pm EST. We described the symptoms and the technical support consultant gave us the usual responses i.e. please re-upload the file, clear the browser cache, and upload the file in ASCII mode in our FTP client. Finally, after 20 minutes of systematic testing, he was finally able to isolate the problem and gave us the advice to move the exiting content from the corrupt webpage to a new webpage document in Microsoft FrontPage.

Our second support issue was sent through using e-mail, concerning errors arising from a PHP script that we sabotaged by inputting a wrong password for a MySQL database query. We provided all the essential information regarding our account and description of the error. After two and a half hours, we finally received a response that identified the problem and gave us an exact solution. Not bad.

Network Reliability and Performance

After we have been using the web hosting services of Infinology for two months, our in-house monitoring tool showed the server we were hosted on was inaccessible for one 5 minute interval and one 10 minute interval. One of the downtime periods was planned, and we were given appropriate notice. Apart from a few hiccups, the reliability and stability of their hardware and network was outstanding with an uptime of over 99.9%, which is part of their network guarantee policy, during the two month period.

We also wish to note that the in-house monitoring tool only checks the http or port 80 of the server we were hosted on and do not check any other services, such as, FTP, SMTP and etc. We intend to fix this in the future!

Final Words

Overall, Infinology passed our lab tests with flying colors, but the intermediate down times, although few and far in between, requires some more work. As discussed earlier, the private server technology really sets Infinology’s web hosting packages from its competitors. When security and reliability are the features you are looking for then these web hosting packages are for you.

Secondly, the added-value features like the user-friendly control panel and web site building software will really make it easy for non-technical minded users. Another feature we liked was the daily backups which would give a lot of potential 9and existing) customers a peace of mind when evaluating their disaster recovery planning.

Lastly, for small businesses and corporations that wish to purchase web site hosting from a reputable web hosting company then Infinology is very good choice. They definitely offer sold and competitive packages with genuine customer support.

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