Web.com (Interland) Web Hosting Review

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Reliability:
Value:

IP Address	Service	Status	Response Time	Last Monitored
64.226.3.45	HTTP		0.106 secs	05-13-2008 22:20:00pm
64.226.3.45	HTTP		0.104 secs	05-13-2008 22:10:00pm
64.226.3.45	HTTP		0.126 secs	05-13-2008 22:00:01pm
64.226.3.45	HTTP		0.108 secs	05-13-2008 21:50:00pm

Interland.com Background and Profile

Interland is a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ, INLD, and has been in business since 1995. The company is headquartered in Atlanta, GA and with data centers in Atlanta and Miami, FL.

Each of Interland’s data center features multiple Gigabit Ethernet connections to the Internet via diverse entries, diverse paths, and diverse POPs through four of the world’s leading IP transit carriers.

One good aspect of Interland is its strong balance sheet and its intentions to grow not only organically but also through acquisitions. Between 2000 and 2003, a lot of large web hosting companies disappeared during the end of the dot-com boom era, and to see Interland come through fighting is an excellent sign of things to come.

Since June 1999 Interland has been on the acquisition trail in picking up companies including HostPro, Lightrealm, CommuniTech.net, Dialtone Internet and web hosting assets if AT&T. This has allowed it to become established across a spectrum of market segments. We can say with certainty that Interland is here for the long term.

Services and Products

Interland predominantly services the small to medium businesses market with its web hosting offerings that includes virtual private servers, shared, and managed dedicated accounts, e-commerce, value-added services for dedicated plans, and managed services. Not all these services are seen through its website but are available through its subsidiaries and other companies it has acquired in the past.

Most of their web hosting services is coupled with e-commerce tools and marketing features to help businesses conduct transactions and sell/buy products online. A lot of small businesses without a previous online presence would appreciate these initiatives since the Internet is still an uncomfortable place for many small business owners.

Value for Money

Interland’s shared web hosting products probably doesn’t reflect as good value against other large companies like lunarpages or Powweb. The plan we purchased was the called Linux Value priced at $9.95/month – same as the Windows version of the plan. It features 1GB of disk storage quota, 25GB monthly data transfer, and 25 POP e-mail accounts. If you need more disk space, the price can be fairly stiff with a mere 1MB costing an extra $0.25/month. Our plan did not provide access to a Miva Merchant either.

The properitary control panel adopted by Interland seems to very clunky and bland. If you are moving from a web hosting company that used hosting panels like CPanel, Plesk, H-Sphere or Ensim, you will be disappointed. It only provides the basic necessities in managing your accounts like e-mail, databases and file management.

Customer Support

There are several avenues that you use to contact their customer support department with Interland. They offer a 24x7 support phone line, live chat, and its customer resource center. We decided to test their phone support and were pleasantly greeted by a human operator within a minute. We asked both technical and general questions regarding our account. For the general responses, it was acceptable but when it came to technical questions, they would try to transfer us to a higher support representative but failed on several attempts and told us they would call us back. It took a day and a half for that to happen.

If you are willing to will try and troubleshoot your own problems, Interland do offer a vast resource of documentation buried in in-depth FAQs and guides.

Network Reliability and Performance

Over the two months that we monitored out domain name, we detected 4 period of downtime ranging from 5 to 15 minutes. It results in a total of 45 minutes of downtime. We were expecting less as Interland is presently the largest web hosting company and have the financial power to really invest into its network and servers. However, to keep things in perspective, this is better than half of the web hosting companies that we have reviewed so far.

Final Words

You can be sure Interland will not be one of the many web hosting companies that can disappear overnight with its financial muscle and market share in the web hosting industry. However, the premium that they charge on web services is a little high considering the features provide, and the up-and-down customer support that they offer. We are not saying they are an average web hosting company, but to really be a top notch service provider, they will need to address these concerns.

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