Website Source Web Hosting Review

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Reliability:
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IP Address	Service	Status	Response Time	Last Monitored
216.177.136.22	HTTP		0.017 secs	05-13-2008 22:20:00pm
216.177.136.22	HTTP		0.033 secs	05-13-2008 22:10:00pm
216.177.136.22	HTTP		0.019 secs	05-13-2008 22:00:01pm
216.177.136.22	HTTP		0.031 secs	05-13-2008 21:50:00pm

Websitesource.com Profile and Background

Websitesource has been offering Internet services and products, and competing against other web hosting companies, since 1998. They are headquartered in Austin, Texas.

The company has access to two datacenters in both Austin, Texas and Baltimore, Maryland. In Austin, the NOC is multi-homed to network providers through OC-3 connections and OC-192 capabilities with Time Warner TELECOM, UUNET, AT&T and Digex. GlobalCenter, Qwest Communications, and Genuity are the bandwidth providers for the NOC in Baltimore.

Services and Products

Websitesource offers an array of services and products including domain name registration, virtual private services, shared web hosting and dedicated server hosting. They also offer e-commerce tools and marketing solutions with its web hosting packages.

With regards to its e-commerce tools, Websitesource provides the infrastructure for businesses to establish their presence quickly and effortlessly by offering an online store feature, merchant account support and secure environment for accepting payments.

The "Marketing Control Panel" offered with every web hosting package is a handy feature for businesses to promote themselves. It includes banner advertising, top search engine placement, newsletter management, and handy reference guides.

We found both of these features surprisingly effective and easy to grasp. For non-technical customers, this is definitely a godsend and will add great value to the Websitesource’s services.

Value for Money

We signed up for the All in One web hosting plan on an annual basis for $6.85/month with free setup. The package comprised of 40GB/month, 1600MB disk space and 1000 e-mail accounts. Compared to the other web hosting, the price is a little high particularly when other web hosting companies waiver the setup fee for annual plans. However, they do offer higher end features such as the e-commerce and marketing features which offsets the higher cost.

The control panel software employed by Websitesource to let end-users to manage their accounts was H-Sphere developed by Psoft. We found this control panel’s user interface to be relatively intuitive, easy to comprehend and feature-packed. It would definitely be competitive against other commercial counterparts like Ensim and CPanel.

We were also pleasantly pleased when we discovered Websitesource includes free access to Psoft’s site builder tool that contained over 1000 design templates to choose from.

Customer Support

It is possible to attain customer support from Websitesource through several means including its toll free telephone number, live chat, helpdesk and through its support e-mail. We decided to test their toll free telephone number during business hours, and we found it difficult locating a support representative. We tried several more times later in the day and then finally got through on our seventh attempt. From our impression, it seems their toll free phone support needs improving. We decided to give them a second chance with their live chat tool and received better treatment when a representative, “Steve G”, responded within thirty seconds of initializing the chat session.

If you do run into any problems, you can also use the company’s client support center. It provides customers with documentation including FAQs, knowledge bases, manuals and video tutorials to self-troubleshoot problems.

Network Reliability and Performance

Over the two months that we monitored our test domain, we detected seven periods of downtime that approximately totaled 70 minutes and ranging from 5 to 40 minute periods. This seems just above the norm for a web hosting company the size of Websitesource. After the downtimes, there was no official notification about what happened or whether they have taken any action to stop it from happening in the future. Websitesource needs to be more transparent in this area.

Final Words

We found Websitesource to be fairly reliable web hosting company with plenty of great products and services at mid-range prices. Its inclusion of rich e-commerce and marketing features really puts pressure on its rivals. However, certain aspects of its customer support, in particular, its toll free line lines require improvements and also more transparency when network problems arise.

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