JustHost.com Review
I’ve already posted that I’ve moved my web hosting over to JustHost.com and that I’m happy with JustHost.com; but I decided it was well worth actually going through what makes JustHost.com a reasonably good choice for hosting.
UNLIMITED would have to start the list.
Web hosting with JustHost.com has unlimited storage, unlimited transfer, unlimited domain hosting, unlimited email accounts, unlimited email storage, unlimited MySQL databases, and unlimited database size.
MONEY BACK GUARANTEE would have to be the second item on the list.
Not a 30-day money back guarantee, but an any time money back guarantee. If you pre-pay for two or three or four years to get the best price, you can still get a pro-rated refund if they ever fail to meet your expectations; and within the first 30-days you get a full refund (I believe they will charge you for domain registration if they provided or extended your domain’s registration, but that’s reasonable).
COST would be the third item on the list.
And honestly I shouldn’t say cost, but rather value. After all, you’re not looking for a cheap web host, you’re looking for a reliable web hosting company that won’t break the bank.
FEATURES would be the forth item on the list.
Web hosting plans include one domain (they will pay the registration fee, but they don’t provide private registration — so you may well find that you can get a better deal using another service for domain registration).
They use a fairly standard cPanel for controlling web hosting, domain, and email features. Though, one thing to note is that just because you see something on their cPanel demo does not necessarily mean that it will be included with the hosting package you order (it may be an extra charge item — though realistically none of the “must have” features are extra charge items).
They have a fairly complete list of applications that can be installed directly from their control panel, and likely any LAMP based web application will run without issue (you may need to change some of the default Apache settings via .htaccess in order to make a LAMP application run optimally).
They support Server Side Include (SSI), PHP5, cron jobs, private/custom CGIs, SPF/DKIM, custom DNS records (you have to request customer service to add records for you on a shared hosting package; but they entered a CNAME for me in just a few minutes) and just about everything else other than Apache Tomcat (Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages framework isn’t include on shared hosting packages).
SUPPORT would also need to be on the list.
Their pre-sales support is great; they’ll answer any question you might have, and generally they’re right on the money (I always test pre-sales by asking them some moderately difficult questions that I already know the answers to along with any real questions I need the answers to).
Their technical support staff is good; I probably should rate them very good. They generally take care of any issue immediately; occasionally you’ll end up having to provide them a little more detail in a response to the original ticket in order to get a resolution, but even then I’ve yet to have any issue that took them more than a few hours to resolve (though keep in mind, when it involves DNS changes they don’t control how quickly that propagates through the net).
By default they organize your hosting account with a primary domain and all secondary and external domains are “under” that in the directory structure. To avoid this you can do what I did and register a fictitious domain as your primary domain <your name>.justhost.com works well since you can be sure there’s not likely to be any collision with a real domain / zone (it would be great if they would just give you this as an option).
RATING would also be on the list.
And by that I mean that you don’t have to blindly trust what I’m saying, JustHost.com consistently ranks high on comparisons with other hosting providers. While you might find some negative comments out there, overall the reviews are positive and when viewed side-by-side with their competitors (many charging far more for less) they get great marks.
One note, the price you see advertised on the web site isn’t the lowest price you can get… if you decide you are interested, when you attempt to navigate away an automated “bot” will offer you a lower price (potentially a very low price). There may be different restrictions with the promotional price than the normal packages (I could only get the price I paid per year for a maximum of three years, but it was substantially lower than their normal four year plan — in fact, three years ran me a little more than the published rate for 12 months and a little less than the published rate for 24 months).
When you decide to buy hosting from JustHost.com, please use the advertising panel on my site so that I get a referral credit (it won’t increase the price you pay in the least) or use this link: JustHost.com.
