Paid Host Reviews - Site5

I've been with Site5 for about two weeks now, and so far it's an excellent web host. The most important criteria of hosting have been nicely fulfilled by their service: the site has been up without fail for 14 days, and it responds quickly. I know this from he statistics from my alertsite.com monitor.

This hosting company has several offerings including shared (which is what I purchased) and dedicated servers. There are several tiers to each of these, more or less small, medium and large. I chose the large plan, which included 27gb of traffic per month and 600 mb of disk space.

The technical support from Site5 has been a little slow but otherwise excellent. All responses have been within 24 hours, but that is a little long for an urgent request. Fortunately, since my site has been up-and-running without fail (knock on wood) I have not had need for urgent support to date.

There is no phone number for support and the human click link seems to do nothing except generate an email requesting you go through their normal support. This could make urgent requests difficult. I do understand why shared hosting companies do not want to get phone calls (emails are much easier on staff) - but it does make them less attractive.

Site5 has a large assortment of features on their systems. Their boxes run Linux and Apache, and they support CGI, CRON, PERL, SSI, MySQL and PHP. They do not support ASP pages, which is no great loss.

They have a large variety of email features, including the usual simple text-based, single-message autoresponders (as many as you want), email forwarding (again, as many as you want) and mailing list support. I have not explored this feature much as of yet, but it appears promising.

One of the coolest features for me was the ability to park lots of domain names on my site. These domain names could be pointed at sub-folders. For example, my Renaissance Faire site is a sub-folder on my internet-tips.net site. Since the wife and I run about a dozen low volume, small sites, this enable us to consolidate everything in one place. Very convenient and it saved us quite a bit of money.

They provide direct access to the server log files via the browser and a directory path. This allows you to simply browse to them, if desired, or, I suppose, to install some script or program to perform your own statistical analysis. One downside, however - the server logs apparently contribute to using up the disk quota. On high-traffic sites this could eat up quite a bit of disk space.

Their cgi-bin directories are secure, unlike a lot of other hosts that I've tried in the past. They also support .htaccess files and have rewriting turned on.

The usual unlimited autoresponders (very handy) which are primitive one-message text files, but useful to me.

Another useful feature is a daily backup stored on the control panel as a zip file. I like to download this once a week or so to be sure I have all of my on-site data files backed up.

One strangeness I found is any file beginning with a dot (such as .htaccess) is not shown in FTP listings. These files must be edited using their control panel file manager.

Overall, an excellent hosting company so far. I'll report again in a few weeks with more information.