AwardSpace reviews – Page 2

It has it's downsides

When I was first looking for a host, AwardSpace was the only one that stuck out to me. It seemed to have a good deal with enough features for me to start a website.

At this point the technical support and customer service was great! I couldn't figure out why something wasn't working, so I sent a 'trouble ticket' and they got back to me in less than a half and hour!

The billing was okay, and the prices were pretty good. There were no hidden fees or sneaky required payments.

And they had all the features I needed...
But then I got a new website. One that was going to be a lot more powerful for my audience.

Things were going smoothly at first. I asked one of the support team if I could make a webpage accessible but without the need for a file extension. They simply said "I don't think so."
I figured out that in order to do that, you can make a directory with the page title, and inside that directory, the index.html will serve as the main page. They could have told me that.

My website was getting more popular. I realized that my traffic plan was too small for the traffic I was getting. Before I reached my traffic limit, I sent an trouble ticket, e-mail, and tried to post on their Facebook page about how I can upgrade my traffic. No answers at all! I even tried calling them, but after the third ring, I got the dial tone. They ignored my call.

After 3 days, they responded to my trouble ticket. They gave me a link to upgrade my account, but the link didn't work.
My website was suspended for over traffic!

The error message told my I could upgrade my traffic from the "Upgrades" section of their website (See here: http://zanzlanz.com/notes/). I went to the upgrades section and there wasn't anything about updating traffic.
And it's 3 weeks later, and I still haven't found an answer.

I still recommend this hosting service, but be careful, because taking the wrong turn at any step can lead you to fall into mud.

Biggest Pro: Very reliable for any website.
Biggest Con: Not very helpful for changing plans

They are incompetant.

Did free hosting for nearly a year, paid to have registration transfered. Original registrar sent me electronic key to unlock domain which I forwarded to them, Awardspace. After two weeks, no transfer and my website is still down.

Customer service sucks and is virtually non-existant. I submitted 4 tickets and no response. I am in process of disputing charge with credit card company for non-service and no good provided.

Needless to say, I'm looking for another provided and NOT going with a 'free' hosting.

They are often hit with DNS attacks and my sites has been up and down. It seems like two/four weeks up, two/three days down. They rarely admit it though, when my simple site takes more than 30 seconds to load, I know something is wrong.

IMHO, Awardspace sucks donkey balls.

Biggest Pro: free (caveat emptor)
Biggest Con: no customer service

Variable quality

I moved from fatcow to AwardSpace because I was fedup having my website being very slow and even down regularly.

During the 3 month,
I had to go through 2 sever problems:
-Once the FTP did not work
-The second time (today) the website has been down for 12 hours now (and still down).

Both time I sent a mail to the tech support who aknowledged the problem and apologised for it,
but did not want to give any detail about what the problem was nor how long it would take.

Otherwise the connection was pretty fast (at least a lot faster), and the sever support the lastest verion of PHP.

I adise to use this host only for people who don't care having their site down once in a while. The rest of the time the quality is pretty good. (Actually we kind of pay for it)

Biggest Pro: Acceptable connection speed, Latest PHP version
Biggest Con: Down from time to time, Support very evasive about what is going on

Horrible Hosting

I have been using awardspace PAID HOSTING for several months.

Page load time is very poor, often several seconds. The SQL database goes down often. Email services go down often. DNS goes down sometimes. They have some services disabled by default and do not tell you that they are disabled.

Support responds fairly quickly but are not knowledgeable at all and do not speak English very well.

The cPanel has ads on it, even though I paid for hosting. Getting a private SSL certificate set up was a huge pain. They won't let you forward catch-all email addresses. Sure it was pretty cheap but I got what I paid for and now I can't get a refund.

I could go on but I think you get the idea. Awardspace is a terrible web host.

Biggest Con: Excessive downtime.

Brilliant!

Normally, I am not given to spending time reviewing things just for the sake of it. Some things, however, are so good, you feel the whole world should know.

In a word, AwardSpace hosting is absolutely brilliant. I am a free user, using a sub-domain of AwardSpace. I hopped over at least five different free web hosts before settling on this one. Each of the ones I rejected had show stopping reasons for rejection: speed or reliability issues, lack of critical features, forced ads or something else. AwardSpace has no such problem.

My site is a personal blog - not at all mission critical. It's a self-installed WordPress platform, which comes with plenty of niggles on other services: missing PHP modules, misplaced CGI folders, draconic file size limits and some file format blocked altogether. On AwardSpace, it was a breeze.

AwardSpace offers excellent tech support. Replies are quick, to the point, and resolved more quickly than most companies even register a support request.

The feature offerings themselves are extremely generous: a fair amount of webspace and bandwidth. Even these are not set in stone - I remember going over my monthly bandwidth limit due to an influx, and AwardSpace admins very kindly reset my limit.

There are two slight blemishes on an otherwise perfect system: the hosting control panel does not feature very sophisticated file managers or back up methods, and they have a fancy (and un-published) list of 'bad words' which causes 404 errors to appear when present on a particular page. While I understand that the second of the two helps prevent abuse of the free hosting system, I do wish they would, sometimes in the near future, implement a system of 'trusted' users for whom they could waive that issue.

Conclusion: I've been on AwardSpace since July 2008. And I have yet to see a reason to persuade me to look elsewhere.

Biggest Pro: Brilliant support eco-system
Biggest Con: The 'bad words' filtering system

Service and support is fantastic

I am not some professional in building web sites. I just have my own site that has 2 domain names hosted at awardspace.com (the 2 different domains lead to the same site). The site I use is just for my hobby in fact my son helped me build the site and I maintain it during the last 9-10 months.

I've been with them for just under a year and only had 2 downtimes for about 5-10 mins each. If you know anything about hosting, you know that is AWSOME. I am really happy with AwardSpace hosting, costumer service very fast to solve the problem. I would recommend them to anyone.

The really go over and beyond the call of duty at all times. I already renewed my hosting for 3 years this instead of just the year I currently have. I even paid a discounted price on that.

Biggest Pro: Good service
Biggest Con: So far none

Until now, the best one I found

Since the beginning of June I'm a customer of AwardSpace. After having left my old host due to billing reasons I had to find a host that was fast, cheap, that had lots of space for my files and a considerable amount of bandwidth and, above all, reliable.

I had a free account in AwardSpace in which I kept files for back up etc And since I got to know AwardSpace I always found it a good host not only for the space in free accounts but also for the control panel's simplicty.

Now I'm very happy with the service and I hope that it'll continue like that. Just two small issues I cannot hide from the review. At the beginning I was surprised by a suden downtime of my website. I mailed the support and in ten minutes got the answer back telling me that the server had to be fixed due to some problem. I just think that they could have mailed all the customers that had websites hosted in that webserver instead of waitting for a "What's happening to my website?". The other problem is that the control penel is missing an extremly important feature - backup. When I want to back up my files or compress all of them for once in a zip file or something (like we can easily do on CPanel) I have to do it manually.

However, I'm very very happy. I would recommend it to anyone who asks me which host he/she should choose for any type of website.

(Sorry about the language. I'm not a native speaker).

Biggest Pro: Technical suport and price
Biggest Con: Lack of back up feature in control panel

Loudest bang for your buck!

I'm very pleased with awardspace. When I first heard of them, I kept thinking: "What's the catch? Maybe they're really slow, or have restricted CGI access;" etc. Turned out it was, in fact, none of the above: their servers are lightning fast, you get excellent database support, quick and easy shell access, plenty of Perl modules installed, good to high bandwidth, and a fabulous uptime. In fact, I'm sometimes 'worried' about their free accounts, as you get so much for the less than 9 bucks a month (Max Pack Plus), that you wonder why they even bother with the free accounts.

A webhost is as good as its support. Their sales reps aren't really all that technically knowledgeable (e,g. I first inquired about the availability of "Image::Magick" when deciding about webhost, and the sales rep referred me to some other image gallery software they have). Nor do they really need to have much technical know-how, actually, as long as they're willing to connect you to someone who has. And in that department awardspace also scores high with me: you get escalated to a Tier 2 admin (or Tier 3, even) pretty fast. And they are always quite willing to assist you with whatever issue you might be having. For instance, the other day I had a biggie: a spurious upload error when uploading files with a browser (which turned out to be a small misconfiguration on their end). It would have been a deal-breaker, as my client's entire site hinges on being able to upload files in that manner. At first they acknowledged the mishap, but told me they couldn't change it (yet), and that I'd basically had to wait for the outroll of the next Apache release (or get a much more expensive VPS). After I told them that was, of course, not an acceptable solution for me, they fixed the issue after all. The morale of this story? They really DO go out of their way to help you. And it really is golden to have admins behind the scenes waiting to help you. Even with that last issue, it was clear that -- while they can of course not revamp major parts of their infrastructure for just one customer -- the willingness to help me was nonetheless clearly present, and they did come thru for me with flying colors.

Although their shell hosts do not allow for running the 'uptime' command, their servers do nonetheless not appear to be overloaded (which one might suspect could be a reason for hiding uptime); and going only by 'feel' (the slugginess of the shell prompt; or lack thereof, rather), I'd say they give you a more than decent share of CPU time. Likewise on the reachability of the server: I have yet to experience any real slow-down.

All-in-all, you just get an incredibly good deal for less than 9 bucks a month. I can't tell, of course, how all of this compares to other hosting companies around the globe; but with a service this good, I have no need to find out, either.

Nice hosting

I am a free lance web designer that signed up for awardspace April 2008. At the beginning it took me some time to get familiar with the control panel but when I managed to do this I discovered that it has a number of great features that I currently enjoy. They recently added asp.NET which I intend to use in the near future, also there is a number of php version which is also an advantage for me. It is not that I use them all but you never know.

The support people are nice and fast in their response. It rarely takes more than an hour to get an issue resolved. Well, sometimes their predefined answers are not as exact as I wish them to be, but that is not a big deal.

In very rare occasions servers have been down. In fact if it was not for their MySQL issue last month I would have given them a 10.

I guess that this is what I could say about awardspace, if you are looking for a hosting provider or want to change your existing one I highly recommend them, for their great value and reasonable prices.

Biggest Pro: Great value
Biggest Con: none

Free the Best, Paid the Worse.

They are an excellent free service, I thought that could get a better service if I pay the very reasonable monthly service fee,, I was sadly mistaken.

The control panel is very limited and outdated. I had to spend hours doing simple tasks because they do NOT have a file manager that has simple functions as file upload, install, or uncompress.

Tech department was ok could get a respond in an average of 1 hour..

The server is real slow, that was all the time. There was no difference of speed with the free service.

There is a limit of 50 mb for a db.

Finally I got my account canceled for no real reason, I never did anything against TOS, they claimed that my account activity made their server crash. That was a big excuse to get rid of me because my site had increase traffic over the last months,

I could not get my money back the good thing is that my plan only had 2 months remaining so I did not loose too much...

This is why I DO NOT RECOMMEND AWARDHOST PREMIUM SERVICE

Biggest Pro: Free service
Biggest Con: Slow server and they close high bandwith sites with no warning