Site5 reviews – Page 2

Site5: great support, powerful multisite feature

I switched to Site5 in February (2010), because my previous web host had been over-selling their hardware, causing my site's loading times to suffer.

I chose Site5 because they prided themselves on under-selling hardware. My site's performance immediately improved after the switch, and has remained consistently at this new level.

I've struggled with a number of technical challenges recently, such as learning how to use Mercurial and SSH access. Site5's support has been outstanding, even when the issues were not actually their fault: they are very willing to help even when there's no fault in their systems. Their responses have been fast, friendly, and useful.

Site5 has one killer feature for me: multisite. This allows me to host multiple sites under the same account, where each site is treated with full independence. For me, this simplifies my development and staging subdomains, as these no longer need to live in subfolders of the main site. This gives me a cleaner site architecture, allowing me to manage all three environments from one Mercurial repository.

Essentially, multisite allows me to organise my project the way I want.

I will definitely be recommending Site5 to any friends who are looking for web hosting.

A bright future

I've had the pleasure of hosting with Site5 for just over three years now. I stuck around when they went through their rocky period until the sale to Ben Welch-Bolen and Joel Brown. I've noticed a huge change to what was already an amazing service with increased support response times, drastic decrease in server outages fleet wide, and even snappier servers. I've also seen a huge interest from Ben in the forums and ensuring every issues is addressed professionally, timely, and above all correctly.

They have clearly communicated the fact they want your business. My experience with this clarification is how they handled a drastic increase in traffic to my site. I went from having around 1-2 GB of bandwidth usage a month to having over 950GB in under a month with the peek around 220GB in one day, over 1100 unique visits (over 2200 visits) in total. This is an unnatural traffic spike and could clearly impact the server, but despite the possible impact to others my site remained online with the server seemingly unaffected.

Words can't express how happy I was about my site staying online during the increase in traffic. I can only wonder how well the new servers must run!

Biggest Pro: Amazing support and CEO Involvement

If you want to have a TERRIBLE experience, Sign up for Site5

I've used Site5 for hosting for the past 3 years. Until recently, I used them for hobby sites. I upgraded to a reseller account and started offering credit card purchase options on one of my sites. That was the beginning of the end. During the first month, the site was down for over a week because of Site5 internal issues. Site5 only offers support via their POS chat system that is supposed to be up 24 hours/day. We were only able to get through on the chat about 1 out of 5 times and then the chat person would tell us to put in a ticket and then the waiting process would start all over again. At writing, I've been trying to get Site5 to release my site to a new hosting company for nearly a week. They finally sent me a link last night to approve the transfer. Guess what, the link is non-functioning and the morons at Site5 can't figure out what to do.

My suggestion: use Site5 if like terrible customer service, less than 100% up time and if you feel like pulling out your hair sounds like fun.

Biggest Con: customer service/support

Site5.com - No longer a good host

I have been a customer with Site5.com for 3.5 years. Their service used to be excellent and their tech support used to be responsive and knowledgeable.

In Dec 07 they transferred their hosting to The Planet and their service and uptime have taken a serious nosedive. Their uptime is terrible, they go through fits and spurts where every client on nearly every server has uptime problems and then things are fine for a while. Email problems have crept up where there weren't any before.

Tech support has taken the biggest hit of all. I used to get great email support, and they customer service reps knew me by name - not because there were problems but because they made an effort to be available. Now they blow off tech support emails for 24 hours or more, even when there is a critical problem. They waste time with questions like whitelisting an IP, when the mail server is having serious problems.

I no longer set up new accounts with them, and I'm moving my accounts off of Site5. I recommend that if you are shopping for a reliable host that you do not consider Site5.

Biggest Con: service and reliability

Site5 Rocks!

I have dealt with other companies in the past. However, this company ROCKS, and you will not be let down. The Price and the service is top.

I would recommend this host to everyone, and I do.

Biggest Pro: The Backend and Cpanel Rocks

Site5 - Awesome webhosting

I was let down dramatically by my last web host, a ton of downtime and poor support had left my website rapidly loosing visitors and was running out of options as to what I could do. I chose Site5 after a little bit of research and recommendation from a friend, and so far it has been the best web host I have used.

I didn't get off to a very good start with Site5. Unfortunately they don't accept PayPal, and while this is only a minor hindrance it does make a difference, but after a quick email to their billing department and a swift response I registered with Site5 using a credit card, instead of PayPal.

I have never ceased to be amazed by the excellent response and professionalism of Site5 whenever I have had a question, they were quick to respond to my emails and support tickets and I can't say I have ever had a problem with the server. One time I had a question about the version of PHP they were using and I received a response and had everything sorted within 30 minutes – and there are time zone differences from where I live to the data centre. I've had no downtime that I am aware of, no server crashes or MySQL errors. Never have any of my domains been slow to respond or unavailable, I’ve never had problems with the Site5 website or logging into the backstage system. When adding on domains, Site5 has picked up the nameservers quickly and on several occasions I have had my domains up and running in an hour or two, far quicker than in previous experience with other hosts. Everything just ticks over smoothly, and it's great to know that my website is in safe hands with support when I need it, I know I’m guaranteed a fast response and I don’t have to worry if my websites are going to still be there in a couple of days.

The backend panel (called backstage and account manager at Site5) is also very stunning. Visually it’s very impressive and much easier to use than the normal cPanel that comes with hosting. Everything is split up into categories at the side of the website which makes for quick access to any part of the website and control panel that you need. It also contains everything you’d expect, from Fantastico and AwStats to phpMyAdmin. Even though I had never seen the backend before I signed up with Site5 and it was a shock to see something other than cPanel there, I quickly got the hang of it and round it much more pleasant and easier to use.

A great referrals system is also included in Site5, whereby referring people to Site5 can make a fair amount of money. Even just referring a couple of friends, the amount that you can achieve through the system is very large.

Overall, Site5 is an excellent host with great value for money, extensive and knowledgeable customer service and it continues to serve me well!

Biggest Pro: Lovely backend system
Biggest Con: Can't pay via PayPal

Great host, except when they have problems!

I've been using Site5 for nearly a year now. My hosting needs started out simply as needing to have one site hosted, and then quickly spread to many sites. The plan is simple enough $10 a month. It's not one of their largely promoted specials but the plan works for me.

One great advantage to site5 is the ease at which I could add a domain. Just click a few buttons and put in my domain I want to host. No this isn't exactly a feature unique to site5, however I'm happy that I haven't run into any issues with needing to purchase additional domain add ons. Currently site5 is hosting around 10 domains for me and I haven't had any issues resulting from that as of yet.

My only complaint with site5 is the service. The great majority of the time the service and uptime are phenomenal. However once in a great while my sites will go down, and it seems that I will spend several hours going back and forth with tech support to resolve the issue. Aside from the random issue of the outages the service is great.

Site5.com

I first discovered site5 when someone on a forum advised me to take a look at them. After visiting their site, I wanted to buy hosting from them. They offer brilliant hosting packages, at very low prices. Their $5 deal (the one I'm on), offers lots of space and bandwidth for just $5 a month.

I have been hosted at site5.com for about a week now, and they offer excellent support. All the problems I had were sorted in a few minutes and they were easy to understand, and very cooperative.

I would recomend this host to everyone.