[ad_1]
The typical web hosting service can overwhelm inexperienced users with its many options. Are you going for dedicated, shared, VPS, or WordPress hosting? Linux or Windows based servers? Network Solutions simplifies the decision-making process by taking most of these considerations off the table. The web host focuses on streamlined options and domain registration so you can quickly create a shared, cloud-based website. Unfortunately, Network Solutions lacks the feature-rich offerings from HostGator, Hostwinds, and other Editors’ Choice Award winners.
Shared web hosting
If you don’t want to spend a lot of money on web hosting, shared hosting is the way to go. This cheap web hosting places your website on a server with other websites and the group shares server resources. This means that it is nowhere near the top performing web hosting type out there. Still, Network Solutions offers several wallet-friendly shared hosting options – at least to start with.
Starter ($ 5.99 per month) is the entry level, a plan that includes a website, five email accounts, 15GB of storage, and unlimited data transfers. Next up is Essential ($ 15.95 per month), a package that includes support for three websites, 1,000 email inboxes, 300GB of hard drive space, and unlimited data transfers. The Professional Hosting tier ($ 22.94 per month) supports 10 websites, unlimited storage, email, and monthly data transfers, and comes with SiteLock Premium. Finally, the Premium tier ($ 32.93 per month) adds an SSL certificate to the Professional service. These prices reflect the monthly costs. However, you can get discounts when you sign up for annual or multi-year commitments.
Network Solutions has unusual prices. The Essential, Professional, and Premium plans all cost $ 15.95 per month ($ 9.96 for the annual commitment), although Essential offers fewer email accounts and storage than the other plans. The difference between the three tiers depends on the add-ons: Professional adds SiteLock for $ 6.99 per month, and Premium adds SSL for $ 9.99 per month. If you sign up for an Essential, Professional, or Premium annual commitment, Network Solutions waives the domain registration fee. There is also an additional fee of $ 1.99 per month if you want to opt for private registration.
HostGator, the editors’ choice for shared hosting, outperforms Network Solutions by offering more features for a similar price. The hatchling plan starts at $ 10.95 per month, but an annual commitment brings the cost down to $ 3.95 per month. The plan also includes free one-year domain registration, the great Gator Website Builder, unmeasured storage space and bandwidth, and a free SSL certificate.
WordPress web hosting
Like many other web hosts, Network Solutions offers WordPress hosting. WordPress is the content management system that operates about a third of all websites. It’s easy to use and has a thriving design and plug-in ecosystem for expanding the functionality of your website. If you want to build a simple WordPress-based website, check out the three levels of Network Solution: Entrepreneurs, Growing Business, and Professionals.
The Entrepreneur plan costs $ 7.99 per month, with support for a website, 50 GB of storage, 10 email inboxes, and a cloud backup solution. A growing company ($ 13.98 per month) is building on Entrepreneur to offer three websites, 100GB of storage, 25 email inboxes, and an SSL certificate. Finally, the Professional tier ($ 18.98 per month) supports five websites, 200GB of storage, and 50 email inboxes. Bluehost and WP Engine, the co-editors’ choice picks for WordPress hosting, have superior WordPress plans. The former offers unlimited site hosting, monthly data transfers, domains, subdomains, and storage at every tier; The latter has great specs and features (like site staging and business-friendly custom plans).
Ecommerce web hosting
If you’re looking to open an online store, Network Solutions is the place for you with its ecommerce plans. The starter costs $ 7.95 per month (renews at $ 29.95 per month) and includes five email accounts and the ability to sell 25 different products. Standard pricing is $ 9.95 per month (renewed at $ 54.95 per month) and comes with 50 email accounts and a catalog of 300 products. The $ 19.95 per month Premium plan ($ 99.95 per month after renewal) lets you create 100 email accounts, store 100,000 products, and organize everything with product management tools. In contrast, the excellent InMotion Hosting has ecommerce plans that start at $ 6.99 per month (renew at just $ 11.99 per month) and have a free domain, two websites, no product limit, unlimited bandwidth, and a free one Provide SSL certificate.
Network Solutions offers email marketing tools ($ 20 per month) as an add-on, but you can try the products with a long, 60-day free trial. The add-on offers over 400 pre-made email templates for use in newsletters and email blasts, as well as real-time tracking and reports on who clicked links and opened messages. The other options include the simple $ 49 per month SEO add-on that improves search engine optimization and the $ 9.95 per month Business Directory service that keeps track of what people are saying about your company Say social media channels.
The ecommerce plans come with a control panel to manage the catalog, customers, orders and shipping options. You can also create a merchant account with Bank Card Services Worldwide to accept payment cards, or use PayPal, Google Checkout, or other options. There’s also a separate site builder to style the storefront, but it doesn’t offer a lot of customization options other than a Facebook marketing tool, SEO optimization add-on, and customer relationship management platform.
Reseller web hosting
If you’re looking to get into the web hosting business but don’t want to bother with infrastructure issues, check out Network Solutions’ reseller hosting plans through the company’s SRSPlus site. There are no annual fees, paper contracts, or volume requirements, and the plans include email, ecommerce tools, and other expected features.
Set up a website
Network Solutions lets you install more than two dozen open source applications including WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Owl, SugarCRM, Magento, phpBB, WebCalendar, PHPWiki, and Tikiwiki. Setting up WordPress (or any other application) is a pretty straightforward proposition. You click the application’s Add button and go through the setup wizard to define the blog URL and administrator username and password. It’s simple, but the option to create the blog is buried in the interface.
A Network Solutions subscription comes with the company’s website builder which we can use to quickly build a great looking website. We dragged and dropped items from the menu, uploaded images, entered text, and embedded YouTube videos. You can also enter forms, social media links, Google Maps, and an image gallery. As a nice touch, you can embed JavaScript and plain HTML code. Network Solution’s website builder isn’t as feature-rich as some do-it-yourself service website builders (Duda, Wix), but it’s free with any service plan. It’s a bit annoying that Network Solutions doesn’t offer a free trial so you can get a feel for the website builder and overall service before you commit.
We have a complaint with our website. Even though we registered our URL during the sign up process, the website we created did not point to our domain. Network Solutions did not ask for the address of our website and by default used a subdomain at netsolhost.com. This wasn’t a big deal as we just went to My Domain Name and used the drop down menu to point the url to the website directory. People who are not used to managing websites need better guidance.
Network Solutions offers 256-bit Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protection starting at $ 59.99 per year for a two-year term. You can also add the nsProtect Assured Trusted Site Seal ($ 69 per year), SiteLock Premium (starting at $ 9.99 per month), and Small Business Cyber ​​Security Protection (starting at $ 4.16 per month with an annual plan).
Reliable uptime
Website availability is an important element of the web hosting experience. If your website goes down, customers or customers will not be able to find you or access your products or services.
We use a website monitoring tool to keep track of the uptime of a test site over a period of 14 days. The tool pings our website every 15 minutes and sends an alert if the website is dark for at least a minute. Our tests showed that Network Solutions failed once for a few minutes, but otherwise demonstrated reliable uptime.
Helpful customer service
If you run into a hosting issue, you can search Network Solutions’ FAQs for answers (though we stumbled across a couple of 404 pages which isn’t a good sign). The web host also provides 24/7 email and phone support. However, ecommerce technical support is only available on weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST. We tested customer service by making a call at 8:30 p.m. during the week during Easter time to find out the difference between regular web hosting and WordPress hosting. We paused for five minutes before a customer service representative answered my call.
The representative explained that we couldn’t install any other applications on the WordPress hosting plan but assured us that we could always switch plans if we wanted. We spent about three minutes discussing updates – Network Solutions would download them but not install them – and storage requirements. We thought we saw the option for a live web chat for customer support at some point, but we couldn’t find it later. It was also difficult to find an email form to ask a question. We asked how to import a WordPress blog into our account around 9:30 p.m. on a weekday and got a detailed answer the next morning. Overall, Network Solutions has respectable customer service offerings and a solid 30-day money-back guarantee.
Is that your solution?
Network Solutions is a mixed bag. Hosting starts out cheap, but the upsells add up quickly. Domain management is simple but not well integrated with web hosting. A streamlined offering makes it easy to choose a hosting type, but the user interface can be confusing for newbies. If you want a more feature-rich web hosting service, check out Bluehost, DreamHost, HostGator, or one of our other Editors’ Choice recommendations. For more information on web hosting, check out 10 simple yet powerful SEO tips to increase traffic in your browser about your website and how to register a domain name for your website.
[ad_2]
