Web Hosting Columns

After reviewing many webhosting customers I was impressed to find that despite the abundance of negative reviews most hosting companies continue to do business. One such company is Lypha. This hosting review is in no way biased to them.

Founded in 2002, Lypha has managed to remain online for over 6 years with a clientele. They offer Linux shared hosting, reseller program, dedicated servers and domain registration, and are located in Washington, United States.

They Survived…

Lypha host must be doing something right that is unknown to online marketers. It has been ranked among the worst webhosting companies since its inception. They have been bashed by every hosting review that I know and they are one of the only few hosting companies with more negatives than positive reviews.

Yet they have remained a strong service provider for so long? May be there is an answer.

You Get What You Pay For

You can get 3GB space and 150GB data transfer per month for only $7.95. This will attract almost every webmaster that needs a lot of space for little money. So eager newbies are most likely to buy, only to discover what everyone else has been saying… later.

Another reason could be our reluctance to research. Although we live in the information age, many people hardly do any research. Gallup found that a whopping 43% of net users never “googled” or “wiki” anything before delving in. Creating a large market for webhosting companies like Lypha.

Why All This Bashing?

Most of the complaints against Lypha is about huge downtime and poor support. One client notes that he averages for downs per day, a similar tone, although far fewer, common among all complaints.

But some services are not buying this. One website that tracks website uptime, Internet Seer, rebuked Vista’s claim showing instead a 99.995% uptime for Lypha. Vista has since upgraded its stats to reflect the new up time.

This makes you wonder to what extent can we accept the reviews of an online user, who could be just a competitor trying to destroy Lypha.

But even on Vista, Lypha could only manage a “40 positive votes … and 35 negatives”.

Just A Reseller

None of the review websites took time to point out that Lypha is a reseller of imhosted.com. This is bad news for webmasters, as imhosted.com does not have a better reputation. We rank Lypha at the lowest grade of 1 star and hope that they can one day provide better service.

Overall rating: 1/5

When you first look at Alps HOST one can get the feeling that this another cheap, fly-by-night, no good hosting service. After all, there are some 8,000+ web hosting services online with five new ones popping up every day. Yet a closer look and some investigating may give one the overall impression that this may be the “Google” of web hosting.

Firstly, there is nothing flashy about the Alps HOST website. No savvy design, no flashy banners, no scrolling bonus or eye grabbing ad. Just a plain, simple Google –like hosting website. With everything right where you can find it.

Low Priced Packages

Secondly, and this may be the only reason, visitors can’t help but notice the low priced hosting packages starting at $3.95. Throw in a couple of freebies and you have buyers. Or, so we imagine. But whatever it is, people have been buying up this cheap web hosting – (Ad Spy).

Alps HOST also offers reseller hosting and domain names. All this on a windows platform. But it may be worth the while hooking up with them, after all they seem to have out spaced Google with their customer service.

100 Positive reviews

So far they are leading the “favorable reviews” competition on both Vista and Web Host Talk. So far this year Alps HOST has over 100 positive ratings and zero negatives. But what was most impressive was the consistency in the reviews: great and rapid customer support, superb uptime, excellent technical support – but zero spam tolerance.

Vista gives Alps HOST a 99.98% uptime, further backing up clients review. It does get worse on Web Host Directory where almost all 41 reviews rated their Alps HOST experience as 4 out of 4, or A+.

Not Flawless

But Alps HOST is not without its share of negatives. Management tends to exaggerate information on their website. At one point they listed being in business since 2004, but a check with WhoIs shows a website creation date of February 2005.

Another alarming watch point is that while the company claims to be in Germany, their servers return a US base location. Further checking with NIC confirmed a US based company. While we consider it normal to be located in a different country than your servers, one would prefer to know from the management and not some watch dog group.

Top Ratings

Finally, while we cannot deny that Alps HOST is indeed a superb, or even Google like webhosting company, we ask the management to be more transparent with technical and logistical information. We give Alps HOST a 4 star rating.

Overall rating: 4/5

One of the oldest web hosting services online is QWK.net, a privately owned webhost located in Boise, Idaho and has been in the hosting business since early 1998. They have provided solid linux hosting in a secured environment to tons of webmasters. Apart from a few PR glitches years ago, they have done very well as a top hosting service.

Excellent, but not so cheap service

QWK.net has five hosting solutions, three of which are considered Budget plans, costing less than $14.95. The others are more expensive. Budget plan for most webmasters means under $5. Yet this has not been enough to stop the tons of webmasters from buying QWK.net services. Their support and service has a lot to do with that.

QWK.net’s Budget plans come with standard features and bandwidth. They have since increased their web space to 100mb baseline to 1GB for the highest of the three budget plans.

First Class, Rapid Customer Service

Support at QWK.net is quick and responsive. They provide 24/7 email, office-hour phone support, and an emergency toll-free phone number. QWK.net’s support department is renown as courteous and knowledgeable. Most webmasters, even those who complained, could not help but state how satisfied they were with the QWK support.

Security and Servers

QWK provides a stable network with dual OC-48 connection and they back it up with a 99.9% Uptime Guarantee and a 30 Day Money Back Guarantee. Or so they write on their website. However, Vista and Web Host Directory rank them a bit higher for uptime, 99.92%, and gave them an “A” for secured servers.

Qwk average uptime is 99.992% with total 78528 successful and 6 failed checks, Vista states in report monitored since 2006-01-29.

One may note that QWK.net shows little favoritism when it comes to its security. In 2006, QWK.net claiming the possibility of “security” risk, closed the account of one of its largest customers, Tiffy, amidst an outstretched battle on nudity and coding security issue.

Among The Top 10

Most host review companies rank Qwk in the top 10 web hosting companies. And a few even place it in the top five aside Godaddy and Rackspace. In the words of one review “QWk Budget plans offer only the standard features, … support and network more than make up for it.”

This many reviews continue to highlight, and users prefer a solid host even if they must pay a bit more. We proudly give Qwk a five star.

Overall rating: 5/5

Superbhosting.net offers three basic hosting plans for customers. They offer their Blog Hosting starting at $2.50 a month, their Unix Hosting starting at $6.50 a month and their Windows Hosting starting at $8.50 a month. They also offer what they call Universal Web Hosting which starts at $6.50 a month, and they have what they call and infinity plan which allows you to get unlimited traffic. This last plan is a complete web hosting solution that is intended for any type of customer, novice thru professional.

Superbhosting.net also offers several dedicated server plans that start out at $59 and go up to $199 a month. If you go on their site and look at their plans and don’t find one that really fits your need they also offer custom hosting plans. They can customize a shared hosting plan and/or a dedicated server plan to fit your needs. You can choose a monthly, quarterly, bi-yearly, 1 year, or 2 year billing cycle.
Advantages of Superbhosting.net are the hosting plans themselves. I find that they offer really flexible plans for a flexible price.

The Blog plan is great for anyone with a blog or a small website. It starts at $2.50 a month and it is primarily designed for Wordpress blogs. Superbhosting.net also offers a 30 day money back guarantee for all shared hosting plans. All shared hosting plans have no setup fee if you choose a 1 year or 2 year prepaid billing cycle. They offer a live sales chat, which is great so you can ask all the questions you need before deciding to sign up. Their knowledgebase, online wiki, is extremely helpful if you have doubts when already setup with a plan. They also have a support ticket system along with dedicated phone numbers to provide, what they say, 24×7x365 customer support.

Some of the things about Superbhosting.net that stand out to be problematic is their infinity plan. They offer unlimited traffic with this plan as a way to attract more customers. This can turn out to be problematic if they are overloaded with traffic from different websites they are hosting. Other than this everyone seems to be extremely happy with the service this web hosting company provides.

With different hosting plans, and manageable hosting rates Superbhosting.net is among the leaders in hosting. Incorporating a blog hosting plan is brilliant, since so many people have blogs because of their popularity. No doubt, Superbhosting.net is truly superb.

Overall rating: 4.5/5

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