Being in the industry since 1999, ApolloHosting knows how to handle the pressure of having too many rivals in the web hosting business. Or do they? They are a EIG owned web hosting company which has changed a lot over the years. EIG owns a lot of companies like Dot5Hosting, Globat, iPage, Webhost4Life, and HyperMart. With over 30,000 customers on their account, this company was once one of the best web hosting providers there is. That is true before being acquired by EIG wherein a lot of their trusted customers had noticed a big difference with their customer support. Here is an honest review about how ApolloHosting is doing now with the current web hosting industry.
In this review I will show you everything you need to know about this company. When I review a web hosting company I like to look at features, uptime, performance, customer support, and last but not least the price tag. Then it’s up to you to decide if you want to give them a shot or not. You will soon learn why ApolloHosting went downhill, and I can’t recommend them to webmasters seeking their services.
ApolloHosting Features
ApolloHosting comes with a variety of hosting plans that appeal to a lot of webmasters. Whether your looking for a shared or VPS plan ApolloHosting has got you covered. They have a number of plans that are offered for both Linux and Windows servers. They offer over 200 tools and services which certainly makes them a feature rich hosting provider. Here is a look at the plans they offer:
Shared Plans
The Starter Plan and Prime Plans both have unlimited disk space and unlimited transfer and bandwidth. The Prime plan differs from the Starter Plan mostly in its ecommerce features. The Starter plan is $3.99 for the 2 year contract, and $4.99 for the 1 year contract. Both have a $10 setup fee.
Windows Hosting
Windows Hosting with ApolloHosting is done with IIS 6 and IIS 7 servers. They support AJAX, ODBC, and ASP.NET, and you have access to their marketing tools. Disk space, transfer and bandwidth, and domains are all unlimited. Email accounts are unlimited as well. There are 100 templates for creating your design, and 9 creator pages. You also receive power plugins WordPress, Gallery2, Gbook, and phpBB. The service supports most of the commonly used software and scripts. You also get marketing and pro9motion tools and services, as well as the expected ecommerce features such as a shopping cart and PayPal.
I contacted ApolloHosting to see how much bandwidth they limit you to. I hate when I see the words unlimited and sadly that is what it states on ApolloHosting.com. So I jumped on live chat and had a quick little chat with an agent:
Please note at first they tried to tell me they don’t limit their customers. Then when I told them “unlimited” is a sales pitch and I was going to use 1 TB a month they told me to get a VPS server. See this article on unlimited hosting offers.
VPS Hosting
ApolloHosting offers two types of VPS plans: VPS for $29.99 per month, or VPS Pro for $49.95 per month. This includes your domain name and personal SSL certificate. You receive unlimited email accounts, FTP accounts, and MySQL databases.
- VPS 10 GB of disk space, 1000GB of bandwidth, 256 MB of memory, with burst power to 1 GB, and 10 websites. This VPS also comes with one dedicated IP address.
- VPS Pro has 60 GB of disk space, 2000 GB of bandwidth, 512 MB of memory with burst to 1 GB, and up to 100 websites. This VPS Pro plan also comes with 1 dedicated IP address, too.
Both of these plans are offered on the Linux operating system. You will also receive a $100 bonus for Google AdWords, and a $25 credit to Yahoo! or Bing search marketing.
Control Panel
I was unable to tell what control panel ApolloHosting.com uses from browsing their website. So once again I jumped on live chat. I should have known since they are EIG owned that they use vDeck. A lot of EIG owned companies use vDeck for their control panel (like FatCow). I have toyed with it over the years and the control panel is pretty user friendly. It’s no cPanel, but I don’t have any real complaints with it.
Security
Whenever you develop a website there is a good chance that you’re going to have to strengthen your security settings to help safeguard all your data. ApolloHosting does offer a service called SiteLock which helps prevent hackers from hacking into your websites. This does come with another monthly fee, though.
Money Back Guarantee
ApolloHosting does have a 30 day money back guarantee. This states that if you’re not happy with your service you are entitled to get your money back within 30 days of your purchase. However, later in the review I show their BBB rating and they do have 117 complaints against them for billing/collections issues.
Now comes the time when I will evaluate their uptime, performance, and customer support. Then at the end of this ApolloHosting review I will either recommend them or point you elsewhere.
ApolloHosting Uptime & Performance
Uptime
With ApolloHosting you can expect your website or servers to be up about 99.97% of the time. I have worked on a couple sites that were hosted with their company and never noticed any extended amounts of downtime. For the most part, most webmasters don’t really complain much about their sites being down (unlike Hostgator). Here is a screenshot that shows their uptime statistics:
Performance
With ApolloHosting I actually checked with isitdownrightnow.com to see what their response rates were like. I like to test every hosting company I review to see what their response times are. For instance, a good response rate is 10-25 ms (milliseconds), average is 26-50, and a slow response time is 50+. To my surprise ApolloHosting is actually slower than a lot of companies. I figured since they had been in business for so long and have a fairly big client base it would be much faster. As this screenshot shows their response time is 72.08:
e-Mail Issues
Maybe this could explain why they have so many issues with email. But, there have been numerous reports online from unhappy customers that state their email accounts ALWAYS have issues. This could mean anything from emails bouncing back to accounts getting flagged as spam, or even a completely useless email account that doesn’t function properly. Here is a look at some screenshots that people complain about with ApolloHosting:
ApolloHosting Customer Service
This is the part where my ApolloHosting review simply goes south. Their customer support is absolutely terrible. Possibly, it’s EIG’s fault since they are known to operate a lot of web hosting companies that are extremely lacking. I have my speculations that most EIG owned companies just choose to use overseas customer support. This is a big mistake when you are doing anything in the technology field. A lot of webmasters (including myself) heavily rely on our websites. We need the assurance that we can talk to an agent that knows how to resolve our problems right away. With ApolloHosting you certainly can’t rely on their customer support.
You can get ahold of them 24/7 via live chat and telephone support. They do have support tickets and a knowledgebase section on their website, as well.
There is nothing more irritating than receiving an unsure response from a customer support representative. Being told of an indefinite solution for the problem is mostly what is irksome from this company. They once had very good technical support, but since EIG acquired them it’s a complete disaster. Just to show you how EIG has put a lot of dirt on “once” good hosting companies names, check out what I have to say about Hostgator. A sensible response is hard to come by and you are extremely lucky if you do get through to their customer support. To add insult to injury ApolloHosting even has a ton of billing issues. I don’t know about you, but I always cringe whenever someone rips me off with billing issues for my web hosting!
I would cut and paste all the negative things people report about customer support, but this review would be a mile long.
ApolloHosting Summary
Apollo Hosting is a classic example of a business that has not weathered the storms brought about by the advancements in technology. I can’t recommend ApolloHosting at this time. There are much better options out there. EIG has completely crapped on this company! True, at one time they did have a respectable service, but not anymore. So unless you like wasting your time with customer support and potentially dealing with billing issues I would highly recommend that you avoid this company altogether. If you have used ApolloHosting in the past I would love to hear your feedback on their company. If you could please leave your comments up above about your experiences (good or bad) I will be sure to post it. Also, if you found this review helpful would you mind sharing it on any social media sites you actively participate on.
If you’re looking for a dependable web hosting company you’re in luck. Go with WebhostingHub or GreenGeeks. They are not going to give you the run around like Apollo and have fantastic customer support! Thanks for reading.
I really try to spend a couple hours evaluating different aspects of every company I review. I categorize everything I find on Apollo Hosting into three different categories; positive, negative, and neutral. Please take the time to read through the content I have found on them.