Jumpline Review – Mixed Feedback On Their Web Hosting

Jumpline, a web hosting company since 1997, is based in Columbus, OH. This company has over 150,000 customers, hosting sites for people and businesses in all 50 states in the U.S. and in over 130 countries. Many of the services they offer are similar to the services offered by other web hosting companies. They have, shared VPS, and dedicated plans (much like SiteGround, MochaHost, and HostNine) . Since this company is one of many in the field, do they have anything to offer that makes them stand out from the competition?

Some of the criteria I consider when reviewing web hosting sites are the affordability, uptime, reliability, customer service,  and features.  Last but not least, I will take a look at their price tag. In this Jumpline review you’ll see why I do not recommend you do business with them.

Jumpline Features

Shared Plans

For shared hosting you have 3 different options with Jumpline.  The plans and prices are as follows:

Stacked

The “Stacked” plan is their entry shared hosting plan.  This plan comes with 10 GB of storage, 100 GB of monthly transfer, 100 IMAP/POP email accounts, a dedicated IP, 10 FTP accounts.  If you pay monthly it’s $9.95 a month, but if you pay yearly it’s $4.97/month.

Layered

The “layered” plan is a step up for the “Stacked” plan.  With this plan you will get 15 GB of storage, 150 GB of monthly transfer, 150 IMAP/POP email accounts, a dedicated IP, 15 FTP accounts.  If you pay monthly this plan will run you $14.95 each month.  However, if you pay annually it will only cost $7.47/month.

Expanded

The next plan is the “Expanded” plan.  This is the highest resource rich shared hosting package you can get with Jumpline.  It comes with 20 GB of space, 200 GB of monthly transfer, 200 IMAP/POP email accounts, a dedicated IP address, and 20 FTP accounts.  This price if you pay per month is $19.95/month.  If you pay annually it only cost $9.97/month.

Additionally, you can purchase three different add-ons with these shared plans.  You can buy a dedicated IP address for $3/month, 50 GB of data transfer for$5/month, and a “restore from backup” service which is $50.

VPS Plans

From a glance the VPS plans from Jumpline do look attractive.  The reason I say look attractive is because ones you add up all the extra features the price tag is above the industry standard.

VPS-512

This plan is the lowest VPS server you can purchase with Jumpline.  It comes with 30 GB of storage, 300 GB of monthly transfer, 2 IP addresses, 512 MB of RAM, and your choice of the CentOS, Ubuntu, or Debian Linux operating system.  The price tag for this virtual private server monthly is $29.99.  If you pay quarterly the price is only $41.92 per quarter.  This is almost $11 per month.

VPS-1024

The next plan is a step up and does come with more resources.  This plan comes with 40 GB of storage, 400 GB of monthly transfer, 2 IP addresses, 1,024 MB of RAM, and your choice of the CentOS, Ubuntu, or Debian Linux operating system.  If you pay monthly it will cost $39.95.  But, if you pay quarterly it will cost $56.92 per quarter.  This is about $14.30 each month.

VPS-2048

The highest VPS plan Jumpline offers is the “VPS-2048” plan.  It comes with 50 GB of storage, 500 GB of monthly transfer, 2 dedicate IP addresses, 2,048 MB of RAM, and your choice of the CentOS, Ubuntu, or Debian Linux operating system.  If you pay monthly it’s $49.95/month.  But, if you pay quarterly it cost $71.92 per quarter which is about $18 dollars a month.

Now these prices for a VPS server look great.  But, your going to need a control panel for your website and this is going to be $15/month for Plesk or cPanel.  Or you can get a cPanel/WHM bundle with WHMCS for $30/month.  You don’t even get free backups for your VPS server with Jumpline.  It’s going to run you $30 more dollars per month.

If you do all the number crunching you will clearly see that a VPS server is going to cost you $56/month just for their low end VPS.  That price includes you paying it on the quarterly terms too.  If you payed monthly it would be $75 each month for a low end VPS server!

Dedicated Plans

For dedicated plans you have to email them or call them to get prices.  Sorry, I was unable to give prices on them :(.

Jumpline’s Uptime & Performance

Uptime

Jumpline has pretty good servers and you can bet that they will be working properly most of the time.  I have worked on a number of sites that were hosted with Jumpline and I didn’t notice any substantial amount of downtime. So yes, with their extra cost compared to other hosting plans you can expect that your servers will be up almost 99.9% of the time.  But, there are other issues I have with them which I will show later on in this review.  Here is a look at their uptime which is pretty good:

Performance

Jumpline has fairly good speed. However, this does not keep them from going down. While the company promises 99.9% uptime, there are still significant numbers of customers who say that their email is down most of the time or has a lot of issues. Imagine trying to operate your companies business but not being able to get in touch with your clients/customers because your email is down or has issues.  I guess this wouldn’t be a huge problem if you could just configure your MX records to Gmail or Yahoo, but sadly this isn’t their only problem. For a company with their quality of servers and the business of hosting businesses, this is a fatal flaw.  Here is a look at their performance:

Just in case you’re wondering, response times are measured in ms (milliseconds).  When you ping their servers it will give you a readout on how quickly they respond.  Great response times would be 20 ms and below.  20-50 is average.  Anything over 50 ms is considered to be slow.  Not, that response times are extremely high with Jumpline, but I would much rather use InMotion which I know is going to be very quick.

It all seems to go back to customer service though.  This is what my major concern is with Jumpline. If you have to get in contact with customer service with Jumpline because of uptime or other related issues you’re pretty much in for a long ride.

Jumpline’s Customer Service

Jumpline’s customer service isn’t very high on there priorities. It seems that Jumpline’s real achilles heel is its support system. Lots of people don’t like Jumpline’s support systems customer service. The hold times are incredibly long, so if you have a problem, you have to block out a significant part of your day to deal with the problem.  This can really drive you up the wall if you have a client baring down on you. In addition, when you finally do get an employee to talk to you, they usually don’t know how to fix the problem. Their customer service lines are open 24/7, and it is a toll-free number (no live chat on the weekends). You also can use email to contact them or fill out a support ticket. However, when you talk to someone, the communication is a waste of time. It is very frustrating to get problems and issues resolved.  Here is a look at some comments about Jumpline customer support:

Billing issues are frequent with Jumpline.  In addition, many customers reported that when they tried to cancel their Jumpline account, they couldn’t get their money back. Some customers say that Jumpline wouldn’t refund their money unless they filed a complaint with the BBB. That sort of action is a bluff, since they don’t expect anyone to go through that red tape.  However, over 40 people have filed a complaint about them on the Better Business Bureau. And, when the customer asked to talk to the manager, they were refused access.  Talking with anyone that has any type of authority is nearly impossible with Jumpline.  This sort of reminds me of 1and1 web hosting. There are also several people who say that they were charged for the free trial, and couldn’t get their money back.  Here is a look at the billing issues past clients have filed against Jumpline on the Better Business Bureau:

Jumpline Summary

Jumpline is not a recommended web hosting provider. The competition is too fierce to settle for an cheap, under-staffed hosting service that has been known to have some problems. Sure, they have several features that are quite attractive, but smooth operation and dependable service are the backbone of this industry. Deceptive practices and poor customer service are just a few of the reasons to move on to another web hosting company.

If you are looking for a web host with good customer support check out InMotion or WebHostingHub because you could run into a number of problems with Jumpline. As always, please feel free to leave your comments about Jumpline down below. If you found this Jumpline review helpful please feel free to share it by pushing the buttons down below this review. Thanks for reading.

I started this special section for Jumpline so I could show you what other websites are saying about them around the net.  Here you will find what other hosting review sites are saying, forums, blog post, etc.  Anything and everything I can possibly find on Jumpline that I feel is from a creditable source I will post up on this section.

This gives me a chance to show you my research on Jumpline.  I feel it backs up my reviews of Jumpline nicely.  A lot of other websites will just either not recommend a company for no reason, or just come up with stuff that may or may not have really happened.  I have categorized my research in three different categories; positive, neutral, and negative.  Please take a second to read my summaries of the content I have found on Jumpline.

The interview section of Jumpline is a great addition to my Jumpline review, because I get a chance to talk with webmasters about their experiences working with the company.  Typically, whenever I get a comment about Jumpline I will email the webmaster and ask them if I could do an email interview with them.  The responses have been pretty good and I have collected some great information about Jumpline.  Please feel free to contact me if you would like to do an interview on them.  You can always reach me on Twitter at @tbwhs.