Web.com Hosting Review- Good Host To Do Business With?

Name: Web.com
Plans: Shared
Website: www.web.com
Summary: Web.com is not a company I recommend. There are much better options out there. Learn why I don’t recommend them in this Web.com hosting review.

ReviewResearchInterviews

Web.com Web.com Logo is a web hosting company that has been around since 1997. They certainly are no newbie when it comes to the industry. They are a large brand in the hosting industry. Recently, they acquired Network Solutions and owned several other brands, as well. But, what are webmasters saying about their experience working with Web.com?

Whenever I review a web hosting company, I like to look at some different things. I like to look at their features, uptime, performance, and customer support. Lastly, I will then either recommend them or recommend another host. I have developed a rating system at the top and bottom of this review that will show you how I rate them.

Also, feel free to vote on them if you have any experience working with them. If you’re not interested in reading the full Web.com review, you can always jump down to the summary and find out what I think about them.

Web.com Features

Web.com offers four plans on their website as well as tons of extras. You can get Linux or Windows plans. The plans are not labeled as “shared,” but for the most part I have come to the conclusion that they are pretty much-shared plans. It means if you’re running a website that isn’t going to have over 200 unique views per day Web.com should be able to handle the traffic. They do not offer any VPS, Reseller, or Dedicated plans at this time. Now, let’s take a look at the four hosting plans they offer and the additional products and services you can purchase.

3 Shared Linux Plans

Above is a screenshot of the hosting plans that are offered with Web.com. These are Linux based plans. Depending on which plan you pick you’re going to be paying $5.95, $7.95, or $9.95 per month. If you’re new to my reviews, you will notice that I am not a fan of data transfers that say “unlimited.” What this tells me is I can run a 3 TB a month website that gets 100,000 visitors a month and my site will run smoothly. However, I know that you can’t support that kind of site on a shared server. I was unable to get the actual numbers of what they will except when I talked to them on live chat. If anyone knows what the limit is before your account gets suspended, please let us know. Their prices are pretty good compared to SiteGround and Doteasy.

1 Windows Plan

I almost missed it on their site when I was evaluating Web.com, but they do offer a Windows plan. This plan is for $11.95/month. It comes with unlimited data storage, unlimited bandwidth, email accounts, one domain name (free) for one year, Windows Server 2008/IIS 7.0, etc.

Ignite Online Marketing

It is a special service that submits your website to some directories. Means if you run a business you can call them for a quote, and they will submit your companies details to Google Places, Yelp, Yellowpages, Mapquest, etc. It says right on their site that their agents are standing by and you can have a no-obligation consultation.

Facebook Boost

Since more and more companies are spending their marketing money on Facebook (because it’s much cheaper than Adwords) it makes perfect sense that Web.com offers a special service to help create a Facebook fan page, get more likes, engage your fans, and manage your Facebook advertising. Again, Web.com is standing by with a no-obligation consultation. Sorry, I can’t give you a quote because you have to call to get that price.

SEO

Like a lot of other web hosting companies Web.com does offer SEO services. With this service, you have a dedicated SEO expert. Each month they will get with you to discuss your strategies, develop links, optimize your site, and then review your results. It is ideal for people that have no knowledge of SEO and want a professional to guide them through the process. Like Ignite Online Marketing and Facebook Boost, they have a no-obligation consultation. You have to talk to them on the phone to get a quote.

PPC

A lot of companies online today are marketing their business through PPC (Paid per click) advertising. It is essentially Google Adwords. You can lose a ton of money if you’re not careful with Google Adsense. Believe me; I am speaking from experience. I have lost lots of money on Google Adwords ($3,000 to be exact). For a lot of people, it’s very appealing to have a PPC expert to help manage and track their Google Adwords campaigns.

Local Leads

If you have a local business and are searching for a way to get more local leads, Web.com has a service that offers this service. They have an opt-in form where you can enter your name, email, and telephone number to schedule a demo.

Online Visibility Report

Web.com offers a service which is called an online visibility report. Gives you a report showing if your site shows up on Google+ Local, Yahoo, Bing, and then a directory score. This service is only $1/year.

Domains

With Web.com you can purchase domain names. They offer six kinds of domain names. The details are down below:

.com $15/year
.co $40/year
.net $15/year
.org $15/year
.biz $15/year
.info $15/year

Email

If you need an email hosting plan, Web.com also offers one plan for that as well. With this plan you get:

1 GB of email storage
Access to check email anytime and anywhere
ActiveSync
Outlook 2007
Spam Filtering/Virus filtering

It does cost $8.95/month.

SSL

With Web.com you can purchase SSL Certificates. They have four different ones you can purchase. The details are down below:

Web.com SSL

Control Panel

I was unsure about what control panel Web.com was using. Whenever you browse their site from time to time, you will get a popup message asking you if you need help. I have no problem with this at all. I did need help because I spent about 10-15 minutes trying to find out if they used cPanel or not. Eventually, I talked to an agent on live chat. This is the screenshot:

Web.com Live Chat

So, I guess they use cPanel based on what their live chat agent said to me. Kind of thought it was a little odd that at first, he was asking me if I wanted to drive more traffic to my website and then wanted to know if I wanted a professional website developed? I suspect it was probably just automated messages. Fail! They did tell me to call customer support though…lol. They did immediately kick me out and ended the chat with me, though. For WordPress users, it’s pretty easy to install your WordPress CMS on your website. Web.com comes with a 1-click installer. Along with installing WordPress, you can also install 100’s of open source applications.

Now that we know all the plans and additional services you can purchase with Web.com I’m going to go over their performance, uptime, and then evaluate their customer support. Lastly, I will then either recommend them or suggest other companies to do business with.

Web.com Performance & Uptime

Performance

Web.com Response Times

Web.com does have slower than average servers. Why am I stating this? No, it’s not just a random comment I like to put in about Web.com. What I like to do is check their response times on isitdownrightnow.com. Typically, this site is good for checking on whether or not a site is down. But, I use it to check out their response times. When I checked their response time, I found out that their response time was 66.46 ms. To have what I consider fast servers as a general rule 20 ms and under is considered fast, 21-50 ms is considered average, and anything over 51 ms is deemed to be slow.

Uptime

Web.com Uptime

Uptime shouldn’t be a problem or issue with Web.com. They have a 99.9% uptime policy. One thing that will drive me up the wall is downtime. I am a busy person and don’t want to have to contact support when my site is down. It’s just a hassle to have to spend an extra 20-30 minutes whenever something is down. According to Webhostingstuff.com, I have found out that their site has been up 99.9% of the time (monitored for 3,343 days).

Web.com Customer Support

I got a preview of what I was in for when I jumped on their live chat. If you remember earlier in my review, I had a question about their control panel. I got asked if I wanted more traffic to my website and if I needed a website designed. Yeah, I know odd. I believe that customer support is only offered through the telephone. Only when are you interested in signing up with them will the live chat feature be available to you. It means that if you’re a paying customer, you have to email them or call them. You can call them 24/7 and they should be able to help you. However, a lot of webmasters have complained that they were the least bit helpful. Some might say they were almost useless when resolving their issues.

Optionally, I do believe they have email support. But here is a look at some of the complaints about support with Web.com:

Web.com Support

Web.com Bad Customer Service

Web.com BBB Rating?

Web.com BBB Rating

Web.com is accredited with the Better Business Bureau. Oddly enough they have received an A+ rating. But, as of December 8th, 2014 they have 688 customer complaints against them. 388 of these complaints are problems with products/services. 274 of the complaints are from angry customers of theirs that have billing or collections issues. Of course, I do understand that any business that is as large as Web.com is going to have a couple of complaints here and there, but 688 is a lot of complaints!

Web.com Hosting Review Summary

So do I recommend you use Web.com? No! For one they won’t work for you if you need anything more than a shared hosting plan. Secondly, their servers are a lot slower than other companies. Third, the prices for the service are pretty high compared to other hosts. Yes, they do offer a lot of features and tools to help your website, but a lot of webmasters have reported they are not happy with the service. Lastly, the customer support with Web.com is very lacking. No live chat and you have to call them for everything.

Do you have experience working with Web.com? I would like to hear what you think about their company. If you could take the time to leave a comment and rate them, that would be great.

However, if you need a recommendation for great hosts checks out InMotion or WebHostingHub.com. I do business with both of those companies. I have been working with them for six years and love them.

Web.com research.

“Positive”

“Negative”

SiteBuilderReport.com

SiteBuilderReport.com is a website that reviews different website builders. They test out lots of different website builders and then write up a review based on their experience. As you might have guessed Web.com is one of the websites that they signed up for and tried out for themselves.

To be quite blunt about their experience with Web.com they said it was a horrible experience. For starters, Web.com does not offer a free trial before you buy. When you first launch the website builder if you want to add any pictures, it’s completely grayed out. It means it is inactive. You first need to add a “content block.” It isn’t explained in their tutorials or anything, though. Managing your content blocks is also very tough because it’s not a drag and drop system. You need to use a widget where you can then move your content blocks around.

Element blocks are very confusing. Meaning there is a separate box that does pop up. As their review showed, the table block has a lot of different settings that might confuse users that are wanting to create a simple table. Some element editors don’t work at all. For example, the footer element never did work.

There is a text editor which they also feel is very clustered. Meaning there are lots of options which are easy to miss. To save your text, you need to click a tiny “X” button in the top right of the screen.

They do offer nearly 10,000 templates, but they are rather bland. In other words, they look like they were created in 1999 or something. A lot of them are the same with different colors. But, one really bad thing is Web.com does not support a lot of fonts.

They did forget their password, and this was a nightmare. Typically, you hit “forgot your password” and it emails it to you. The customer did do this, but sadly nothing ever showed up in their inbox. They had to call customer support. It turns out his account was flagged, and he needed to get them to remove the flag. They did this, but no email was ever sent out to show the website was flagged.

All in all, you have to call Web.com to cancel your account with them. The templates were very bland and nothing special. The site owner believed there are much better companies out there and rated Web.com a one out five stars. For this reason, I am adding it to my negative section of my research.

Whoishostingthis.com

Whoishostingthis.com is another web hosting review site just like tbwhs.com. They have collected a lot of reviews from webmasters that have used Web.com over the years. So far, it looks like they have collected over 65 reviews from other webmasters. These webmasters have rated Web.com 1.9 out of 5. Is very low, and a lot of webmasters have a lot of problems with Web.com. The following praises and complaints were left about them on this review:

Praises

Great templates.
Easy to use website builder.
Great Facebook management team.
Great customer support.
Price is inexpensive and of some real value.

Complaints

SEO packages don’t deliver at all.
Web designs offered is horrible.
Outdated templates.
Very sluggish website builder.
The support team has business hours.
Unresponsive customer support.
Long waiting times for customer support.
Billing issues.
Troubles were releasing domain names.
Sites go offline.

The general feedback on Web.com seems to be very poor. A lot of their customers complain about poor templates, and when they hire them for web design, the designs are very 90’s looking. The biggest complaints seem to be the lack of customer support that you get with Web.com. For these reasons I am adding them to my negative section, because the webmasters that took the time to leave them a comment were very negative towards them.

“Neutral”

PCMag.com

PCMag.com is a very popular website that has lots of helpful information on anything technology related. It could mean anything from laptops, phones, printers, software, hardware, and feedback on web hosting. Jeffrey L. Wilson and Molly McLaughlin got the chance to try out Web.com. Here are some highlights on what they liked and didn’t like about Web.com:

Pros

They do have a very helpful customer support team. The telephone wait time is not very long at all.
You do get a free domain name whenever you sign up with Web.com.
They do have a 60-day money back guarantee.

Cons

They are not that easy to use for newbies.
Setting up emails accounts is hard. You have to have two windows open at the same time.
The interface can be very confusing.
It’s kind of hard to import an already build WordPress site to Web.com. You have to pay $174 for Web.com to migrate it over for you. It is more than your yearly bill!
Editing text is hard to do.
There wasn’t any live chat support.
Web.com is a bit more expensive than other DIY website builder sites. Therefore, their web hosting is a bit more expensive.
They only offer a shared hosting plan. You can’t purchase a VPS or dedicated server.

Overall, Web.com doesn’t stand out to them. They are overpriced and not all that transparent with their pricing. A lot of other companies tell you the cost upfront, but Web.com doesn’t. Web.com does get a fair rating on PCMag.com.

TopTenReviews.com

TopTenReviews.com is a website that reviews lots of different products and services only. They review anything from electronics to software. They even review many industries that don’t have to do anything technology based or anything. But, they have a nice web hosting review section where they have reviewed a lot of the ‘big name’ web hosting companies. There Web.com review does not speak too highly of the company.

They state that Web.com is just an average web hosting company. They are pretty much just “Plain Jane” and don’t offer a lot of features that other companies do. For instance, you can only buy a shared web hosting plan with them. Only three plans to choose from to on the Windows and Linux operating system. That means if you’re looking for a VPS, reseller, or dedicated server they won’t be able to meet your needs.

Web.com is a DIY type of web hosting service. Meaning that if you don’t have any experience designing websites and want to do everything yourself they would probably appeal to you. They are pretty easy to use with a nice in-house control panel, but they just lack functionality for developers. You can’t even upload your pre-made scripts or anything.

Overall, Web.com is an overpriced web hosting company that isn’t very dynamic. They have rated 5.8 stars out of 10.

Web.com interviews.

All content on tbwhs.com are opinions and not facts. I have thoroughly reviewed each company and then provide my personal opinions on them. It’s up to you as the consumer to do your due diligence and do more research if you feel something might be inaccurate.

Web.com Hosting Review – The Many Reason I Would Look Elsewhere