Nowadays, the choice of a hosting is no longer a battle between the names. Whatever reputation the companies might have, we still choose based on the features they offer versus the needs we have. However, sometimes, we come across differently managed companies, and the choice becomes hard. Shall we go for a corporate hosting that has had it all plus experience? Or shall we go for novelty, and invest in new-coming startups?
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A Small Orange – Corporate Client Oriented Hosting
Acquired in 2012 and belonging ever since to Endurance International Group (EIG), A Small Orange has been developing alongside with its sister companies. Some of them are widely known, like Bluehost and Hostgator. And though one might be cautious about signing up with company sister of a huge corporation, our research has discovered that despite the merging, it remained less known and more client oriented.
A SMALL ORANGE: ADVANTAGES (+)
HIGH UPTIME. After staying with the company for an extended number of months, we have discovered that despite the traffic flood, the website stayed strong. The number of website’s downtime during a certain period of time indicates the percentage of uptime it can provide. A Small Orange stayed “organic” along the whole time, showing strong uptime statistics: 99.95% over twelve months. That was even higher than the performance of its notorious sisters: Bluehost and Hostgator.
What else are we searching for in a hosting company? Right! FAST LOADING TIMES. A Small Orange Hosting has provided data overview over a specific number of months. It has released the response of as high as 32% faster than the average loading time among other known hostings. Usually, even one-second delay in opening the page translates into a loss of 7 of the total percentage of users. What means 3 seconds of slow load times? Statistics provide the 40% loss of users, a dramatic result. Thus, any hosting company should at least provide basics in order to stay attractive, and A Small Orange manages to maintain the basic standards. It provides great loading time, times higher than the accepted medium in the industry.
HELPFUL SUPPORT is among the most necessary preconditions for a choice of a technical service in any industry. How they are going to support you with a newly acquired technology, be it real or virtual, is the cornerstone of your activity. And if you’re activity is related to your job or business, then the caution should be even higher. A Small Orange’s support gets back quickly with problems that come up via chat, offering links to solve situations and speak to their clients in order to find solutions.
GOOD OFFER VS. PRICE. Taking into consideration the price vs. the good package, even the basic one, that includes de facto good uptime and loading speed, we speak already about a good deal. A Small Orange offers for a basic yearly plan, where you pay around 6 dollars per month, and has no hidden commitment about which you find out at a later point.
WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET would be its motto. The company adopted a transparent approach to the deals they offer for the clients. No hidden extra pays after you decide to sign up with them and a clear language stating the rights and obligations. They do not mention unlimited offers if they do not offer them. Except for their basic Tiny Plan, all other offer premium features with USA based customer support, the type of servers they offer (SSD) and unlimited domains.
cPANEL is the simple thing that makes almost any website hosting system run easier. cPanel is known as efficient, user-friendly and a widely used standard in the industry. There are tons of user manuals, guides and tutorials on how to use it found online. And in case you get bored to scan that information through, you can always address it to the forums: people had issues long before you discovered it. Thus, you get the guide on how to solve those minor things if they still didn’t get fixed by developers.
And as if it wasn’t enough for a good start for a Hosting, it also offers a 90 DAYS GUARANTEE period in case you would change your mind about this hosting. While other companies in the industry offer potentially 30 day trial period, A Small Orange hosting provides the return of the money. Offering 3 months of freedom to stay or to go might only mean serious investment into their clients. And the only other company in the industry to offer a similar length is InMotion.
FREE DOMAIN NAME is a perfect match to the offers from A Small Orange, a great advantage. It is offered with all except for the basic plan and saves you an amount of money that could be used for promotional features, for example.
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A SMALL ORANGE: DISADVANTAGES (-)
PLANS HAVE LIMITS, and that means you need to be careful with specifics. They offer a fair amount of bandwidth allocation though. Consuming if to the end means getting the account suspended, and that is mentioned in the Terms of Service. Also, the server’s resources are indicated to be used with caution in order to maintain servers’ performance (and should we remind about the fact that A Small Orange is a shared server type?). Overuse of resources (CPU and memory, over 500 emails per hour, bandwidth) might be flagged as abusive activity and it might mean suspension from the server.
With bandwidth, once you use the allocated number, you would have either to pay for extra allocation or to get a plan upgrade. Ouch, a painful experience.
NO PHONE SUPPORT. Yes, their support team seems to be awesome. Yes, they got to help you 24/7 any day of the year. Yes, they are quick. Nonetheless, in situations where things need to be fixed fast, you cannot just dial the number and get to a human there on the other side of the line. You will have to open chat box and text. You will have to wait for a getting back to you via that chat or via a call. This is not a huge drawback, but if you are the person who prefers to solve issues via phone, this would definitely not be the case.
The fact that the company is OWNED BY ENDURANCE INTERNATIONAL GROUP (EIG) the company that keeps a few others under its umbrella might present a huge NO. They are well known for privatizing smaller hosting companies and changing their policies regarding target clients and offers. A big company can ruin its smaller companies’ reputation easily. And this is what often happens with EIG’s hosting companies.
Sitelio Hosting – Signing up with a StartUp
Satelio is a United Kingdom-based small company, a startup, launched in 2014
. It offers opportunities for building your website yourself with as little IT knowledge as possible. It offers various useful tools and template designs to start from something. But why should you consider a new company for hosting? We tried to offer you an insight into what is there interesting about Sitelio Hosting.
SITELIO’S ADVANTAGES (+)
FEATURES. Themes are multi-paged that can be edited according to your needs. As features, it includes drag and drop editor, image galleries to stock and post your photos and social media integrated tool
s. As if it wasn’t enough, Sitelio comes up with SEO services that help you rank higher your search engine results. Moreover, the company claims that they do not limit its usage requirements to any group of browsers and is easy to use by its accessible tools that make an amateur learn the basics within an hour.
E-COMMERCE is extremely important if you are thinking of using your website in the terms of an online store. It offers features and themes related to the topic, offers you the possibility to store paying details, makes payments accessible, offers the visual galleries for your products, etc. E-commerce usually takes care of the necessary integrations of other valuable platforms or services like PayPal, credit card paying systems, etc. Whether your website will look like a store or not it fully depends on e-commerce feature offered by any hosting. Perfect businesses targeted by Sitelio are in the field of real estate, beauty stores, blogs, consulting, design and hospitality among others. See how to make marketing part work for you.
GOOGLE ANALYTICS is present in the themes offered by Sitelio Hosting and Plans. It will help keeping track of valuable information about your website, including traffic lines, bouncing rates, visitors and performance. It helps a lot in tracking your website related drawbacks and working on them.
PRICING AND GUARANTEES. Before you get to embark on the sail with Sitelio Hosting Company you’re offered a 14-day trial use of the website, which is nice. Thus, you may have time to experiment a bit, seeing the templates, features, how they get integrated and what would be missing. It goes without saying 14 days is a short time to make an overall impression. But it still lets you have a view of what you’re buying. You obtain a free domain, and in case of cancellation of the services, you can keep it by paying for it.
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SITELIO’S DISADVANTAGES (-)
SUB-DOMAINS AND PLANS. Sitelio offers a free sub-domain for all who are interested to sign up. That reminds of popular WordPress blogs that are built on free templates and sub-domains. Of course, you can find here a wide range of themes that can be easily customized and chosen according to your website orientation, but they would carry Sitelio’s sub-domain name.
If you want to have an independent domain, you should choose between the paid options (Simple from 6 Dollars, Captivating from 7 or Outstanding from 12 with options of monthly or yearly billing, and additional functional features). Pricing for Sitelio if generally vague and unclear, add to this constant reminders to upgrade the plans.
TECHNICAL SUPPORT is present in the terms of general help when serious issues appear. The clients get feedback through a contact sheet describing the problem, sent to the client support team. It also offers a knowledgebase for your independent study. However, cross out any possibility to contact them directly through a live-chat or a phone number. And in case the support is important (especially for newbies in the industry of clients with huge businesses where sometimes a minute delay results in financial losses) then you should put it as number one disadvantage to consider it.
CONCLUSION:
Despite its queer name and belonging to a huge corporation, A Small Orange is doing a good job through its stable uptime, loading times and professionally amazing support. Not a perfect hosting company, it still ranks in top 5 during a certain period of time. It is exposed as reliable and business like hosting for simple websites and medium and small-sized companies.
Being a very simple website builder to be used, this company lacks important viable like extended payout features for e-commerce, with an unclear form of prices, being in the position to be constantly asked to upgrade and general lack of information about the company itself. Being a new company, a startup, it lacks more popularity resulting in personal reputation.
The post <span>Discover</span> A Small Orange vs. Sitelio: Big Corporation or Startup Hosting? appeared first on ThemeFuse.