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Site5 prides itself as a niche service provider for designers and developers, and has become an international firm, with 19 server locations in four continents.
The company has been in business since 1998, with a 100% remote team and over 50,000 clients worldwide.
Site5 was one of the many hosting firms acquired by EIG, which has also merged with HostPapa, Bluehost, and many other small companies. This has led to some ongoing issues as all these companies adjust to the new management. So, does Site5 still hold up to scrutiny?
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Site5 reviews: pros & cons
Site5, like so many other longtime web hosting services, remains strong in many aspects of web hosting, but has not always held up its promise of consistent quality for developers in recent months.
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Pros
When you sign up with a niche web host, you expect them to deliver services above the industry standard. Site5 delivers on this promise, loading pages at 695 ms, compared to the standard 700 ms.
Lots of options
Site5 offers a wide range of tiered hosting plans, with their basic plan starting at $4.95 per month. Other plans can get as high as $81 a month with a VPS3 Managed VPS plan, or as low as their Pro plan of $8.95 a month. Such pricing is comparable to other hosting sites, but as Site5 focuses especially on designers and developers, their pricing may be a particularly good deal for that niche.
Site5 also offers unmetered disk space and bandwidth for its shared web hosting plans. Disaster recovery backups also come standard with their standard plans at no extra cost – a huge plus if you want to avoid, well, disaster. But if you’re looking for the BEST web hosting deal…
Free trial
Site5 also gives customers the option of going for a 30-day free trial – a rare offering from any hosting provider. If you want to test out their VPS, this only costs a dollar for the first month.
That’s not the only thing they offer for free, either. Site5 has free website migrations for up to 25 cPanel accounts. On top of that, Site5 has a 45-day money back guarantee, with no conditions.
Site5 customer support
Historically, Site5’s customer support staff is knowledgeable and friendly. Wait times for help tickets would be not more than a few hours, if not minutes, and issues would be resolved quickly. Their ability to talk with a more sophisticated client base has been one of their hallmarks. Unfortunately for some Site5 customers, this is not always the case.
Here’s a video laying out how Site5 claims to stand out from the herd:
Cons
Recent Site5 web hosting reviews across the internet tend to be more of a mixed bag. Many of these new Site5 hosting reviews skew low, with longtime customers pointing out a sudden drop in the quality of customer support.
Less availability
Site5’s customer support options are limited to begin with: you can only LiveChat with support 24/7, and phone lines are open only during business hours. Apparently, since the EIG acquisition, the older support staff was let go and a new staff brought in. And this staff, according to several customers, is not nearly as knowledgeable or prompt to respond as the old staff was.
Average performance
Nor is Site5’s uptime much to boast about. The industry standard for uptime is 99.94% – not a terribly high bar to pass these days. However, Site5 logged an average uptime of around 99.85%, nearly 0.10 points below the standard. And in the business of uptime, that small point difference matters.
Sometimes Site5 performs above the industry standard – but other times it dips significantly below the 99.94% threshold. All told, Site5 can’t be relied upon to keep uptime above industry standard.
Site5 pricing
And like other web hosting sites, Site5’s pricing shouldn’t be taken at face value. The basic plan is advertised at $4.95 a month, but that’s only if you commit for two full years and pay up front. If you want a shorter-length commitment, you’ll be paying more – $5.95 per month for a year.
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Site5 review 2020: Our conclusion
A change in management will result in a lot of growing pains for any company. The recent changes that Site5 underwent have left a lot of unhappy customers. But things could get better with time, once the dust from the merger has settled.
Site5 still has a huge customer base, so the complaints are but a drop in the large bucket of a 50,000-plus customer base. If you’re a designer or developer uncertain about whether to commit, you can give their 30-day trial a go. Otherwise, we’ll just have to wait and see whether Site5 can truly fulfill its promises in the future. Keep an eye out for future Site5 reviews.
But since you’re ready to ACT NOW and decide on a hosting company – you might as well go with the BEST…
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