You might have read some short reviews on NetFirms, but this time, you’ll read an in-depth NetFirms review.
NETFIRMS HOSTING REVIEW
WHAT IS NETFIRMS?
So, what’s NetFirms?
NetFirms is an old web hosting company that started its hosting related services a long time ago in 1998.
After the long 12 years of the company’s operation, Endurance International Group (EIG) bought NetFirms in 2011.
Though EIG is the largest hosting corporation in the whole world, many people believe that NetFirms has lost its fame after the company sold out to EIG.
On the other hand, many of you still find NetFirms as one of the reliable hosting companies.
Here’s a screenshot from the site of the hosting company –
You can see that more than 1.2 million sites are now hosted on the web hosting company.
This large number easily reveals the fame of NetFirms for sure.
This is one of the rare hosting companies that provide multiple domains for free with some of its hosting plans.
In addition to this, there are also many other awesome features and benefits of using NetFirms that you can explore one by one throughout the post.
BENEFITS OF NETFIRMS
The opportunity to start your site without thinking about buying its domain is a great experience that NetFirms always serves its customers.
With the availability of so many unlimited things like storage, bandwidth, domain hosting, etc, anyone can run a site without worrying about its hosting plan’s limited resources.
Easy-to-use Hosting plans along with an affordable fee for them has made the hosting company very attractive to many of you.
Though NetFirms focuses on 6 factors for choosing them, there are many other features that can be also a matter of attraction when it comes to choosing the hosting company.
FEATURES
NetFirms is full of awesome features and in this part, I’ll introduce all the major exciting features of this web hosting provider.
Storage. If you start your website with NetFirms, then you won’t have to worry about the storage given by the hosting company. The reason is that the disk space is unlimited. So, no need to worry about how much storage you’re using.
Bandwidth. The bandwidth is also scalable which means this is limitless. So, there’s room for driving tons of traffic to your site. Not only is that you can use the online data of your site without worrying about its limit.
Free domain. All the hosting packs of NetFirms come with one to multiple free domains. When it comes to having multiple domains for free, NetFirms is totally unique in this sense.
Free domain transfer. If you wanna host one of your previously bought domain on any of the hosting plans of NetFirms, you can do so seamlessly. You can transfer that domain to NetFirms for free.
The number of domain hosting. You can host an unlimited number of domains on a single hosting pack of NetFirms. So, you can enjoy running multiple websites using the same hosting pack.
Domain registration. NetFirms can also be treated as a domain registrar. So, you can buy your desired domain name (s) using NetFirms just by paying some dollars. You can see the screenshot below that proves the cheap rate for different domain names –
Use the above option on the site of NetFirms to buy your domain name (s).
Website builder. You can design your own website for free if the hosting provider is NetFirms. The reason is that the hosting company provides a free website builder using which you can beautify your site seamlessly.
Though the free website builder isn’t that great, you can still use it to design your site for the basic options.
1-Click installer. Softaculous is undoubtedly the best 1-Click installer. You can also name MOJO Marketplace for installing different scripts for a website.
NetFirms doesn’t provide any of the installers though you can have their own apps installer that can install your required script like WordPress or other ones for your site.
Support. NetFirms provides a 24/7 support system for their customers. The support system includes phoning, emailing, and chatting.
All these types of support are available for all the hosting packs of the hosting company. You can also go for the premium customer support option in the Business plan and the VPS hosting packs.
Clustered hosting. Clustered hosting is very effective in making your hosting more powerful than before. The reason is that it’s operated by multiple physical machines.
So, unlike the virtual systems of cloud hosting, you get the real power of physical ones with clustered hosting. Good to know that all the hosting packs of NetFirms come with the clustered hosting feature.
E-commerce facilities. Using NetFirms as your hosting provider, you won’t have to worry at the time of making your site an e-commerce type one. Why? Because all the hosting packs of the hosting provider are e-commerce enabled.
SSL certificate (shared and dedicated). To protect the privacy of the visitors to your website, you need to opt-in for an SSL certificate. Some hosting providers provide an SSL certificate for free with all of its hosting plans while others provide this only when you’ll pay for it.
The good news is that NetFirms provides a free shared SSL certificate with all the hosting packs. If you wanna have a dedicated SSL certificate for your website, then you can have that using the Business plan and VPS hosting packs.
The number of MySQL databases. The starting shared hosting plan of NetFirms doesn’t provide unlimited MySQL databases, so this may disappoint you a bit.
The maximum number of MySQL databases that the Plus plan offers is 5 only. You can upgrade this number to 200 just by using the next shared hosting plan. And by buying the Business plan, you can get an unlimited number of MySQL databases.
Control panel. I always mention that cPanel is the best control panel for a website. So, if you seek any control panel for your site, then you should go for cPanel.
But the bad news is that some hosting companies don’t provide the cPanel as the control panel for their websites. This time you should check whether the given control panel of those types of hosting companies is good or not.
As for example, FatCow and iPage both the hosting providers give you the vDeck control for managing the files of your site. vDeck isn’t comparable to cPanel though you can use the tool for a nice user experience when you manage your site.
NetFirms also provides its own control panel that you can get a user-friendly one, but obviously not as simple as cPanel.
The number of email accounts. Sometimes, many of you may wanna create hundreds of email accounts using your domain name. That time, if your hosting provider doesn’t allow you to create an unlimited number of email accounts, then you’ll fall in real trouble.
You won’t have to worry regarding this matter since your website’s web hosting provider is NetFirms. Yes, the number of email accounts that you can open is unlimited.
Spam filtering for emails. It’s not uncommon to see that there are tons of spam emails that many website owners receive on a regular basis. If I check my website now, I’ll see that hundreds of spam emails have been caught red-handed by Akismet (thanks Akismet for taking care of my messages).
In the same way, your email accounts may receive tons of spam emails which are very threatening to your accounts. NetFirms is aware of this and for this reason, they provide a free spam filtering option for their customers’ emails.
Virus scanning for emails. Also, the virus attack on different emails is at its peak. So, you should always be very much caring about this issue.
Money-back guarantee. NetFirms offers a 30-day money-back period. So, you can use this long period for testing if the hosting company suits your exact requirements.
If you see that the hosting pack that you have purchased from NetFirms is good enough and meet up your requirements, then there’s no question of using this option.
But if the situation goes wrong, then you can use the money-back guarantee option to be safe. You won’t have to spend a penny on the testing.
NETFIRMS HOSTING PLANS
NetFirms focus mainly on the shared hosting plans though they never tell that all the hosting plans below are the shared hosting plans –
You can see that the plans are quite simple and you can choose the period of buying any of the hosting plans from 1 to 3 years. The longer the time of your hosting purchase, the lower the hosting bill will be.
Just by changing the period of purchase from the list above, you can see the reflection of the price change.
From the above screenshot, you have come to know that there 3 shared hosting plans of NetFirms which are the following –
- Plus plan
- Advantage plan
- Business plan
The Plus plan is the cheapest of all the 3 hosting plans and this plan has loads of awesome features most of which I’ve already mentioned in the features section of this post.
Other than the shared hosting plans, there are also 3 different VPS hosting plans available in NetFirms –
You can choose 512, 1 GB or 2 GB of RAM for your VPS hosting plan. All the RAMs are dedicated. The bandwidth for all the 3 VPS hosting plans is 1K GB, 1.5K GB, and 2K GB respectively.
You can also check the different storages for the 3 different hosting packs. The starting VPS hosting plan provides 20 GB of disk space where the next plan has 40 GB of storage.
The best VPS plan comes with 60 GB of disk space. So, choose your VPS hosting plan as per your requirement.
The good news is that all the 3 VPS hosting packs provide 2 dedicated IP addresses for your website. All the plans are Linux-based. So, if you plan to host your website on a Windows-based server, then you’ll have to be unhappy with NetFirms.
PROS AND CONS
Pros
- Fabulous uptime
- Effective support team
Cons
- No dedicated hosting plans
- The windows-based server isn’t available
- No cPanel
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FatCow Review
VERDICT
All the three major factors for choosing a hosting company which is promising uptime, a decent server response time, and responsive support representatives are on the side of NetFirms.
So, we can dare to host our sites on any hosting plans of this web hosting company. This is the reason I wanna rate it with a 4-star rating.
If you talk about dedicated hosting, then this hosting company will be nowhere in the ranking as you have already known that it has no dedicated hosting plans.
If you overlook the lack of dedicated hosting in NetFirms, then you can be happy with the company’s different hosting services.