At first, I was sort of regretting the fact that I had just paid for a plan with another host before finding this offer. I’m not sure why, but I pointed my domain to this host rather than the paid host. I then came to find out that the free offer was only for 12 months, and the paid packages were not competitive based on my research. I was interested in working with CGI scripts but found out that this feature is not available with the free package. I wanted to update my site via FTP but this feature was frequently unavailable because they were attacked by a “malicious group of spammers”.

The control panel (siteworx) has all the features you need, but I’m starting to prefer cPanel now that I’ve gotten used to it at my other host. I should mention that their control panel can be very sluggish at times, which is why I preferred to update via FTP.

Support was also lacking; I opened up a few tickets and got a response like a month (!) later. I had given up on getting an answer at that point, so I was actually sort of surprised to see the responses. I’ve had a number of issues where a combination of password/e-mail address change/site updates have resulted in my site not being accessible via the web. It may be something that I caused, and I don’t know if that’s just a result of using Linux or whatever, but I really don’t see how that would impact things, as long as the files have the right permissions. Obviously, I wanted to quit screwing things up if I was at fault, but support never gave me a response either way.

In their defense, FTP eventually did start working, for a little while, then I was once again unable to log in via FTP or via the web to update my site. No response to multiple tickets on the issue. There were also periods in which I couldn’t even see my site via the web.

I’m NOT really seeing this as a “you get what you pay for” kind of thing; I’m assuming that the free package is a sort of trial, so if you’re satisfied with it then you’ll be motivated to go with a paid package when the trial is up. Personally, I’m not too impressed; their paid packages are not worth it in my opinion (even IF the free package had no problems!). The other paid package I bought turned out to be a winner as I’ve moved my site over and haven’t had any problems since.

I’m assuming people are here to find out about free packages, which I suppose this is, but let me tell you, this is NOT the one you want. The fact that it’s not free after the first year should steer you away…that is, if the unreliability doesn’t!