131 Orange Street
Durham, NC 27701
ASmallOrange.com was founded in Atlanta in 2003. Now located in North Carolina, A Small Orange is a green web hosting company that not only uses wind energy, but allows many of their workers to do their jobs from home, lessening their impact on the environment. A Small Orange offers shared web hosting, reseller hosting, business class hosting, cloud virtual private servers and dedicated servers.
Review
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Sales
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A Small Orange takes sales questions by live chat and email. There’s a small graphic on the bottom on their website homepage that lets you know how long of a wait you can expect for email support. A nice touch!
I spoke with live chat rep Maria M., and she was able to share with me the philosophy of the company, as well as explain the differences between hosting plans. I felt absolutely no pressure to sign up, and Maria encouraged me to return to chat if I had further questions. Could not have gone better!
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Setup
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I signed up for a shared hosting account, which was configured and ready-to-use 15 minutes after I made payment. The welcome letter from A Small Orange laid out my plan details, gave me my username and password, and linked me to channels of support within the company. Very welcoming!
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Billing
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A Small Orange takes PayPal, checks, money orders and all major credit cards. I was billed properly every month for three years, and cancelled my account with no difficulty.
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Pricing
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Shared hosting starts at $5/month, reseller plans are $15/month and up, business class plans are $20/month, VPS runs $25 and up and dedicated servers are $175/month and more. A Small Orange is not the cheapest host online, but their pricing structure is well within average.
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Reliability
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My hosting server hardware was 100% reliable.
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Help & Support
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Support comes by live chat and a trouble ticket system. Average wait time for live chat is about five minutes, and all of my tickets were answered in less than 15 minutes. A Small Orange provides very personal support. There are no cut and paste answers, and you’ll never be linked to an online knowledge base. A Small Orange also has an active online forum where users can go to get support or quick answers from the community. Simply put, support is excellent!
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Uptime
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My uptime monitor indicated that A Small Orange maintained a 99.999% uptime rating.
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Guarantee
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45 day money back guarantee.
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99.9% uptime guarantee.
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Terms of Service
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Uptime credits are given when 99.9% uptime guarantee falls short.
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Clients solely responsible for website backups.
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CPU/memory resource abuse not allowed.
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IRC servers forbidden.
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No spamming.
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Bottom Line
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Advantages
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High end hosting experience.
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Responsive, personal support.
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Green hosting.
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Free domains with some plans.
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Endlessly scalable.
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cPanel.
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Strong network.
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Disadvantages
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No phone support.
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Not the cheapest host on the block.
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