3250 W Commercial Blvd, Ste 200
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33309
1-866-233-0602
Gate.com has been in business since 1996 and today operates on the Infinity Network, with datacenter locations in Chicago, Florida, Texas and British Columbia. Gate.com serves more than 600,000 customers around the world.
Review
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Sales
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I was interested in a shared Linux hosting plan and set off to contact the Gate.com sales department. Gate offers phone support to potential new customers, but no email communication or live chat options. I was able to get in touch with a member of the sales team about thirty minutes after initiating the call. Several days later, I phoned the sales department again and that call also took almost thirty minutes to answer.
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Setup
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Signing up for a new account with Gate.com was a breeze and from start to finish, the process took less than ten minutes. Moments after signup I received an email confirming my purchase and less than an hour later I had the details of my account in my email inbox.
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Billing
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The Gate.com billing is straight forward and automated. I did not encounter any billing mistakes or other problems that required my attention.
My one issue with the billing department was in cancelling my account. The cancellation process is not automated and took six weeks to complete, even though I’d cancelled the account more than once with the billing department by phone. I was eventually refunded and the account cancelled.
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Pricing
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Gate.com offers shared hosting packages beginning at $9.95/month with a fixed amount of space and an unlimited amount of bandwidth. Prices are good to average for the market.
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Reliability
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The server hardware that hosted my website was rock solid. To my knowledge, hardware never needed to be repaired or upgraded during my stay, and I was notified of any server software upgrades in advance.
My website did experience a measurable amount of lag at times, with pages sometimes taking up to one minute to load.
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Help & Support
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Support for customers of Gate.com can be had with a trouble ticket system built into to each web hosting control panel, and by telephone. Support tickets often took four hours or longer to be addressed and even then, my questions remained mostly unanswered. By telephone, the average wait time for support was one hour, and operators were thorough and helpful.
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Uptime
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I used a professional uptime monitor which kept tabs on whether my website was online or off. My uptime monitor did indicate periods of downtime sporadically throughout the month, though they were all short bursts of time, never violating Gate.com’s 99.9% uptime guarantee.
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Guarantee
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99.99% uptime guarantee
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30 day money back guarantee
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Terms of Service
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Gate’s Terms of Service are accessible online. Highlights include:
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Strictly enforced SPAM policy. Violating accounts will be suspended and fined $200.
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Limited CGI script usage
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No chat rooms or IRC allowed on shared hosting accounts
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No software file distribution
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Limited database sizes
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Bottom Line
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Advantages
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Excellent and reliable server hardware
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Easy to use control panel
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Inexpensive domain name registration
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Free shared SSL certificate
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Disadvantages
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Website speed issues possibly related to overselling of services
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Ticket support is slow
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Possible issues with cancelling account
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