2 Castle Quay
Castle Boulevard
Nottingham
NG7 1FW
United Kingdom
44-115-9342140
Jonathan Brealey and Tim Beresford, the geniuses behind Internet brands like WebFusion and 123-Reg, launched Heart Internet in 2004. Heart Internet offers Linux shared and reseller hosting, server hosting and domain names.
Review
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Sales
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Sales questions for Heart Internet can be answered by telephone, live chat or email. I couldn’t find any mention of Heart Internet’s uptime guarantee on their website, so I turned to live chat to get the skinny. I was met almost instantly by sales representative Nick Brown, who quickly and easily explained to me that Heart Internet did not offer an uptime guarantee, though they did maintain a 99.999% uptime record. Nick went on to tell me a little about their data center, control panel and basic account setup. I was impressed with the amount of time Heart Internet was willing to spend with me, and even more impressed that Nick seemed to have ample knowledge of the company he worked for. Excellent!
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Setup
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Signing up for an account with Heart Internet is a somewhat long, time consuming process. First, you must register as a new customer with a valid email address so that Heart Internet can verify your address. It took about twenty minutes for my verification email to arrive. Once you have that in hand, you return to Heart Internet with your new username and password, verify your order, and eventually proceed to checkout. The entire process took about 45 minutes. Once completed, setup is pretty much instant. I had the details for my new account within 15 minutes of paying. Tiring and tedious, but thorough!
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Billing
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Heart Internet accepts debit and credit cards. Shared web hosting accounts and domain names are billed by the year. I had no billing issues to speak of.
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Pricing
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Heart Internet’s smallest shared web hosting plan includes 5 gigabytes of space and 30 gigabytes of bandwidth for $4/month. Users must pay by the year. About average.
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Reliability
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There were no hardware failures to report during a 24 month stay.
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Help & Support
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Heart Internet gives support by telephone, live chat, and help desk. Help desk support is slow to arrive and often, my questions were not answered. It generally took two or three tickets to get a simple hosting question answered, and that would often stretch over a few days. Live chat support is quick, though nine times out of ten I was told to file a trouble ticket. Could be better!
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Uptime
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My premium uptime monitor indicated that my website remained online 99.998% of the time.
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Guarantee
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30-day money back guarantee.
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Terms of Service
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The Terms of Service for Heart Internet are available on their website. Highlights include:
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Websites may use no more than 5% of any server’s resources.
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IRC not allowed.
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No file storage permitted.
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Bottom Line
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Advantages
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Solid uptime.
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Live chat reps well versed in company business.
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eXtend control panel easy to work with.
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Lots of add-ons to choose from.
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Disadvantages
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No uptime guarantee.
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Sign-up process can be lengthy.
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Support often slow.
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