45 Howard Street
New York, NY 10013
1-877-848-7614
Noida Office
A-16, Sector 63,
Noida, Uttar Pradesh,
India 201303
Limedomains was founded in 2009 and is a service of Lime Labs LLC, a company with an impressive four year history in online development. Limedomains is headquartered in New York, where they host more than 30,000 domains, and has a large satellite office in Noida, India.
Review
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Sales
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Before signing up for a webhosting account I wanted to speak with a representative of the company to be assured that their free hosting offer had no string attached. Limedomains offers sales support by live chat, email, an online forum and a toll-free telephone number. I tried to contact live chat, but it turns out that live chat is really an online form that sends an email to Limedomains when all operators are busy. I filled out the form and then jumped on the phone, where I was connected with a sales representative about 35 minutes after placing the call. The gentleman I spoke with was very knowledgeable about the company, freely offering details regarding the history and network of Limedomains, and explaining in great detail what products and services were available to me. I was very pleased with telephone sales support. The response to my live chat questions were answered approximately 90 minutes after my inquiry.
Though both sales representatives were helpful and polite, I was slightly disappointed with the wait time to actually speak with an operator.
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Setup
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If you purchase a domain name with Limedomains, an accredited ICANN registrar, a small web hosting package is free of charge. I paid for my domain with a PayPal account and within thirty minutes I had an email from Limedomains welcoming me onboard as a new hosting customer. The welcome letter was integral in getting my account set up and before the afternoon was over, my website was ready to go.
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Billing
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Since web hosting was included free of charge with my domain purchase, I had only one payment to make. The bill was accurate and I was not charged for anything I had not ordered. The free hosting does not auto renew each year, so users must be sure to renew their domain name with Limedomains in order to continue hosting without interruption.
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Pricing
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A web hosting package of 250mb of space and 500mb of bandwidth is free of charge to those who buy domain names through Limedomains. Limedomains never places ads on websites, as many other free hosts do, and there are no strings attached to this deal. This is certainly one of the better hosting bargains online. Limedomains also offers two paid hosting packages that are well below market prices.
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Reliability
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Limedomains was a reliable web host. There was one hardware upgrade performed during my stay and it was announced on their online forums ahead of time. One minor complaint from me was that I had to seek out this information on their forums and was not notified by email of the planned downtime.
I did have several instances where my site was slow to load, though they were all short-lived and did not have a negative impact on my business website.
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Help & Support
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Limedomains offers customer support by email, live chat, an online forum and a toll-free telephone number. Email support takes 2-24 hours. The live chat support, as mentioned above, isn’t really live at all hours, but a backup system to email support. I was able to get an answer from live support approximately 4 hours after submitting my request. Telephone support is available, with an average wait time of one hour. The support personnel at Limedomains were always courteous and informative, albeit a little slow to respond.
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Uptime
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I use a premium service uptime monitoring tool and was notified that my website had gone offline five times during one particular month. None of the outages lasted longer than fifteen minutes. Each period of downtime was addressed on the forums owned by Limedomains and I felt confident that they had the problem under control in each instance. My other seven months spent with Limedomains were trouble-free.
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Guarantee
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- 30 day money back guarantee (paid hosting plans only).
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Terms of Service
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The Terms of Service for Limedomains are available online. Highlights include:
- No adult content.
- No IRC, cgi intensive scripts or BitTorrent clients.
- Strictly enforced SPAM policy.
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Bottom Line
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Advantages
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- Free!
- Reliable.
- Easy to use custom control panel.
- More than 10,000 open source software applications available for use.
- Helpful support staff.
- Detailed server and network announcements on company forum.
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Disadvantages
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- No uptime guarantee.
- Support is excellent, but slow.
- Hardware and network announcements posted only to an online forum.
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