164 N. Gateway Drive
Providence, UT 84332
1-866-MIDPHASE
Midphase has grown by leaps and bounds in the last nine years. Originally launched out of a dorm room in Chicago in 2003, Midphase was acquired by the UK2 Group in 2007, and today services more than 120,000 customers from around the world. Midphase offers Linux and Windows shared web hosting, reseller hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers.
Review
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Sales
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Midphase sales support is available by email, live chat and telephone, and is only offered during business hours (8am-7pm) Monday-Friday. This was something I hadn’t noticed when I fired up live chat to find out more about Midphase. Despite getting in contact with representatives at 5am on a Monday morning, well outside their standard sales hours, rep Stacy was happy to answer all of my questions, and did so thoroughly. I walked away from my live chat with Midphase feeling very confident in their abilities to manage my domains.
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Setup
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Signing up for a Midphase account is simple business and takes place online through a website order form. Within one hour of payment I received my invoice and account details.
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Billing
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Midphase accepts all major credit cards and PayPal. I had no issues with the billing department during my stay with Midphase or with cancelling my hosting account.
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Pricing
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Midphase has three shared Linux hosting plans to choose from. Their most popular plan, called Unlimited, features unlimited space and bandwidth and a free domain name for $8.95/month. This price is about average with web hosts offering unlimited services. Customers can save oodles by purchasing their hosting package for a longer term. For example, if you choose to pay for the package three years in advance, you’ll be billed just $5.95/month, a 33% discount.
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Reliability
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My hosting server had some issues from the get-go. During my first week with Midphase my server performance clocked in on the reliability scale at only 75%. Completely frustrated with my website being online one moment and down the next, I asked to move to a new server. It took 48 hours to hear back from the support department and ultimately my request was denied, with Midphase reporting that the issues were network related and telling me that a server move wouldn’t rectify the problem. Makes sense, and my website did finally come back up, only to go down again one week later due to hardware failure. The hard drive on my server was replaced and things looked up from there. To their credit, despite the slow response from support, I was offered a money back guarantee refund and I was credited for the downtime.
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Help & Support
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The Midphase support team is available 24/7 by telephone, live chat and email. I found most support personnel friendly, helpful and very knowledge, though once again, slow. Responses by email often take 24-72 hours and there were several times when live chat and telephone support team members asked me to file a trouble ticket, instead of offering assistance in a quicker fashion. Mediocre, at best.
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Uptime
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My premium uptime monitor indicated that Midphase maintained a 99.5% uptime rating over a one year period.
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Guarantee
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30 day money back guarantee.
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99.9% uptime guarantee.
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Terms of Service
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The Terms of Service for Midphase can be found on their website. Highlights include:
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Clients responsible for backing up their own data.
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Spamming will result in automatic account suspension.
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No hate speech or content permitted.
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Adult content not allowed.
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Bottom Line
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Advantages
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Free domain with all plans.
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cPanel control panel.
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Decent pricing.
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Many plan sizes to choose from.
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Disadvantages
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Support needs to speed up their game.
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Network not always reliable.
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Sales and billing departments open only limited hours M-F.
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