164 N Gateway Drive
Providence, UT 84332
800.222.2165
WestHost has been in the web hosting business since 1998. Acquired by the UK2 Group in 2008, Utah-based WestHost offers shared and reseller hosting, cloud hosting, dedicated servers and domain names.
Review
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Sales
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Sales questions at WestHost are taken by live chat, telephone and email. I spoke with reps using all three mediums, and found them each to be well schooled, polite and helpful. Each sales representative also gave me a coupon code for a free domain name and reduced hosting charges. The coupon code was given to me without any pressure to sign-up, and still worked when I finally did get an account some two weeks later. Fantastic!
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Setup
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Signing up for an account takes place online or by phone. The online order form is easy to understand and takes about three minutes to complete. It was an hour or more after sign-up that I received my bill of sale and another hour before my welcome letter arrived. While this is a fairly decent turnaround for a larger sized company, online shoppers (including me) tend to feel more secure about doing business on the Internet when their proof of payment is sent to their email address immediately. Aside from that, no complaints.
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Billing
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Money matters are handled by email. I had no issues with the billing department during my one year stay.
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Pricing
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WestHost’s smallest and most widely advertised plan includes 50 gigabytes of space and 1,000 gigabytes of bandwidth for $4/month. That price can only be secured, however, by paying for an account three years in advance. Unfortunately, you don’t find out about the three year contract requirement until you get to the final page of the checkout process or by reading the fine print. It’s undoubtedly a great deal, but slightly misleading.
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Reliability
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My website was down sporadically during my first week with WestHost. After not hearing a peep, I phoned, only to learn that the RAM on my server was bad and would be replaced within 24 hours. True to their word, WestHost did have me up and running less than a day later. I had no other hardware issues in a 12 month period.
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Help & Support
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WestHost is quick to answer questions by live chat, email and phone, but is not so quick to inform customers of server status, routine maintenance or network issues. On multiple occasions I was forced to contact WestHost myself to find out why my website was offline or had slowed to a crawl. While the reps were helpful and glad to answer my questions, it would be nice for WestHost to reach out themselves with an informative email or at least have a network status page available to clients.
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Uptime
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I use a premium uptime monitor to keep an eye on my domains. That monitor alerted me often that something was awry with my web hosting. While WestHost did maintain their promised 99.9% uptime guarantee during the majority of my stay, their network speeds were so slow at times that my uptime monitor reported them as being offline.
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Guarantee
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60 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 WestHost are online. Highlights include:
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Contract delivery network streaming not allowed.
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IRC bots, spamming, adult content, and gambling websites forbidden.
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Money back guarantee does not apply to cloud, server or reseller hosting.
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Bottom Line
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Advantages
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Support team is knowledgeable, fast and friendly.
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Free domain with some plans.
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Happy to offer coupon codes and discounts to new customers.
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Easy-to-use control panel (cPanel).
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Solid money back guarantee.
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Disadvantages
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Website prices misleading.
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No month-to-month plans offered.
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Server speeds very slow at times.
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No mailing lists allowed on some plans.
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Fails to reach out to clients and communicate about server and network issues.
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