 Best
Web Hosts™ reviews ODSOL Premium Web Hosting.
From the outset, ODSOL.com's Standard hosting plan has been
a reasonably priced hosting service for small business types.
It offers shared hosting on reliable servers and a strong focus
on customer service, with round-the-clock technical support.
A year after we first reviewed it, the service is still all
that. Only $7.95 a month buys you 250MB of Web server space,
with 10GB traffic limits, 50 e-mail addresses. Plus, in recent
months, ODSOL.com has revamped its look and packed on a considerable
number of features, but their price is still unchanged, less
than 10 bucks a month. ODSOL.com gets our nod.
Installation and interface: 8/10
Many small-business hosts hand you an off-the-shelf site administration
program called CPanel to help run your site. CPanel looks a
bit like the classic Windows Control Panel--lots of icons dropped
almost at random on the screen. ODSOL.com, however, uses its
own administration interface - WebAdmin - that's tidier and,
we think, much easier to navigate and use. Divided into tabbed
sections with clear labels such as Account Administration, Webspace
Setup, and E-Mail Management, the sections are well organized
and easy to follow.
The smooth administration makes it a shame, then, that ODSOL.com's
sign-up process is so counterintuitive. Before you get to the
outstanding site-administration tools, you have to wade through
several steps to set up hosting and register or transfer a domain
name to ODSOL.com's domain registration arm. (The latter is
not required, but they'll give you an extra year's registration
free and charge less than $9 a year to keep your domain registered--cheaper
than some of the lowest-cost registrars.)
Features: 9/10
ODSOL.com's Standard hosting plan offers an impressive set
of basic hosting features for the price: 250MB of disk space,
10GB data transfer, 50 POP3 e-mail addresses with a Web mail
reader, too. (By contrast, $11.95 a month at Yahoo Web Hosting
gets you just 50MB of shared server space, 20GB of data transfer,
and 10 e-mail forwarding accounts). What's more, you get a
dizzying array of extras. In addition to classic hosting features
such as autoresponders, unlimited subdomains, FrontPage and
MySQL database support, and basic site-traffic analysis tools,
there are more beginner-friendly tools, too.
Performance: 8/10
In Web hosts, performance means two things--server uptime
and server responsiveness--and both are moving targets that
are tough to quantify. However, judging from NetMechanic's
ongoing tests of major hosting companies, Aplus gives no cause
for alarm. The company's been on the NetMechanic charts for
72 weeks as of this writing and currently stands in the Bronze
section, with a measured uptime of 99.998 and 99.98 percent.
During our two-week trials, we ran separate tests to compare
our ODSOL-hosted site to three other low-cost hosts. In response
and download times, ODSOL was squarely in the NetMechanic-defined
zone, sometimes a little faster at downloading than, say,
ValueWeb or Catalog.com, sometimes a little slower. ODSOL
even provides its own tool that lets you test your site's
performance. When we used this tool, its results were the
same good news we'd gotten from other resources.
Service and Support: 9/10
The first level of service from any Web-based service is the
help available on the company's Web site. ODSOL offers a good
volume of feature tours, FAQs, and tutorial screens to guide
you through the process. However, for the one or two stumbling
blocks we found en route, the company's support proved a godsend.
As we found in last year's review of the site, wait times
are minimal and the service is excellent--whether we contacted
on Monday morning, Saturday evening, or Wednesday night. We
do wish ODSOL offered a toll-free support system -- but when
you get fast, reliable technical support via their Help Desk,
that's a minor quibble indeed.
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