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IONOS web hosting review
8:32 pm | August 29, 2020

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets | Tags: | Comments: Off

Founded in Germany in 1988, IONOS (formerly known as 1&1 Internet) is a web hosting giant with 2,000 employees, 10 data centers, more than 90,000 servers and 8 million customer contracts worldwide.

Putting that into perspective, Datanyze says IONOS has 6.86% share of the web hosting market: that's ahead of everyone but Google Cloud (7.82%), Amazon AWS (10.96%) and GoDaddy (14.99%).

Products

There are products covering every area (Image credit: 1&1 IONOS)

What types of hosting does IONOS offer? 

IONOS has plans covering a very wide range of hosting types and needs. Low cost shared hosting, a website builder and managed WordPress plans are ideal for personal and small business sites.

More powerful VPS and dedicated hosting have the resources to handle more demanding business and ecommerce sites (and if it's web stores you're after, there's managed WooCommerce hosting, too).

Windows ASP.NET hosting and the Github-friendly Deploy Now are value plans for developers and expert users.

Need even more power? IONOS' high-powered and ultra-reliable cloud servers have the resources to cope with even the most heavyweight, feature-packed and business-critical sites.

There isn't the space to cover every detail of what IONOS has to offer, but scroll down and we'll break down the company's key ranges, explore their pros and cons, and find out which products could work for you.

IONOS shared hosting homepage

(Image credit: IONOS)

IONOS shared hosting

Shared hosting is a scheme where several websites are hosted on the same server. It's cheap, because server costs are shared between all the accounts. With many sites sharing the same CPU, RAM and network connection, performance may be poor. But a good shared hosting package has more than enough power for most low-traffic blogs, personal and small business sites.

IONOS has three shared hosting plans.

The highlights: every plan has free SSL, a free domain, free daily backups and easy WordPress installation. 

The single site starter plan is reasonably priced at $4 a month in year one, $6 on renewal.

The mid-range Business plan ramps up speeds by adding more resources, supports unlimited websites, and - thanks to a spectacular introductory offer - is only $0.50 a month for year one, $10 a month after that.

The highest Expert plan adds even more resources, throws in SiteScan malware protection, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and analytics to monitor your website traffic, yet it's still only $8 a month in year one, $16 on renewal.

On the down side, IONOS doesn't offer free migration to help import your site from a previous host, and all the plans give you just one email account. It's a good one (2GB inbox, spam filtering), but that's no help if you need more. 

Our tests found IONOS Business plan has below average performance, too (more on that, later). IONOS shared hosting could still be a decent choice if you can live with just one email account. 

If the email is an issue but value is important, also consider Hostinger and HostGator for their low starter prices, extended email abilities and lengthy feature lists. Or if it's speed you're after, A2 Hosting and InMotion Hosting go beyond the basics with plenty of advanced performance-boosting tech.

IONOS WordPress hosting homepage

WordPress plans range from seriously cheap to very powerful (Image credit: IONOS)

IONOS WordPress hosting

WordPress is a hugely popular website creation tool which can be used to create anything from a simple personal site, to a huge and feature-packed international web store.

IONOS Managed WordPress hosting plans are priced almost identically to the shared range (special offer of $0.50 a month for the mid-range plan, $3 to $8 a month for the other plans, $6 to $8 on renewal), and the main features are similar: free domain, free SSL, still no free migration, but you do get daily backups.

There are important differences, too. Improved email support means the mid-range plan supports five email addresses, the top plan has ten. All plans include scanning for malware, and the top plan can remove any threats it finds. There's also one significant downgrade: the shared hosting plans support unlimited websites, but you can only have one managed WordPress project.

WordPress-specific additions include the WP Assistant to build a simple initial site for you, automated WordPress updates, and free themes (pre-built website designs), perhaps handy if you'd like to give your site a new look and feel.

There's nothing outstanding here, but these plans do give you fractionally more WordPress functionality for the same price, and that works for us. If you're looking to master WordPress, you're only building small or simple sites, and speeds really don't matter, getting a year of the Business plan for $6 is an amazing deal.

The IONOS WP Pro range is aimed at business users or anyone who needs more features and speed. IONOS says extra server resources deliver a 300% speed increase overall. There are automatic and manual backups, smarter automatic updates to reduce the chance of a buggy security patch breaking your site, and the ability to website changes before you put them live.

All this power comes at a cost. To begin to get the full speed benefits you'll need the Advanced WP Pro plan, priced from $40 a month on the annual plan ($48 billed monthly.) But this is fair value for what you're getting, and overall IONOS WP Pro is worth a look for business users or anyone with large or high-traffic sites.

If you're more interested in features than price, check out Bluehost's WP Pro plans (yes, they do have the same name). Speeds are good and they include more business-related tools, including SEO tools, and analytics to monitor website traffic.

But if cost is absolutely key, A2 Hosting's managed WordPress range offers top performance and lots of features from $23.99 billed monthly.

IONOS VPS hosting homepage screenshot

(Image credit: IONOS)

IONOS VPS hosting

VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting improves on shared hosting by giving you more resources and ensuring only you get to use them, hugely improving performance. While shared hosting accounts can sometimes handle only ten to twenty thousand visits a month, a good VPS can cope with hundreds of thousands, maybe more.

IONOS has an impressive 13 VPS hosting plans, giving your far more choice than most. All plans include unlimited traffic, unlimited email accounts (up to your plan storage limit), free SSL, 24/7 support, the ability to host your VPS in the USA, UK, Germany or Spain, and a 99.99% uptime guarantee.

The plans start with a 1 CPU core, 512MB RAM and 10GB storage system for a tiny $2 a month. That's cheap, but so underpowered you can do barely anything with it. The most powerful plan has 8 cores, 24GB RAM and 240GB RAM, and it's good value at $24 a month for the first six months, $45 afterwards.

Unusually, most VPS plans can come with Windows, though get ready for a big leap in price: it'll cost an extra $10 per core. (That's due to Microsoft's licensing rules, though, so don't blame IONOS). These are quality products, and could work for anyone with a demanding, high-traffic or business-critical site. 

Consider Hostwinds, too. It has more powerful high-end plans for heavyweight projects (up to 16 cores); uptime is better at 99.9999%; there's a 1Gbps connection to the outside world, and it's cheaper in many configurations. Worth a look, especially for experienced users looking for more control.

IONOS dedicated server homepage

Dedicated servers are cheap but a little short on power and configurability (Image credit: IONOS)

IONOS dedicated hosting

Dedicated hosting sits right at the top of the hosting tree. There's no sharing of RAM, network connection or anything else, because the entire server is yours. It's the perfect choice for serious high-traffic sites which not only need the best possible speeds, but they have to deliver all of the time (news sites, busy web stores, anywhere poor performance might hit your bottom line).

IONOS has only four dedicated server plans, far fewer than the specialist competition. All plans include a free domain, free SSL, malware scanning, Railgun CDN to accelerate speeds, and unlimited traffic. 

Prices start cheap at $65 billed monthly for an Intel Atom C2750, 8GB RAM, 240GB SSD plan. At the top of the range, an Intel Xeon E3-1270 V6 CPU, 64GB RAM, 800GB SSD server is $160 billed monthly. You can equip each server with regular hard drives (HDD) rather than solid-state drives (SSD), reducing speed a little, but raising capacity to a maximum of 2TB.

These plans are good value, and a decent choice for experienced business users who need speedy and reliable hosting, but are also on a tight budget.

If you're looking for more choice or power at the top end of the range, though, check out Hostwinds. As with VPS, it also starts cheap, but has many more plans, and has more configuration options, including support for Windows hosting.

IONOS website builder service homepage

(Image credit: IONOS)

Does IONOS have a website builder? 

If you don't have a website, or much idea of how to get one, then a website builder is the simplest solution. Most come with a range of pre-built site designs called templates, and all you have to do is choose one you like, drag and drop elements you need on a page (text, images, maps, videos, contact forms), then customize the site with your own content.

IONOS has a simple website builder with free templates, a 17,000+ royalty-free image library, a free domain, a single email account (yes, just one) and free SSL.

The Starter plan is cheap at just $1 a month for year one, $5 on renewal. The Plus plan adds blog support and many more design and page options (photo galleries, social media support, integrating business apps such as bookings and reviews.) It's $5 a month for 12 months, $10 on renewal.

You can add a web store to all plans from no initial cost at all on the Starter plan (it's still $1 a month for the first year, $12 on renewal), to an extra $15 on the highest plan ($25 a month for six months, then $35). All plans give you payment and shipping support, and allow selling via Facebook and Instagram.

This is a useful product, but not outstanding. There aren't many templates, they're not great quality, the editor is basic, the starter plan is missing some basic abilities (no image slider, can't integrate social media Like/Follow buttons), and these days we expect more than just one email address per plan. But you can't beat the price, and if you'd like to build a small site or web store, just learn the basics, and you can live with its limitations, $1 a month for the Starter account is an exceptional deal.

IONOS web store homepage screenshot

(Image credit: IONOS)

Can you build a web store with IONOS? 

As we're discussed above, IONOS' website builder supports building a web store with up to 10,000 products. But it's short on features and based on IONOS' slower-than-average shared hosting, making it best suited to small or low-traffic sites.

A separate eCommerce Builder adds more professional features. It allows you to sell digital products, supports favorites and wish lists, adds volume discounts, enables selling on Amazon and eBay, and more. The top plan is priced at $35 a month for the first six months of the annual plan, $50 afterwards. That's a better choice for larger stores, or if you've real ecommerce ambitions.

Other options include using popular platforms such as WooCommerce, PrestaShop or OpenCart to build your store. IONOS has simple shared hosting plans for each, priced from $0.50 a month in year one, $8 a month afterwards, or you can buy a VPS or dedicated hosting plan to get faster and more reliable performance. This might take more work, as you'll have to master something like WooCommerce largely on your own. These platforms are hugely capable, though, and have the power to build and manage the largest ecommerce projects.

This is a decent set of plans covering just every type of user, but there are still other options worth considering. HostGator's Gator and Hostinger's website builder support building basic web stores at minimal cost; Wix has better store templates and many more features, and Bluehost's WooCommerce plans include an array of business-friendly marketing and SEO extras.

IONOS uptime results

(Image credit: Uptime.com)

How fast is IONOS? 

Every web host promises lightning speeds, but do they really deliver? To find out, we sign up for a shared hosting plan, set up a simple website using a standard WordPress template, then use some of the best testing and monitoring services around to see exactly how it performs.

Uptime.com checks our site's availability by accessing a test page every five minutes for fourteen days. IONOS scored a perfect 100% uptime, meaning our site was available for every visit. 

IONOS GTMetrix results

(Image credit: GTMetrix)

Next, GTmetrix accessed a test page and calculated how long it took to display the main content, a value technically known as Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP. The lower the LCP, the quicker your pages are likely to appear in the browser, and the happier your visitors are likely to be.

IONOS' LCP was a disappointing 1.3 seconds, placing it 13th out of our last 15 tests (most providers scored between 0.6 to 0.8 seconds). That's not a disaster - 1.3 seconds is still an acceptable time - but it's noticeably slower than many competitors.

IONOS K6 results

(Image credit: K6)

Measuring the best possible load times for a single user is important, but it's also useful to know how a site performs when it's really busy. We check for this by using the stress-testing service k6 to unleash 20 visitors simultaneously and monitor what happens.

IONOS scored poorly here, too, with our site averaging only 9.8 requests per second (most providers manage 14 to 16). If you've a low-traffic site and are unlikely to have 5 simultaneous users, let alone ten, that also might not matter very much. But again, it's a noticeably worse performance than many competitors.

(Please note, our results are based on the performance of the IONOS Business shared hosting plan. If you're opting for the Expert plan, VPS or dedicated hosting, you'll get far more system resources and may see very different speeds.)

IONOS web account dashboard

IONOS web account dashboard (Image credit: IONOS)

How easy is IONOS to use? 

Log into many web hosts and you'll find familiar industry-standard platforms: WHM to manage your accounts, cPanel for all your key website management tasks, Softaculous to reliably install and then manage WordPress. That's generally good news, partly because they're top quality tools (which is why they became industry standards), but also because if you've any experience of web hosting, you're likely to know how to use these already.

IONOS ditches all these in favor of its own custom control panels. That has some advantages (it probably saves a pile of cash in license fees, helping IONOS keep its prices low), but it also means even expert users will have to spend some time exploring the system to find the functions they need.

This isn't as easy as we'd like. Functions aren't always organized intuitively, and common tasks, such as logging into a WordPress site, took more time to locate than we expected.

IONOS' website search engine helps a little. Enter 'WordPress', say, and it doesn't just list top WordPress support articles. A 'Product and Actions' includes control panel tasks such as 'Install WordPress', and clicking these links takes you directly to that page. It's a good idea but doesn't quite work everywhere. We tried to find the right keywords to show a WordPress newbie how they could log into the dashboard, for instance, but never quite managed it.

If you're an experienced user who makes in-depth use of all kinds of low-level cPanel and other features, this could easily be an issue. Even once you've found the functions you need, there's no guarantee they'll deliver precisely the same results.

But if you're only after the hosting management basics - configure your domain, set up some email addresses, install WordPress - then this may not matter very much. Sure, it might take you a few extra minutes to master the control panel basics, but after that you'll use IONOS much like any other host.

IONOS customer support

Support is available via phone and live chat (Image credit: IONOS)

What is IONOS support like? 

IONOS offers support via its website knowledgebase, phone, live chat and email.

The support site has a huge number of articles, sensibly organized into categories such as WordPress, Email, Domains and SSL Certificates. Some of these articles are a little short, but there's a lot of valuable information here. 

Unusually, telephone support doesn't simply mean 'dial this international number and be left on hold wondering what this is going to cost.' You can book an appointment and have the company call you. 

When we tried this at 12:10pm, the site offered us 15 minutes slots from only 1pm, so you probably won't have long to wait. But if that's not convenient, you can book up to four days ahead from 8am to 8pm.

We set up an appointment, and sure enough, a call arrived within 30 seconds of our starting slot time. The agent listened carefully to our query about installing WordPress on subdomains, clearly explained what we needed to do, and sent us links with more advice via email. Impressive.

If you prefer live chat or email, they also work well, with speedy and accurate replies quickly pointing us in the right direction.

Final verdict

IONOS cuts a few corners with its shared hosting (no free migration, only one email account, below-par performance), but they're still great value. And if you need more, there's a wide range of WordPress plans, and the company has the VPS, dedicated and cloud hosting products to cater for everyone from enthusiastic amateurs to SMB and enterprise users. 

Sign up for 1&1 Ionos US deals here.

Sign up for 1&1 Ionos UK deals here.


IONOS FAQs

What payment types does IONOS support?

IONOS accepts payment by card and PayPal. 

Does IONOS offer refunds?

IONOS has a general 30-day money-back period covering most hosting products and a handful of other services (check the small print for the precise details).

Domains, SSL certificates, cloud and bare metal servers are not included.

Does IONOS have an uptime guarantee?

IONOS has a 99.99% uptime guarantee for its hosted web pages. If the company doesn't hit the target, you can claim an account credit to match the real downtime (90 minutes downtime, your account is credited with the cost of 90 minutes hosting).

At first glance, that looks better than most providers, who only offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee. But limiting compensation to the actual downtime isn't as generous. The top-of-the-range shared hosting plan is $8 a month in the first year, for instance, or $0.263 a day. If your site is down for eight hours, that could be a disaster for you, but even IONOS admits responsibility, you'll get just $0.09. It's not even worth your time asking.

ScalaHosting 'only' offers a 99.9% guarantee, but if its uptime is less than 99% (that's only seven hours, 18 minutes and 17 seconds in a month) you'll qualify for a whole month. That's still not a huge amount, and it's best to have no downtime at all, but we like the principle: if the service doesn't hit a certain standard, you effectively get it for free.

IONOS choice of data centers

Host your site with a choice of data centers (Image credit: IONOS)

Where are IONOS's data centers?

IONOS has ten data centers located in the USA, Germany, UK and Spain.

The company allows you to choose your preferred data center for some of its more high-end products. You can't pick a data center if you're buying regular shared hosting, for instance, but you do get the option with VPS plans.

What is my IONOS IP address?

Log into your IONOS control panel.

Click Domains and SSL, then find and click your domain in the list.

Click the DNS tab.

Scroll down and look for a record with the type A, the host name @ (or www) and the service 'Webhosting.'

Your website server's IP address is displayed in the Value column for that A record.

What are IONOS's nameservers?

If you sign up for IONOS hosting but are using a domain managed elsewhere, you may need to find IONOS' nameservers to connect the domain to your hosting plan. Sounds complicated, but fortunately it only takes a few clicks.

Log into your IONOS control panel.

Click Domains and SSL, then find and click your domain in the list.

Click the Nameserver tab and the control panel displays the IONOS nameservers for your account.

IONOS cancel page

(Image credit: IONOS)

How do I cancel an IONOS product?

Log into the IONOS control panel.

Click the Account icon top-right, and select Contracts & Subscriptions.

Find the plan you'd like to cancel, click the gear icon to its right and choose Manage Contract.

Click 'Show Cancellation Options' and decide what you'd like to cancel: an entire contract, or specific add-ons only.

If you got a free domain with your plan and don't need it, select the 'Change domain expiration dates' option to disable automatic renewal.

Domain.com review
8:08 am | August 27, 2020

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets | Comments: Off

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Founded in 1998, Florida-based Domain.com is a web hosting provider and domain registrar who claims to power 1.2 million websites across the globe.

The company is now owned by Newfold Digital (previously known as Endurance International Group), the power behind other hosting names like Bluehost, HostGator and iPage.

What types of hosting does Domain.com offer?

Domain.com offers easy-to-use and low cost shared hosting plans in various forms: WordPress hosting, a website builder, an online store builder, and general-purpose do-everything shared hosting plans to cover everything else.

The company doesn't offer VPS hosting, dedicated server hosting, or any more advanced hosting plans.

Domain.com's plans should be powerful enough to handle most personal and business sites. But if your traffic is 100,000 visitors a month or more, rather than 10,000, or it's vital that your site has consistently high speeds, then its shared hosting plans are unlikely to be a good choice.

Could those plans work for you, though? Next up, we'll look at what each hosting range has to offer, what they do well, and where they fall short.

Domain.com shared hosting homepage screenshot

(Image credit: Domain.com)

Domain.com shared hosting

Domain.com's shared hosting range is refreshingly simple. There are only three plans, all with the same core features: free domain, free SSL, unlimited bandwidth, 1-click WordPress install and a free website builder. Upgrading only adds more resources, so there are no extra features to weigh up. Prices start at $3.75 a month on the annual plan, $4.99 on renewal, but there's no complex discounting scheme if you sign up for longer. Choose a one, two or three-year contract, it's still $3.75 a month.

We signed up, but quickly ran into problems. Domain.com doesn't use any of our favorite hosting management platforms (cPanel for its all-round tools, Softaculous to install and manage WordPress and other apps.) We found its replacements have fewer options and aren't always organized logically, often leaving us struggling to find key functions.

The 1-click installer is especially disappointing. It only covers WordPress, has the bare minimum of configuration options, includes few management tools, and has occasionally failed to install WordPress in the past (though not during this review.)

The plans have some feature gaps. In particular, there are no backups with the cheaper plans (adding them to our test account would cost an extra $2.13 a month.) Even when we got our site online, performance was below average (more on that, later.)

If you're running a basic site, with few visitors, and long-term prices are your top priority, then Domain.com might, just about, be acceptable. Although many providers have lower prices in the first term, they tend to jump on renewal, and Domain.com's 'from $4.99' renewal price is very low.

Unfortunately, opting for Domain.com means you'll pay in other ways, with below-par speeds, few features and poor management tools.

Hostinger's shared plans start a little cheaper at $2.99 a month on the annual, two or four your plans, although they're more expensive after that $6.99 to $8.99. Backups are still limited on the cheapest plans (weekly rather than daily), but performance is good, there's an excellent control panel and 1-click installer, useful WordPress extras, six data centers, and more.

Domain.com WordPress hosting homepage screenshot

The WordPress plans come with preinstalled plugins and themes (Image credit: Domain.com)

Domain.com WordPress hosting

WordPress is the world's favorite website creation platform, a hugely configurable tool which can handle everything from a single page personal site to a product-packed international web store.

Domain.com's shared hosting supports installing WordPress, perhaps enough if you just want to explore what it can do. But if you've something more serious in mind, Domain.com's WP range extends the range with a handful of extra features. 

The WP Starter plan is priced from $3.75 a month, just like the shared hosting, but adds unlimited storage, a customized control panel and pre-installed themes and plugins. They're small improvements, but not worth very much. You probably don't need a lot of storage (simple WordPress sites are often barely 1GB in size), and even newcomers can find plenty of quality themes and plugins for themselves.

The WP Essential plan (priced from $6.95 a month) includes more valuable extras, including Sitelock's malware scanning and removal service, and a direct phone line 'to a team of support agents who are specially-trained in all things WP Essential.'

Malware scanning is useful (hacked WordPress sites are a well-known web danger), and the plans are fair value, but they just don't have enough WordPress-related functionality to justify your time. Many hosting providers offer malware scanning as a paid extra, and you could easily buy a better shared hosting package elsewhere and add malware scanning yourself.

Domain.com does have one unusual extra in its WP Live support service. Priced from $29.95 to $149.95 a month, this goes beyond troubleshooting problems to giving advice on all kinds of design and optimization issues: social media strategies, creating an online store, making sure your site works well on mobile devices, more.

This could be useful in some situations. If you're new to WordPress, just starting your site, spending a one-off $149.95 for a month of design advice could save you a lot of time, and produce a better site. But in reality, you're likely to be better off choosing a more capable WordPress plan with additional WordPress-related features, faster hosting underneath, and the option to upgrade to VPS hosting if your site grows.

Alternatives include Hostinger's shared package, very cheap but with handy WordPress extras. Bluehost has a wide range of plans, with some strong business features at the top of the range. And if you're not quite sure what you need, IONOS' has WordPress options ranging from the impossibly cheap ($0.50 a month for year one, $8 on renewal) to supremely powerful ($120 a month for agencies and developers).

Domain.com website builder template example

The website builder includes a powerful web store (Image credit: Domain.com)

Does Domain.com have a website builder?

If you're looking for the easiest and quickest route to create a web presence, then a website builder is often the best choice. Most builders come with or can create starting sites in minutes, and adding elements to pages (text, images, videos forms) is as easy as dragging and dropping.

Domain.com has three website builder plans, ranging from $1.99 a month (billed monthly) for a limited product which supports a maximum of six pages, to a $12.99 a month ecommerce plan with product listings, inventory tracking, integrated shipping, order and tax management, and more.

The builder is certainly easy to use. No need to browse through templates to find something that appeals: just answer a few questions on yourself, your site and its goals, and it creates a starter site for you right away.

There's a reasonable set of features, too. All plans include free SSL, unlimited storage, social media sharing, blogs, contact forms, easy integration with an existing Facebook page, and more.

The plans are fair value, and the $1.99 plan in particular could be a smart low-cost solution for very simple sites.

As with Domain.com's WordPress plans, though, the lack of VPS or dedicated support is a problem for more demanding projects, such as a web store. If your site outgrows Domain.com's basic shared hosting infrastructure, you can't upgrade to anything better, and could be forced to move somewhere else.

Wix is a capable website builder with many more features and a far wider range of plans. Casual users can build and host a website for free, and an array of other plans covers everyone from personal users to (potentially) big international corporations.

Squarespace is a powerful alternative with great-looking templates and professional business and e-commerce plans. Or if it's value you're after, Bluehost has plans from $2.95 a month, while the Hostinger-powered Zyro has an 'e-commerce essentials' plan from an initial $3.99 a month.

Domain.com's uptime results

(Image credit: Domain.com)

How fast is Domain.com? 

Reliability is a must-have for any serious website. If your site is regularly broken, or down entirely, it hurts your reputation and may drive users away.

We check reliability by using Uptime.com to access a test site every five minutes over a two week period. We expect hosts to show 100% uptime with this short a test, but Domain.com managed a disappointing 99.11%. That puts it last in our last 15 tests (11 hosts hit 100% uptime, even the next-to-last host managed 99.63%.)

Uptime also records the response time of each test web server. Domain.com came bottom of the list here, too, with an average response time of 2.97 seconds (nine of our last 15 averaged less than 0.5 seconds.) 

Domain.com's GTMetrix results

(Image credit: GTMetrix)

We measure hosting performance by using a tool called GTmetrix to access a test WordPress site and calculate how long it takes to display the main content of a page (a figure technically called Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP). The lower the LCP, the faster and more responsive your site appears, and the happier your visitors will be.

Domain.com's LCP was relatively disappointing at 1.5 seconds, far slower than providers such as Bluehost (0.8 seconds), GoDaddy (0.7 seconds) and Hostinger (0.6 seconds.) Although 1.5 seconds is still acceptable, keep in mind that's based on launching our very simple template site. If yours has any significant content or features then it could be much slower.

Domain.com's k61 results

(Image credit: k61)

Finally, we use k6 https://k6.io to measure website performance when it has many visitors loading pages at the same time. Our Domain.com site handled an average 22.67 requests per second, but with a price. Response times became even longer and more unreliable as the site load increased, and the overall test response time was a lengthy 1.591 seconds. Most providers were at least a second faster, and Hostinger, HostGator, InMotion Hosting and Bluehost managed response times of around 100ms or less.

Domain.com's web control panel

Domain.com's web control panel is basic (Image credit: Domain.com)

How easy is Domain.com to use?

Buying a Domain.com plan is easier than usual. There are generally only a few plans, and the site only displays the bare minimum features for each. Pricing is clear and there are no misleading discounts to catch you out (a '$4.99' starter price which leaps to $14.99 after a year, say).

Managing your plan isn't as straightforward. Domain.com doesn't use standard tools such as cPanel or Softaculous, opting for its own custom control panels, instead. We found them relatively basic, with fewer features. These don't seem as intuitive or well organized as more standard control panels, either, and we spent longer than expected trying to carry out some tasks.

Use the control panels for a while and these initial impressions won't matter as much, because you'll learn where everything is. But if you're looking for the most straightforward shared hosting, we'd generally recommend choosing a host which offers quality tools such as cPanel or Softaculous.

Alternatively, there are some hosts who do produce very capable control panels of their own. Hostinger's hPanel is a great example, and it's available in the company's budget shared hosting range (from $1.99 a month).

Domain.com's support page

(Image credit: Domain.com)

What is Domain.com's support like?

Domain.com offers support 24/7 via telephone, live chat and a web knowledgebase. There's no ticket support, though. That can become a problem if you've a long-term issue, as you'll have to explain the situation from the beginning whenever you talk to an agent.

The web knowledgebase has plenty of useful content, and its search engine does a good job of displaying the most relevant articles at the top. We noticed that some content appeared to be cut-and-pasted from iPage, (both iPage and Domain.com are owned by Newfold Digital), and no-one had remembered to replace the 'iPage.com' references with 'Domain.com.' That looks a little clumsy, but as iPage and Domain.com use the same technology, the articles should hopefully apply to both hosts. 

We opened several test live chat sessions, and in every case an agent appeared to respond in under a minute. The initial responses are largely automated, and appeared more or less identically for every test question, but typically we still had an initial reply to our issue within three to four minutes.

The quality of responses varied depending on the issue, with agents performing noticeably less well on more complex or unusual problems (how to install WordPress on a subdomain, and the SSL consequences of that.) But when it came to common issues which you're far more likely to have, the agents quickly identified each problem and pointed us to the best solution.

Domain.com's very few plans

Domain.com has very few plans (Image credit: Domain.com)

Final verdict

Domain.com's low long-term prices are appealing, and if cost is your top priority, your site is basic and you're not that bothered about power or performance, it might - just about - do the job. But if you're managing any more serious project, you'll find faster, more reliable and powerful hosting available elsewhere for only a little extra cash.


Domain.com FAQs

What payment types does Domain.com support?

Domain.com accepts payment via card and PayPal. 

Does Domain.com offer refunds?

Domain.com has a 30-day money-back guarantee covering hosting, but not domain registration, setup fees, or the cost of any additional services.

The small print warns that all first-time hosting accounts are eligible. If you've been a customer before, and signed up again, you won't be able to claim a refund.

Domain.com offers uptime guarantee

(Image credit: Domain.com)

Does Domain.com have an uptime guarantee?

The Domain.com states in several places that some hosting plans have a 99.99% uptime guarantee, which translates to a downtime of just four minutes and 23 seconds a month. Sounds like good news, especially as most hosting packages only offer 99.9% uptime, or 43 minutes and 50 seconds a month.

Unfortunately, we can't find anything on the Domain.com website which explained anything about the policy: what counted as downtime, what didn't, when you might start being compensated for problems, and you might get. We asked support but our agent couldn't tell us, either.

Maybe the company has the tech to hit that target, maybe it doesn't, but with no clear definition of what 'downtime' means, it's not a meaningful guarantee. We'd recommend you ignore it until Domain.com adds some relevant details to its terms and conditions.

Where are Domain.com's data centers?

The Domain.com website doesn't have any significant information on the company's data centers, and we weren't offered a choice of locations when we signed up for our regular hosting account.

We put our server IP address into IPLocation.net  https://www.iplocation.net/ip-lookup  to find out where the server is located. This doesn't always return an accurate answer, but of the eight databases IP Location checked, six suggested our IP was in Florida, one said Massachusetts, and one couldn't give us a location.

What is my Domain.com IP address?

Log into the Domain.com customer account panel.

Click the Hosting tab at the top of the screen.

The server IP address is displayed in the Server Information box on the right-hand side of the control panel.

What are Domain.com's nameservers?

Log into your Domain.com customer account panel.

Click 'DNS & Nameservers' in the left sidebar.

Domain.com's nameservers are displayed beneath the 'Add Nameserver' button. (If you don't see them, they're probably ns1.domain.com and ns2.domain.com: try those, first.)

Domain.com's change auto-renewal status to cancel a product

Domain.com's change auto-renewal status to cancel a product (Image credit: Domain.com)

How do I cancel a Domain.com product?

Log into your Domain.com web account.

Click the Hosting Tools icon at the top of the page (nine small dots arranged in a square.)

Click the 'Logged in as ' box at the top of the screen, and choose Hosting Renewal.

Choose whether you'd like your hosting canceled immediately, or when your subscription expires. Read the details carefully to avoid any mistakes, and click Change Status.

The TECHRADAR coupon is good for 25% off the cart total with no minimum purchase. All renewals after the initial discounted period will be charged at the then current standard list price for the selected period. Coupon is not valid with sunrise registrations, landrush registrations, EAP registrations, pre-registrations, premium registrations, renewals, transfers, custom website design, other coupons, or special pricing.

GeoSurf Review: Pros & Cons, Features, Ratings, Pricing and more
1:29 pm | August 7, 2020

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets | Comments: Off

GeoSurf is one of the oldest proxy providers, having been around since 2009. Known best for its residential proxy network, it claims to have a pool of 3.7 million residential IPs that cover over 1,700 cities worldwide. 

This Tel Aviv-based company is also very vocal about its privacy. In fact,that it signs legally binding agreements with its customers, a guarantee that it is not data sharing under any circumstance.

GeoSurf: Plans and pricing

GeorSurf’s plans are all pre-paid, and have an auto recurring subscription fee that is charged automatically at the start of a new billing cycle. This can be a convenience so that a subscription does not lapse, or an expensive stumbling block for those that forget to cancel these types of recurring costs. 

As is fairly common with all the proxy providers, GeoSurf’s plans require a minimum monthly commitment. With a higher data allotment for the month, it becomes a better deal when you work it out by the GB.

For instance, their cheapest residential proxy plan, Geosurf Residential Explorer, starts from $300/month and bundles 25GB of usage ($12/GB), and additional bandwidth will cost the same $12/GB. If you have a higher usage, you can choose a higher tiered plan- there are five plans in total. For example, the Geosurf Residential Professional plan costs $800/month but offers 100GB of bandwidth, which comes to $8/GB, with additional bandwidth available at the same rate. 

GeoSurf 1

(Image credit: GeoSurf )

GeoSurf: Features

GeoSurf offers both types of IPs -- static IPs and residential IPs. It also has available mobile IPs as well.

Static IPs are the data center IPs that are available While they can be identified and blocked more easily, but do have their advantages, such as being more stable as they are provided by an ISP.

GeoSurf’s main offering is the residential IP network that has over 3.7 million high quality residential IPs across 192 countries, and every city in the world. They are more anonymous, and there is no indication of proxy use.

The company claims its IPs are clean, and haven’t been blocked or blacklisted. Furthermore, it owns all of the servers on their network and hosts them in Tier 1 backbone data centers around the world. 

GeoSurf claims that thanks to these steps, their IT infrastructure has a high level of reliability, availability, and security. In fact, GeoSurf claims that its residential IPs work with particularly tough targets like Instagram as well as on targets that use age-verification. In fact, they claim that they are “Never blocked,” and “100%” reliable, which are seriously lofty claims that competitors don’t make.

GeoSurf 2

(Image credit: GeoSurf )

The good thing about GeoSurf’s offering is that it offers unlimited IPs. This means there aren’t any limitations on the number of connections, threads, and locations you can target, simultaneously. Rather than restricting the IPs, GeoSurf meters plans by bandwidth.

The service enables you to target based on geography, such as the country, state, and even down to the city. While it supports the common HTTP and HTTPS protocols, it doesn’t support SOCKS5. 

GeoSurf offers two types of IP rotation policies. Sticky IPs help maintain persistent connections for a predefined time. The service offers sticky IPs that you can choose to keep for 0, 1 or 10 minutes. 

On the other hand, the Per Session rotation policy gives you the ability to maintain session persistence. You can use this rotation policy to effectively bind your connection to a specific IP and keep it- without any time limit. In other words, this lets you keep the same IP as long as you keep sending requests before the expiration of the time-to-live (TTL).

GeoSurf offers a number of useful tools, including the browser extension for Firefox, Chrome. You can use the extension to switch IPs and also delete all cookies and cache from the browser with a single click. There is also a dedicated browser toolbar available, and a desktop VPN for times that is more convenient than a proxy.

GeoSurf 3

(Image credit: GeoSurf )

GeoSurf: Interface and use

Getting started with, and using the service is quite simple.

The onboarding process requires going through a sales executive who’ll help you choose a plan for your requirements. While this might be useful for some, others might find it an unnecessary step.

Once the sales executive has registered you with the service, you can log into its dashboard, which gives simple usage statistics on the landing page.

To use the service, the next step is to create a gateway address. The dashboard has a streamlined three-step setup wizard for generating this.

First, select the desired targeting level or service type as GeoSurf calls it. You can choose between Country, State and City for granular control of the geographic location. 

Next choose your rotation time, which can be either Per Session or Sticky. Finally, use the pull-down menus to specify the location based on the targeting option you selected in the first step.

When you are done, the wizard will then display the IP address of the gateway, and also a port number or a range of ports, depending on your prior selections in the wizard.

GeoSurf 4

(Image credit: GeoSurf )

As long as you keep sending a request you should stay on the same sticky IP. In case you wish to change the IP, all you need to do is to change the port number according to the port range. Each port will give you a new IP.

For session IPs, the port is always 8000 as they connect through a username and password that’s listed below the gateway address.

GeoSurf offers several mechanisms for using the generated gateway. You can send your requests through GeoSurf’s API- or integrate it with third-party software and bots.

The service has an integration guide, which has instructions to help you add the gateway in popular apps and tools. The integration guide will also help you get started with example code in various languages including PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, Node.js, and more. You can also use the gateway through the browser add-on mentioned earlier.

GeoSurf: Support

GeoSurf offers support that is available 24/7. There are some self help options, such as whitepapers, but we did not find a comprehensive knowledge base, webinars, nor a community forum.

There are some direct options, but we are lacking a phone number other than in Tel Aviv, an email, a fax, or a chat box. Rather, we find a WhatsApp, Telegram, and a contact portal, the last option we confirmed can be used for sales or product support.

While the overall support looks to be adequate, we think some of these options, such as WhatsApp are not the typical communication options that we would be expecting for this type of service.

GeoSurf: Final verdict

GeoSurf certainly has its positives. Although it can’t match the sheer number of IPs offered by some of its peers like Luminati, the 3.7+ million it offers are high-quality residential IPs that cover the globe.

Furthermore, the service limits accounts by bandwidth, rather than by the number of IPs, which makes it a fairly attractive option. 

That said, the service isn’t particularly cost competitive as compared to its peers in the proxy space. Also, while GeoSurf has been in the game for longer than many of the other proxy providers, it doesn’t offer the same level of service. For instance, you can’t get mobile IPs with GeoSurf, neither does it offer any custom crawlers of its own, nor does it support SOCKS5. 

According to GeoSurf, its proxies are great for ad verification, sales intelligence, and purchasing sneakers, and we’d agree. GeoSurf doesn’t offer a trial as much, but you can ask for one during the onboarding process to explore the service and see if it works for you.