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Web.com website builder review 2025

9:21 pm | April 10, 2021

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets Pro Website Building | Tags: SEO | Comments: Off

EDITOR'S NOTE:

Web.com has now been integrated into the Network Solutions website builder. If you already have a Web.com website, you can login to Network Solutions with the same credentials.

With many of Web.com's features being transferred, you can read our full Network Solutions website builder review to learn more.

Our detailed Web.com review examines a website builder that has undergone significant changes following its integration with Network Solutions. Web.com, which has been helping small businesses create user-friendly online experiences since 1997, has now been reworked for even more ease of use with AI. But for those seeking advanced website building options, check out our guide to the best website builders.

TechRadar reviewers have spent thousands of hours testing 140+ website builders to bring you authoritative insights. Web.com offers a straightforward approach to website creation with over 200 templates and AI-assisted design tools. While it provides solid functionality for basic websites, it faces stiff competition from more advanced platforms like Wix, our top pick for the best website builder in 2025.

Web.com, now the Network Solutions Website Builder, emphasizes simplicity over complexity, making it appealing to users who want to get online quickly without technical expertise. However, its focus on ease of use comes at the cost of advanced customization options that more experienced users might expect.

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Web.com: 2-minute review

Web.com positions itself as a beginner-friendly website builder that prioritizes simplicity. The platform offers a section-based editor rather than true drag-and-drop functionality, which simplifies the building process but limits design flexibility. With over 200 templates covering various industries and AI-powered tools for content generation, Web.com provides a solid foundation for small businesses and individuals looking to establish an online presence quickly.

The company's recent integration with Network Solutions has led to a radical shift in its business model. Founded in 1997, Web.com has built a reputation for serving small businesses. But its acquisition and merger with the Network Solutions brand combines decades of web hosting and domain expertise. Still, this provider occupies a middle ground between ultra-simple platforms and professional-grade tools — though there are better alternatives currently available in each category.

What is Web.com?

Web.com, or Network Solutions Website Builder, is a website building platform designed to help individuals and small businesses create professional websites without coding knowledge. Think of it as a digital toolkit that provides everything you need to build a website — templates, design tools, hosting, and domain registration. The platform uses what's called a "section-based" editor, which means you build your site by adding pre-designed sections (like headers, galleries, or contact forms) rather than placing individual elements wherever you want.

Network Solutions targets website creators who want to get online quickly without dealing with technical complexities. It handles the behind-the-scenes technical aspects like hosting, security, and maintenance, so you can focus on creating content and managing your business. The platform also includes AI-powered tools that can help generate website content and suggest design improvements, making it even easier for beginners to create professional-looking sites.

Features

Web.com positions itself as a complete website building platform with marketing and ecommerce, designed for simplicity over flashiness. The platform offers a solid foundation of essential features, including over 200 templates across four main categories, AI-powered content generation tools, and integrated marketing capabilities through SocialBooster, AdSpend, and email marketing platforms.

Its section-based editor, while marketed as drag-and-drop, provides a more structured approach to website building that streamlines the design process for beginners but limits creative freedom for advanced users.

The platform's feature set is clearly geared toward small businesses and beginners who need to establish an online presence quickly without technical complexity. Web.com also includes practical business tools like appointment scheduling, Google Analytics integration, and basic SEO.

The AI copywriting tool helps generate SEO-friendly content for various purposes, while the marketing suite provides social media scheduling and advertising campaign management. However, the platform lacks the kind of app marketplace found in competitors like Wix, which offers over 800 apps compared to Web.com's basic built-in tools.

Tools

Web.com provides a suite of tools designed to help users build, manage, and grow their online presence. The platform combines website building capabilities with marketing tools and business features to create an all-in-one solution.

Website builder

The core website building tool uses a section-based editor that allows users to add and customize pre-designed sections. While marketed as drag-and-drop, the interface is more structured, with elements that can be moved within defined parameters to maintain design consistency.

AI-powered content tools

Web.com includes AI tools for generating website content and marketing ideas. These tools can help create text for different sections of your site and suggest improvements to enhance user engagement.

E-commerce features

The platform offers built-in e-commerce capabilities including unlimited product listings, multiple payment options, abandoned cart recovery, and inventory management. Higher-tier plans include marketplace selling and advanced inventory features.

Marketing suite

Web.com provides integrated marketing tools including SocialBooster for social media management, AdSpend for advertising campaigns, email marketing capabilities, and MyLinks for creating custom branded links.

SEO and analytics

The platform includes SEO health checks, Google Analytics integration, and website analytics tools to help users track performance and improve search engine visibility.

Ease of use

Network Solutions Website Builder interface — Web.com prioritizes simplicity throughout the user experience, making it particularly accessible for beginners. (Image credit: Network Solutions)

Web.com prioritizes simplicity throughout the user experience, making it particularly accessible for beginners. The onboarding process includes an AI chatbot that helps generate a starter website, though some users find its initial setup process underwhelming compared to more sophisticated builders. A section-based editor keeps your design process focused, by providing pre-built sections that can be customized and rearranged to create a unique website.

The interface features a clean, intuitive design with a left-side menu containing essential tools like Pages, Blog, and Appointments. Adding new elements is straightforward — you simply click the blue + icon to access different content blocks like buttons, text, galleries, and Google Maps. The platform shows layout guides at the bottom of the editor, helping users understand how elements can be positioned within each section.

While the simplified approach makes Web.com very beginner-friendly, it does limit design flexibility for users who want more control over their site's appearance. You can't change templates for existing pages, and the selection of blocks and elements is more limited compared to advanced website builders. However, the platform compensates with reliable performance, featuring 100% uptime in testing and fast loading speeds averaging 1.2 seconds for the Largest Contentful Paint metric.

Pricing

Plan	Starting rate (paid annually)	Renewal rate (paid annually)
Website Builder	$1.99/month	$16.99/month
Website + Marketing	$3.99/month	$21.99/month
Ecommerce	$9.99/month	$29.99/month

Web.com's offers significant new-user discounts, with prices reduced by 67-100% for a 12-month term for every new user. But on the flip side of that, you can expect a sharp incline in subscription fees once the initial term has passed.

But while the entry-level pricing is higher than many competitors, Network Solutions' overhauled pricing removes any significant price hikes for those looking to upgrade. Web.com's most expensive plan costs $29.99/month during renewal, even with the upgraded features and hardware needed to support ecommerce.

Security

Network Solutions Website Builder terms — Web.com provides essential security features including SSL certificates and secure website hosting across all plans. (Image credit: Network Solutions)

Web.com provides essential security features including SSL certificates and secure website hosting across all plans. The platform offers automatic SSL certificate installation and renewal, ensuring data encryption between websites and visitors. However, the company isn't particularly transparent about its comprehensive security measures, and some security features that competitors include for free may require additional payment.

The platform includes basic security monitoring and protection through its hosting infrastructure, though it lacks some advanced security features found in enterprise-grade solutions. Web.com's integration with Network Solutions brings additional security expertise from a company with 45 years of experience in web services, potentially strengthening the overall security posture. Users seeking enhanced security should consider the platform's SiteLock integration, which offers cloud-based scanning and real-time threat detection.

Support

Network Solutions offers a wide range of ways to get in touch with its team, including an online chat feature, phone support, and email support. You could reach out at any time of the day or night, which is great if your team is spread across time zones.

Another great thing is the knowledge base articles. These resources are incredibly helpful, especially for newbies who don't know much about building websites from scratch. There are step-by-step tutorials for setting up your account, as well as more general advice on topics such as SEO optimization and social media marketing.

Alternatives

WordPress.com is one of the most popular website building tools in the world today, and for good reason. It's easy to use and completely customizable, making it ideal for businesses of all sizes and types. The platform also comes with plenty of features, including customizable themes and plugins that can help you create an effective and attractive website in no time at all.

Wix is another great alternative to Web.com website builder if you are looking for something that's easy to use while still providing plenty of features and customization options. With Wix, you can create a professional-looking site without any coding knowledge or technical skills at all—all you need is a drag-and-drop interface and a few clicks of the mouse.

Squarespace is another excellent alternative to Web.com if you want something that's both powerful and easy to use at the same time. Squarespace lets users customize their websites quickly and easily with its intuitive drag-and-drop editor as well as dozens of templates designed specifically for businesses in mind.

Web.com: Summary

Web.com serves as a solid choice for beginners and small businesses seeking a straightforward website building experience with AI-powered assistance. The platform excels in ease of use, performance reliability, and customer support, making it particularly suitable for users who prioritize simplicity over advanced customization.

However, its section-based editor limits design flexibility, and the steep renewal pricing structure may deter cost-conscious users in the long term. While Web.com's recent integration with Network Solutions adds credibility and technical expertise, the platform faces strong competition from more feature-rich alternatives that offer better value propositions.

Web.com: FAQs

How do I create a website on Web.com?

Creating a website on Web.com is easy and straightforward. All you need to do is sign up for an account, select the type of website you want to create (such as an e-commerce store or portfolio site), and then customize it with your own design elements and content.

You can even add features like contact forms, galleries, blogs, and more. Once you’re happy with the design of your site, click “Publish” and your new website will be live for everyone to see.

Can I build an online store with Web.com?

Yes, Web.com offers a dedicated plan for those who want to build an online store. The plan comes with a host of dedicated ecommerce features including secure online payments, the ability to sell via platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and marketplaces, as well as promotional tools such as discount codes and abandoned cart delivery.

Does Web.com offer a free trial?

Unfortunately, Web.com does not offer a free trial of its website builder service at this time. However, they do offer several different pricing plans to suit any budget, so if you have some money saved up you can try out its service without breaking the bank.

Can I create a web page with Web.com?

Yes. With Web.com’s easy-to-use tools, you can create a basic web page in no time at all - no coding experience required.

Automattic Jetpack SEO review

4:37 am | March 26, 2021

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets Pro Software & Services | Comments: Off

Automattic Jetpack is a well-known WordPress plugin suite that boosts the functionality and performance of websites present on WordPress. It was developed by Automattic, a company behind WordPress.com and also a major contributor to the brand’s open-source project.

It offers multiple features in different domains including security, performance optimization, site management, and content creation. While Jetpack offers many features for free, it also has several premium tiers that provide advanced features and dedicated support.

But is it really worth your time and money? In this review, we will be using this tool and breaking down the A to Z of this popular WordPress plugin. So, let’s get started.

Want to try Jetpack SEO? Check out the website here

Automattic Jetpack: Plans and pricing

Automattic Jetpack pricing — (Image credit: Automattic Jetpack)

Here’s a list of different packages offered by Jetpack to improve the security, performance, and marketing capabilities of WordPress sites.

1. Security and Backup Solutions

Security Package: At an introductory price of $9.95/month (then $19.95/month), this plan includes VaultPress Backup with 10GB storage, Scan for continuous protection, and Akismet Anti-spam to filter out spam from comments and forms.

VaultPress Backup is available separately for $4.95/month in the first year (then $9.95/month), offering real-time cloud backups and easy one-click restores.

Scan is also offered as a standalone option at $4.95/month initially (then $9.95/month), providing WAF and automatic malware scanning for continuous site protection.

2. Performance and Growth Tools

Complete Bundle: Priced at $24.95/month for the first year (then $49.95/month), this comprehensive package includes the entire Jetpack suite, enhancing site security, performance, and business growth tools.

Boost Package: For those focused on site speed and SEO, the Boost package is available at $9.95/month initially (then $19.95/month), designed to accelerate website performance without developer intervention.

3. Content Creation and Management

AI Subscription: For $8.33/month (billed annually), this plan offers advanced AI tools to streamline content creation.

Creator Plan: At $9.95/month for the first year (then $19.95/month), it equips users with tools for audience building, expansion, and monetization.

Social Subscription: Starts free for the first month, then $14.95/month, simplifying content distribution across social media platforms.

4. Additional Tools and Services

VideoPress: Offers ad-free video hosting for $4.95/month initially (then $9.95/month), enhancing multimedia content on your site.

Search: Priced at $8.25/month (billed yearly), it improves site search capabilities for instant results.

CRM Entrepreneur: At $17/month (billed yearly), this tool aids in building better customer relationships and business growth.

Stats: For $8.33/month (billed yearly), it provides advanced statistics for deeper insights into site performance.

All plans include a 14-day money-back guarantee and the option to start with a free version of Jetpack for exploring basic features before committing to a paid plan.

Automattic Jetpack: Features

Automattic Jetpack valutpress backup — (Image credit: Jetpack)

1. Security

Automattic Jetpack offers a range of features to improve the security of your websites. Here are the best of them:

VaultPress Backup: VaultPress is like a digital time capsule that provides both real-time and scheduled backups for your website. It goes beyond saving your content by backing up everything on your site, including posts, pages, comments, and media files. This cloud-based service ensures that the data is safe even outside of the hosting environment. Its one-click restore feature quickly brings back the site's integrity after any accidental data loss. Plus, real-time backup ensures that sites with frequent updates are fully protected, capturing each change as it occurs. VaultPress is more than just a backup tool - it also helps with restoration and migration, making site management easy and secure.

Scan: Jetpack’s Scan guards the website as it performs daily scans to detect malware and vulnerabilities. What sets it apart from ordinary scanners is its proactive alerts and automatic threat resolution, providing not only detection but also remediation. By integrating with your dashboard, this tool enables the users to take immediate action, minimizing the risk of prolonged exposure to threats. Its efficiency lies in its accuracy and automation, relieving one of the administrative tasks of site maintenance.

Akismet Anti-spam: Akismet uses advanced algorithms to filter out spam comments and form submissions, protecting the website's credibility. With its vast global spam database, Akismet can accurately detect spam and adapt to new spam tactics. This tool not only keeps your site clean but also enhances user experience by ensuring high-quality interactions in your online community.

2. Performance

Jetpack’s USP lies in boosting your site’s performance with its intuitive features. Let’s have a detailed look at them.

Site Search: The website search feature utilizes Elasticsearch to enhance how users look for information on your site. It's fast, accurate, and customizable to meet your preferences, helping visitors locate desired content more efficiently.

Boost: Jetpack Boost makes the process of optimizing your site's performance simple and makes it faster without any advanced technical knowledge. By focusing on ‘Core Web Vitals’, which are factors that Google considers important for user experience, it improves your site's search rankings and user satisfaction. On top of it, with its actionable insights, this tool provides guidance on refining a site's performance, making technical optimization accessible to everyone.

VideoPress: VideoPress ensures that your viewers can fully focus on your content by providing ad-free hosting. It focuses on speed and compatibility with various devices, ensuring excellent playback quality on all platforms. With VideoPress, your website offers an enhanced multimedia experience, captivating users with high-definition content without compromising site performance.

3. Growth

We were also impressed by Jetpack's growth tools that have been specifically created to enhance the reach, engagement, and content strategy.

AI Assistant: While testing, we found the AI Assistant quite helpful as it provides suggestions and improvements to enhance your storytelling. This tool helps you in creating content by generating ideas and refining drafts. It is a valuable resource for bloggers, marketers, and content creators who are looking for inspiration.

Jetpack AI assistant tool — (Image credit: Jetpack)

Stats: As the name suggests, it gives detailed data about your website's traffic, visitor actions, and content success. Using simple metrics and up-to-date information, Jetpack Stats assists in customizing your content plan to suit your audience's interests, improving engagement and visibility. It simplifies analytics, allowing site owners of any expertise level to use data-driven strategies for growth.

Social: Jetpack Social simplifies the task of sharing your content on various social platforms, allowing you to reach a wider audience with less effort. By scheduling your posts to go live at the best possible time, it boosts visibility and encourages more interaction. Additionally, Jetpack Social seamlessly connects your website with social media, making your work more efficient and improving your online presence.

4. Management

Here's how Jetpack guarantees the smooth functioning and management of your website.

Jetpack Manage: With this feature, you can easily handle updates, backups, security checks, and performance optimizations for all your sites. The user-friendly interface of Jetpack Manage simplifies even the most complex management tasks, allowing the user to maintain the health and security of their sites effortlessly. Using Jetpack Manage, site administrators can greatly enhance their efficiency and minimize the burden of managing multiple WordPress installations.

Mobile App: Jetpack’s app allows you to effortlessly monitor your site's activity, share content, and reply to comments from anywhere. It sends you instant notifications, keeps you informed about the site's status, and helps you to take necessary actions. Jetpack's commitment to offer accessibility to site administrators is evident in this app, which offers them all the essential tools at their disposal. Although the app seems to be a little boring when it comes to its interface, it delivers a good use case and can be pretty helpful for people who stay away from their laptops frequently.

Jetpack mobile app — (Image credit: Jetpack)

Automattic Jetpack: Interface and in-use

Jetpack's SEO interface is clean and simple, housed within the Jetpack settings tab of your WordPress dashboard. Features are split into logical tabs (like Sitemaps and Sharing), with most tools activated or deactivated by simple toggles. While Jetpack covers the basics well, there is very little room for extensive customization options.

Once installed, most features just require activation and perhaps a quick verification through your preferred search engine's webmaster tools. Plus, Jetpack SEO largely functions invisibly in the background, apart from the ability to add custom meta descriptions directly within the WordPress post editor. During our tests, we loved Jetpack SEO's ease of use, making it great for those wanting basic SEO functionality without complexity. However, we quickly outgrew the limited options, particularly when it came to customizing elements like title tags.

Automattic Jetpack: Support

Automattic Jetpack SEO Review — (Image credit: Jetpack)

Jetpack comes with a detailed knowledge base that’s open to all users. It can be used to browse for free resources on how to make the best use of the plugin. There’s even an active community forum where fellow users and customer support can help you figure out the solution to any problems you might encounter along the way.

Priority support is only available to paid subscribers. It allows you to contact Jetpack’s support team directly. While this can result in a speedier resolution for websites with advanced needs, most users will find the free support offered via the knowledge base and community forum to be more than sufficient.

Automattic Jetpack: The competition

There aren’t any single plugins that offer the same wealth of features that come with Jetpack. That said, Jetpack is known to cause bloating, a side effect of using heavy-duty plugins that causes your website to slow down. Various plugins offer one or more of the features that come with Jetpack. Used together, these plugins can offer the same functionality without slowing down your website.

Jetpack SEO, being a search engine optimization module, is rivaled by Yoast SEO, All in One SEO, and SEOPress—just to name a few. These plugins offer more advanced SEO features at a fraction of the cost. For example, they both also come with keyword research functionalities that help you see how well your blog post or website page is optimized for search engines.

Automattic Jetpack: Final verdict

Wrapping up, it's clear that Jetpack's standout feature is its simplicity; it's so easy to navigate that virtually anyone can use it, no matter their tech expertise. The pricing is pretty flexible too, which is great because it means there's likely a plan that fits just about any budget. Now, it's not all sunshine and rainbows—some of its features don't quite stack up against other SEO tools out there, and if you're watching your pennies, the price tag might make you pause. But all things considered, for folks and businesses looking to give their WordPress SEO a boost, Jetpack's still a solid bet.

We've also highlighted the best SEO tools

WP Engine review

6:36 am | March 24, 2021

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets Pro Website Building | Comments: Off

One in twelve people online visit a website hosted on WP Engine daily. They host over one and a half million sites across 150 countries and still maintain a customer satisfaction rate of 96%. That is reliable hosting.

WP Engine uses its own caching system and content delivery system (CDN) and your get your choice of data centers in North America, Europe, or Asia. Plus, your websites are hosted on the fast Google Cloud Platform. This all means your customers should have a better user experience because of faster loading times and reliability.

WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting solution
WP Engine provides everything needed for a true managed WordPress solution, including automatic PHP and WordPress updates, effortless backups, all without compromising on security and speed. With techradar10 you can get an additional 10% off at checkout .

WP Engine manages your WordPress site for you making the day-to-day running of your site easier allowing you to focus on your business. In addition, WP Engine provides features like automatic plugin updates, malware detection, and automated backups. Although managed hosting comes at a higher cost than unmanaged, it's not until a vulnerability is discovered at 2am on a Saturday that the value of having someone look over the security and updates of your server becomes really noticeable.

If you run a digital or marketing agency, WP Engine also offers a hosting solution to support managing multiple clients. Whether you have 5 or 50+ clients on your books, shared and container-based servers are available, complete with the same managed WordPress experience and updates to PHP, MySQL, and of course, WordPress itself.

The startup spec for these hosting plans is 25GB of storage, supporting 50,000 visits per month, two sandbox sites and five live sites. Various configurations can be selected, designed to enable easy scaling as your client base expands and your business evolves. Specific agency hosting features are included, such as bulk site management, Git integration and other developer tools, and as the plans increase in price, things like WooCommerce optimizations, Stripe Connect checkouts, data insights, and a dedicated WP Engine API.

WP Engine Plans and pricing

WP Engine have three main types of hosting: WordPress Hosting, WooCommerce Hosting, and Headless.

WordPress hosting has five plans which are all on a shared infrastructure. The most basic plan is Startup which provides hosting for one site, 25,000 monthly visits (with a 50GB bandwidth cap which is enough for the average website), and 10GB local storage.

With this plan you get chat only support, security patching, plugin risk scans, daily backups, EverCache, and global CDN. This plan is $20/mo and refreshingly there are no confusing renewal prices.

From there onwards, the plans support 3, 10, and 30 sites and the bandwidth, storage space, and monthly visits increase as you would expect. There is also the option to completely customize your plan starting from $600/mo.

For WooCommerce, the plans are similar in their specs and what they support but they come with lots of features as standard such as elastic search capabilities, support for unlimited products, Live Cart, and more. These plans are slightly more expensive than the WordPress hosting plans and the custom plan costs a minimum of $800/mo.

WP Engine review — You can use the Page Performance tool to diagnose issues with a slow-loading site (Image credit: WP Engine)

Features

The core reasons to choose WP Engine over cheaper WordPress hosting are increased reliability, performance, support, and management, but these are hard to quantify. Some features stand out when you browse the interface, however, that can give you some insight into the service offered.

WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool designed to help you speed up your WordPress site by offering meaningful metrics on performance.

Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how quickly your page rendered, how long it took to load in its entirety, and the total size of the page. It even includes historical data on your site’s performance over the past six months and recommendations on how you can reduce page load.

Avoid embarrassing mistakes on your site by making changes to a copy of your website before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it allows your developers to make extensive changes to your site without affecting your customers.

In a relatively unusual move, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can install. Those typically restricted are plugins that have been noted to cause performance issues and security holes. For important features such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has made alternatives available that don’t put a high load on the server.

Interface and in use

WP Engine’s interface is professional and well laid out, but the powerful features might mean a steep learning curve for inexperienced users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and redirect rules, you’ll be right at home here, but otherwise you’ll need to spend some time on the support site.

Creating a site in WP Engine is made simple, thanks to a straightforward process. Whether you’re hosting on a domain, or building a staging site, the process is automated, so you don’t need to do anything. Once the name of the site has been set, and you’ve decided on adding WordPress on its own, or Word Press with WooCommerce, it will self-install while you make a coffee.

Note that WP Engine doesn’t offer any AI-guided site generation tools here. Anything you create will have to be done manually through the current WordPress theme management environment.

One of the main attractions for many customers is promised easy migration. Intended to make it simple to move a WordPress site from one host to another, WP Engine offers a dedicated plugin specifically for this purpose. Using it is simple enough – you install the downloadable plugin on the source (old) web host, create a secure key when prompted, then paste this into the plugin on your WP Engine hosting. In testing, the migration of a site around 500MB in size was pretty slick, completing in just a few minutes.

Support

A managed WordPress service should offer extra value through its support, and WP Engine delivers. The support site includes videos and articles of a quality you’d expect from a paid training course, with help on deeper WordPress functionality that many WordPress hosts don’t go into.

There’s 24/7 live chat support and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the response was quick and the agent knowledgeable. For all plans except for single-site plans, there’s telephone support, too.

While WP Engine has a strong collection of support resources, we found that its sales team were not as well-informed as they could be. Specifically on the topic of agency hosting plans, they seemed to be unaware as to some of the intricacies. We have been separately informed by WP Engine contacts that the agency hosting plans rely on shared hosting for the Agency Essential plans, scaling up to container-based hosting for Agency Plus and Agency Pro. However, two conversations via the online chat tool revealed that the sales team were under the impression that all agency plans use container hosting.

If you’re planning to use WP Engine for agency hosting, and as it isn’t easy to find the answer within the support resources, you might consider requesting a call or email conversation with their tech support to establish whether they suit your requirements.

Testing

Testing the performance of WP Engine – specifically, the Essential Startup – I was intrigued to find that while reasonably slick, it seemed slower than other hosts. Now, I’ll preface this with the knowledge that WP Engine specifically aims for efficient WordPress hosting. It is known to block some plugins that can affect performance; it opts for its own caching plugin, for example. So, gauging performance with benchmarking tools on WP Engine is a little different to other hosts.

However, the tests delivered results around 30% slower than other hosts. Given that the comparisons were with plans for a similar budget and server specification, I was surprised at how poorly WP Engine scored.

WordPress Benchmark
Performance metric	Result
Operations with large text data	6.9
Random binary data operations	7.93
Recursive mathematical calculations	5.06
Iterative mathematical calculations	7.9
Filesystem
Filesystem write ability	7.79
Local file copy and access speed	8.25
Small file IO test	9.76
Database
Importing large amount of data to database	1.94
Simple queries on single table	6.66
Complex database queries on multiple tables	5.78
Object cache
Persistent object cache enabled	0
Network
Network download speed test	9.5
Server score	6.4

Siege
Performance Metric	5 concurrent visitors	9 concurrent visitors
Transactions	9583	17028
Availability	96.28	96.31
Elapsed time	299.70	299.33
Data transferred	106.33	189.25
Response time	0.15	0.15
Transaction rate	31.98	56.89
Throughput	0.36	0.63
Concurrency	4.84	8.15
Successful transactions	9578	17028
Failed transactions	370	652
Longest transaction	2.25	5.67

The competition

If it’s the higher level of customer support you value in a managed WordPress host, Liquid Web often tops customer satisfaction polls. It has a focus on high-end products like virtual private servers (VPS) and dedicated servers, so if your needs extend beyond a high-performance WordPress site into other software solutions, we recommend checking it out.

TsoHost is another managed web hosting provider we recommend. The price can ramp up, with even the most basic VPS options starting at $52 per month, but you get a level of on-hands customer support that’s virtually unrivaled.

If managed WordPress hosting is your primary motivation, however, one of WP Engine’s key competitors is Kinsta. Both offer a managed hosting environment specifically geared towards WordPress, along with a similar price point. However, Kinsta doesn’t allow manually migrated data, so if you prefer to be more hands-on, WP Engine is the better option.

You might opt for Kinsta in another scenario, however. While WP Engine has a solid set of agency hosting plans, we found that while it omits smaller scale agency plans, Kinsta bundles in more features and boasts superior performance.

Final verdict

WP Engine is not the cheapest hosting around and it doesn't seem to be the fastest either. It's also not the first WordPress host we’d recommend to newcomers, as the breadth of tools can be intimidating.

WP Engine used to be the champion of WordPress hosting but I think that's starting to change with hosts like SiteGround and Kinsta taking over.

Dialpad VoIP services review

6:24 pm | March 10, 2021

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets Phone & Communications Pro | Comments: Off

San Francisco-based Dialpad is one of the world’s best VoIP services, but the company faces some stiff competition in the light of more businesses committing to Internet-based communication platforms.

If you're shopping around for a VoIP business phone system it's worth considering, could Dialpad's VoIP services be right for your team? The answer to the question will depend on the size of your business, your calling needs, whether you care about AI features, and so much more.

Sign up for Dialpad

VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol, and many businesses around the world use the tech to replace transitional calls. There are a lot of services on the market and so we recommend spending some time checking out both Dialpad and its competition.

Every business needs something specific, and VoIP offerings can range from fairly cheap for small businesses to feature-heavy behemoths that cost a pretty penny. Many services offer a free trial, which might be the perfect way to read test without having to commit to a subscription.

In TechRadar's Dialpad review, we take a close look at every aspect of this company, including its customer service, plans and pricing, main features, and more, to help you decide whether it's the best VoIP service available for your business.

How we test, review and rate on TechRadar

Dialpad pricing October 2022 — (Image credit: Dialpad)

Dialpad VoIP: Plans and pricing

Dialpad has a wide range of services available that get bundled together in three different tiers, including video conferencing tools. Every plan gets unlimited calling (within your country, the US, and Canada), unlimited SMS and MMS messaging, and unlimited video calling, so things look pretty promising from the get-go.

The Standard plan costs $23 per user per month (or the equivalent of $15 when paid annually), and leverages some pretty smart AI for things like real-time call and voicemail transcription and even automated post-call summaries. In terms of third-party integrations, Google Workspace is as far as it goes.

If you’re looking to integrate with other apps like Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zendesk, and HubSpot, the Pro tier may sound more attractive, and supports up to 10 office locations and gets the important addition of 24/7 support. Expect to pay $35 per user per month (or $25 per month paid annually).

The top-end Enterprise plans take things to the limit with unlimited office support, a claimed 100% uptime, and single sign-on (SSO) with tools like Okta. Pricing for this plan is not disclosed publicly and you'll have to speak to Dialpad directly.

Regardless of plan, video calling is restricted to 10 participants (Nextiva can host up to 250 members), but each meeting can last up to five hours (compared with Nextiva’s 45-minute limit). This is where the separate ‘Meetings’ plans come in.

The 14-day free trial is an industry standard. While we prefer trials that last a month (or 30 days), two weeks should still be enough time for a dedicated IT team to try things out.

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Dialpad VoIP: Features

Dialpad provides an excellent VoIP for business service, backed by numerous advanced features. Let's dive in.

Based on machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), Dialpad’s built-in voice intelligence features are excellent. They are designed to provide automatic call notes and transcripts, assist customer service agents in real time, and more.

Dialpad isn’t the only company to offer AI assistance, though, so if this is important to you, it may be worth considering other offerings like RingCentral, which has recently announced a bundle of AI updates.

To go above and beyond standard VoIP voice calling, Dialpad includes impressive audio and video conference calling features, such as screen sharing, conference on-hold music, and various user controls.

If it’s just something you may need occasionally, the included capabilities should be fine. A pair of video conferencing-specific plans do exist if you need to branch out – one free, and another for $20 per user per month ($15 annually).

If it’s primarily the phoning functions that interest you, it’s refreshing to see that every single plan gets call forwarding, three-way calling, and recording functionalities. Hold queues are also standard on all but the cheapest plan.

Finally, Dialpad enables virtual faxing directly from your desktop dashboard. You will have to purchase a fax add-on for this, but this shouldn’t be too expensive – although the price will vary depending on what plan you’re using.

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Dialpad features October 2022 — (Image credit: Dialpad)

Get a Dialpad VoIP free trial

To start a free trial with Dialpad, simply work through a short sign-up process. Here, you can choose a phone number, select the plan you want to use after the free trial has finished, and confirm personal details.

Download the desktop app on Windows or macOS, and mobile apps on Android or iOS, and log in to your account to get started.

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Dialpad's web based team dashboard — (Image credit: Dialpad)

Dialpad VoIP: User interface

We trialled the Dialpad VoIP Windows desktop and web apps, and came away very impressed with the service.

For starters, the web app is simple and intuitive, if a little basic, and lets you make calls, send messages, listen to voicemail and recorded calls, and manage your contacts.

The Windows app is similar, but with even more features, meaning that the old enterprise adage that having a desktop app holds true as the dedicated desktop clients will almost always provide the best experience.

And finally, the web dashboard lets you view analytics, manage the program’s settings, and set up your business phone system with many more features included.

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Dialpad help center October 2022 — (Image credit: Dialpad)

Dialpad VoIP: Support

When you’re setting up your Dialpad account, there’s every chance that you will run into some sort of problems or need advice on something. If so, you can speak with the customer service team via phone, live chat, or online ticket submission. There’s also an online forum where you can ask questions and browse previous conversations.

On top of this, Dialpad has a comprehensive Help Center containing hundreds of articles, guides, video tutorials, and other self-help resources. Use the search bar at the top of the screen to find relevant information or simply browse by category.

Pro and Enterprise plans get 24/7 support, but the standard 24/5 support on Standard plans should be adequate for smaller companies that are unlikely to run into issues on the weekend.

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Dialpad security and compliance October 2022 — (Image credit: Dialpad)

Dialpad VoIP: Security

It’s always nice to see transparency and openness surrounding a company’s security measures, and Dialpad excels here. It provides clear information about the tools it uses to ensure your personal information and any sensitive data is kept safe at all times, and it does this well.

At the simple end of the spectrum, it includes tools to enable you to define clear user permissions and access controls, manage which users have access to which integrations and features, and ensure things are being run the way they should be.

In addition, all communications are fully encrypted using TLS (Transport Layer Security) technology and AES 256-bit security. And what’s more, all data is encrypted while at rest, greatly reducing the risk of hacks or data breaches.

All things considered, Dialpad’s security features are excellent.

Dialpad VoIP: The competition

Dialpad provides excellent business VoIP service across the board, but there are plenty of other providers worth considering.

For example, the 8x8 X Series is an excellent option for those on a tight budget. It’s similarly priced at $15 per user per month, and all plans are fairly well equipped including the most basic.

Another decent option is Aircall, which focuses on providing high-quality VoIP services coupled with a whole host of CRM integrations, all in a neat and easy-to-use package. It is a little more expensive, but it still offers a lot to like.

We recommend checking out GoTo Connect, RingCentral, Zoom, and Nextiva, to make sure your business gets the right fit.

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Dialpad VoIP: Final verdict

Dialpad impressed as soon as we landed on its website for the first time, and nothing changed during our review.

The VoIP service's features are excellent, and are backed by powerful security integrations, plus there are versatile subscription options for businesses of all shapes and sizes, from one-man-bands to enterprises.

What’s more, its prices are quite competitive, and most plans come with a 14-day free trial. Ultimately, we’d recommend signing up for the trial and testing the platform if you’re looking for a reliable, feature-rich VoIP service provider.

Sign up for Dialpad

Whitepages people search review

11:44 pm | March 5, 2021

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets Pro Software & Services | Comments: Off

Whitepages is a well-known online directory service that provides contact information for individuals and businesses. It boasts the largest database of resident contact information in the United States. Founded in 1997, Whitepages has established itself as a leading provider of online directory services, fraud screening, background checks, and identity verification.

The website allows users to search for people using their name, phone number, or address. Additionally, Whitepages offers a reverse phone lookup feature that enables users to identify the owner of a specific phone number. Beyond its directory services, Whitepages provides a range of other services, including background checks and identity verification.

Here’s a look at Whitepages to give you a better idea of whether you should use it.

Want to try Whitepages? Check out the website here

Whitepages has proven to be extremely valuable during the coronavirus pandemic due to its extensive databases of information. However, the online service is useful for many other reasons as well. It offers features such as scam and fraud ratings, along with search statistics. Whitepages contains contact information for over 275 million people and continues to expand its database.

Whitepages: Pricing

Whitepages offers a tiered pricing structure that starts with free, limited searches providing basic contact information. For those interested in more extensive data and the ability to conduct higher volumes of searches, various premium subscription plans are available. Plans like Premium Contact Info and Premium Business provide access to complete contact details, including all associated phone numbers and addresses, as well as features like contact saving and exporting.

The business-oriented plan, Premium Business Enterprise, comes with additional tools such as batch searching and access to property data, along with a significantly higher monthly search allowance. In addition to subscription services, Whitepages offers individual background reports for a one-time fee, which can include in-depth information such as public records, criminal records, and property records.

Occasionally, Whitepages offers trial memberships for a nominal fee, allowing temporary access to premium features. It’s important to note that Whitepages' pricing and plan details are subject to change, and their services primarily focus on data from the U.S. Therefore, it’s advisable to consult their official website for the most current and accurate pricing information and to carefully review the terms and conditions before committing to a paid service, as customer feedback often highlights potential issues with subscriptions and billing.

As of now, the Premium Contact Info package is priced at $5.99 per month, while the Premium Business plan starts at $9.99 per month, depending on the number of monthly lookups you anticipate. The Premium Business Enterprise package begins at $109.99 for 500 lookups, and separate background checks are available for $11.99 each.

Whitepages: features

Whitepages is a comprehensive online resource designed to assist users in locating individuals, identifying unknown callers, and obtaining detailed background information. One of its standout features is the people search function, which enables users to search for individuals using a variety of criteria such as name, phone number, address, or email. This feature not only provides basic contact details but also reveals relatives, associated individuals, and even historical addresses, making it easier to connect with long-lost friends or family members.

For those puzzled by unfamiliar numbers, the reverse phone lookup feature is invaluable. It identifies unknown callers by displaying their name, address, and other pertinent details associated with the number, helping users avoid scams or unwanted calls.

In terms of background checks, Whitepages offers robust reporting options that include comprehensive details such as criminal records, arrest histories, property ownership information, and other public records. This makes it a useful tool for individuals looking to vet potential partners or calm concerns about new acquaintances or employees.

Another useful tool provided by Whitepages is the reverse email lookup, which allows users to trace the sender of an email back to their identity. This can be particularly useful for identifying potentially spam emails or verifying the legitimacy of a contact.

For businesses, Whitepages extends its services to include identity verification and fraud screening. These tools are critical in helping businesses confirm the identities of sales leads, ensuring that the data collected through forms is genuine and helping prevent fraud, thereby safeguarding company resources.

With these diverse offerings, Whitepages stands out as a go-to platform for anyone seeking to enhance their knowledge of individuals and protect themselves from various risks associated with unknown contacts.

Whitepages: performance

The Whitepages website offers up a very speedy experience. At its most basic level you simply enter your search criteria into the dialog box and start your search. You’ll need to enter some basic information, such as names, possible location and so on in order to improve the odds of getting a correct return on your search. Considering how much data the Whitepages databases hold though the way it scans through this info and returns results is very good indeed.

Whitepages pricing as of February 2025. — Premium subscriber options let you dig even deeper for a price (Image credit: Future)

Whitepages: ease of use

Customers of Whitepages can choose from using the online browser-based experience or opt for the Whitepages app. The latter is basically a tweaked version of the web edition, which lets users view current contact information.

Whitepages has aimed this primarily at people who want to get in touch with people quickly, or find out who’s calling them. The app experience, much like the desktop edition, is pretty straightforward as all you’re really doing is tapping into the might of the Whitepages information databases.

The Reverse Phone Lookup is a useful app for quick and easy phone number searches, serving as a convenient supplement to Whitepages. Although it is only available on iOS, it allows users to efficiently find information on phone numbers. If you identify a person and want to access a more detailed report, Whitepages provides the option to do so.

Additionally, we discovered that using this method gives you the choice to select an Enhanced Background Report. This report includes an instant background check and access to up-to-date criminal records.

White pages: support

If you need assistance while using this online service, Whitepages offers a preferred online Help Center as a starting point. The Help Center features a knowledge base that includes frequently asked questions (FAQs) and guidance specifically for Premium users, as well as support for customers accessing Whitepages on mobile devices. Additionally, if you have more complex questions that aren’t addressed in the knowledge base, or if you have inquiries about your account or billing procedures, there is an option to submit a request for further assistance.

White pages: final verdict

Whitepages continues to provide various valuable services, supported by substantial data that enhances its online experience and associated apps. However, this data comes from diverse sources, including phone companies and public records, raising concerns about the level of privacy individuals can and should expect.

Fortunately, Whitepages addresses this issue by allowing users to remove their information from the company’s database or correct and update any inaccuracies.

Overall, Whitepages leaves us with mixed feelings. It is a valuable tool serving a specific purpose, similar to general web searches and social media platforms. Nonetheless, how comfortable individuals feel about their personal information being so readily accessible varies. This does not deter people from using platforms like Facebook.

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Kinsta review

11:30 pm |

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets Pro Website Hosting | Comments: Off

When it comes to best web hosting and website management, there is no shortage of options. The vast majority of companies out there offer affordable services that are good enough to get the job done. For us, Kinsta is the standout choice for agency hosting.

Kinsta is a cloud-based hosting solution providing services for WordPress websites. They provide access to high-performance servers and features such as staging environments, automatic backups, enterprise-level Cloudflare integration, and more.

Kinsta also includes quality security features such as DDoS protection, SSL certificate with wildcard support, and malware scanning and removal.

Want to try Kinsta? Check out the website here

From the main website, you can access Kinsta’s official blog. It’s easy on the eye and filled with a myriad of articles, most of which are related to WordPress and software development. In addition to this, Kinsta offers a fresh and video-packed YouTube channel and relatively active presence on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

A screenshot of the Kinsta customer dashboard — (Image credit: Future)

Kinsta features

Kinsta offers high-end CPUs, as well as global availability, thanks to its infrastructure built on a powerful cloud network. By using these top-of-the-line CPUs, you are guaranteed that your website will be up and running faster than ever before.

To further improve your website's speed, Kinsta also offers a global content delivery network with over 300 locations worldwide. This allows Kinsta to deliver fast pages and serve cached assets from your visitors’ closest location.

Kinsta also comes with built-in application performance monitoring (APM), a custom-designed tool specifically for WordPress sites. We used this feature to identify potential issues or bottlenecks slowing our site during our hosting service test.

Kinsta's DevKinsta feature provides a comprehensive development environment that makes it easy to develop applications locally on your computer. DevKinsta includes many helpful features, such as version control that allows developers to roll back to previous versions of their code if needed, easy debugging with Xdebug integration, and deployments to production servers with just one click.

With the new Kinsta Cloudflare integration, we leveraged a wildcard SSL certificate to secure our subdomains with a single certificate. A wildcard SSL certificate secures both a root domain and its subdomains. This contrasts with other certificate types, which require listing each subdomain on the certificate.

As part of its Cloudflare integration, Kinsta offers customers a unique benefit - reserved IP addresses. Reserved IPs are unique IP addresses assigned to each Kinsta customer site. These IP addresses are reserved exclusively for that customer and ensure that other sites on Cloudflare's network will not share the DNS A-record IP address. In some cases, this can cause problems if a service blocks a spam site that shares the same Cloudflare IP address as your site.

We were also impressed by the Kinsta Brotli Compression Tool (a lossless compression format supported by all major browsers that achieves higher compression ratios than gzip).

Kinsta also released a tool called Edge Caching. This is an incredibly powerful tool for WordPress websites that can significantly reduce the time it takes to serve cached HTML to site visitors. Edge Caching is included free with all Kinsta plans, and no additional plugins are required.

Kinsta’s Edge Caching works by saving your website/page cache to Cloudflare’s global network of over 260 data centers. When site visitors load your website, cached responses are delivered from the location closest to them, helping reduce latency and improve loading times.

With the help of the Early Hints, you can further enhance site speed. Early hints is a modern web standard that defines a new 103 HTTP status code. Enabling this web standard on your site gives your site visitors’ browsers the chance to download certain resources in advance or in parallel with others. This results in faster page rendering.

A curiosity of Kinsta’s hosting, but one that we found made sense, is the apparent lack of a temporary URL for checking that the site runs accurately. However, this feature can be easily turned on and off and lasts around 60 minutes when enabled. Given that a site doesn’t need to be seen by the public or crawlers before launch, this is useful.

For web hosting services in Australia, Kinsta CDN is available in six Australian cities, namely Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney.

Is Kinsta easy to use?

We find Kinsta easy to use - from signing up to navigating through the dashboard. The web host provides you with an intuitive dashboard that makes hosting your website easy. The dashboard let us quickly access all the features and settings in one place, which makes it simple to manage our website’s performance and security.

With Kinsta, you can set up and manage multiple websites from one account. Kinsta also has a number of helpful features that make managing your website easier. All these features are designed so that even those who aren’t tech-savvy can easily manage their website without too much hassle.

As a fully managed WordPress hosting provider, Kinsta's prices are higher than other web hosts (Image credit: Future)

Kinsta plans and pricing

Kinsta offers plans ranging from $35/month to $ 1,700/month. All plans include free wildcard SSL, CDN, staging, and unlimited migrations. Kinsta offers two pricing models for its plans: visit-based and bandwidth-based. In visit-based plans, the plan is defined by the monthly sum of unique IP addresses seen each 24-hour period. While bandwidth-based plans are defined by the amount of data in gigabytes (does not include content served by CDN and Edge Cache, and does not count bandwidth used by staging sites)

But what do you get when you purchase one of these plans? The Single plan starts at $35/month and includes 1 WordPress site, 10 GB of storage, 125 GB of free CDN, and 35,000 visits per month or 20 GB server bandwidth. The Single plans scale with each step up, providing more site visits or server bandwidth, storage, and CDN bandwidth. Each Single site plan denotes the support amount of visits or bandwidth . The plans go up to 1,250,000+ visits or 500GB+ server bandwidth, 15 GB+ storage, and 1,000 GB CDN bandwidth.

Multiple-site plans support multiple WordPress installs. Each plan name denotes the number of WordPress installs supported. Each multiple-site plan supports multisite network and site cloning. For WP 2 ($70/mo), you get 2 WordPress installs, 70,000 visits or 40 GB server bandwidth, 250 GB of CDN bandwidth, and 20 GB of storage. As the plans increase in price, so do the resources, site visits, and number of WordPress installs. The WP 40 plan ($450/mo) supports 40 WordPress installs, 60 GB of storage, 1,500 GB of CDN, and 75,000 monthly visits or 500 GB server bandwidth.

Kinsta also offers an Enterprise Plan for multiple sites, which starts at $675/month and includes 60+ WordPress installs, 100+ GB of space, 1,250,000+ visits or 750GB+ server bandwidth, and a 30-day backup retention.

All the above plans come with unlimited free migrations and a 30-day money-back guarantee, so if you are not satisfied with the service, you can request a refund. Select plans on Single and Multiple-site tiers also include a one-month free trial.

Agency Hosting

Kinsta’s Agency program is targeted, price-wise, at established digital agencies. The Agency 20 plan ($284/month with annual billing), which we tested, offers support for 20 WordPress installs, so potentially 20 clients. It also includes an extra site, for your agency. 500,000 visits or 250GB server bandwidth , 50GB of storage, and 1,000GB CDN storage make this an attractive starting point, but Agency 40 ($375/month with annual billing) and Agency 60 ($563/month under the same terms) are also available, with corresponding increases in installs.

These plans also include white labelling and access to beta tools. Backups, advanced caching, and migrations are also included with these packages, along with that all-important developer support. Several tools are available here, from easy site cloning to Git integration and access to the Kinsta API.

Kinsta speed and experience

Kinsta argues that users will almost certainly see “faster page load times, along with back-end (WordPress dashboard) speed” when hosting with them. Faster than what, we asked ourselves. Faster than the average speed, faster than lightning, or faster than Superman?

In any case, we ran tests on Kinsta's Single plan and Agency 20. One test was to create a benchmark of core WordPress performance metrics, and the other was to measure their performance under load.

Latest results

WordPress benchmark test
		Single Site	Agency
CPU & Memory	Operations with large text data	6.68	6.62
	Random binary data operations	8.27	8.22
	Recursive mathematical calculations	7.32	7.3
	Iterative mathematical calculations	8.62	8.54
Filesystem	Filesystem write ability	9.74	9.41
	Local file copy and access speed	9.61	9.42
	Small file IO test	10	10
Database	Importing large amount of data to database	9.18	8.92
	Simple queries on single table	9.92	9.79
	Complex database queries on multiple tables	8.63	7.94
Object Cache	Persistent object cache enabled	0	0
Network	Network download speed test	10	10
Overall	Your server score	8.2	8

Kinsta performed well on its core benchmarks and maintained these scores across both its Single and Agency plans. We noted especially high scores in file and database performance, which bodes well for WordPress sites, especially those with high transaction rates, such as eCommerce stores, membership-based sites, or large-scale enterprise websites.

Siege test (Single Site Plan)
Concurrent visitors	5	9	15
Transactions	9954	6681	2025
Availability	99.67	99.2	100
Elapsed time	299.9	299.17	299.33
Data transactions	32.69	24.17	7.32
Response time	0.16	0.38	2.21
Transaction rate	30.19	22.33	6.77
Throughput	0.11	0.08	0.02
Concurrency	4.87	8.51	14.93
Successful transactions	9054	6681	2025
Failed transactions	30	54	0
Longest transaction	2.25	2.36	2.39
Shortest transaction	0.13	0.13	1.15

Siege test (Agency Plan)
Concurrent visitors	5	9	15
Transactions	8484	13580	3846
Availability	96.37	96.36	94.94
Elapsed time	299.43	299.19	299.3
Data transactions	91.72	145.90	42.4
Response time	0.17	0.18	0.18
Transaction rate	28.33	45.39	12.85
Throughput	0.31	0.49	0.14
Concurrency	4.87	8.11	2.32
Successful transactions	8164	13068	3846
Failed transactions	320	513	205
Longest transaction	1.33	39.76	0.08
Shortest transaction	0.09	0.08	0.11

Under increasing load, Kinsta was a mixed bag in performance. However, we noted that although some transactions failed, Kinsta's servers seemed to handle load balancing well. That means its servers should be well-optimized to ensure that your website visitors encounter more or less similar experiences, rather than facing wildly varying transaction times. This is highly crucial to high-performance websites and not something you fix on your own.

Kinsta security

Kinsta is one provider that offers quality security measures (in our opinion), including SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates. An SSL certificate is a type of digital certificate that provides encryption and authentication for data sent over the internet. It helps protect user information, such as credit card numbers and passwords, from unauthorized access by malicious third parties.

More essentially, sites at Kinsta are containerized. That means everything required to run your site is within your container, including the entire tech stack. This isolation means that as long as you can secure your website, nothing else that's happening to other sites on Kinsta can affect you.

Kinsta uses Cloudflare's infrastructure to provide wildcard SSL certificates with 128-bit or higher encryption as well as 2048-bit RSA keys. Kinsta says its servers are also constantly monitored 24/7 for any signs of suspicious activity or hacking, which is good to know. Kinsta also offers a 99.9% SLA-backed uptime guarantee.

There's also a Malware Security Pledge in which Kinsta's dedicated Malware team will help restore a site in the event of an attack. The team monitors all sites, and its services are free for all Kinsta customers.

Customer support

Screenshot of Kinsta's documentation page — You'll find plenty of how-to guides in Kinsta's knowledgebase (Image credit: Future)

Kinsta offers knowledgeable sales representatives who can help you find the hosting plan that best fits your website or project.

If you want a deeper dive into all of Kinsta’s features, consider scheduling a personalized demo with one of its experts. This is an excellent way to get familiar with Kinsta's powerful dashboard and hosting features, as well as ask any questions that come up during the process.

We had a few questions about our website and contacted Kinsta through its question form on the website. They got back to us the next day with answers tailored specifically to our hosting dilemma.

Kinsta’s support team is available 24/7/365 via live chat in the MyKinsta dashboard, so you can quickly get help. You can also open tickets here if you ever have any issues with your site. Additionally, Kinsta has beefed up localization in its customer support by making help available in 10 languages.

As noted, we also tried Kinsta’s Agency 20 plan, arranging for a site to be migrated via a backup. The support operative who took ownership of this task completed it within a couple of hours, a timescale that included not just scanning the ZIP file for potential issues, but also fully migrating it and testing the site.

We later ran into an issue trying to point a domain at the hosting. This requires a bit more clicking and settings configuration than with other hosts (switching nameservers is just one aspect of this), but while I found this baffling at first, the support team member who walked me through it helped me solve it within 15 minutes.

Kinta's blog — Kinsta also offers free webinars to its customers (Image credit: Future)

There are more than a few self-help options including regularly updated documentation, free e-books, free webinars, a newsletter and a blog we mentioned before, and everything is dedicated to bringing knowledge about WordPress to its users. In addition to this, Kinsta’s YouTube channel is filled with step-by-step guides and the new ones are coming out on a week-to-week basis at the very least.

As an alternative, you can reach Kinsta’s “timely and knowledgeable” support via email and chat.

Kinsta alternatives

Much like Kinsta, Flywheel is a fellow US-based host specialized in “top-of-the-line” managed WordPress hosting solutions. Both of them strive to be beginner-friendly, offer well-rounded, feature-packed packages and are on the high-priced side of the spectrum. However, Kinsta’s least expensive solution starts at a whopping $30, half as much as what is offered by Flywheel. Therefore, if the price is the key criterion (since both hosts are competent) for you, you could save some bucks by going with Flywheel.

Bluehost is one of the most popular hosting options on the market today, even when it comes to managed WordPress hosting. In comparison with Kinsta, Bluehost has a myriad of hosting types and options besides WordPress and its WordPress plans are well-structured and suitable for newcomers. If you are, however, looking for premium managed WordPress options, you might find yourself at home with Kinsta.

DreamHost is a US-based provider supplying WordPress-optimized hosting solutions and related services, including a domain registration, which is something you won’t get with Kinsta. Another thing they don’t provide is a website builder and you’ll have that as an option with DreamHost. What is more, in addition to offering more hosting options, DreamHost has more pocket-friendly plans, so you’ll save some money as well.

Although HostGator does not specialize in WordPress hosting, it has a few rather attractive solutions on the offer. Nonetheless, if you are looking for a premium fully managed WordPress hosting (and you are ready to shell out the money) Kinsta might be a better pick. If you would rather have something simpler and more on the affordable side, HostGator is an excellent choice.

WP Engine is also a great alternative as it offers a wide range of services, from shared hosting to managed WordPress hosting and dedicated servers. WP Engine is known for its fast speeds and reliable uptime, as well as its excellent customer service and support team.

SiteGround is another great option if you’re looking for an alternative to Kinsta. This provider offers a variety of hosting plans that range from shared hosting to VPS and cloud solutions. SiteGround also has excellent customer service and support, which makes it a great choice if you need help getting started or have questions about how to use their services.

Is Kinsta right for you?

Kinsta offers a range of features to help businesses get up and running quickly and easily, including easy scalability, managed updates, automated daily backups, and 24/7 support.

Kinsta offers a range of features to help businesses get up and running quickly and easily, including automatic scaling, managed updates, automated daily backups,SSH access, WP CLI, a powerful API, Application Performance Monitoring, and 24/7/365 support in 10 languages, with a response time within a minute and 98% client satisfaction.

Kinsta also prides itself on its performance and reliability - It’s caching technology ensures websites load faster than ever before; this helps keep visitors on your site longer which can lead to increased conversions.

Kinsta FAQs

Is Kinsta only for WordPress?

Kinsta is mainly known for managed WordPress hosting but also offers other types of hosting including static and database hosting

Do I need a security plugin with Kinsta?

Technically, you don't need a security plugin at Kisnta. Their servers are robust, and they have proactive monitoring and malware removal services. However, we prefer to err on the side of caution and advise you to assess your site's security requirements in case you need anything beyond what Kinsta covers.

Network Solutions review

11:30 pm | March 3, 2021

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets Pro Website Hosting | Comments: Off

Network Solutions was launched in 1979 as one of the first companies to provide DNS (domain name system) technology. Since then, it has developed to provide many more services, all related to web hosting. Today they provide “all you need, in one place”, that is: domain names and various hosting options with a whole variety of features and accessible applications including a page builder. The company is headquartered in the US, with its main office located in Herndon and its data center situated somewhere in North America.

In 2011, Network Solutions was acquired by Web.com Group, one of the leading web technology companies that provided services to millions of customers all over the world. Then, in 2021 web.com merged with EIG to become Newfold Digital. Later, in 2025 Newfold Digital consolidated brands and absorbed web.com into Network Solutions.

So, it's fair to say Network Solutions has had a long and varied life changing hands and merging more than most hosts. Is this Network Solution's final form? Who knows but one thing is certain. It's not staying power.

Want to try Network Solutions? Check out the website here

Also check out our roundup of the best shared web hosting

An image of Network Solution's plans — You'll have to opt for the Premium plan in order to get an SSL Certificate (Image credit: Future)

Is Network Solutions good value for money?

Network Solutions’ Starter Plan is perfect for businesses just getting started. This plan costs only $2.99 per month for the first year and includes 10 GB of disk space, 1 website, and five email boxes. You also get 25 FTP accounts, a drag and drop page builder, and unlimited bandwidth.

For $4.99 per month, the Essential Plan gives you even more features than the Starter Plan. It includes 20 GB of disk space, 3 websites, 1,000 email boxes, and a domain name included in your package (for one year). If your business needs more than the Essential Plan provides, consider Network Solutions Premium Plan. This plan covers all of the features of the Essential plan plus 40 GB disk space and supports 10 websites for $6.99 for the first year.

Is Network Solutions easy to use?

Because Network Solutions doesn’t exactly have a myriad of hosting options, picking out a preferred plan shouldn’t be a time-consuming decision. The first thing you’ll need to know is if you want a simpler cloud-based solution or a WordPress-optimized one. For the most part, together with these hosting packages, you’ll be getting email services as well. If not (and you want them), digging a bit more around the website will take you to a few email hosting solutions as well.

Network Solutions is a decent choice for anyone looking for an easy-to-use web hosting service with sufficient features. Not only does it offer a good range of benefits such as domain registration, design tools, email hosting, marketing tools, and more but its user interface is also incredibly intuitive and simple to navigate whether you’re a novice or an experienced user.

All plans come with a proprietary control panel, which isn’t as user friendly as some industry-standard alternatives, but we managed to find our way around. From there, most of the famous apps can be yours after a click or two (WordPress, Joomla, Durpal and so on) and all developers out there will be glad to hear that a whole variety of website development features are supported as well (PHP5, Python, Ruby on Rails, Java Servlets, Zend Libraries and much more). A number of e-commerce features (and all-inclusive ecommerce solution) are available for purchase, as well as a competent drag-and-drop website builder.

Performance — We used GTmetrix to measure the uptime and response time of our Network Solutions site (Image credit: GTmetrix)

Speed and experience

When trying to convince us of the superiority of their services, Network Solutions brings up their “reliable” uptime with the guarantee of 99.9%, live tech support and flexible hosting plans, without any promises regarding the speed. Not knowing what to expect, we tested the speed performance of Network Solutions’ main website using GTmetrix as a tool. It placed the website's speed performance above the average with the conclusive result of B (85%), which is quite good.

We decided to test the uptime of Network Solutions’ main website by using UptimeRobot and see if we're going to take advantage of the guarantees they provided us with. After a month of constant monitoring, UptimeRobot reported a few occasions of downtime, with the longest one lasting for 19 minutes straight. However, the total of downtime was around 42 minutes. This means the total recorded uptime was 99.917% and that Network Solutions managed to deliver on their promises by a whisker.

While this isn't a true reflection of the speeds you can expect from your site on shared hosting, it is a good indicator of how reliable and powerful Network Solutions' infrastructure is.

Help and support

The first help options you’ll probably notice with Network Solutions are their telephone number (which is advised to be used for urgent matters only) and “Contact us” button that will present you with a few ways to help yourself. Their knowledgebase (titled as “Help Center”) can be browsed with the help of a search box or you can pick out some of the preselected categories. There seems to be a decent number of articles which are mostly written in an easy-to-follow way (often with pictures) and rated by users with a five-star rating system.

If you would rather rely on support agents from Network Solutions’ technical team, you can get in touch with them via support ticket, live chat and telephone, all of which ought to be available around-the-clock.

Network Solutions features a community forum, where its registered users (we assume, since trying to proceed without registration made us hit the dead end) can seek answers to their questions, answer questions from other users or leave feedback for others to see. However, when we tried to register, not a single one from dozens of display names (and some were quite original) was deemed acceptable (the only explanation we got was “Name you entered is already in use”, which doesn’t seem to be the case), so we can’t report anything more than this.

The competition

Bluehost is also one of those hosts that will provide their users with everything need but also have servers in Europe and Asia. Even so, Bluehost provides a great value for money and offers (unlike Network Solutions) VPS hosting, managed WordPress and dedicated server in addition to basics, so it is better suited for more ambitious users.

HostGator can provide you with everything Network Solutions can and go beyond that, and we are not thinking about hosting types only. The entry-level (adorably named “Hatchling”) plan with HostGator includes a domain name, website transfer, unmetered bandwidth and SSL certificate, all cost-free. In comparison, Network Solutions’ elementary plan has less bonus features to attract new users with.

Both of those brands are also owned by Newfold Digital. If you wanted to look outside of that group you could also consider Hostinger.

Is Network Solutions right for you?

Since it was founded at the end of the disco era, Network Solutions certainly knows how to get groovy with its hosting packages, offering a great deal of helpful tools to get your website down with a boogie in no time.

When deciding on a web hosting service, there are many factors to consider such as price point, customer service availability, and uptime guarantee. Network Solutions offers all these features in one package, making them a great option for anyone who wants reliable web hosting without breaking the bank.

Network Solutions FAQs

Does Network Solutions support WordPress?

The short answer is yes. Network Solutions supports WordPress, which means you can create a fully functioning website with ease. The service includes auto-installers so that you don’t have to worry about installing WordPress manually or dealing with complex server configurations. You also get access to hundreds of themes so you can customize your site with ease, as well as numerous plugins that further extend the functionality of your online presence.

What is Network Solutions used for?

Network Solutions can be used for much more than just hosting websites and registering domains. The service also offers support for email services, online stores, SSL certificates, marketing, and SEO tools.

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McAfee True Key review

12:46 am |

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

McAfee True Key is a simple password manager which is distinctly lacking in advanced features, but, somehow, still manages to have a lot of appeal.

Maybe it’s the platform support, with browser extensions and mobile apps to ensure it runs almost anywhere. True Key’s ease of use is a big plus. It doesn’t hurt that it’s produced by one of the biggest and most experienced security names in the business. Oh, and a free version means that, if you still like the sound of the app by the end of this review, you can try it out right away. If you only need the password manager essentials, could McAfee True Key be the perfect app for you?

McAfee True Key: Pricing

McAfee True Key has a free version which gives you access to all its features, but can only store 15 usernames and passwords.

You can’t buy True Key as a stand-alone password manager any more, but an unlimited version of the app (which stores as many passwords as you need) comes bundled with every McAfee security suite.

The cheapest option, McAfee True Protection Basic, gives you True Key, antivirus and unlimited VPN for one device, and is priced at a very low $29.99 in year one, though leaps to $89.99 on renewal.

McAfee True Protection Essential is essentially the same package but with antivirus and VPN for five devices. It’s only a little more expensive initially at $39.99 in year one, $119.99 on renewal.

McAfee’s renewal charges are very similar to the competition, but if you could use an antivirus and full VPN, the first year prices are seriously cheap. Sign up with Dashlane’s Premium Plan, for instance, and you’ll pay $59.88 for the password manager and a VPN alone.

McAfee True Key: Features

True Key is a basic password manager which allows users to create secure logins, store and share them across all their devices. And we do mean ‘all’: with Android and iOS apps for mobile devices, and browser extensions for Chrome, Edge and Firefox covering everything else, you can run it almost everywhere.

The True Key Wallet is a place where you can store personal details - names, addresses, phone numbers, date of birth and more. This is only useful as a form of secure storage, though. True Key can’t use this kind of information to fill forms, unlike Dashlane and other top password managers.

Our favorite True Key feature is its excellent multi-factor authentication support. There’s nothing more important to protect than your password manager account, so it’s great to see that True Key doesn’t solely rely on a master password. You can optionally ask True Key to protect its login with another factor - a trusted device, your Windows Hello PIN or biometric authentication - to help keep your valuable passwords safe from snoopers.

McAfee True Key: Performance

If you’re not keen on manually entering all your passwords into McAfee True Key, we’ve good news: the app can import stored passwords from Edge, Chrome, LastPass and Dashlane, while a generic CSV import might work with other apps. We tried importing 600+ Dashlane logins and True Key appeared to handle everything correctly, including multiple logins for the same site.

There’s not much in the way of advanced, or even fairly standard functionality. True Key doesn’t have secure password sharing, for instance. It can’t fill in forms with delivery addresses or credit card details, and there’s no ‘Password Health’-type feature to warn you about reused or weak passwords.

When it comes to the most basic ‘username and password’ tasks, though, True Key works reasonably well. Usernames and passwords are captured automatically as you enter them. When you’re creating an account, it can generate and enter a secure password in a couple of clicks. When we opened a login page, True Key displayed any matching profile (that could include multiple usernames if you’ve several accounts on the site), and clicking the profile logged us in successfully.

McAfee True Key: Ease of use

True Key installs easily, and after prompting us to choose a master password, we imported almost 700 logins in just a few seconds.

Creating new logins isn’t quite as simple as we’d like. When a site asks for your email, for instance, Dashlane can automatically enter your main email address in a couple of clicks: True Key leaves you to do this yourself.

There’s better news with new passwords, though. True Key automatically displays its icon in password boxes, and clicking this allows the app to generate and insert a secure password. You get to choose what the password contains, too - using your rules on symbols, upper and lower case letters, numbers and more - to match your or the site’s needs.

Visit any login page with a stored password and True Key enters your username and password automatically. If you’ve multiple logins for the same site (you’ve created accounts using different email addresses, say), True Key displays these in a list Choose the account you need and the app logs you in: simple.

McAfee True Key: Final verdict

True Key has a very basic feature set, and if you’re looking to, say, fill in forms with your name, address or credit card numbers, this isn’t the app for you. Opt for a password powerhouse like Dashlane or check out our best password manager list for more ideas.

If you’re happy with the password management essentials, though, True Key does a much better job than the password managers we see from most antivirus companies. Try the free version or get a full unlimited edition with McAfee Total Protection or McAfee+ Premium.

We've listed the best business password manager.

SEOTesting.com review

6:35 pm | February 26, 2021

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets Pro Software & Services | Tags: SEO, URL | Comments: Off

SEOTesting.com is one of the few SEO tools out there that help you run various tests with your SEO strategy. You can run a test before and after changing your strategy to see its effectiveness. It offers rank tracking and different types of reports and can also be integrated with Google Chrome Extension and Google Data Studio Connector. In this review, we will give you an overview of what SEOTesting.com excels at, where it may fall short, and how it compares in terms of value for money. Whether you are an expert or just starting out, this review will offer an unbiased perspective to help you determine if SEOTesting.com is the right tool. Let's explore and discover more about it.

You can sign up for SEOTesting.com here.

SEOTesting.com: Plans and pricing

SEOTesting.com pricing — (Image credit: SEOTesting.com)

Single Site Plan ($40/month)

Ideal for individual website owners, this plan covers all features for one website. It's perfect for small business owners or solo entrepreneurs who need a comprehensive SEO toolkit for their single website.

Team Plan ($100/month)

Designed for small to medium-sized teams or freelance SEO professionals, this plan supports up to five websites. It strikes a balance between functionality and cost and is ideal for businesses or consultants managing multiple sites.

Agency Plan ($300/month)

Targeted at large SEO agencies, this plan allows the management of up to 20 websites. It's a robust solution for agencies handling extensive SEO projects across various clients.

All plans include a 14-day free trial, offering a risk-free way to explore the tool's capabilities. The subscription is flexible, operating on a month-to-month basis with easy cancellation options. For those interested, SEOTesting.com also entertains inquiries about annual plans. The pricing is straightforward, based on the number of sites without additional user fees, ensuring a transparent and simple pricing structure.

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SEOTesting.com: Features

SEOTesting.com dashboard — (Image credit: SEOTesting.com)

Comprehensive SEO Testing

SEO Testing is a powerful resource for conducting various tests, which are essential for understanding the impact of your SEO strategies. It includes Time-Based tests, which lets you compare your website's performance before and after making specific changes. Next, you get an SEO Split Tests feature which lets you create specific control groups and test groups of URLs to analyze the effectiveness of different SEO tactics. You also get a Group SEO Test that helps you examine multiple URLs or queries together and gives you a broader perspective on your results.

Additionally, it also has URL Switch Tests which evaluate the impact of significant changes, such as publishing topic clusters. Moreover, the ability to conduct tests on historical data provides a unique viewpoint that lets you apply current strategies to past performance and assess long-term effectiveness.

In-depth Reporting tools

SEOTesting.com excels in its reporting capabilities as it offers a range of insightful tools. For starters, the Content Decay Report is instrumental in identifying pages that are losing traffic. This helps you to pinpoint areas that need revitalization. Then, the Brand vs Non-Brand Report sheds light on how different query types affect your site's search performance. Similarly, Content Groups are invaluable for agencies or large sites as they help in performance tracking of specific URL clusters. The tool also enhances content strategy with features like search intent highlighting in queries, tracking Google algorithm updates, and custom annotations in Google Search Console data. Not to mention, the reports focus on long-tail keywords, CTR opportunities, and new keyword rankings and provide actionable insights for you to fine-tune your content strategy.

Content Optimization Focus

SEO Testing focuses heavily on optimizing your site’s content. It recognizes which pages would benefit from adding popular search terms to their titles and meta descriptions, and it gives recommendations for improving the content based on Google Search Console’s data. During our tests, we loved the Cannibalization tool, which helps to identify and resolve conflicts between internal keywords on different pages. Moreover, the tool gives you a quick overview of the most successful and least successful keywords and pages and reports on the questions your website ranks for.

Integration and Accessibility

SEOTesting.com is designed for seamless integration and ease of use. The Google Chrome extension and Google Data Studio Connector are especially remarkable and greatly improve the user experience. For instance, the Chrome extension not only helps with on-page SEO but also shows Google Search Console data right on the browser. It makes your work much more streamlined and organized. Plus, the Google Data Studio Connector makes it easy to add SEO test data to your existing dashboards and makes data presentation and analysis more efficient and insightful.

We've featured the best rank checking tools.

SEOTesting.com: Interface and in-use

SEOTesting.com focuses on delivering a user-friendly experience through daily email updates containing crucial metrics from the Google Search Console. Moreover, you can customize your own dashboard as per your needs and demands. This emphasis on user experience, combined with the tool's various testing models and reporting capabilities, positions SEOTesting.com as a valuable resource. It particularly benefits those who prefer a data-driven approach to improve their online presence. With its wide range of features, SEOTesting.com streamlines the SEO testing and content optimization process quite seamlessly.

We've featured the best onpage seo tools.

SEOTesting.com: Support

Responsive Customer Support

SEOTesting.com offers direct support through a chat widget on its website. The team is online from 9 am to 5 pm UK time. This immediate access to support staff ensures that users can get quick answers to their queries. Additionally, users can reach out via email at hello@seotesting.com for more detailed inquiries or support issues. This dual-channel approach caters to different preferences and ensures that help is just a few clicks or an email away.

Extensive Documentation

The platform has an extensive collection of documents that cover different parts of the tool. It has a guide for beginners, detailed explanations of features like Search Intent, annotations on SEOTesting graphs, and guides on running various SEO tests. The documents are easy to use, with clear instructions and tips to help users make the most of SEOTesting.com.

Specialized Report Guides

SEOTesting.com queries — (Image credit: SEOTesting.com)

SEO Testing’s support team provides specific guides for each type of report generated by the tool. These guides offer insights into interpreting and leveraging reports for SEO optimization, such as finding click-through rate opportunities, understanding top queries missing from titles and meta descriptions, and even utilizing the Content Decay report.

Integration Support

As we already mentioned, if you’re looking to integrate SEOTesting.com with other tools, the platform offers support for their Chrome Extension and Google Data Studio connector. This includes guides on how to set this up and make the most of these integrations. These integrations help you to enhance the tool's functionality and user experience.

Google Search Console Resources

SeoTesting.Com pays importance to Google Search Console as well. They provide an introduction and a list of tutorials and guides for understanding Google Search Console and how you can use SEO Testing to make the most of this feature.

SEOTesting.com: The competition

SEOTesting.com competes with various other alternatives, each with its own unique features. First, is BAVOKO SEO Tools, known for its detailed data and specialized workflow management. Similarly, SEO Scout uses search console data to boost organic traffic. On the other hand, Surfer SEO is great for optimizing content and creating data-driven strategies quickly, whereas, SimilarContent focuses on SEO writing and provides keyword coverage scores for content-focused SEO. Apart from these, Rush Analytics is perfect for small businesses and agencies as it offers an easy-to-use interface and precise scaling of SEO efforts.

Moreover, GetGenie brings AI assistance to content and SEO on WordPress and combines multiple app features. Lastly, Rank Math offers a WordPress SEO plugin for content optimization based on industry best practices. It’s vital to notice that all these competitors focus on different aspects of SEO, from overall management to specialized content optimization and AI tools, catering to a wide range of business needs and SEO strategies. But, if your focus is on testing your strategies along with some other SEO tools, SEO Testing can be an ideal choice for you. Be it the user interface or the cost, it stands tall in this sea of competition that it faces in the industry.

SEOTesting.com: Final verdict

SEOTesting.com mainly focuses on testing and data analysis. It's not an all-in-one solution, but it excels at what it does. The tool's strength lies in its ability to monitor and create extensive reports on the results of your SEO activities with precision. This is what makes it a valuable asset for content analysis and optimization. However, it falls short in areas like rank tracking and technical SEO, which means it's best used in conjunction with its competitors. For those who prioritize data-driven insights and content optimization, SEOTesting.com is a strong contender. Its user-friendly interface and evolving features, backed by top-notch customer service, make it a worthwhile investment for specific SEO needs. While it may not replace your entire SEO toolkit, it certainly enhances it, and offers plenty of unique features that other tools might not always have.

8×8 X Series review

10:42 am | February 18, 2021

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets Phone & Communications Pro | Comments: Off

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is becoming an increasingly popular alternative to traditional phone lines, letting users to make voice calls over an internet connection.

Since you don’t need the cable infrastructure, it’s easier to set up and can be more cost-effective to run. In 2024, it's well worth finding the best VoIP service for your business, no matter the scale.

Due to the large number of providers out there, working out which VoIP provider is the right one can be difficult. 8x8 is a popular provider that offers several different All-in-One Communications plans under the banner 8x8 X Series. (The service was formerly known as Virtual Office Pro.)

Sign up to the 8x8 X Series

In this 8x8 All-in-One Communications review, we assess the pricing, features, interface, support, and security offered by this VoIP service.

Every company has its own needs – sometimes very specific needs – and so we recommend checking out our reviews of RingCentral, GoToConnect, Zoom, Aircall, and the best VoIP services to make the absolute right decision.

How we test, review and rate on TechRadar

8x8 X Series: Plans and Pricing

We have to be upfront here: assessing the pricing for 8x8 is difficult as the new tiers are available only upon request. What we do know is how much these plans, or at least similar plans, cost prior to this update, as detailed in previous reviews.

Starting off, 8x8 offers five tiers: X2, X4, X6, X7, and X8. As you can imagine, each of these adds on something to the prior tiers, from X2 to X8, and many of these upgrades are applicable to larger organisations.

In past reviews, the price of the X2 plan was $28/user/month, the X4 was $57/user/month, the X6 was $112/user/month, the X7 was $131/user/month, and the X8 was $170/user/month. While 8x8 is unlikely to have changed these levels too drastically, it's worth checking with them based on your specific needs.

Some of the core considerations will be whether your business needs to make international calls, whether you need video conferencing, internet fax, and so on. We'll get into the features in more detail below.

As with most companies on our radar – but not all – there are savings to be had if you’re willing to pay for one year upfront. The exact saving depends on which plan you’re considering and where you are in the world, but they’re mostly somewhere between 14% and 24%, which is can be a nice discount.

Best VoIP service for the home office of 2024

8x8 X Series: Features

The call options offered by 8x8 are more than just the standard VoIP calls.

The X Series enables high-definition audio and video conferencing with up to 100 participants, and there are multiple moderation controls available, including host delegation and participant lobbies.

8x8 has also added the ability to record the audio, video, and chat, to be published to the cloud for those who missed the meeting.

A large amount of cloud analytics data is efficiently collected on 8x8's single platform, enabling easy access and analysis. The dashboards are updated in real time and can be customized to your liking.

With detailed data like speech analyses of every call, you can identify employee and customer trends and interpret them to solve problems and increase efficiency.

8x8 X Series 2 — (Image credit: 8&8 Inc)

Besides making calls from 8x8’s own app, you can integrate the service into other apps and software that your employees may already use, such as Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, Google Workspace, and Slack. This makes your processes more efficient and reduces the time that employees need to spend learning new software.

Larger companies will value the extra features that come with the higher-level X tiers, like hot desking, wider call handling capabilities, and 30-day UC meeting and call storage.

Empty list

8x8 X Series: User interface

8x8 X Series 3 — (Image credit: 8&8 Inc)

The setup process for 8x8 X Series is simple. It only takes a few minutes to provide the basic information about your business needed to get going, and you can then access the web dashboard, as well as the mobile and desktop apps.

All the interfaces are well designed for efficient use. The main app for employees is called Work and has a simple layout that makes it easy to navigate. It functions as a central hub from which you can access voice calls, video calls, text messaging, meetings, and more.

The browser-based dashboards for supervisor use are more complex but have a wide range of functions, including analytics and switchboard control.

8x8 X Series: Support

8x8 X Series 4 — (Image credit: 8&8 Inc)

If you run into problems when setting up or running your 8x8 X Series system, there are various support options available. You’re first sent to an AI assistant, which will direct you to articles on the knowledge base relevant to your question.

If these don’t help, you can contact technical support via text chat, ticket, or phone. However, the live assisted support is only available to those on the X2 plan or above, not 8x8 Express. The quality of tech support does seem to be variable - many customers have complained that communication has been poor, or that problems have been passed on from phone call to email. There are plenty of positive reviews to counter this, though, so it’s likely that 8x8 is no different to other companies.

8x8 X Series: Security

When you’re running a business that handles financial information or other confidential customer data, it’s crucial to know that your systems are secure. 8x8 excels in this respect, as it has multiple security measures in place, and it’s open and transparent regarding them.

Communications are fully encrypted using Transport Layer Security and Secure Real-time Transport Protocol, so you can be sure messages and calls aren’t being intercepted. Secure coding practices are used to ensure that the technology is safe. Fraud detection tools are also built into the system.

We like additional steps that end users can take to protect their own data, and 8x8 delivers in this respect, too, with two-factor authentication (2FA).

8x8 X Series 5 — (Image credit: 8&8 Inc)

8x8 X Series: The competition

One popular choice is Dialpad, which has prices beginning at $15 per user per month when paid annually. It has an impressive range of features and like 8x8, has comprehensive security and decent video conferencing performance.

Another option is RingCentral MVP (formerly known as RingCentral Office). This is more expensive, starting at $19.99 per user per month, but it comes with a suite of advanced features and integrations with numerous CRM programs and other software, including some pretty impactful AI-driven features like call monitoring.

8x8 X Series: Final verdict

There’s not much to fault with the 8x8 X Series. The app combines multiple methods of communication into one efficient workspace, and there are multiple useful features, such as analytics, integration with other software, and video conferencing. Also, the security is among the best on the market.

One downside is that the quality of tech support seems to be a little sub-standard. However, the pricing is quite good, with plenty of features packed into one of the most affordable VoIP packages that you’ll find.

While the basic 8x8 Express plan includes all main features, the increased support options and international calling make the X2 plan the most likely choice for most small and medium businesses. If you’re looking for a comprehensive and reliable VoIP provider, we recommend signing up for a trial with 8x8.

Sign up to the 8x8 X Series

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