Having been with Site5 for over three years, a review is owed to their prospective customers.

Site5's Pricing

The first thing that hits you in the face about Site5 is their prices. Generally they stick to a single plan that they advertise, and it can start from just a few bucks, never exceeding $10 per month thus far. So as far as pricing is concerned, Site5 is dead cheap, but are their services just as cheap?

Site5's Offer

At the time of this review, Site5 will give you unlimited webspace, bandwidth, number of domain-names, email accounts, MySQL databases and pretty much everything that you could ask for from Linux webhosting. The deals may vary from time to time, but usually they revolve around the "unlimited" scheme.

Site5's Servers

Their servers may not be particularly overcrowded, but you'll be definitely not be splitting a server with only 30 other websites. While you will be given nearly unlimited everything, you won't be given unlimited CPU and memory usage, obviously. This means that your website(s) can quickly outgrow the server you are on. Only 10,000 visitors / day will be enough for Site5 to show you the door, since they don't offer VPS or dedicated servers. They may refer you to The Planet, since that's where Site5 gets their services.

Showing you the door typically happens by them shutting down your website(s) because of too many Apache or MySQL connections. Getting it reinstated can take a few good hours, thanks to the ticket support system.

Site5's Technical Support

Speaking of technical support, you can expect to receive generic responses to your support tickets, or "it works OK on our end" responses when claiming that your website is down, but only after they've repaired it. The staff is polite, but not extremely helpful, which is expected considering the insignificant monthly fee. You can contact them through support tickets or more recently, the online chat, which many times yelds a faster resolution to your problem. Unfortunately no phone support is available.

Site5's Uptime

The uptime can vary from server to server. There may be periods of time (read 'a couple of months') when you'll experience only a few minutes of total downtime, however you can as well get very unlucky and have your website down for 30 or 40 hours in a single month. Many times you won't get a clear answer as to what's causing the problem, which may become frustrating.

The response time across the world is very good for this webhost, and unless there's an issue with the server, the loading time is very fast.

Overall, Site5 is a greatly affordable webhost for running small websites that don't matter as much to you. As long as you don't mind occasional downtime and the webhost not supporting you with traffic peaks, you should remain satisfied. If you're looking for more from a $5 webhost, you're looking in vain.

» Go to Site5.com.