WestHost - Reviews at Web Hosting Ratings

Westhost offers a good package at very good price. Annoyance: default email is yourdomain@yourdomain.com, and that's how it appears in emails, not just name@yourdomain.com. Fatal Disease: Westhost shows up on Spamcop's blacklist fairly often, so with some regularity, my business emails cannot be received. Thus, the ill behaviour of certain of westhost's customers is dooming me. That can't be allowed to stand, so I'm going to move hosts soon.

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Excellent! - Review by Brandon submitted on March 25, 2003

Customer's web site: www.twofangs.com

Length of time hosted by this company: N/A

Date when last hosted by this company (as of March 25, 2003): Current customer

Plan used: Starter

Customer service rating: 10 out of 10

Technical quality rating: 10 out of 10

Cost rating: 8 out of 10

Overall rating: 10 out of 10

I've been with another host prior to transferring to westhost that promised out of this world packages such as unlimited POP, high transfer and high storage. However, as the saying goes, you pay for what you get. I ended up with poor uptime.

I finally decided to switch to Westhost. Although they are not very generous in some features, you can count on them being an extremely stable and reliable host. I'm monitoring my server and so far, I've been having a 100% uptime!
The uptime and speed definately outweigh the benefits of having such features as unlimited POP and high storage. What's the use of that if no one can access your site?
Customer service is available round the clock and, answers get answered pretty quickly through emails.

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Excellent - Review by Faery Babe submitted on February 24, 2003

Customer's web site: www.faery-magic.com

Length of time hosted by this company: 1 year - 3 years

Date when last hosted by this company (as of February 24, 2003): Current customer

Plan used: E-commerce Pro Plan 1

Customer service rating: 10 out of 10

Technical quality rating: 10 out of 10

Cost rating: 10 out of 10

Overall rating: 10 out of 10

I have now been with WestHost.com for almost a year. IMO Their service and support is second to none. Every enquiry I have ever made over the last year has been returned to me with a full and considered response and in a timely manner. When I wanted to upgrade my Miva Shopping Cart, nothing was too much trouble and they helped me and held my hand through the whole process. If you want to set up an online shop cheaply this really is the way to go.. Miva comes with their e-commerce plans and is easy to use.. On top of that all upgrades are free! (normally costing hundreds of $US) Also, every request ie for MySQL, extra email accounts, upgrades, queries, questions have all been answered in the exact time frame promised with highly satisfactory results. My only little teensy whinge is when they 'upgraded' my plan I noticed that I did gain space, yes, but I did lost bandwidth - just a little thing but I would have liked to have been asked, it did sound good at first when we were emailed about it, but losing bandwidth scared me, however I haven't gone over so I suppose it's okay.
At first I was nervous joining a US hosting company as I am in Australia but it hasn't made a stitch of difference to anything at all, so wherever you are in the world you can join WestHost with confidence. I have also NEVER noticed my site down in the whole time I have been with them and I also have an independent thingy which checks my site for down time, you know what I mean? It's separate to WestHost and they report consistently 99.99% up time for my domain, so what do I have to complain about? Nothing really :)
- FB

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Look Elsewhere For a Host - Review by mike submitted on February 14, 2003

Customer's web site: www.akweb.com

Length of time hosted by this company: 1 year - 3 years

Date when last hosted by this company (as of February 14, 2003): Less than 3 months ago

Plan used: N/A

Customer service rating: 1 out of 10

Technical quality rating: 2 out of 10

Cost rating: 1 out of 10

Overall rating: 1 out of 10

Overpriced, and their tech support department was the worst I've encountered in my 6 years of webmastery.

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Westhost Is the Way to Go For Small Business - Review by Paul Grohne submitted on December 16, 2002

Customer's web site: paulpt.com

Length of time hosted by this company: 1 year - 3 years

Date when last hosted by this company (as of December 16, 2002): 1 year - 3 years ago

Plan used: Basic

Customer service rating: 9 out of 10

Technical quality rating: 9 out of 10

Cost rating: 9 out of 10

Overall rating: 9 out of 10

WestHost is cost-effective (my plan's $95.40 a year), packed with plenty of features (plenty of disk space, and useful bells and whistles like Miva e-commerce), and with them, my sites are always up (using InternetSeer, my sites have been ALWAYS UP 24/7). Visitors to my site access resources quickly (much faster than my previous, more expensive web host). Setting up your website on Westhost is easy and enjoyable using their online manual (which is detailed yet clearly organized so you can learn a great deal about webhosting or simply do what's important to you first). Westhost customers are supported by not only their well-designed, user-friendly website (which is user-friendly to the rest of us as well as computer experts), but also by 1-800 telephone support (and they really answer their phone, with real, competent, and knowledgeable people and let me tell you that's not the industry norm) and timely e-mail support if you need them. The industry should look to Westhost as a model of not only how to run a webhosting service but how to run a business.

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Great uptime and service for the price - Review by brian submitted on November 19, 2002

Customer's web site: www.bicaeti.com

Length of time hosted by this company: 1 year - 3 years

Date when last hosted by this company (as of November 19, 2002): Current customer

Plan used: basic

Customer service rating: 9 out of 10

Technical quality rating: 10 out of 10

Cost rating: 10 out of 10

Overall rating: 9 out of 10

I've had a great experience with Westhost and the couple of times I've had to contact technical support, they were friendly.

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Lousy support - Review by Anonymous submitted on November 16, 2002

Customer's web site: Submitted but not made public

Length of time hosted by this company: 1 year - 3 years

Date when last hosted by this company (as of November 16, 2002): Current customer

Plan used: N/A

Customer service rating: 2 out of 10

Technical quality rating: 7 out of 10

Cost rating: 8 out of 10

Overall rating: 2 out of 10

Westhost generally works pretty good, though they did have a meltdown where a lot of email was lost. However, tech support has totally gone to hell since I signed up - they rarely reply in less than a day, and often a week, or never.

WestHost representative's Jennifer response:

We have been giving our Tech support our greatest attention lately, building it up with qualified and friendly support. Within a few weeks we will be offering 24/7 Toll Free phone Tech support. That will make it very easy for all of our customers to get help whenever they need it. The growth to our Tech support department has greatly improved our response time for email questions as well.

Service turbulence in Aug - Review by Steve Kane submitted on August 16, 2002

Customer's web site: esap.tv

Length of time hosted by this company: 3 months - 1 year

Date when last hosted by this company (as of August 16, 2002): Current customer

Plan used: N/A

Customer service rating: 3 out of 10

Technical quality rating: 3 out of 10

Cost rating: 3 out of 10

Overall rating: 4 out of 10

WestHost has hosted my site for several months now. I can't speak for the first couple of months, because I wasn't monitoring it much - but the last two weeks have had several periods of unannounced downtime: i.e. when the site was unavailable and/or mail service was interupted. I rely on the site for email forwarding and as a face to potential customers. It's the lack of communication that is the biggest issue with me. Everyone has downtime - unavoidable. But WestHost has to learn to keep their customers better informed when services are interupted. Customers spin their wheels checking everything on their end and then, magically, service reappears.

WestHost representative's Jennifer response:

Hi, We were doing some maintenance in August and had more down time than we had anticipated. You should have received an email notifying you of the maintenance. Despite the down time we have still been able to maintain our 99.9% uptime (which is calculated annually). I hope that you have not had any problems since then. Thanks for the feedback.

Rather Good! - Review by submitted on July 7, 2002

Customer's web site: www.faery-magic.com

Length of time hosted by this company: N/A

Date when last hosted by this company (as of July 7, 2002): Current customer

Plan used: e commerce package

Customer service rating: 9 out of 10

Technical quality rating: 10 out of 10

Cost rating: 10 out of 10

Overall rating: 9 out of 10

After a terrible experience with a host called Paradise Designs (don't get me started) I shopped around for a new host. I researched and researched and found WestHost to be a great package and well priced. I was also told they were very good by 2 other close friends. I moved my site over and found everything went very smoothly, I was a little surprised to find I had to pay a whole quarter up front but that is a small thing, everything else went well without a stitch of trouble. My package even came with miva merchant valued at $595US, very powerful ecommerce software. Highly recommended! I am very happy with WestHost.
Owner of domain www.faery-magic.com

WestHost representative's response:

I am glad to hear that you are happy with the service. We are now offering monthly billing if you are still interested in that option. However, you get the best savings by paying annually. Thanks for the feedback, please let us know if we can improve on anything.

I like it, but lack of features for price - Review by submitted on June 22, 2002

Customer's web site: www.bLesys.com

Length of time hosted by this company: 1 year - 3 years

Date when last hosted by this company (as of June 22, 2002): Current customer

Plan used: $9/month

Customer service rating: 8 out of 10

Technical quality rating: 10 out of 10

Cost rating: 8 out of 10

Overall rating: 9 out of 10

I think they're a good deal IF you're NOT looking for lots of storage space, etc.

I was shopping around, because there are probably better deals around. However, it made me think twice, because I'm worried that the hosts that offer unlimited POP3 might have worse uptime.

Anyways, I've had pretty good uptime.

In the first few months, MySQL was shoddy, going down almost monthly.
Now, I see MySQL up for almost 4 months straight.

E-mail support has slowed down, though. When I sent one a year ago, it took about 10 min to reply. Now, it takes a few hours.

No phone support, but I don't like phone support anyways.

I also think that the fact they limit user space keeps the site fast. I pinged the server, and it's only about 50-100 ms more than Yahoo (which uses akamai to really speed things up).

They definitely are NOT cheap if you want built-in features such as majordomo, sub-domains, more POP3, more MB, free referrer logs, etc. However, I mostly use my PHP3 scripts anyways.

Also, I use MySQL quite heavily and of the 200 or so others on the server, only about 20 of them also use MySQL. I already mentioned, though, that MySQL is working fine now.

I remember why I chose WestHost in the beginning is because of the lack of negative ratings!

The main reason I came to this site is to see reviews of iPowerWeb (they offer much more features at the same price), and whoa! Half of the ratings are 3 for iPowerWeb.

WestHost representative's Anonymous response:

Hi David,

Thank you for your comments. Just wanted to let you know that we have added 24/7 toll free phone support and Live Chat for providing our clients with easy to use support. We are always looking for ways to improve our services. We hope it shows.

They are a contender - Review by submitted on June 3, 2002

Customer's web site: www.mistcat.com

Length of time hosted by this company: 1 year - 3 years

Date when last hosted by this company (as of June 3, 2002): Current customer

Plan used: 15 bucks a month plan

Customer service rating: 9 out of 10

Technical quality rating: 9 out of 10

Cost rating: 10 out of 10

Overall rating: 9 out of 10

I've got a PHP driven website hosted with them and its been great. They have very quick customer support and the service has been in general excellent. Their main weakness is the poor quality of the online bill payment system for the domain. Otherwise this is a great value for the money. I've recommened many of my friends to switch to them.

WestHost representative's response:

Just to let you know, we are in the process of revamping our control panel and the new one will allow you do managing your billing there. It will also let you make changes to your account setting, ad ons etc, all in one spot. I hope these changes will make it easier to use the online billing interface. Please let us know if there is anything else that we can do to improve. Thanks for the feedback.

Mostly a very solid host, down occasionally - Review by Colle submitted on March 29, 2002

Customer's web site: mycoach.com

Length of time hosted by this company: 1 year - 3 years

Date when last hosted by this company (as of March 29, 2002): Current customer

Plan used: 200 Meg

Customer service rating: 8 out of 10

Technical quality rating: 9 out of 10

Cost rating: 7 out of 10

Overall rating: 7 out of 10

I have been with these guys for a couple of years and have referred probably a dozen people to them because generally they are very solid. Caveat. Every once in a while they go completely down. No email, no site, no help, nothing works. This happens for about 45 minutes every three months during the morning. No explanations, no 'forgive us' nothing. It is infuriating and is making me look elsewhere. No phone support is also aggravating. Overall a very customer centric company.

WestHost representative's response:

WestHost is going to be offering 24/7 phone support in the next one to two months. We are moving into a new facility the middle of June (2002). In the meantime feel free to contact us durning the day from 9-6 MST at 1-800-222-2165. Customer service is VERY important to WestHost and we are working very hard to improve in that area.

Bad support! - Review by Anonymous submitted on March 27, 2002

Customer's web site: www.brlug.net

Length of time hosted by this company: 1 year - 3 years

Date when last hosted by this company (as of March 27, 2002): Current customer

Plan used: Regular UNIX

Customer service rating: 1 out of 10

Technical quality rating: 7 out of 10

Cost rating: 5 out of 10

Overall rating: 2 out of 10

We found that their built-in mailing list support wasn't good, so we added a majordomo list (for a $25 fee!). So, we wanted to add more. More money! Therefore, I tried to setup Mailman on our own and got no support. We are currently dropping this service and moving.

BTW, if they respond to your support email requests you are lucky.

WestHost representative's response:

Our mailing list program is definatly an area that we need to work on. We haven't really found a perfect solution that is also cost effective. It's something we are working on however and have something in the works right now in fact. We hope that it will be available to our customers soon.

Solid Service - Review by submitted on February 28, 2002

Customer's web site: www.expcvsbrazil.com

Length of time hosted by this company: 1 year - 3 years

Date when last hosted by this company (as of February 28, 2002): 1 year - 3 years ago

Plan used: basic

Customer service rating: 9 out of 10

Technical quality rating: 8 out of 10

Cost rating: 8 out of 10

Overall rating: 8 out of 10

Had few problems and they responded quickly. Downside, only one POP account for basic plan. Access speed good. Good for a simple, basic FP 2002 site.

WestHost representative's response:

The 50 meg plan now comes with 5 POP accounts! http://westhost.com/packages.html

This page is not connected with the company. These reviews and ratings are only the opinion of the poster, are no substitute for your own research, and should not be relied upon for any purpose.