There are 10 hosting user reviews for
Pair Networks
Average Jury Ratings & Reviews of
Pair Networks
4.9/5
4.8/5
4.6/5
3.9/5
Reliability
Support
Pricing
Overall
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Date Submitted :
July 22nd, 2011
Length of time hosted by this company :
More than 3 years
Overall Rating :
2 out of 5
Reliability :
4 out of 5
Support :
4 out of 5
Pricing :
1 out of 5
Verdict :
I started as a customer with Pair back in 1996 when they first started and I hosted a number of sites with them but stopped in 2002 because they did not offer enough disk space, and they charged monthly for parking domains and charged setup fees to add a new domain. There cpanel was pretty basic compare to other hosts. I had a really important client whose site required a fast server that would not be oversold like the cheap hosts so I decided to setup another accoount with Pair in 2009. The site ran on Pair for about 2 years without any problems until one morning I got a call from the client telling me his site was down. I checked and found that the mysql database was corrupted severally do to a server crash that Pair admitted. Pair boasts that they offer weekly backups so I figured no problem they would just restore it from backup and we might loose a couple days worth of data. As it turns out there was software switch on my server a year prior and the techs never configured my server to backup. Thus the last backup they had was over a year old! I had to hire a database programmer to go back in and rebuild the database using the old database and the corrupted one and this cost me $180. I contacted Pair and asked them to pay the $180 bill since the server crash, and not configuring the backup was their issue and they sent me to their terms page which says that they are not responsible for any data loss due to outages or crashes. I argued my point with 3 different levels or management and finally just asked them to credit me $180 of hosting and they refused. I really could not believe in this day and age where customer reviews are so important that they would not at least offer to give me the slightest bit of credit for a problem that was admitted, in writing, as theirs. I told them I paid double the rate of other hosts just to be with a host which would not cause problems like this and here I'm with $180 loss plus 4 days of down time and a really good customer pissed off and ready to sue me for lost revenue, and crediting me for hosting would be no expense to them and if they could not do this I would leave them. They responded that they were sorry but they would not help me. I must admit they were polite about it but seriously, that was the worst handling of long time account holder, with an issue that could easily be resolved with very little effort their part and they refused. I even sent emails to the founder, and his VP about what happened and they never responded. The final end to the story was that I lost the $180 to repair the database, I lost the client because I refused to reinburst him for lost revenue during the 4 days he was down, which was an annual loss of revenue of about $3k and he has been with me for 6 years prior. Needless to say, I'm not happy with Pair and in this case, I truly did not get what I paid extra for with Pair and I'm going to have to not recommend them based on the fact that they don't handle good customers very well.
Customer support is great, but customer service is terrible.
I've been with Pair for many, many years; probably more than 10. A few years ago I was tempted away by Site5 (because I needed more disk space), who within a week shut down my website because of a rogue script and ignored all my cries for help or information. After a few hours I gave up, and went back to Pair, and they set me up again on a new server where I have been ever since.
I've also started transferring my domains to their PairNIC subsidiary -- easy, painless etc.
What are the good points about Pair? Firstly, they are reliable. I don't remember any outages at all. I don't do anything very critical; but they really do seem pretty good on this.
Secondly the customer service by email is excellent. You realise that you are dealing with a sensible person who cares about the company and the customer. But then the service is so good that you hardly ever need to contact them. You get shell access, a reasonable control panel, and you can run most things. If you want to leave, they give you no hassle and help you as you need it (a factor that caused me to prefer to return to THEM when I ran into problems with Site5).
Less good things: they don't provide enough disk space and never have. I have always felt a bit constrained on this front. In fact on a "features per dollar" test, they don't do all that well. But it must be remembered that the hassle factor of a cheap, lazy and greedy host is really something no-one needs. I'm not rich; but $17 a month (I think) is not exactly unbearable, and that's what I pay.
Another non-good thing; I was on the same server for years, and they slowly let it get slow and out of date (over a period of many years). When I moved back, I got a different server, and it was much better. I think these days they do server migrations, transparently -- I remember seeing an email about one. But I never saw an outage.
One other: time was when they charged you a dollar a month per domain that you hosted. I really hated that. I don't quite recall if they still do but I think they improved that and removed most of the charges. But check!
I'm trying to think of any other negatives, but I'm not finding any. We're all familiar with the "yeah, it's costly but it's quality, innit, guv" spiel of the overpriced conman. Pair is not like that, and I think you do get good value. I just wish they'd double the disk space, tho! (Bandwidth, by contrast, is generous and I have never come near it).
If you're fed up with sharks, deal with Pair. What you see really is what you get.
Pair.com is an excellent host and I would highly recommend it for commerical sites where reliability, up-time and support are more important than cost. I have a webmaster account and host 6 sites and subdomains. For less demanding needs, similar or better features can be had elsewhere for a fraction of pair.com's cost.
Pair has always provided excellent affordable service from the first day I signed up several years ago. I would recommend them to anyone with a high traffic site.
Pair has been my fist host and I will probably always keep my important accounts there. Virtually no downtime in all those years, professional management and fast as well as qualified support are worth the above average price. They are a bit conservative in terms of new technologies (e.g. Ruby On Rails support) and bandwidth. Because of this I am also hosting some sites with other providers.
I had sites hosted with Pair Networks from about 1999 through 2004. I left because in one case a contract ended and in the case of my personal sites, Pair was too expensive, so I left for Dreamhost.
I will say that Pair's uptime and reliability are nothing short of legendary. Yes, they cost a LOT in comparison to most other shared hosts, even some good ones. However, you get what you pay for in terms of uptime and server reliability. 99.9% really means 99.9%.
If you can't afford dedicated but need reliability, Pair Networks is a good option. If you are on a very tight budget and can afford something less than 99.9% uptime, another provider might be a better choice.
pair networks in my opinion is the best web hosting company out there.
other competitors may provide more disk space at more affordable prices,
but when it comes to downtime and support pair is a winner:
they provide telephone support
their servers run on unix (much more stable than any windows server)
network downtime is very low
urgent issues are handled in a very timely manner.
support requests, depending on the complexity of the problem, are handled
on average within an hour
they have a newsgroup and detailed support documentation to assist
customers with support issues as well
I have used Pair for several years now and have not had any problems. Their server-side spam filter is working very well for my email accounts. My only complaint is price. I don't use very much bandwidth or storage space, but in order to get FrontPage Extensions I have to get the $17.95/month package.
Outstanding customer service and reliability has been 9.999%. Even when they moved their facility to a new physical location I was only offline for 3 minutes. I was giving a customer demo that day and they moved my sites to the new data center and swapped the DNS. It was seamless. Price is a tiny bit above average but you get what you pay for. Good luck if you choose a $1 month plan somewhere else. If it sounds too good to be true.....
Pair has a good product, responsive customer support, a DNS registrar, the whole package is very professional.
They have a customer issue tracker *visible to the user*. This is a fabulous feature that I've never seen, even on million-dollar e-commerce sites.
Other evidence of a well-run shop:
An up-to-date outages/important news page, a careful attention to versioning of resources like php & perl.
Their billing department is very customer-focused, with good sets of warnings for overages and limit crossings.
I have had my site hosted with them since 1999, and I can't recall any significant outages.
Only downside: pair's offering seems to be focused on professionals who know what they're doing. The mail system is very wizard-driven, but they're not in the business of setting up webpages for you.
