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Date Submitted :
April 26th, 2009
Length of time hosted by this company :
6 - 12 months
Overall Rating :
3 out of 5
Reliability :
2 out of 5
Support :
4 out of 5
Pricing :
4 out of 5
Verdict :
I have mixed reviews about Site5. I signed up for them because they offer cheap hosting service with a good admin tool and 27/7 support. Sounds pretty good, right? Well, I sort of think of this as buying a cheap car which runs well, but only holds a half gallon of gas. It's functional, but you will have many inconveniences.
I strongly do NOT recommend this service for developers. Web programming is tough, and Site5 will add more hurdles to your venture. They have 24/7 support, which is good. However, you will need this support a lot. And yes, I mean a LOT! I've contacted them for many reasons - things not working, their admin tool not working the way it's supposed to, password mixups, affiliate program problems, IP address getting blocked every day. Yes, it's problem heavy... even things you wouldn't expect to break. For example, they prepared my server space. I immediately had problems becuase they didn't set a variable. It took me about an hour of talking with them to get it fixed... something that shouldn't have been a problem in the first place. They are usually quick to fix the problems they do have. Sometimes I emailed them about problems and I had to bug them for two or three weeks before they looked into it. That made me angry. For some reason, some Site5 accounts only worked with certain FTP clients. I don't know why. I created a site for a client and, after speaking with Site5 staff, learned that I could only access it through FileZilla, not WinSCP.
However, for clients, the service is good! All the client wants is a site that works, shows stats, has some emails that they can easily manage, and is cheap. This gives them all that. The client should like the 24/7 service as well. The developer has to go through a lot of problems to get the site working properly, but the client just deals with the site after the fact. Therefore, it's good for them.
I would recommend this service only to clients, not other developers.
Also, there's something I don't understand. Site5 was titled such because they offered $5 / month hosting, correct? At least this is the impression I got out of it. Well, it used to be the case. It doesn't seem like you can get this good of a deal any more. It seems like their lowest possible rate now, without discounts, is about $7.50 / month.
Again, having Site5 is like having a good car with half a tank of gas. You'll need to fill up all the time. Even small trips to the store can be cumbersome. You'll need to contact support for problems that shouldn't have occurred in the first place, and there are a bunch of inconveneiences, such as a not-so-intuitive interface which requires the memorization of many passwords in order to operate to its full potential. On another note, their site in general is not as user-friendly as it should be. They seem to move elements frequently and arrange their interface in a strange way. Also, they tend to use an overabundance of DHTML, which causes much cross-browser incompatability and, in my opinion, makes the interface more difficult to use.
My company serves stock market data to a small number of users across the world. We joined up with Site5 because they represented themselves as happy to hold large amounts of data for sparsely-used sites, like ours (google: The Plan To End All Plans).
Too bad it's all a lie.
We established our site, serving our users happily until we got to about HALF our available allocation, then Site5 decided that they never really intended for anyone to actually USE their allocated space. They made up outrageous claims about our inode usage and CPU usage, which they then retracted when challenged on the facts, and ultimately dumped our site with 48 hours notice - much too short a time to actually retrieve our data!
In addition to this, we had numerous occasions where Site5 had just removed our data and we had to ask for it back. At one point they even moved us to a different physical host without telling us!
I\'m very sorry Neil, we spent a lot of time explaining to you that was not the issue. The issue was you were using so much of the CPU and memory from this and the application you were running it was causing other users on the servers sites to crash.
We don\'t allow any one users on a shared server to crash everyone else. We offered you a very big discount on a dedicated server and to help you move.
I\'m currently in the process of moving to another host.
The reason I signed up for Site5 hosting was great price for all the features my sites required.
I, however, will not continue to use their services because I want to try my luck elswhere and see if I can get less downtimes, less MySQL breakdowns and more savvy tech support.
The other my MySQL database got corrupted for no apparent reason, and I asked the support for help. Their \"help\" consisted in clicking the \"repair\" option (which I already tried, and didn\'t work) and offering a month old back-up which would wipe out the very database I was trying to fix. In the end I fixed it myself because luckily I know a thing or two about \"teh internets\", but most users need and deserve a better tech support.
I have been with Site5 for probably 4 years now (since around 2004). Originally, their response times to support tickets was literally in the minutes - almost always around 15 minutes or so. For probably at least since 2006 there has been a SHARP decline in support response times. It is now COMMON not to receive a reply for AT LEAST 6 HOURS. And I do say \"COMMON\". I have recently been with clients on the phone discussing their websites when the server crashed (two times in the same two week period). It was very disappointing. Of course, servers do go down from time to time. We are not complaining about that. But it seemed to be the icing on the cake, the fact that it went down twice in a row for these two clients in such a short span, while I was with them on the phone. I have to say, I don\'t think I have ever submitted a comment like this anyone on the internet, certainly not in the last several years. But I\'m really getting very disappointed in Site5, particularly because of their terrible response times. I mean terrible. For Site5 to improve their image, they need to desperately work on reducing their support response times.
I have been with site5 for the past 3 years. During the last 2.5 years they offered a very stable shared server environment plus the tech support was very responsive.
In the last 6 months things have started to go wrong which include the following.
1. Downtime on the server or slow site load times. Tech support advise this was due to high server loads and they would resove the issue. That was 3 weeks ago and i am still gettings slow response times or time outs on the site. I suspect over selling on the server which is impacting the servers performance which may explain the 90% CPU spikes when i view the service status.
2. Tech support take for ever to respond it can take from 12 hours to 2 days to respond. When they do respond you get the usual standard response \"run a trace route\" and they seem to ignore the fact that the servers CPU / memory resources are getting hammered.
Site5 was good but now they are getting worse and worse. Its time to look for another host who take care of there customers.
I've been with Site5.com for eight years, and used to be extremely happy (fast tech support response, high reliability, attentive owners). For the last three years, however, it's been going downhill, especially since it was moved to/sold to/bought by to ThePlanet. Tech support response times that used to be in minutes is now in the high hours, and even into days, before I get anything back. They have a "General Feedback, Comments, and Suggestions" forum where we can offer opinions on their hosting, but only the poster and Site5 can read it so you can't see other people's complaints.
In November of 2006 my SSH access stopped working. I spend thirty hours trying to get some response from tech support: no dice. Finally I emailed every person on the management team with my problem, and the issue was quickly resolved. They said they were hiring new tech support people to reduce wait times, but thirty hours is absurd.
22 hours ago I got a notice from them that one of my accounts has too many files, and unless it is fixed within 72 hours it would be suspended. I immediately tried to logon and investigate, but the account is already suspended and the website is down, which means I can't do anything to address their concerns. Repeated queries to their tech support (they do email and web tickets, but no phone tech support) have been ignored. I tried the tech support chat link, but nobody answers. There are now only three people on the Management Team list (none of the original owners); trying them has gotten me nowhwere.
So, I've got no access, no response, no sign that there's anybody home, and no certainty of a solution. Looks like it's time to jump ship.
Yesterday was my 1st year anniversary of hosting with Site5, it was certainly a happy one. After a bumpy ride with some other hosts I was referred to Site5 by a friend. So far my experience with Site5 has been excellent and beyond my expectations.
Site5's support staff is extremely helpful and I have not experienced any noticeable downtime in the past year.
In all fairness, I must say that lately I have been happy with the service of Site5, so I am reconsidering my previous post. (Unfortunately, the only time people post is when they have a complaint.) I was unhappy at the time. Eventually, the problem was resolved, and my experience with site5 hosting has been good ever since.
I have 5 sites being hosted with site 5 using there domain pointer feature. First I wold like to say that their uptime has been really good for me.
Their customer service is some of the worst I have ever seen. I have been hosting a couple Ruby on Rails apps with them and there have been multiple issues in which I have needed support (20plus). Their response time to my questions is at the very soonest 12 hours and usually around 16 - 24 hours. When they do respond, it is usually with another question of insufficient response. So, it going back and forth with them at that rate takes forever to resolve an issue.
If your site goes down with something more than just the norm, I would expect at least 2 days before it gets fixed and a week is what I'm used to.
So overall, the hosting has been good, the customer service horrible. It's up to you weather you want to host with them or not, but you better be patient if you do.
I own a small vBulletin forum dedicated to my town. Averages about 100 posts a day. The site just celebrated its third anniversary and I have been with Site5 since the beginning. One of the reasons I picked them was they run their own support forum on vB.
Site5 is killing me. As my site grew, I learned that you cannot run a vB forum on the resources they allot, notwithstanding I told their salespeople what I needed hosted. I'm constantly apologizing to my members about the database errors they receive, which are generated by exceeding the 15-connection MySQL limit. The site has been down for hours today because the server (Metis) is flat on its a$$.
It goes without saying that I cannot afford a dedicated server for my hobby, which generates no revenue. I don't think I should need to, either.
If I needed a cheap webhost for a small site then I might recommend Site5. Unfortunately, since you never can tell what your needs will be, I'd stay away.
Probably heading to HostGator or ASO by the weekend.
I moved all my sites to Site5: great pricing, friendly user interface, excellent support and decent uptime. Now, the uptime has gone down the tubes (down for hour at a time, every few months) and support is pretty much gone. Today my main sites have been down, and, after 12 hours, I still can't get anyone to respond (no phone support).
D'de
I have been with Site5 hosting for about 3 years now, on one of the old plans (Horsepower I believe) with 3Gb space and seemingly unlimited bandwidth. I host two large-ish websites (one of which receives thousands of unique hits a day) and several subdomains.
Despite being dugg on a couple of occasions and being featured in several high-traffic CSS design galleries, I've experienced maybe a couple of hours downtime tops - and that was through at least one server move and several upgrades. For 3 years, that's an impeccable uptime record in my opinion. I see hosts who have that each week.
I've never had a problem with billing and my account gets renewed yearly without problem or additional charges.
Support is usually great, my only complain being that the original average support response time of 14 minutes is now more like 3-4 hours. This is to be expected with the kind of growth they've experienced, however.
Site5 are a good host, and I've recommended them to several people who now also use them and are impressed with their uptime and website speeds. I had no hesitation in recommending Site5 to my boss for one of our clients through work. Will continue to use Site5 for as long as physically possible.
Overall summary:
An outstanding set of features for a very low price. Good support and user forum. Not recommended for large or mission-critical sites though, due to poor reliability and a limited total number of files that can be hosted.
Features and Value
For $5/month you get more features than most people will ever need - currently 110 gigabytes of disk space, 5 terabits/month of bandwidth, 110 domain pointers and unlimited mail accounts, mySQL databases etc. Admittedly, you have to sign up for 24 months to get that price, but if you leave early they promptly refund the unused portion.
This includes features that are sometimes missing or cost extra at other hosts, such as your own IP address, SSH access, shared SSL, mailman "discussion" mailing lists, Ruby on Rails, anti-virus scanning and a user forum. They also offer more expensive "true multisite" accounts, a bit like reseller accounts with their own control panels. They currently advertise a "free website time machine" call Flashback but I believe it has been withdrawn, so their advertising is not really honest here.
They have their own control panel, but it's just a "skin" over cPanel with all the same features (and a few extra bugs, such as a file manager that added extra characters to the end of files and set incorrect file permissions!). One unusual trick though is that it can access webmail via the usual http or https ports (80 and 443) instead of the strange port cPanel uses (2095), that sometimes gets blocked by corporate firewalls.
Support and Reliability
Their support staff are generally helpful and unusually knowledgeable - probably the best of any hosting company I've experienced so far. Response times are not always quick, especially at weekends, but the overall time to solve a problem is good because they don't waste time asking stupid questions. Their user forum is also very useful, although marred by heavy-handed moderation of anything vaguely critical. The set of icons that can be used to label discussion threads have had all unhappy faces removed - how pathetic! There's an unusually comprehensive wiki-style user manual.
Unfortunately, they're not very good at monitoring and maintaining their servers. Their web site claims "ultra-low number of sites per server", "our customers love the extra speed they get" and "99.9% uptime guaranteed" but my own experience over many months and two different servers was that pages would often load slowly or not at all, and 99.9% uptime was never achieved. This was particularly frustrating when trying to access webmail, which could be impossible to reach for a whole day. They often seemed to be unaware of these problems and it was very hard to get anyone to acknowledge or address them, even when shown evidence from monitoring logs. Ultimately taking care of servers is what webhosting is all about and these problems were one of the main reasons I left.
Site5 don't give you any help when migrating, and in fact I had to raise several tickets to get misconfigurations of my account corrected before everything would work. They don't even help when migrating between two of their own servers - the recommended way is to sign up for a new account, download all your files, upload them to the new server, configure them, change all your nameserver settings, wait for the DNS propagation then terminate the old account when everything is working. It's not difficult but it takes several days, during which your sites are offline for a while. Plus the time for the inevitable tickets to be resolved.
Restrictions
Another reason I left was their "30,000 file" limit. 30,000 may sound like an awful lot of files, but it's surprisingly easy to exceed if you install some standard applications like phpBB or Gallery, each of which can quietly add many thousands of files to your site (even when empty). I only have half a dozen small "community" sites with a couple of forums, one photo gallery and a shopping cart, but I was way over the limit without realising. I was still over the limit even after trimming them down by removing all unused language packs and templates. This limit also means it's effectively impossible to use some of your web space for offsite file storage (e.g. for incremental backups or for accessing files away from home). I've discovered that many cheaper hosting companies have limits like this, possibly because large numbers of files cause backups to fail, and it's definitely a significant "gotcha" to watch out for.
There are other usage restrictions (e.g. a maximum of 15 concurrent MySQL connections, 50 simultaneous Apache connections or 200 mail messages per hour) that could be a problem for popular sites. Don't expect to get dedicated server performance for a fraction of the price!
Just to let you know Site5 is not getting any better. They've recently announced a deal merging with The Planet in some way, maybe that will help. But the negative comments below are really an eye opener. I signed up with them in December 2006 and only wish I'd seen these before signing a two year contract!
I do think they are trying. Their customer service is responsive, just not helpful. They are also prone to acting without notifying customers of what they have done. They do let customers communicate with one another, but the complaint below that Steven Byrd closes threads and deletes postings is spot on. They don't seem to understand how to treat customers well.
I've been at site5 for more then 2 years and never experienced any major problems.
The helpdesk is great, quick and friendly. Site5 also has a nice messageboard where other people (but also the staff) can help you with minor things. It's a nice feature and I love the whole 'community environment'.
One time there was a hard disk failure and I couldn't upload anything to my site. The helpdesk quickly moved all the sites to another disk and my site was up in no time.
The pricing is great, but only if you pay 6, 12 or 24 months in advance. That's the rason I gave pricing a 4/5.
I started to build web sites in 1997. Over the years I have hosted web sites in more than a few web hosting companies. Of all the web hosting companies I have used, Site5 certainly is the best. Another host company that is also good is TotalChoiceHosting. Both Site5 and TCH have very good server and connection speed, and both companies provide excellent customer services. I am a demanding customer and I contacted customer services quite frequently. It is unrealistic to ask for immediate response, but Site5 usually responded to my request within 15 minutes. What make Site5 better than TCH is the price and feature. Site5 provides SSH access which enable you to use SFTP. We all know that FTP is not secure and SFTP is a very secure protocol. This feature along beat out most of the hosting company in the market.
I highly recommend Site5 for anybody who wants a reliable, fast, and secure web hosting provider. If you don't care about the security issue of using FTP, then TCH is a good choice too.
I agree with most of the comments including the down times or slow servers.
Somehow, their support is not fast as we get replies after 10 hours. Most of the times the support people reply to your questions with "questions" to gain time even though your requests are clear. I even got rude answers from some of them (the support person's name is Beau...), fortunately that was during the last month of our subscription.
There is no coordination between the sales people and the support; I had to fight my way to get some things to be done by the support which was promised by the sales people.
The price is attractive. They gave additional two months for moving to their servers.
Looking at the price and the documentation which is jealously kept in a closet somewhere and the KB which does not come with freedom of speech, but is dictatorial, I would say that SITE5 is a concept which I could live without.
went through checkout process. received an email from them welcoming me to the service. the email listed features of the site, but no instructions other than to log on. i logged on successfully to the account management area using my email and password, but i wasn't able to do anything from the "dashboard" page. so i emailed tech support for help and their response was "your account is not fully setup, you will receive another email when it is". so i wait a couple days and i still can't access any account management functions, and i send another email to support. finally, six days after my welcome email, i receive a reply to my fifth email stating my order was rejected because my address info was wrong... well, why was my credit card authorized then? also, why did i receive a welcome email and an order confirmation and why did i did i go through so many support reps before discovering this?
The 2nd review on this page is awesome and totally spot on. Site5 was great before they spent their time rebuilding their lives in Ruby on Rails and posting in their blogs 24/7 and aggregating now playing lists from last.fm.
Here's my story: My site ran perfectly fine until a mass upgrade to PHP 4.4.3. Afterwards, my site was blacklisted by their datacenter and I was not notified. Customer service took 4 hours to reply before the blacklist was removed and said I should have received a notification about the block beforehand. Funny thing is, immediately after I received a notification that my site was using too many resources and everything was shut down. Customer service has been extremely unresponsive from here on out, and I have two systems administrators trying to work with me in two tickets (you think they would have merged them by now as they started out about two completely different things...)
Verdict: Awesome when I started; Horrible now. Do not recommend.
I've just switched away from Site5 as it's been a bad experience for the past two months. The site, which is tiny, has been slow to load (as has the webmail). The site has also been down, only temporarily but quite frequently lately.
Worst of all is the lost emails. The emails we receive are submissions for publication, so to lose emails is drastically bad form. We must have had at least 4 reported lost emails and we suspect far more. Very poor.
I was all set to chronicle my adventures with Site5's rapidly declining services, but after reading all the existing reviews, I find that I have little to add which has not been said already.
Site5 was great for about a year and a half. There was some occasional downtime, but nothing severe, and support tickets were always answered by someone who actually knew what they were doing.
Then along came Rails, and the Site5 staff was so greatly enamored with it that they apparently lost all interest in doing anything anybody actually cared about. Suddenly every single piece of software they used had to be re-written as a Rails application for no apparent reason whatsoever, and the entire administrative staff decided that they didn't feel like doing anything except post in their exciting new Rails-based blogs about how excited they were about Rails. A tiered tech support system was introduced, and instead of getting your questions answered by an administrator who knew what they were doing, you instead were directed to some underpaid teenager who neither understood nor answered your question. Now I know better than to expect genius level software engineers to field tech support questions for a budget-end hosting company, but when you've got questions like "Why haven't I gotten any email for two weeks?" or "Why has my server been down for a month?", I expect something more in response than "Go read our engineering blog and ask billing for a refund."
So what other options do you have with Site5? Well, you can post your problems and concerns on their support forums, but then Steven Byrd (who is the only Site5 staff member who regularly reads their forums these days, more than likely due to the fact that he has some genetic defect which prevents him from going outdoors and doing anything else) will either lock your thread or delete your post entirely if it makes Site5 look bad in any way. Their defense for this behavior is invariably something along the lines of "This is not a support forum and you need to file a ticket", but this obviously means very little to those of us whose dissatisfaction with the efficacy of their ticketing system prompted us to post in the first place.
Their latest set of marketing jargon laden hosting plans just confirms that Site5 is no longer interested in attracting anyone but teenaged bloggers. Compare what they offer resellers to what any reputable VPS provider would give you for the same price (if not less), and Site5 is so far behind it's not even funny anymore. I was losing clients left and right since (surprise, surprise) most people don't like losing all their email to general incompetence or having their sites go down for weeks at a time with no explanation in sight, so I left. If they keep up the trend, they'll have a hard time keeping even the most irrelevant blogger kiddie happy with the garbage they're shilling. I thought ProHosters went down the tubes quickly, but Site5 has shown me the light.
Unbelievable how poor this company is. I have been with them about two years, had a few minor issues at first but they the refunds at me to make me happy. Then 6 months ago we started having a lot of down time. They have changed their web site 4 times since I have been with them, and change their hosting packages names and prices more... they sure keep you guessing.
Here is the problem --
I had a reseller account and upgraded to another new package they were offering about 6 months ago. I had to create a new account and let the transfer my 10 web sites. This took several days... with many errors along the way. After much frustration, I was given 3 free months of hosting for the trouble. Now let me say, if you have an easy question or problem, you can usually get quick response via email, your only option for support.
Because of all the problems getting my sites transferred, I never told them that in my admin area, I still had the old account listed which caused me to toggle each time I logged in. So this week I decided it was time to bring this to their attention to have the old account removed from my admin area.
I promptly received an email from support saying "yes the old account should have been removed, but never was, and that momentarily it would be removed" Minutes later, I no longer existed on the Internet. With one key stroke my 10 web sites were gone.
I started contacting support via email as my only option. I was ticket number 74... so I was in for a wait. I contacted Live Support via Chat, but they would not help because they were for "New Sales" only. I tried their web site forums which is closely monitored. But because it is a happy place only, I was quickly banned for posting my problems. I was furious... about three hours go by and I get a response.. we are looking into your problem.... well 24 hours later, 25 emails later, No one will admit that my account was deleted. They restored the data from the back up files they had from 37 days earlier. But they do back ups each night.. but I was told there was a problem... so I had no recent data. Further more they could not get my main web site running because the main db file was not recoverable. I'm dead in the water. My webmaster most recent back up was two weeks old... we had no web site and needed to recover fast...
I demanded someone call. Nothing. I demanded to know what happened, but they ignored that question each time. After 36 hours I get an email from the President of operations saying, "you asked us to delete your account so we did, then you asked us to restore it so we did, but some of your data is now lost".. Mad as He11 that he accused me of wanting my account deleted. I sent him the email from support that quoted them as saying, "we will delete your old reseller account but your main account will be left intact". I forwarded the email and noted the mistake had cost me nearly $10,000 in 24 hours.
Do you know what the remedy was??? Yes, 3 free months of hosting and whoops sorry, but we are not responsible for data back ups!
My complaints on Site5 center around their method of resolving problems. They only use e-mail and then refuse to include your questions or comments in their reply. This makes it impossible to actually track and resolve an issue.
I'm on a server that has been down WAY too much lately. After several attempts at resolving the issue without success, I asked to be transferred to a different server. Rather than answer my request, they simply reply that they're working on the problem. I sent another e-mail restating my request and asking additional questions. Same answer - we're working on it. They totally ignore the additional questions.
They also have serious issues with blacklisting. I'm finding my server is frequently black listed making reliable e-mail impossible.
I'm here because I AM going to be on a different server. If Site5 refuses to transfer within their group, they're not the only provider out there. Either they know that all of their servers are equally bad, or they have no interest in keeping a customer.
Ok, sometimes they experience some problems not related to bandwith.
Bandwith is great, uptime is outstanding.
Sometimes (3 times in a year) I experienced slow server/SQL queries. I wrote an e-mail to the technical support and in 30 minutes they solved the problems (I think they just shut down un-optimized crazy scripts). And... that's it! Everything works fine then. What's strange is that I feel like *I* have to care about the quality of the service because they really don't, they just wait you to write them for this kind of problems. BTW when I had other smaller problems, they solved them in no more than 10 minutes.
I started hosting with Site5 over 4 years ago. In the beginning, things were great!
However, over the last six months, their focus has been on getting more customers and releasing buggy software. Server loads and email delays are a constant problem now. I've already moved most my accounts else where and would not recommend using Site 5 if you really depend on your site to survive.
I'm on a site5 server at Liquidweb. Outages are very rare and support has been pretty good but rarely needed. Anytime they do a scheduled maintenance an email is sent ahead of time for notification. Pricing is really great for what they offer.
Bottom line is Site5 is growing faster than they can handle. Their current emphasis is on marketing and creating upgrades that are buggy.
Billing department is more than California laid back and same unresolved issues over and over - high server loads, email problems, stats not being updated.
I have been a customer of Site5 since the end of June 2005. My plan (Horsepower) includes 3GB disk space and 50GB bandwidth (although it appears as if my bandwidth is not being metered). I can host a total of 6 domains from 1 account (1 main plus 5 pointers). If I had my decision to make all over again, I would not choose Site5 again, however some people may find them to be suitable for their needs.
I believe their strengths are:
+ good pricing (for space/bandwidth)
+ quick response from support staff
+ fairly full featured
I believe their weaknesses are:
- many inexperienced support staff (not all are inexperienced)
- unable to resolve some issue (see below)
- Reliability (see below)
Most of my complaints fall under two categories. One is with their inability to keep my IP address off of SPAM blacklists. Other customers sharing the same IP as me send out SPAM, then large companies like AOL (and other smaller companies too) will block the IP address. They normally get the blacklisting resolved within a day (or two), but it happens frequently. So if you want to be able to reliably send email, you may not want to use Site5. I should note that they claim repeatedly that they are working on a permanent fix to this problem, but who knows when or if that will happen.
The other problem I've had deals with the tech staff's generally inexperience with SSL certificates. In theory, we should be able to use the shared SSL certificates for IMAP & SMTP access. And indeed I can, except they haven't installed the certificate correctly, so you have to manually download and install the root certificate (a Comodo cert), so that your MUA doesn't yell at you everytime that the certificate is signed by an unknown authority. This shouldn't be necessary. I have gone around and around with their support staff on this issue, before I finally gave up, and manually installed the Comodo cert. They claim that it is installed correctly, and this is the way it has always worked... but this is NOT true, since it WAS correctly installed for the first 2 months I was a customer. When they did some upgrading, they got it all out of whack, and they are unable to get it fixed now.
I've had several other support issues, that are normally resolved fairly quickly, but often you have to have an email exchange 3 or 4 times before they get it right, which is more time than I'd like to spend to have them get things right. For example, they keep screwing up my SSH access. With enough complaints, they get it restored... but I grow tired of having to open tickets with them. All these issues lead to me giving them a 3 for Reliability. If you consider Reliability to only pertain to "uptime", then I'd give them a 4, or maybe a 5.
I'd say if you are primarily looking for a web hosting, and you aren't too concerned with email, then Site5 may be a good value for you. Otherwise, I'd keep looking. My 2nd choice was HostGator, which I will look into again after my Site5 contract is expired. My main concern with HostGator is that I don't think they offer shell access, which is a major plus for my needs.
tI do not if this site was going to be good because I never received enough support to set it up. Never sent the password to my email address, called them up 4 times, emailed them once and they replied with 2 automated responses that didn't help me out. I do not know if other people are just posting here to suck up but a site can't start off on this bad off a foot. I just called them to retrieve a refund and still no one has answered. College students have ran my site better
I am satisfied with Site5’s customer service and tech support. The features are easy to use i.e. cpanel. I don’t mind paying the extra for the service and support that I have received. I have sent in support tickets that were answered in less then one hour. Great job Site5.
Was a good host for me. Ran into some bandwidth issues and other billing issues- they were nice enough to refund some money and to see my side of the disagreement.
