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Servlets.com | ISP Reviews

Reviews for ISP: HostForWeb.COM

The following comments have been recorded for "HostForWeb.COM".

Average Overall Score: 3.6
Average Features Score: 4.3
Average Reliability Score: 3.3
Average Support Score: 3.5

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Bargain-price hosting

Date: January 15, 2003
Reviewer: Gary M
Reviewer site: http://www.timeczar.com
Overall: 3 Features: 4 Reliability: 3 Support: 2

hostforweb.com is one of the lower-priced hosting services; even with a private JVM, they charge only $40 per month, and throw in useful extras like list servers. Service is friendly, but not always timely. They appear to be geared more toward hosting simple JSP sites than complicated webapps. They have always tried to meet my needs, but often go for a quick fix rather than explaining what's really necessary to do things the right way. I can recommend them for a startup or amateur site on a tight budget.

REALL GREAT JSP/Servlet Support!

Date: March 17, 2003
Reviewer: Scott Selikoff
Reviewer site: http://www.selikoff.net
Overall: 5 Features: 5 Reliability: 5 Support: 5

I just switched over from a terrible hosting company to HostForWeb.com, and they've been absolutely incredible! They have technicians available at almost any time of the day on Instant Messenger who immediately were able to set up my system and resolve any issues. I highly recommend them if you plan to JSP/Servlets at the core of website.

Best I've experienced

Date: March 17, 2003
Reviewer: Michael
Overall: 5 Features: 5 Reliability: 5 Support: 5

I'm a freelance software developer and a lead web software developer for a major fortune 500 company. Over the years I have recommended and experienced alot of hosting companies for my clients. In my opinion, HostForWeb.com is by far the best I've seen for price and service. Their customer service is professional and timely. The have entertained all my request such as J2EE servers and personal JVMs. I'm impressed with their tech support guru named "Alex" who has a shown to me he knows server side java and is willing to share his knowledge.

A good value.

Date: March 26, 2003
Reviewer: Tyson Nunemacher
Overall: 5 Features: 5 Reliability: 4 Support: 5

You get a lot of bang for the buck at HostForWeb - plenty of HD space, plenty of bandwidth, and a generous helping of the sides. There were some growing pains as we published our site with HFW, mainly having to do with getting our various pieces configured properly. But the tech support is abundant and freely offered, particularly by the aforementioned Alex, who seems to be on at all hours of the night and weekend. Response to tickets can be slow, but instant messaging typically elicits instant response. Overall, a great bargain.

Generous package with good technical support

Date: April 8, 2003
Reviewer: Chi
Overall: 4 Features: 5 Reliability: 2 Support: 5

This hosting plan is by far the most economic plan I have ever had so far. It provides lots of feature such as SSH, unlimited databases, e-mail accounts, and generous disk space and bandwidth usage. The technical support is always available to help. The only down side is the reliability of there server. I experienced quite a few down time. But with the price, I still consider it to be a good hosting plan.

can not beat this value and support

Date: April 8, 2003
Reviewer: Rick (r@reumann.net)
Overall: 5 Features: 5 Reliability: 4 Support: 5

For $20.00 a month, I get so much. Check the website out and compare. Then compare what you get with the fact that you are getting the best support around. I was with another hosting company (which I should mention but won't- but I did mention them in a javaranch post:) and they were horrible. Overall I couldn't be more happy with HFW. They keep up to date with upgrades of Tomcat, tons of features, awesome control panel, great uptime, and best of all - above Excellent support. Email tickets are responded to within a day and you can usually catch someone on AIM to ask a question. At the time of this writing HFW is awesome. Now will they be able to keep it up?- I sure hope so because they are good!

You get a lot for the price :)

Date: May 10, 2003
Reviewer: Adam Carl
Overall: 4 Features: 5 Reliability: 4 Support: 4

I have their supreme package and for $20 I get php, java, mySql databases and all sorts of cgi scripts, applets and stuff like that. For support they have a message board and an IM chat which is really cool. The people at Host For Web are very nice and you can tell they really want to create a good company and support their clients.

lazy support

Date: November 15, 2003
Reviewer: larry hamel
Overall: 2 Features: 4 Reliability: 3 Support: 1

After a couple months with two accounts, one each of their $5 and $10/mo. accounts, I'm looking elsewhere. I never got to try their java support because I was too busy trying to get them to deal with all the more basic problems I found. Their tech support consisted of giving a bunch of no-effort, canned responses, and then you get bumped up to the next level support where you explain everything again and get similar no-effort advice. For example, although Eudora support is mentioned on the web site (with information on configuring the POP server), TLS does not work for sending. Not one of the five support techs was willing to download the free Eudora to test with themselves. Similarly, they offer a bunch of tools that can be installed via "Fantastico", but the vast majority have bugs and problems, and when I asked about these, the techs would give me generic responses and plead ignorance, rather than try installing it themselves in some sandbox. Grrr.

Going downhill fast

Date: October 1, 2004
Reviewer: sherzy
Reviewer site: http://www.sherzy.com
Overall: 3 Features: 3 Reliability: 1 Support: 2

I switched to HFW 3 months ago when my host went out of business. At first I thought they were pretty good, they have lots of nice toys, but things went downhill fast. This week alone my sites have been down twice a day, an hour or so each time, every day this week. One day my site was down for 5 hours. I emailed them repeatedly trying to get them to fix it, finally I got this response: "It seems the tech who restarted the services, he didn't restart the Tomcat to have it running properly, hense causing those 500 errors as you reported." Nice.

So if you are looking for a inexpensive host that isn't reliable, go with HFW. If you need reliability and knowledgeable staff, look elsewhere.

No support answer the phone when your site is down

Date: March 28, 2005
Reviewer: Suba Acuma (ringplus2@hotmail.com)
Overall: 1 Features: 2 Reliability: 2 Support: 1

They promised to have the support answer in 15 minutes, our sites went down for 2 hours and nobody pick the phone or reply an email. BAD.

Just great

Date: January 17, 2006
Reviewer: Francisco Ruiz (krakon@gmail.com)
Overall: 5 Features: 5 Reliability: 5 Support: 5

I have been working with different companies all over the internet/world for about 10 years.

Now i have found just what i was looking for.. I usuaylly used to rad reviews to see wich company is better but i never thought that i was going to write a review, but this time hostforweb.com deservs it. it is just the best company of hosting that I have ever known (just after my company of course ;) )

The have support 24x7x365... live support not like everyone says.. i had a problem the 24th of december and there was somebody online to help me solve it.

Just great you should really try it.

Not good for me

Date: April 7, 2007
Reviewer: Gary Nargi
Overall: 2 Features: N/A Reliability: 2 Support: 2

I started on Hostforweb when my previous host went from great to bad, and ad first HFW is very impressive. But I kept noticing that sites were down. I put an alert service on and got alerts that the sites were down at least 2x daily, sometimes 4 or 5. Support (quickly) got back to me with different answers - "we had to fix the dns", "we had to restart apache", etc. I was always told that the problem was solved but it was never affected. I don't know what the problem was. The moved me to another server. No improvement. A couple of times their live help person told me that it wasn't happening! Eventually they just ignored me. I left, very unhappy. When HFW works, it works very well, but not for long.

5 years of mediocrity

Date: August 24, 2007
Reviewer: larry
Overall: 3 Features: 3 Reliability: 3 Support: 3

I signed up in 2000 or so, no java; I used just web hosting and mail. It is a pain to change, so I put up with tech support that answers quickly in a very shallow manner. Never ask 2 questions. Always make it perfectly clear what you need.

There were various outages of mail, and I eventually changed when it got worse (problems with secure POP and SMTP; complications from my use of 'nolisting' in DSN for my MX records).

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