GlowHost Review
Florida based GlowHost has been in the web hosting industry since 2002. They have grown to become an international hosting powerhouse. They have multiple datacenters worldwide, including six across the US, two in the UK, and one in the Netherlands. Their service supports an extremely impressive array of features and their solutions are not only customized, but also comes with 24/7 dedicated support. We are happy to recommend this service to users across the range of experience from small home user to enterprise business.
Features
GlowHost offers four packages on a sliding scale ranging in price from $4.95-17.95 per month. Disk space ranges from 10GB to unlimited and monthly transfers range from 100GB to unlimited. A great feature of this service is its flexibility. GlowHost supports all TLDs including, .com, .net, .org, .info .biz, .ca, .au, .uk, .in, etc. Other features include:
- Unlimited domains (excluding the basic package)
- CloudFlare enabled
- Authorize.net setup included
- Merchant Account Setup included
- Webmail with Email Aliases
- Spam Assassin
- Hotlink Protection
- IP Address Banning
With regards to security, GlowHost uses 2048-Bit SSL encryption for data transfer and supports PGP/GPG email encryption. All sensitive customer details are stored encrypted in their databases, and they also require users to establish a security question in their account in order to receive support via phone or live chat. As for the servers themselves, GlowHost constantly runs several types of antivirus scanners: IDS/IPS, web application firewalls, spam filters and many other proprietary systems to ensure all business and personal web sites are completely safe and secure.
Customer Support
GlowHost offers US based support with a trained team of experienced support engineers that are not only knowledgeable but helpful as well. The support is available 24/7/365 via a technical support ticket, as well as phone and live chat support. Their ticket responses generally occur in less than 20 minutes which is extremely fast for the industry.
Ease of Use
Many porviders have a waiting period of up to two weeks before you are launched. Thankfully this is not the case with GlowHost. With instant account access, you can get started right away.
With regards to the user interface, GlowHost offers the ever-popular cPanel with a web-based file manager for complete control over your sites. Additionally, for dedicated servers they offer the option of CentOS / CloudLinux with cPanel or Windows Server with the Enkompass control panel. You are provided with all the information you could need to know about everything that is happening with your site including Error, Raw, and Referrer Logs as well as AWStats, Webalizer, and phpMyAdmin. Also, GlowHost offers fully equipped programming and database tools with MySQL, PostgreSQL, PHP, CGI, Fast CGI Access, custom php.ini and .htaccess, Ruby On Rails, SSH, PERL, Python, Cron Jobs, Curl, GD 2, Image Magick, as well as secure POP3 and POP3S, IMAP and IMAPS, and SMTP and SMTPS.
Glowhost C-Panel Dashboard
Website Building
GlowHost offers SohoLaunch and are working on unveiling a new easy-to-use s ite building solution. This site builder will allow everyone from web professionals to complete novices the ability to create amazing professional websites in a matter of minutes. Softaculous is included in each plan which is an instant, one-click install, for over three hundred scripts including WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Drupal and ownCloud. Moreover, thousands of templates are available for these installed scripts.
Reliability
GlowHost, like many of their peers, claim 100% network up time guarantee on every type of hosting package offered. They also guarantee 99.95% overall uptime in a 12 month period which includes outages for items like hardware failure or scheduled maintenance. Generally, we are extremely sceptical about guarentees like this because as we all know unforeseen circumstances do occur and uptime fluctuates dramatically over the year. However, we have looked around and read several reviews of the service, and found that with GlowHost, many users have experienced an average of 99.98% up time. This is even better than their guarantee and we were pleasantly surprised to find our scepticism was unfounded.
Summary
GlowHost offers an extremely well equipped service they can be proud of. They have excellent uptime ratings, a great support and an overwhelming array of features. This is a service we are more than happy to recommend. Moreover, they offer a 90 day money-back guarantee, so if you are not 100% satisfied with the level of service you receive, you will get your money back. However, we feel it is highly unlikely that you would need to use it.
