GreenGeeks Review
We had never come across a web hosting provider that we feel bad for until we found GreenGeeks. In today’s world, large companies backed by major investors seem to dominate an industry, regardless of how good or bad their service truly is. These enormous companies have an unlimited amount of resources, a lot of which is allocated towards advertising. This is unfortunate because competing with these larger entities makes finding a truly incredible service almost impossible. Look at any web hosting reviews. How many consumers talk about GreenGeeks? Unlike many hosting services, GreenGeeks lives up to what they offer. As per their ‘About Us’ page, CEO Trey Gardner will personally assist you should you feel it’s necessary (we have tested this ourselves). GreenGeeks offers all basic web hosting features along with some nifty advanced features for more professional customers. Moreover, GreenGeeks is one of the pioneers in offering an environmentally friendly hosting solution, as they run off of wind power, which compensates for using power created from standard fossil fuels. Many people may brush this off as a “small but irrelevant” offer, but being environmentally friendly in the cloud and web hosting industries alone can quite literally reduce an absurd amount of carbon emissions. And most importantly, they are the only provider we have come across that is open about every facet of their hosting service. Want to know about their data centers and servers? GreenGeeks goes into great detail, along with pictures, about their operation. This is not only the case with their data centers, but also with their reliability, features, ease of use, customer support and anything else a webmaster may want to know.
Features
For all the talk about GreenGeeks customer support and environmentally friendly solution, little focus has been put on their features list. GreenGeeks should likely put more of a focus on this as they offer some pretty unique features, much of which comes with an unlimited “price tag.” Some of these include:
- Unlimited disk space
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited domains to host
- Unlimited MySQL databases
- Unlimited FTP accounts
- Unlimited forwarding e-mail accounts
- Unlimited POP3/POP3 and IMAP e-mail support
- Unlimited parked & sub domains
- Unlimited e-mail autoresponders
- Unlimited add-on domains
This is just the list of features that are unlimited. You are also entitled to a free domain name. However, many top web hosting services will limit you to a year for a free domain name. GreenGeeks offers you this domain for life (as long as you are hosting with them). You also are awarded webmail access, FTP access, SSH access, anonymous FTP, override .htaccess support, custom 404 pages and cron jobs, spam assassin protection, and site stats. A GreenGeeks account also comes with various website scripts including PHP Nuke, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, PHP5, Perl5, Flash/Shockwave, and about a dozen others. Looking to build an e-commerce site? GreenGeeks offers 4 of the most popular e-commerce shopping carts along with SSL secure server and Open PGP/GPG encryption. And of course, they offer a range of multimedia features, and superior and reliable technology.
Customer Support
Like all other hosting providers, GreenGeeks offers all of the major support channels – live chat, e-mail and phone, all 24/7. Their representatives were very supportive. We even asked for an in depth explanation of their green initiatives. Surprisingly, they were able to deliver a detailed response on how exactly it works. But this is not what impressed us. What captivated us was how easy it was to correspond with the CEO of GreenGeeks. We supplied our e-mail address to the support rep and within a few hours, we had a reply from Trey Gardner (CEO). This, in our opinion, is a testament to their stellar customer service.
Ease of Use
GreenGeeks made a wise choice by offering the cPanel control panel to its customers. It is the most well-known control panel in the industry. It is easy to maneuver and the layout is extremely straightforward. From the file manager to managing your e-mail accounts, everything is accessible right on the dashboard. There is no need to delve deep into it in order to find what you’re looking for. Also, all categories are defined nicely, making this control panel even easier to use than it already is. GreenGeeks also comes with an auto installer for over 150 apps, further simplifying your life. Need to install WordPress? No problem.
GreenGeeks WordPress Backend
Website Building
The free website builder provided by GreenGeeks is the standard version that many other brands offer. This is a great tool for beginners with no technical background. If you wanted, you could have a site up in just a few minutes with this tool. What’s great about GreenGeeks is that even if you are still unsure you can do it, they have a separate page on their website explaining every step you need to take to build your site.
Reliability
If you do not reside in the US or if your website is not targeting US citizens, you will want another web hosting provider. However, if you plan on having a US audience, GreenGeeks is a reliable service for you. They operate two data centers – one in Arizona and the other in Illinois. We won’t dive too much into it since we would need a separate page, however GreenGeeks is a leader in reliability. Their data centers are equipped with 24/7 security, UPS and generators, RAID10 storage arrays (for redundancy and optimal reliability), SSD acceleration, and they use Intel’s latest energy efficient processors.
Summary
There is no other way to put it. GreenGeeks is a gem of a web hosting service. They stand up to some of the largest web hosting companies like iPage in regard to features provided. On top of all the features, GreenGeeks puts an emphasis on customer support and the environment. They also offer a 30 day money back guarantee (no strings attached), making this an easy decision for anyone looking for a shared hosting plan.
