Network Solutions Hosting Reviews

Hosting Plans

Network Solutions offers shared web hosting through the cloud. While this isn’t yet ubiquitous across the web hosting market, it’s becoming more popular due to its increased versatility and extra security over traditional shared environments.  For those wanting an economical solution, most of the plans are relatively inexpensive, with several coming with top-tier features provide more value for money.

Plans

The Starter plan is the ideal choice for anyone starting and includes a basic spread of resources, modest storage space for one website, and mediocre initial security. It’s best used if you have only an essential beginner website and want to grow it slowly as you learn the ropes. Network Solutions doesn’t outline whether a free Let’s Encrypt SSL is supported with their site, and the lack of a free included domain is a downside to the entry-level plan – offered as standard across the industry.

As for the Essential plan, you’ll get much higher storage, up to three hosted sites, Sitelock basic, and a domain name too. Ultimately, it’s a good choice for freelancers looking to host a few client sites, or even a single site with a lot of content – taking advantage of the beefy 300GB disk space, which is more than you’d usually get for a plan at this price.

The Professional plan brings things together, offering unlimited hard disk space and unlimited email inboxes. This level of plan is better if you intend to build an online business and want to run multiple client websites. Including Sitelock Premium as well, you’ll also benefit from faster page load speeds through its CDN (or Content Delivery Network).

Finally, the Professional Plus plan doesn’t scale very well – when compared to the professional plan. Only including SSL certificate on-top of the included resources. At $21.62 a month, this plan is at the higher end of the price spectrum when compared to other hosts. You’ll still only get ten websites, but the included SSL Certificate is a bonus – that said, it’s only for one of your sites.

Purchasing a one-year contract grants you a reduced monthly bill for twelve months, whereas the monthly billing amounts are a bit higher. Thus, it’s more economical to grab a yearly subscription if you want the most bang for your buck.

Top Features

Custom cPanel
Both the Shared and WordPress hosting plans use the proprietary Network Solutions control panel. This is different from the cPanel used by most other hosting companies in the industry. It’s relatively user-friendly and comes with a step-by-step tutorial to help beginners get around the various controls and tabs. While cPanel is an excellent default choice for most, we feel that some will appreciate the Network Solutions custom interface.

Technical Setup Support
All of the shared hosting plans come with a trained setup specialist support, who can help you with FTP access, setting up firewalls, and transferring files from host to host. They’re entirely complementary, and the on-demand customer support will prove invaluable for beginner users.

Windows & Linux Support
You’ll also be able to choose between Windows or Linux depending on your preferences regardless of subscription plan. Network Solutions also supports PHP 7.0, PHPMyAdmin, MySQL, and Python across both operating systems.

Migration Support
Transferring your website from another hosting service to Network Solutions is quick and easy. The only downside is that it costs $9.99 if you also want to bring your domain name with you. While this is a low price for the service, it’s commonly offered from other hosts free.

Included Website Builder
All hosting plans can also take advantage of the Network Solutions website builder. It’s an excellent solution with thousands of templates on hand. They also provide you with a generous library of stock images to help you customize your site and make it appropriately flashy for first-time visitors. Even better, you can use the demo video on the website to figure out how the website builder works. It’s one of the more user-friendly features we’ve seen.

The website builder lets you add blogs or upload videos with ease. It even incorporates basic SEO features, which can help your website rise in the Google rankings. You can pretty easily customize the templates available, and you can quickly make them more attractive by using a little digital elbow grease.

Automatic Site Backups
Network Solutions does provide automatic backups of your websites for each of the last 14 days, but it doesn’t come with any manual controls, and the snapshot of your site may not be the one you need to recover data or save many hours of work. It’s a good barebones backup feature, but not as in-depth or user-friendly as we’d like. For more reliable site backups, you’d want to opt-in for the CodeGuard add-on offered at checkout.

Final Thoughts

Network Solutions’ shared hosting plans offer a decent spread of features. While several freebies that other hosting providers offer are only present as paid add-ons. Their premium plans are great value for money for resellers and individuals. However, some may consider the plans to lack enough scalability to push them past some of the top hosting companies offers.