The World of Webhosting

Overview: Aplus.net’s Budget Hosting plans offer plenty of Web space and Data Transfer. Whether using Windows or UNIX operating systems, Aplus serves up plenty of feature for both brands. Some of the more prominent features include a Marketing Toolkit (Google Pagerank, Backlink tracer, Search Engine tools, etc), Perl, PHP4, Ruby, Python, SSI, Blog tools, Coppermine gallery, ASP.NET, XML, MySQL, MS Access, and a lot more.

Aplus.net provides numerous ways to get in touch with support. These ways include, 24/7 email, 24/7 toll free phone, and live chat. In all of these Aplus.net excelled. During our test period, our Independent Review Panel was surprised at how rapidly support calls were answered. From our experience, it was far and away faster than the norm, and, as usual, it is nice to have around the clock, toll-free, phone support.

Although our Independent Review Panel believes the support to be outsourced, the language barrier was minimal and problems were answered in a concise manner. Without exception, every person that handled our calls, emails, and live chat sessions was polite and knowledgeable and, something we rarely experience, each seemed to be genuinely interested in finding a solution to the various support questions and issues we raised, even tricky technical issues.

Overall, Aplus.net receives excellent scores in support.

Aplus.net does a great job of keeping their customers informed of any upcoming scheduled maintenance. The better Web Host companies do this, and Aplus.net does this better than most Web Hosts we have tested. They kept us aware of any hardware and network upgrades in advance so we were never caught off guard. We wished more companies did that.

We have read a lot of comments in forums that complained about about Aplus.net downtimes, but in our three months of monitoring Aplus.net from multiple locations we experienced less than a few minutes overall.

Our Independent Review Panel thought that it is nice to be able to buy a low cost Web Host plan on month to month basis instead of paying 3 or 6 months in advance, which seems to be the trend in Budget Hosting.

In the past, Aplus has been blamed for sales tactics such as cold calling and mass emailers (SPAM). A lot of companies do cold calling and it can be annoying, but SPAM is something that no one likes. We cannot verify the cold calling reports except the multiple reports we have read online from verified posters, but we have received SPAM from Aplus.net in the past. These do not reflect on their hosting solutions, but we thought it necessary to mention them due to the low industry ratings we gave Aplus.net. Aplus.net does not have a very good reputation in the forums from current and past customers. We conduct our hands-on reviews using blind accounts so we do not receive special treatment from a Web Host and overall, our experience Aplus.net was very good.

Aplus has had a colorful history with the complaint desk at the Better Business Bureau (BBB). As it stands, the amount of complaints filed with the BBB has been steadily declining and 2006 was a vast improvement over the previous year. However, these things should be kept in perspective. Other companies that have worse records with the BBB include Ford, Dell, Microsoft, Apple Inc, and a lot more.

Important Addition to this Review:

At the time of the writing of this review, Aplus.net had just been named as one of San Diego’s Fastest-Growing Privately Held Companies by the San Diego Business Journal. Furthermore, Aplus.net has been acquired by Catalyst Investors (a New York-based venture capital group: catalystinvestors.com) and Gabriel Murphy, formerly of Interland (web.com) and Communitech.Net, has assumed the role of CEO. Gabriel Murphy has a great reputation in this industry and we have no doubt that Aplus.net will greatly benefit from his high quality, customer service based approach.

One of the first orders of business was the rebuilding of the network infrastructure. Since the rebuild our Website Monitoring service, Hyperspin, as well as the independent test firm RealMetrics have both shown Aplus’ network to be extremely reliable and fast. We look forward to revisiting our review of Aplus once all of the dust settles from the restructuring.

Verdict:
Aplus has been a long time player in Web hosting and have amassed a large customer base. Although they have had a tarnished reputation they have been taking great steps to repair their image with Web developers and have increased the quality of the support they offer. Despite a low industry score, overall, our experience with Aplus.net was actually quite good. Aplus.net’s new CEO, Gabriel Murphy, brings experience, exceptional leadership skills, attention to detail and a high quality, customer-oriented approach to the company — We will continue to monitor Aplus.net and report our results here. Look for their score to improve.

Pros:
Lots of Web space • Lots of Data Transfer • Lots of Features • Fast Phone and Email Support • Courteous and knowledgeable support techs • New ownership and leadership under its new CEO, Gabriel Murphy, can only benefit Aplus.net and its customers

Cons:
Sales Practices that have included cold calling and SPAM • Poor reputation in the forums