Bounceweb Introduction

Bounceweb was founded in 1999 and originally offered free website hosting. It later switched entirely to a paid model, concentrating on shared hosting. There’s evidence of a move towards cloud VPS hosting in the future, although there are no cloud plans on offer yet.

The company’s mailing address is located in Houston, TX, but the company has a Brazilian office which is located in Santo Angelo. It’s not clear whether the host operates entirely from the Brazilian address and simply uses the US address for mail, although it should be noted that no telephone support is provided to customers of its US website.

Bounceweb comes across as an enthusiastic host. It stresses the quality of its support and servers and hosts 57,000 websites. Its plans are fairly standard for a shared hosting provider, although it does offer Windows and Linux dedicated servers too.

Bounceweb Hosting Plans

Bounceweb offers one shared hosting plan on Linux. This is the primary package that’s promoted prominently on its website. The specifics will be familiar to anyone who has purchased a shared web hosting plan. For one monthly fee, customers receive unlimited bandwidth, domains, parked domains, sub domains, FTP accounts, databases and email addresses.

Reseller hosting is split into three plans: Bronze, Silver and Gold. All are Linux reseller plans. The Bronze plan limits resellers to 25 GB storage and 250 GB bandwidth. The Silver plan doubles this. The Gold plan ups the limits to 75 GB and 750 GB respectively.

Dedicated servers are provided on Linux and Windows platforms, and there are four plans on each OS, giving buyers plenty of options. Cloud VPS hosting is mentioned on the website but wasn’t offered at the time of this review.

Tucked away in the Terms of Service, there’s a clause that states customers with more than 10,000 files in their account will have to pay an additional $10 per month. This would make Bounceweb unattractive for large websites that aren’t database-driven, but customers using scripts like WordPress are unlikely to be affected.

Bounceweb Uptime/Downtime

Bounceweb provides conflicting information about its data centres. On its Data Centers page, it says it uses two facilities called CCO and DFT. Both of these are located in Chicago; both are SAS 70 Type 1 certified facilities which are staffed around the clock. CCO appears to be a shared facility, but details about DFT are hard to come by. However, photographs are provided.

Delving deeper, I noticed that Bounceweb says its data centres are located in Houston and Dallas on its Contact page. There’s no further information provided, except for the address of each one. Presumably this is old information.

Bounceweb offers a standard 99.9% uptime guarantee, but this is measured over 12 months. It’s therefore fairly unlikely that customers would be successful in claiming a credit for downtime unless the problem was very severe. It likes to a third-party website to provide uptime statistics for its servers; many hosts don’t offer uptime information, so it was good to see this on the site.

Backups are made daily for all customers on shared and reseller hosting plans, which is a useful feature. The company is carbon neutral and proud of its green credentials - it purchases renewable energy credits (RECs) from 3Degrees to offset its emissions, making it a wind-powered hosting company.

Bounceweb Support

Bounceweb is keen to stress the importance of great support via email and chat.

The company claims to offer 24/7 support, although when I tried the Live Chat tool, nobody was available to answer my query. The company says that all email tickets receive a response within 30 minutes and uses this as a marketing tool on the site. However, support is not offered via telephone, and this might be off-putting for non-technical customers.

The Bounceweb Knowledgebase includes a clutch of fairly basic topics, including a Getting Started guide. Most of the entries are short, just a few sentences, and cover to Frequently Asked Questions rather than full-on technical support subjects.

There’s no forum for customer interaction, and the company doesn’t advertise any social media presence on its website.

Bounceweb in the News
I checked out major technology news websites for stories about Bounceweb, but I didn’t find any high-profile articles about the company. It appears that its services haven’t received any notable negative press.

Bounceweb Control Panel

Experienced hosting customers will be pleased to see that Bounceweb offers Cpanel on reseller and shared plans. On its features page, it specifically mentions that it provides the latest version (v11 at the time of writing this review). Dedicated server customers are provided with free Cpanel (Linux) or Plesk (Windows) to manage the features of their hosting accounts.

Customers also have access to a client area where they can manage their account information. This is separate from Cpanel or Plesk and accessed via a login page on the site.

Bounceweb Extras

With a focus on shared hosting, it’s unsurprising that Bounceweb offers a slew of free marketing credits to tempt new customers to sign up. Free gifts include a catalogue of ebooks (reportedly worth $500), Miva credits, Yahoo! ad credits, Google Adword credits, search engine submission software and directory submission tools.

The host makes a point of promoting of its FFMpeg support which allows all clients to offer video streaming. This is an important feature which could be a deal-breaker for clients looking to provide multimedia content without relying on YouTube.

Fantastico is offered on shared and reseller plans, and more than 52 scripts are provided. These include WordPress, Joomla, phpBB, phpCOIN, Drupal, CubeCart and osCommerce.

Bounceweb Money Back Guarantee / Cancellation Policy

The host offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. After this time has elapsed, no refunds can be given.

Additionally, the money-back guarantee only applies to the first hosting plan you cancel; additional hosting plans are non-refundable.

As you might expect, the money-back guarantee doesn’t cover free domain names which are charged at the usual rate if the plan is cancelled.

If you’re ready to sign up, bear in mind that Bounceweb hosting plans are set to automatically renew at the end of each year. Should you fail to cancel more than 10 days before your renewal date, you must cancel your next year’s service within three days of the renewal. Otherwise, you’ll be charged a $50 cancellation fee.

Bounceweb Summary

My first impression of Bounceweb wasn’t great because the standard of English on the site is poor. This gives the content a slightly unprofessional appearance.

However, its plans are solid and offer good value for money. There’s often little to separate shared hosting providers, and Bounceweb is no different, but it is clearly proud of its technical knowledge, features and FFMpeg support, all of which are commendable.

I was a little concerned about the lack of information regarding the physical location of the company and its data centres. However, the main downside to Bounceweb is the lack of telephone or social media support.