Cirtex Hosting Introduction

Cirtex Hosting has been in business since 2003. Its parent company, Cirtex Corp, is based in New York and was founded by John Xie. Xie is also linked to Minus.com, a photo board website similar to Pinterest.

Cirtex Hosting currently hosts around 20,000 websites, making it a fairly small hosting provider. Despite this, its website is incredibly detailed and its service pages are very thorough.

The company is registered at Cirtex Corp’s headquarters; the same building also services HostV, Jenku and MySitesOnline.

Cirtex Hosting Plans

The Cirtex Hosting website is busy and detailed, and there’s no shortage of information to review. The company seems to focus on its low-cost shared hosting plans, and it advertises hosting specifically for adult websites.

Cirtex Hosting offers a wide range of options for cheap shared and reseller hosting, so we’ll just cover the basics in this section.

Shared web hosting is provided with on Linux only. Its custom control panel, Colortex, is a customised version of cPanel. The Basic plan limits the customer to 7 websites, 25 email addresses and 25 FTP accounts. The Advanced plan has no limits on domains but limits FTP accounts to 250 and emails to 250. All other features are unlimited. The Professional plan is the most expensive and removes all resource limitations.

Business hosting appears to be a souped-up shared hosting plan with more resources. Cirtex Hosting promises that there are fewer Business users per server, improving performance for more intensive website. Bandwidth is unlimited on SD-2, SD-2 and SD-3 plans, but disk space is limited. Business users also receive a private SSL certificate.

Reseller hosting is offered across three plans, RC-1, RC-2 and RC-3. All offer unlimited websites, FTP accounts and email accounts, but bandwidth and disk space are limited on all plans.

VPS and dedicated server plans are offered via Cirtex Hosting’s sister company, HostV. HostV also supports all customers on shared hosting plans.

In the sidebar of the main website, you’ll see various cartoon animals offering support for new users. Clicking one of these widgets opens a pop-up wizard which is designed to help new users choose the right hosting plan for their needs.

Cirtex Hosting Uptime/Downtime

Cirtex Hosting offers a standard 99.9% uptime guarantee, measured from month to month. Clients can request a credit for downtime, but the amount of credit isn’t specified.

The company’s Terms of Service suggests that full refunds for one month’s service are rare. Perhaps this is because the terms are strict. Customers can’t claim any compensation for downtime caused by third-party providers (such as telecoms companies that supply fibre connections), server hardware failure, hosting software bugs or DDOS issues. This limits the circumstances under which a customer could make a claim under the uptime guarantee. Any refunds are limited to a maximum of one month’s service fees.

The company doesn’t appear to publish any uptime statistics on its website.

Cirtex Hosting publishes detailed information about its two data centres. The first is located in New Jersey and includes office space and conference rooms for Cirtex employees. Its facilities include air condition, raised flooring, fire suppression and a generator capable of powering its servers for four days. The facility is protected with biometric locks and CCTV. A detailed infrastructure diagram is provided on its website.

The second data centre is located in the Chicago Board of Trade building in Illinois. The facility is patrolled by police and is secured by guards. Technical information is a little harder to come by, but Cirtex Hosting does mention that the building is air conditioned and has fire detection systems. This facility is shared with other hosting companies and ISPs.

Backup services are not provided on shared plans, although clients can make their own backups through Colortex, Cirtex Hosting’s modified version of cPanel.

Cirtex Hosting Support

Cirtex Hosting’s support department is provided via HostV, its sister company. It offers live chat, telephone support, Skype support and a ticketing system. Customers can open a support ticket via email.

In addition to personal support, Cirtex Hosting offers a large catalogue of video tutorials and a variety of tools, such as a Whois checker. Its Frequently Asked Questions page currently links through to the video tutorials. The customer support forum doesn’t appear to be heavily used by clients, although some areas are locked down and hidden from public view.

Cirtex Hosting claims to offer two mobile apps, one for Android and one for iPhone. The apps allow users to control basic account features, contact support, check the company discussion forums and check billing information. However, the iPhone app is not currently available to users in the UK. I couldn’t find the Android app in the UK Google Play store, so it has either been withdrawn or is only offered in specific territories.

Cirtex Hosting has active social media profiles on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. These are not used for support and are almost exclusively dedicated to announcements and marketing.

Cirtex Hosting in the News

Cirtex Hosting hasn’t hit the headlines since it was founded. I also looked for news stories about HostV and didn’t find anything, good or bad.

Cirtex Hosting Control Panel

Cirtex Hosting offers a customised version of cPanel called Colortex Control Panel. The layout and features are very similar to the ‘vanilla’ version of cPanel, but it isn’t clear which version of cPanel Colortex is built on. While some users may be put off by the customisation, note that important features such as backups and Fantastico are available as normal. Cirtex Hosting offers a static demo of Colortex on its website: you can get a basic idea of the look and feel, but none of the features are functional so it’s difficult to say how deep the customisation goes.

Cirtex Hosting Extras

Shared hosting customers receive a free domain name on signup, and one-click installers are included via Fantastico. Scripts include b2evolution, WordPress, Xoops, phpBB2, SMT, osCommerce, PhpWiki, Moodle and Drupal. The host also offers a fairly standard site builder tool. Other than that, no free gifts are advertised.

Cirtex Hosting Money Back Guarantee / Cancellation Policy

Cirtex Hosting offers an “unconditional” 30-day money-back guarantee on shared and reseller plans. After the first 30 days, refunds are permitted on a pro-rata basis, so you’ll never be locked in to a plan.

Free domain names become chargeable if a refund is requested, but clients are free to claim the name and have it transferred to another registrar.

Cirtex Hosting Summary

Cirtex Hosting’s shared Linux hosting is well-priced and should be affordable for any customer. The features are standard across the board, and there’s little to separate the company from similar low-cost hosts. It does promote its own control panel very heavily on the website, but I wonder if it would be better off advertising cPanel more prominently.

Although the limited uptime guarantee is a little restrictive, the company offers well-rounded service and its video tutorial library is excellent. The option to upgrade to a Business shared plan is innovative and will be attractive for companies who want to protect against resource hogs on the same server. It’s a shame that its mobile apps aren’t as widely available as they could be, since this could be a major selling point for the company.