GreenGeeks Introduction
GreenGeeks specialises in shared web hosting and claims to be the world’s number one green energy web hosting company. The company was founded in 2006 with a goal to become the best green energy web hosting company in the industry.
Whilst GreenGeeks is relatively new, founder and CEO, Trey Gardner, has worked in the industry for nearly 15 years with companies such as iPowerWeb and Lunarpages. After discovering that the web hosting industry is on track to become one of the world’s biggest contributors to pollution, he decided to form GreenGeeks.
GreenGeeks started by offering shared web hosting services with a goal to attract small and medium sized businesses. It has since introduced reseller, VPS and dedicated hosting for larger businesses.
Interestingly, GreenGeeks also advertises an acquisitions programme for hosting companies who are looking to exit the business.
GreenGeeks Hosting Plans
All of GreenGeeks servers run on Linux/Unix. The company does not support Windows hosting that would require ASP or .NET support.
● GreenGeeks has one simple and competitively priced plan for shared web hosting. This includes unlimited disk storage space, bandwidth and allows for unlimited domains.
● For potential resellers, GreenGeeks offer s5 different plans. The plans all come with unlimited disk space and bandwidth, but are priced based on the number of resold accounts you have. The accounts begin with the Seed account, which allows for 10 resold accounts, Sprout allows for 25, Plant 50, Tree 100 and Forest 250.
● There are 5 different VPS hosting plans, which range from 25 GB of RAID-10 storage space, 500 GB of bandwidth and 512 MB of memory, up to 125 GB storage 1,500 GB bandwidth and 2,048 MB of memory.
● The GreenGeeks website does indicate that they offer dedicated server hosting, but they only offer this on a case-by-case basis and you need to email them for a quote.
GreenGeeks Uptime/Downtime
GreenGeeks has a 99.9% uptime guarantee, but like most other web hosting companies, it has not published any uptime statistics on their site to back it up. There is a 99.9% uptime service level agreement in its terms and conditions, but there is no indication of any refund should this be breached.
The GreenGeeks data centre is located in Chicago, IL in the US. The servers are based on Supermicro rack-mountable servers with the latest power-efficient Intel quad-core processors, and they are are monitored 24/7 and backed up on a nightly basis. The data centre also has 24/7 onsite security and utilises a UPS system.
GreenGeeks Support
GreenGeeks provides 24/7/365 live chat and email support, with technicians spread across North America and employed directly by GreenGeeks. The support departments are based in Toronto, Chicago and Los Angeles and staff also provide telephone support, although this isn’t 24/7.
The Help Centre on the GreenGeeks website provides a huge amount of video tutorials, covering many aspects of cPanel, Drupal, Wordpress and more. There is also a knowledge base and FAQs which provide additional information.
There is also an Education Centre which provides regular articles and ‘how to’ information. GreenGeeks has a blog which features regular articles and offers. The company also has an active Twitter account and Facebook page, both of which are used for support and proactive engagement with customers.
GreenGeeks in the News
GreenGeeks is relatively new in the web hosting industry, being only 6 years old at the time of writing this article. As such, there has been little news publicity, either good or bad.
However, an article on the Zdnet site refers to GreenGeeks in a positive way. The writer was searching for a hosting company that do not host pornography sites.
GreenGeeks Control Panel
Every GreenGeeks hosting plan comes with the latest version cPanel rather than a custom control panel of their own design. The majority of people with website management experience will be familiar with it, so in this respect, there’s nothing new to learn if you’re used to Cpanel already.
GreenGeeks Extras
One of GreenGeeks biggest selling points is, obviously, the eco-friendly stance. The company purchases 300% wind energy credits to offset its energy use three times over, and employs a variety of green policies in its offices to ensure a minimum carbon footprint for the entire company.
It also regularly supports causes tsuch as the World Vision organisation who provide clean drinking water to Africa and Haiti. It matches 10% of customers’ donations.
GreenGeeks supports ecommerce features such as SSL secure server, OS Commerce Shopping Cart and Zen Cart. It also provides Fantastico and Softaculous script installers, supporting ‘one-click’ installs of PHP 5, Perl, Joomla, Python, Wordpress, Joomla and more.
GreenGeeks offers a free domain name for the duration of your GreenGeeks account, free website builder and offer a free website migration service. It also gives customers free marketing credits when they sign up.
GreenGeeks provides an affiliate programme which gives rewards for any successful referrals. The programme is based on how many referrals customers make per month.
GreenGeeks Money Back Guarantee / Cancellation Policy
GreenGeeks offers a 30 day money-back guarantee for their hosting services, although this does not include the cost of registering a domain name. Customers just need to contact the customer services team if they wish to cancel their plan.
GreenGeeks Summary
GreenGeeks offer a competitive shared web hosting service with a unique eco-friendly slant. With the option to purchase reseller, VPS and dedicated hosting, the list of services is very comprehensive (although cloud hosting is not yet available).
The green credentials of the company give it an edge over many other companies and will appeal to businesses and individuals who are keen to support green initiatives. Community programmes and drives to support charitable organisations are also another big selling point.
GreenGeeks’ interaction with its customers through social media tools also suggest that they are a very modern and forward-thinking hosting company in terms of customer support.
It's so great to work with a Host company that can solve ANY issue I have but the icing on the cake is that you guys respond to my support requests soooo quickly. And the cherry on top of the icing is that your'e all polite, professional and helpful beyond what's necessary.
I'm glad you were referred to me and I've never had to experience any of those crazy stories I hear from friends about other Host companies.
Thank you a million times over!
Beatrice Otero | Virtualista.com