Simply Hosting Introduction

Since 2001, Simply Hosting has been providing reseller and shared web hosting to individuals and small businesses. Over time, it has expanded into VPS hosting, semi-dedicated hosting and domain name registration too.

Simply Hosting claims that its mission is to provide a ‘one-stop solution’, although its primary market appears to be shared hosting customers and people researching their family history.

The company is based in Chicago, IL in the US and appears to be privately owned.

Simply Hosting Hosting Plans

I’m going to cover Simply Hosting’s plans briefly as there are quite a few to choose from.

● All of Simply Hosting’s shared plans include support for PHP, Perl, MySQL, Softaculous, Zend Optimizer and CGI, and customers get access to a shared SSL certificate. Sites are run on CloudLinux, and clients can have unlimited email accounts. There are six plans, ranging from a basic 1 GB of disk space and 15 GB bandwidth through to 20 GB of disk space and 150 GB bandwidth. No shared plans provide unlimited disk space or bandwidth, and no Windows hosting is available.

● Reseller plans come in four varieties. Again, disk space and bandwidth are limited on all plans. The Mini plan provides 4 GB / 50 GB disk space and bandwidth respectively, while Plan C, the biggest reseller plan, comes with 40 GB / 300 GB.

● Semi-dedicated hosting customers have a choice of four plans and VPS customers a choice of three. Again, all have limits. Interestingly, cPanel is provided free on the VPS plans which is unusual.

● Genealogy Hosting is a quirky plan which includes The Next Generation of Genealogy SiteBuilding (TNG) software pre-installed as standard. This appears to be provided as part of a deal between TNG and Simply Hosting.

Dedicated hosting and colocation both appear to have been removed from the website; the links to the services are still there but they didn’t work when I tried them.

Simply Hosting Uptime/Downtime

Simply Hosting offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee. It’s important to note that this is 99.9% over 12 months, whereas most hosts provide guarantees than are applied monthly. The Simply Host guarantee is potentially less robust since downtime will be averaged out over a year. No details are provided about account credits or compensation should Simply Hosting fail to meet this SLA. I also didn’t find any published uptime history.

After a quick Google search, I found some information about Simply Hosting’s data centre, but this information is from 2009. After searching the site, I found an update from December 2011 suggesting the data center is now in Chicago. No further information was given.

All of Simply Hosting’s shared customers get advanced backups, virus scanning and spam filters as standard. Backups are taken seven times a day, with additional snapshots taken four times a week and once a month. It appears that customers can access these backups, although it’s not clear if there’s a charge to do this.

Simply Hosting Support

Support is provided via a ticketing system, a US toll-free number and a system announcements page. The last update was posted in December 2011, though, so this doesn’t appear to be used any more.

There doesn’t appear to be a live chat option for contacting support, and the knowledge base is fairly scant, covering around 150 topics in total - two thirds of them relating to cPanel. It’s also not clear whether support is provided 24/7 or not.

Genealogy Hosting customers receive a free install of The Next Generation of Genealogy SiteBuilding (TNG), but it isn’t supported by Simply Hosting’s own team.

Simply Hosting in the News

I didn’t find any negative press about Simply Hosting. It appears to be a fairly small company, and perhaps that’s why.

Simply Hosting Control Panel

All small business and personal accounts are set up with cPanel, and reseller customers are also provided with WHM. Most users will be familiar with both if they’ve had a web hosting provider before.

There’s a demo of cPanel on the Simply Hosting site which links through to the cPanel website, so it’s not clear which version you’d be using. Reseller customers can also click through to the cPanel site for a demo of WHM.

Simply Hosting Extras

All of Simply Hosting’s shared hosting customers have access to free backups, virus scanning and spam filters. Softaculous is also included. Beyond that, no incentives are provided.

Genealogy Hosting customers receive a free install of The Next Generation of Genealogy SiteBuilding (TNG) and one month’s free hosting on top.

Simply Hosting Money Back Guarantee / Cancellation Policy

Simply Hosting offers a standard 30-day money-back guarantee. This doesn’t cover any domain names that might have been provided at the time of signup. The guarantee isn’t covered in any detail, even in the Terms of Service document, so it’s not clear how users would cancel or what other services may not be covered.

Simply Hosting Summary

Unusually, Simply Hosting admits that things do go wrong from time to time, but that honesty is always the best policy when it comes to putting things right. Reading the website, I got the impression that the company is keen to demonstrate its commitment to personal customer service. It doesn’t sell unlimited shared hosting, but in a way, that’s a responsible approach, even though it might not look attractive on paper.

The free backups are an attractive extra, but Simply Hosting is let down by a lack of basic details about its support provision: the news updates haven’t been updated for ten months as I write this, and I couldn’t figure out whether the team was available 24/7. I also thought that the lack of updates to the Announcements page was quite worrying, since all news articles date from before the server move. Perhaps this is why some of the advanced services, such as dedicated hosting and colocation, are no longer available.

I initially thought Simply Hosting were a promising host, but I think I’d need a little more information before I signed up. That 99.9% guarantee isn’t as good as it looks, either. Nonetheless, the Genealogy Hosting will be a major draw for people who want to research their family history.