BetterWebSpace.com

My daughter has been making hand-made greetings cards for a while, and needed a website that she could provide to her customers so that they could find her easily, my son spent a long time convincing us that for doing anything on the internet a domain name is far better than having a "free" email account (hotmail, yahoo etc.), and that getting a website needn't be as costly as we thought.

After searching through the mass ...
...Why?

We'd seen a lot of recommendations about them on a forum, and it seemed like around half the members of the forum were customers! So after some more intensive digging we found an interview with their owner (http://uk.webhostdir.com/hostreview/hostReview.aspx?spid=4003). That sealed it for me. A company that was taking the moral high ground and being honest with its clients, as well as passing savings on to them - was it too good ... more

My daughter has been making hand-made greetings cards for a while, and needed a website that she could provide to her customers so that they could find her easily, my son spent a long time convincing us that for doing anything on the internet a domain name is far better than having a "free" email account (hotmail, yahoo etc.), and that getting a website needn't be as costly as we thought.

After searching through the mass of web hosting companies out there we plumped for BetterWebSpace, Why?

We'd seen a lot of recommendations about them on a forum, and it seemed like around half the members of the forum were customers! So after some more intensive digging we found an interview with their owner (http://uk.webhostdir.com/hostreview/hostReview.aspx?spid=4003). That sealed it for me. A company that was taking the moral high ground and being honest with its clients, as well as passing savings on to them - was it too good to be true?

A quick visit to their website told us that getting our website online should be as Easy as "1-2-3", so we opted for their basic £12 per year package "Easy 1". We were assured that this was more than enough for a small site. I could list all of the features here that come with the hosting, but it would make this a very long review (and I wouldn't understand some of the things I was writing). So here are the two big factors:

100MB of Disk Space
1.5GB of Bandwidth per month

The ordering process was remarkably easy, no hidden extras - just a domain name, and the hosting package. They offer a variety of payment methods Paypal (which all you ebayers out there will be familiar with), Cheque or Worldpay (That's credit/debit cards to you and me!). We opted for Worldpay and within minutes our invoice had been processed and we were just waiting for the "Welcome e-mail", which arrived around half an hour later.

The mass of features are all controlled from within their amazing control panel. Almost anything you would want to do with your website is controlled in here, creating email accounts, mailing lists, databases, statistics on who's visited your site and when. I've never seen such an array of features, it can be quite daunting! Luckily there are some tutorials available on the website for the most common things you might want to do. If you want to do anything that is not there you'll need to talk to hunt around the web or talk to support.

I know reading this people will be cringing and saying "but they never answer the phone", "they're computer guys who don't talk english" etc. BetterWebSpace aren't like that, from the outset they are honest that they only run the business part time. As for them talking "computer speak", nothing like! I didn't really understand the theory of bandwidth until it was explained to me in pints of beer!

You have a real choice of methods of contact when you want support:

Email - During the daytime I've never waited more than 3-4 hours for a response, often getting a helpful response in under 10 minutes!

Telephone - They use a messaging service to handle all their calls and you can sometimes be waiting a while for a call back. I've been told that email is invariably faster for a response as those go through to the owners mobile phone!

Support Forum - BetterWebSpace is one of the founding members of a support forum which was formed by a group of web hosts. These web hosts are all in different time zones so there is always someone around to answer your questions, day or night (I've not posted yet, but it's nice to have the knowledge that "somebody is out there").

So the big question on everyone's lips, are they reliable? Well since we've been with them we've not had any problems accessing our website, and the more I see of people talking about BetterWebSpace the more convinced I am that they don't seem to suffer any downtime. They announced a potential period of unavailability due to some upgrades a while back and gave us a one hour window when this would be happening. I only noticed 5 minutes when we couldn't access our site - and they even apologised for that!

They seem to offer something for everyone (and at affordable prices too!), from the people who just want a couple of page hobby website, to corporate customers with far bigger sites. They also offer a reseller package, which allows you to start your own web hosting company on their servers! Considering that is how BetterWebSpace started less than 2 years ago, if I had the technical knowledge & time I'd be snatching their hands off!

So if you have ever considered creating a website or starting your own web design (or hosting) business. Head over to BetterWebSpace they'll help you through it in a kind and friendly manner, without ever feeling insulted because you don't understand.

I'll sign off with their signature which I'm sure they won't mind me adding here:

www.BetterWebSpace.com
Where hosting just got better...
 

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