Site5 Editorial Review & Aggregated Reddit Reviews

Site5 is a hosting provider with extensive experience in this field. The pride of the hoster is a simple, bauble, no server overload, and convenient 45-day money-back guarantee, and it tries to be comfortable and easy to use.

However, starting in 2015, this company is no stranger to criticism. In the same year, after the company’s acquisition by Endurance International Group (EIG), Site5 reviews began to become quite controversial.

Many users are disappointed with customer support and the overall performance of their pages – many of them blame only the group that bought this host.

However, there is no better way to evaluate a company than to test it yourself.

That’s exactly what I did. In this Site5 review, I will evaluate the performance of the shared hosting plan, ease of use, customer support, and much more. So, here we go!

What is Site5?

Site5 is an American hosting company currently residing in Dallas, Texas. Founded in 1998, Site5 has twenty years of experience in the hosting industry and is widely known among thousands of its loyal customers. 

However, Site5’s list of services is not too long. There are only three options:

• Co-hosting web hosting
• Reseller hosting
• Controlled VPS

As you can see, it’s a pretty naked identification mark: no Clouds, no dedicated hosting. SSL certificates and domains (resale Enom and OpenSRS) are available – but only when you buy along with your hosting plan.

And while browsing the site and comparing plans, I noticed a couple of exciting Site5 features. These will be unaccounted resources and free site transfer – many customers are interested in such specifications.

By the way, the Site5 homepage itself is very minimalistic. 

That gives the impression that Site5 behaves professionally, and you can trust it.

But let’s take a look at this Site5 and see what the real cost of Site5 services is!

Site5 Pricing

There are three shared hosting plans: the cheapest one is hostBasic for $6.95/mo, the average one is hostPro for $10.95/mo, and the highest plan is hostPro+Turbo for $13.95/mo.

Here is the prospectus of all three Site5 plans:

1. HostBasic – starts at $6.95/mo. It offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth. It’s a simple one-site plan with less than 10,000 visitors per month.
2. HostPro – starts at $10.95/mo. Along with unlimited disk space and bandwidth, this plan offers an unlimited number of websites suitable for less than 25,000 visits per month.
3. HostPro+Turbo – starting at $13.95, this is a limitless site visit plan suitable for less than 100,000 visits per month, including unlimited cPanel accounts and significantly increased performance.

Many hosting providers do what they do to display the prices as if they were “monthly.” However, in many cases, the prices shown are only legal if they are paid for an extended period in advance.

Let’s dig an entire period of purchase.

 

^{*The prices here do not include tax. You may be charged extra for your order, depending on your locale.}

 

The only way to describe them is “darling.” 

The cheapest plan with ” unlimited resources” is still 

• recommended for “about 10,000 visitors per month”, 
• does not include protection against DDoS or malware, 
• and costs $107.40 per year.

That is $8.95 per month, or $6.95 per month if you pay two years in advance.

More advanced plans are even more expensive, but at least you can buy a monthly plan there. 

Another encouraging thing has come in the form of an extension price. They will not increase – you will be charged the same amount for the same period that you purchased the first time.

Now let’s take a closer look at what is being offered.

Here are all of the most prominent features and differences of Site5 shared hosting plans:

 

It’s pretty simple — three plans: normal, multi-site, and multi-site with extra speed.

There’s no surprises or uncertainty, which is great. However, I was a little puzzled by the lack of anti-DDoS protection and SSL certificate. 

Fortunately, both are supported by every hosting plan, and you can get a free Cloudflare and ‘Let’s Encrypt’ SSL certificate for free if you need it.

With this in mind, it will not cost much money for Site5 to include them in the packages now, and we are worried that many Site5 sites do not have essential security measures applied to them.

It’s also been a little disappointing that only HDD servers are available. 

Of course, in 2018, most users want their sites to be stored on more advanced SSDs. That is the downside when you get unlimited disk space; SSDs cost much more per gigabyte, and by offering unmanaged storage, Site5 is forced to reduce its costs.

However, there are some excellent search options. For example, free data transfer to the site.

Many companies get a fair share of the criticism if they decide to charge their new customers for transferring the site. Such disapproval certainly makes sense – if you have already purchased services, it should be in the host’s interest to ensure a smooth transfer, right? Well, that’s definitely what Site5 thinks. Its cPanel website transfer service is free.

Site5 doesn’t look bad with untapped resources – even a shared Site5 plan offers unaccounted resources – both bandwidth and disk space. 

Quite often, many companies have one or more of their plans limited to a specific point. Site5 goes in a different direction and does not have a specified number of allowed resources. According to the companies, their servers are never overcrowded. 

That means that under normal use, you will not accidentally get your site suspended at any time.

The more I looked at Site5, the more I saw that everything it does is embroidered ‘without fuss.’ A simple website, simple service plans, generous and straightforward shared hosting resources – all this made me believe that it would be an effortless experience and an easy overview to write.

So I bought his shared hosting plan and continued my research to make sure that the first impressions were correct.

Website Customer Service5

At present, Site5 offers only two types of customer service: live chat and tickets.

However, you may still notice the remnants of a slightly more extensive operation. 

For example, you may find support emails, but if you write there, you will receive an automatic reply asking you to use the chat or go to tickets instead. 

And in some cases, you can find the phone number in the header of the site, but it will take you to the support page, which informs you that the phone connection has been terminated.

This way, you can see that this provider had much more to do in the past. Now there are fewer options – there is hope that they are good enough.

Generally speaking, customer service is a crucial part of any host. After all, in stressful situations, when your site is not working or something is not working well, a useful specialist who is ready to help you is simply amazing.

So it’s imperative to check how well Site5’s customer service is doing. You never know when problems might arise. And then it would be great if someone was there to help you.

Site5 Support Review

When I evaluate tickets, I look at two main things: response time and thoroughness of answers. Tickets are usually reserved for more complex technical stuff, so it would be ideal if ticket support representatives were quick and helpful.

After a little testing, I concluded that Site5 Ticket Support works well. I was answered in 1 hour or less. The representatives tried to explain to me what they knew best. 

Although my questions were not quite complicated, there were no real problems with their solution.

As for the tickets, Site 5 gets a check.

Evaluation of chat support on site 5

This one’s a little more interesting. Live chat is probably the most popular form of customer support, especially when it comes to hosting. 

It’s also a good test of the knowledge of people who work for the company. A real conversation allows you to see how experienced the agents are. If they are brilliant, a live chat can be a fantastic experience. If not, it can become painful.

To see what it is, I evaluated Site5 live chat on three different criteria:

• Response time – the less you have to wait in line, the better.
• General customer knowledge. It is also quite simple. They need to know the most important things without problems. If they don’t know what it’s all about, right?
• The human factor. This one’s a little more complicated. The time when you have to go to customer service can be very stressful. During this time, you may need someone who is not only willing to help you, but also to feel that your problems are taken care of, and everything is fine.

Very often, even the tone of an agent’s text can cause or disrupt the whole chat process. Therefore, I will also try to evaluate how Site5 agents handle stressful situations with clients.

So, how was Site5 chat support?

Not as good as it could be. One thing you can’t blame for is the response time. The Site5 chat took me five minutes. In most cases, the waiting time was between 1 and 2 minutes. Problems started as soon as I got connected.

In some cases, the agents misunderstood what I wanted to find out. 

Sometimes the agent had to leave for a minute or two to get an answer, presumably by contacting someone else. In the end, I didn’t feel that the agents were as knowledgeable as they should have been. In some cases, I even thought that they were baffled about their platform.

In one case, I asked how many auto installation scenarios they had and was referred to their “QuickInstall” wizard, without a number. 

Later in the chat room, an agent told me that I could also use Softaculous. After asking, “how do I install the program from there?” the agent admitted that this was what the administrators told her, and she had no idea.

Honesty is great. 

Is your field too complicated even for you? Not really.

It’s a case of serious misunderstanding between different layers within the company. These things should be incredibly rare, and I hope that by removing phone and email support, Site5 can improve its chat over time.

Overall, I would say that Site5 support for users is passable. A decent ticket service brings in a live chat. But even there, the waiting time will be negligible, and most of your questions will be answered. 

Improvements must be made, but things are by no means tragic. Up and about.

First impressions during and after the purchase

The buying process was as simple as you expected.

Right at the bottom, you can choose to buy a domain name or add additional services. Nothing has been pre-selected, no annoying pop-ups, or attempts to trick you into buying something you won’t need.

It’s possible to pay by credit card or PayPal. It’s nothing special – but it’s nice to know that there is at least one alternative to the classic card payment method.

After a simple payment process, I learned that this is the end of the smooth sailing. I bought the service and was told that I would have to pass an additional check. But there was no information on how I had to get to them.

After consulting with the chat service, I received several authentication letters to several of my email accounts, but nothing worked. In the end, I ran out of options, so I had to use someone else’s Gmail. Only then did it finally work. So, it took a few emails and much trying, but in the end, I was allowed to send a photo ID so that I could be identified. Then it took me a few more hours to check, but I was inside!

Complicated? Absolutely. 

That was when I finally got to the dashboard.

It is quite modern and has much information directly on it – webmail, cPanel, and a few essential shortcuts. 

It is one of the best panels I have come across so far.

As for cPanel, it is quite confusing. It seems that Site5 is using its custom theme.

Weird, isn’t it? That is a sign that some things don’t fully match Site5’s panel.

It’s a shame that setting up cPanel ruins the convenience of this panel. It loses its intuition, and some directives just don’t work.

Hopefully, this will clear up, but for now, let’s evaluate the performance.

Site5 performance review

Site5 offers higher performance. And, given that the plans are expensive enough, you can expect it to be much better.

But let’s see how Site5’s performance will compare to the competition. 

As usual, I will look at four main points.

1. Host speed with low maintenance (small website).
2.  Host speed with high service (larger website)
3.  Total server uptime
4.  Anti-theft security assessment

Small website hosting on Site5

The logic here is straightforward – the bigger and more complex the website, the longer it takes to load. Very often, clients tend to criticize the provider for having slow servers, but instead, they are guilty of overloading them.

Therefore, in this part, we will see how fast Site5 servers work when they have to deal with a tiny, 20-line HTML site. 

And the results were pretty decent. Not surprising, but adequate. 

As expected, the Dallas servers are performing well in the USA. In the UK, Brazil, Japan, and Australia, the performances also do not reach just over 200 ms.

India and Singapore are again missing – but that can only be expected with a server located in the US.

In general, however, there is nothing wrong with what we have just seen.

Hosting for a large website

Site5 does not include any site designers with their plans, so I decided to take a regular WordPress site, fill it with content, and see how it is done.

And the results here were average. With performance up to 60ms in the West of the US, it’s not so bad in other regions as well. Except, of course, India and Singapore.

It’s very similar to low performance, isn’t it? It is by no means terrible, as it is obvious that Site5 can easily handle large sites.

Of course, the speed is by no means surprising, but at least it is stable. Don’t expect anything extraordinary, but it definitely won’t be a severe bottleneck.

That’s good. It’s not great, but it’s okay. Speeds range mostly from 500 to 1000 ms, with an odd spike to 2000 ms.

Speeds are not very impressive, but there are no ten or 20-second delays, which many providers suffer daily. 

Besides, there was no downtime in a couple of weeks of testing.

The theft protection on Site5

Here I will find out how easy it is for someone to access your account. In today’s world, web security is incredibly essential. It would be dreadful if it were your hosting company, leaving gaping holes in security.

We’re not going to try to hack into your ISP – it would be incredibly illegal and very insensitive. Instead, we’re going to try to test Site5’s security systems. Then we’ll see if I can lure the password from the hosting provider’s live chat representative.

I started with brute force. The operation is simple. I cleaned my browser, changed my IP, and tried to log in to my account 20 times in a row without success. So, pretending I’m trying to guess someone’s password, I should disallow the blind guessing.

From the 21st attempt, I finally got the right password. Site 5 has not responded. Instead, I was immediately allowed in. There seems to have been no distinct security mechanisms used with brute force.

Well, that’s disappointing.

For the second test, I pretended to be the “legitimate owner” of my account – and demanded the return of my password, even though I did not provide any material evidence that I own my account.

One exciting event happened here. The agent asked me to provide the last four digits of the credit card and the ZIP code that I used when registering. That’s good. In no case will a random hacker passing through accounts have both of these things readily available. 

However…

After providing them, I was told that it could only be sent to the email I used for registration! 

That doesn’t make any sense – if I had access to my email (duh), I would use it to access the client section in the first place.

While many ISPs may send your information to a new email address, if you provide enough information, Site5 does not. So rest assured – if your email is secure, so is your hosting. Hackers will not have access to it.

Unfortunately, if you lose your email, you will be blocked too.

To sum up the Site5 Review

Not everything is perfect for Site5. Functions are thrifty at best, with random errors on the panel. However, the price is not even close to being compared with some inexpensive hosts such as Hostinger. Also, customer service options are frustrating, and this could use some improvements.

However, this Site5 overview shows some good things too. In the US, performance is more than acceptable. Add to that a very stable response time plus some pretty rare downtime, and things are starting to look pretty healthy.

Site5 tries to be very simple. Its “zero” approach can be appreciated. However, some things must be improved to be the best of the best.

The pros are

• Stable performance
• Decent response time

Cons

• cPanel has faced several challenges
•  Bad support in chatting
•  Expensive pricing
•  There are no essential features