Our Detailed Netfirms Review & Analysis
Netfirms first caught our eye about 3 years ago when we reviewed their $9.95/month Advantage hosting plan. What we found back then was a company that offered many great features, but lacked consistency. For example the included site building software was a real bonus, however actually using it to build a website turned out to be a real chore.
Fast-forward couple of years. Aside from getting a glowing review by the Wall Street Journal for their E-commerce Pro shopping cart system, Netfirms has been a regular news item in the hosting circle for their low-cost ".com" domain names, a newly released Control Panel and substantial feature updates to their hosting product lineup. We thought it was about time to take another look.
Just as we did before, we opted to review their $8.95/ month Netfirms Advantage web hosting plan, which now includes a massive 250 GB of storage space and 2000 GB of monthly transfer . In fact at that price point you would be hard pressed to find more storage space or bandwidth anywhere else (check our top 8 hosts). Netfirms has obviously raised the bar with these specs.
The Netfirms Control Panel XL6 is one of the best control panels we have ever used!
Signing up with Netfirms was a breeze, and as was the case last year we were greeted with a welcome e-mail containing our account information almost immediately after we clicked "checkout". We could FTP to our webspace and access our website literally 30 seconds after we signed up! This may not seem significant, however many other hosting companies take hours or even days to activate a new account.
Netfirms recently launched an upgrade to their web hosting control panel, now labeled Control Panel XL6. Their old one left us with mixed feelings, so we were anxious to put this new one to the test. Of course all web hosting companies include some sort of web-based control panel to manage website, e-mail, domain name and account settings. Unfortunately the usability and features included with these control panels vary greatly and really make or break a hosting plan.
The good news is Netfirms' new XL6 Control Panel really is an improvement over their previous offering and is now one of the best control panels we have ever used (on par with 1&1's stellar offering). It is fast, looks really polished and is loaded with all sorts of cool features. For example the "Site Tools" tab contains "one-click" installers for the popular WordPress blogging tool, the Wall Street Journal recommend Commerce Pro shopping cart, a file manager, photo gallery, password protection and about 15 other applications. As advertised we had a blog up and running in just a few seconds. Wow!
Domain and e-mail management are also above average with many new features, including the ability to host multiple websites with a single account. We added 3 domain names to the domain manager and could create unique e-mail addresses and web folders for each domain name. Not too many hosting companies allow you to do this (Media Temple does), but it really is a great feature and should be something that all hosts allow you to do. Of course the additional domain names we added were free, as the Business Advantage plan includes 2 free domain names. Another bonus!
In our old review of Netfirms we really felt their "business class" e-mail service could use an upgrade, and again it seems that Netfirms has delivered. Their WebMail 2.0 application now includes spam filtering (free of charge) and auto responders (two features that were noticeably absent last year).
That said there is still no way of sending mass e-mail (eg. newletters to your customers) short of installing your own application. To put this to the test we installed Interspire's popular SendStudio e-mail marketing suite and launched a test campaign to 500 of our closest friends. Upon doing so we were quickly greeted with an e-mail from Netfirms support indicating that we would need to agree to an additional terms of service before we could continue with our mass mailing. Considering many web hosting companies have banned e-mail marketing completely we found this to be an interesting approach.
Netfirms has also upgraded their web hosting platform, which now includes MySQL 5+ and PHP 5. It is good to see that Netfirms is committed to offering current versions of the most popular web development tools, although we would still like to see Cron-Jobs and log files (also mentioned in last years review). We have had a test website up and running with them for over a year now and have experienced very little downtime (none that we have noticed). Our webpages are delivered fast at all times of day from coast to coast in North America and Europe. For anyone hosting a small business website this is a must.
As for technical support Netfirms still excels, mostly. The knowledgebase is easily searchable and contains more articles than ever before. E-mail response time is quick, but as was the case last year, was still a little hit or miss with more advanced PHP questions. This time we got mixed answers (unresolved) to a question relating to the installation of the SendStudio application mentioned earlier. It wasn't a showstopper, but it did slow us down. Furthermore Netfirms still does not provide a toll-free support line, even during regular business hours.
Netfirms has positioned itself as a web hosting company for small business, and they really do deliver. Netfirms is now a truely a leader in web hosting industry and hosts over 1.2 million websites. Over the course of couple of years everything has gotten easier, better and faster; and we liked them before! Getting a website up and running was surprisingly easy with the new Control Panel XL6 and WordPress, and the included 250 GB of storage space is really, really generous. At $8.95 per month the Netfirms Advantage web hosting plan is an excellent value and ranks among the best we have ever used. Highly Recommend for anyone looking to host a small business website, e-commerce store or a blog!
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