Netfirms (Our Review)

Review Date:

2004-11-26

Netfirms started out as a free web hosting provider almost 8 years ago, and have since expanded their product line to offer low-cost hosting and domain names. The good news is Netfirms executes its hosting products very well and will appeal to both novices and business customers. The bad news is their hosting is no longer free (well they still have a free plan but it is almost unusable).

We tried out Netfirms' Business Advantage plan. Business Advantage customers get 1000MB of storage, 50GB of monthly transfer and 100 email accounts. The company sells this package for "$9.95 a month," but that's misleading because Netfirms charges a year's worth of hosting fees as soon as you sign up.

We didn't like that.

It may boost the bottom line to get 12 months of hosting up front, but it seems a little arrogant and unnecessary. Netfirms' offerings are strong enough, we believe, to retain customers on a monthly or quarterly basis. And the company probably scares off plenty of potential customers who don't want to commit $120 up front. Now, it should be pointed out that Netfirms does offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. But that's it. The sales rep we talked to said the company doesn't refund hosting fees - even on a prorated basis - once you've crossed the 30-day deadline.

But despite that billing annoyance, Netfirms is truly hard to beat, especially for business customers.

We liked Netfirms from the outset. Signup was very easy and quick. We were greeted with a welcome email 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!

The Netfirms Control Panel is professional, contained and easy to navigate. There are no superfluous tools or wizards included just to pack things in. Quality - not quantity - of tools is the focus, or at least not quantity just for quantity's sake. There are no links to third party software that you have to leave Netfirms to configure. We found it comforting to actually stay at our webhost's website to set up the details of our hosting. Customers have easy access from the Control Panel home page to billing details, email, their domains, site tools and even web statistics.

Speed was never a problem for us as we moved around the admin area. We also were comforted by Netfirms' multi-layered "Clustered Hosting" platform which, according to the company, offers plenty of robust security and redundancy.

However the platform is not perfect. We couldn't figure out how to enable spam filtering on our email addresses, and even after being assured by support that spam filtering is "always on" we were unconvinced. Furthermore Netfirms does not support email autoresponders which seems to be fairly common among hosting providers. There is also no way to access your raw web log files.

That said, if you want to get an ecommerce business up and running quickly, Netfirms is a great choice. Both of its business plans come with Netfirms' "Commerce Pro." Click a button and your store is up. Administration is through an easy-to-use graphical interface where you can load products, set taxes and shipping, view orders and generate reports.

We also liked the bulletin board and photo gallery tools. First, they were both easy to use - whether we were setting them up, modifying them or taking them down. Second, they were attractive and professional right from the get-go on your site. So many of the enhancements other webhosts provide for customers - like bulletin boards, counters, forms - look awful without a lot of customization. Not so with Netfirms' offerings. You can modify them, but you don't have to and they'll still look good.

Each Advantage account comes with 10 MySQL databases and Netfirms also provides the admin interface, using phpMyAdmin. Database setup went smoothly and, really, couldn't have been much easier.

As for support, Netfirms excels, mostly. You get a detailed knowledge base that is packed with FAQs, and online demos. In fact there were probably too many documents here. Their email support responded within 2 hours during the day and funnily enough within 20 minutes at 4 in the morning. Unfortunately Netfirms does not seem to have toll-free telephone support so you will be forced to dial long distance. Also the support was a little hit or miss. We sent a technical inquiry involving PHP configuration 3 times and got 3 totally different answers.

So what are we trying to say? Well, for novices and business customers Netfirms is a good choice. This webhost packages excellent tools in an efficient, easy-to-use control panel. You will have to pay up front, but it's definitely a good investment. That said, we would probably recommend going elsewhere if you are a developer or someone looking to build a heavily customized website or application. Netfirms is geared towards self-starter small business owners.

We also mentioned that their free web hosting solution is not usable. What we mean by this is that there are banners placed at the top of your webpage and when you try to use CGI scripts you get all sorts of "limits exceeded" error messages.