Editors Site5 Review

Site5 Review (Page 1)

Posted by Jim on Apr 05, 2006

"Site5 is no longer a web host … At least not in the web hosting industry's implicit definition of what a web host should be," writes Kevin Hazard, Site5's Director of Customer Service and hosting evangelist extreme. So what is Site5 then? Read on as we try to answer this age-old question …

Site5 was a relative unknown until a couple years ago when they repositioned themselves as the web host for a new generation of web developers and designers (if you don't fall into this category you should probably look elsewhere). Their current rapid growth stems from a major shift in focus towards innovation and engineering coupled with a new website loaded with Web 2.0 terminology and exclusive brand names.

We went for Site5's Superhosting™ Xtreme plan, which includes Superfeatures™ such as Site5 Backstage™, True MultiSite™, MultiAdmin™, NetAdmin4™, Account Jumper™ and Flashback™; all hosted on Site5 Thunder™. Keep in mind most of this is marketing speak for features you would typically get with any host. You also get the more traditional 11GB of disk space, 400GB data transfer and unlimited E-mail accounts, all for just $8.77 / month - very competitive.

Signup

Signup was quick and easy and about 3-hours after the fact we were greeted with an E-mail detailing our account information. The only limitation with signup is that Site5 doesn't do domain names. You'll need to register your domain elsewhere (and point it to Site5) before you can really get started. This seems odd as you're essentially forced to purchase an integral part of your hosting plan from the competition.

Control Panel

Most of Site5's brand power takes shape in the form of the Site5 Backstage account portal (formerly MySite5). This is a single account login that serves as a gateway to the tools used to manage your website(s) including NetAdmin4 and MultiAdmin.



The new Site5 Backstage.

Under the hood Site5 is actually a CPanel host, although with all of the customizations you would never know it. They have replaced CPanel's default user interface with something that is actually good-looking and well organized. This is what they call NetAdmin4. While NetAdmin4 succeeds for the most part in making everyday tasks like E-mail account creation easy (easier than CPanel at least), the web-based file manager and DNS management utilities could definitely use some work.

Site5 also includes a feature called True MultiSite hosting, which essentially gives you a NetAdmin account for each domain name you host. To do this their engineers have crafted a tool called MultiAdmin, which is essentially a pretty interface layered on top of CPanel's Web Hosting Manager (WHM).



The MultiSite and NetAdmin interfaces make CPanel look respectable.

To be honest Site5's control panel system looks slick but is ultimately confusing. Almost every tab in Backstage presents a similar list of domain names. Things that you would expect to find in NetAdmin are located in MultiAdmin, or both. For instance NetAdmin tells you there is a $50 surcharge to install SSL certificates, MultiAdmin allows you to install them for free. MultiAdmin is used to add additional NetAdmin accounts but the way things are presented it feels like you are clicking into an existing NetAdmin account to add a new one. If this doesn't make much sense don't worry, it doesn't make much sense to us either. Of course when it comes to control panels we've seen worse, but we've also seen better.

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