Reviews and expert opinion BDWEBS.com

Features and Ease of Use

BDWEBS has servers located in the United States and Russia that promise 99.9% uptime.

This company’s plans are differentiated by the capacities and speeds for the following common feature list:

• SSD drives
• Daily and weekly site backups
• 300+ Softaculous scripts for integration with WordPress, Joomla, Magento, and more
• cPanel

Unfortunately, their website makes no mention of the PHP versions available, the number and type of MySQL databases, the cost of migrating your site to their service, or any additional security features.

Beginning webmasters can benefit from a number of value-added services. They offer a ‘static’ web design service to help you create a website, and a ‘dynamic’ service to help you with ongoing maintenance. An additional SEO service will also research the most relevant keywords for your businesses, and help you rank high on the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

E-commerce merchants can benefit from a free SSL certificate and one-click integrations with WordPress, Joomla, and Magento on all plans.

Pricing and Support

BDWEBS offers four different pricing plans that provide a good range of price/performance options. Discounts are available if you purchase a yearly plan, but what really makes this company stand out is access to servers in the American market for less than you would pay to almost any North American web hosting company. And you get a 21-day money back guarantee.

• The entry-level Basic plan comes with just 1 GB of SSD storage and 40 GB of bandwidth, but the price makes it an excellent choice for true entry-level webmasters.
• The Standard plan only costs twice as much but you get a 5x increase in disk space and bandwidth. However, every subsequent jump to a higher plan gives you only 2x the performance for twice the price, which is a much lower ratio than the industry average.
• On the highest-tier Advance plan, e-commerce merchants will find that the attraction of good proximity to the North American market is attenuated by the 20 GB cap on storage space. Small to medium-sized stores might not hit this restriction right away, but merchants with higher ambitions might eventually need to migrate to another web hosting option.

Support is somewhat disappointing. I lost a lot of confidence when an initially very responsive live chat support agent answered my simple question with the counter-question “PHP means?” I don’t know about you, but I’d quite like my web hosting provider’s support staff to know what PHP means. In fact, this company’s support services seem to be more geared toward generating more sales, and this applies to telephone support too. My email support request never got answered. They have a small self-help database, but it isn’t comprehensive enough to be truly helpful.