CenturyLink is a telecommunications company based in Monroe, Louisiana. Although it also offers hosting solutions for Microsoft Lync and SharePoint, its main hosting offering is the “Hosting for Business” set of hosting plans.
CenturyLink’s website is in English.
Features and Ease of Use
CenturyLink provides three Hosting for Business plans – Essential, Advanced, and Enterprise – that are designed to provide businesses with a secure, easy-to-manage, and reliable online presence.
The Essential plan includes 50 GB disk space, 20 FTP accounts, automatic backups stored for 3 days, and 1 x 200 MB MySQL database. The top Enterprise plan comes with 200 GB disk space, 50 FTP accounts, automatic backups stored for 30 days, and unlimited monthly bandwidth.
The plans come with the following features:
- MySQL databases
- Automatic backups
- FTP accounts
- SiteBuilder
- CMS tools (WordPress, Joomla or Drupal)
- phpMyAdmin
- SiteLock
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
In addition to including free backups in its hosting solutions, CenturyLink has extended its backup services to customers who require more advanced backup solutions. The backup plans include Secure Online Backup 10 GB (with 10 GB backup storage), Secure Online Backup 25 GB (with 25 GB backup storage), and Secure Online Backup 100 GB (I don’t need to tell you how many gigabytes). These backups feature 256-bit encryption in-transit and at-rest.
CenturyLink also offers SiteLock packages that are packed with features to protect your website against hackers, malware, cross-site scripting, SQL injections, and viruses.
CenturyLink owns 54 Tier 3 data centers spread across the world, and they all have enterprise-level cloud infrastructure. Additionally, this hosting firm has a network of 224,000 route-miles of fiber optic cable, and it receives internet connections from two diverse internet backbones, which almost guarantees reliable service.
Pricing and Support
CenturyLink’s hosting solutions are quite expensive for the few features they include. They are priced in U.S. dollars and can be bought on flexible monthly billing cycles. First-time customers get one month of free hosting, and everyone gets a 99.9% network uptime guarantee.
Customers can contact CenturyLink’s 24/7 technical support team via telephone, ticketing system, or email. Live chat is also advertised, but it always seems to be offline. Unfortunately, I received no reply when I tried to contact the company via its support email address.
For self-support, CenturyLink provides a knowledge base that includes some video tutorials:
