While iBiz Network legally began selling hosting in 2001, it had been in business unofficially for longer than that. Currently, this Bangkok company has more than 5,000 customers using its services, and its unappealing website is in Thai.
Features and Ease of Use
iBiz Network sells a comprehensive range of services from its unappealing website. Its shared hosting plans come with the following core features as standard:
- Guaranteed 99.99% uptime, backed by compensation
- Daily backups
- Domain registration available
- Multiple add-on domains
- SSL certificates available
- 100 MB to 50 GB disk space
- 5 GB to 1000 GB data transfer
iBiz Network co-locates its servers in Tier III data center: CS Loxinfo, Cyberworld, in Bangkok, Thailand. This center is ISO 27001 certified and offers an uptime SLA of 99.98% with a higher 99.99% uptime guarantee.
You can choose between Windows or Linux hosting plans, which are then further subdivided into resource tiers. There are lots of plans to choose from, each with its own web page, which makes the iBiz Network website hard to navigate and hard to compare the plans.
All of the plans come with the standard features you’d expect from shared hosting packages, such as FTP accounts, MySQL / Microsoft SQL databases, and phpMyAdmin. The Linux plans support PHP version 7, whilst the Windows plans support ASP, ASP.NET, AJAX, and Crystal Report 12.
Although advanced users are well catered for, the situation for beginner webmasters is less clear since the website doesn’t mention any one-click installer or website building tool. I did try to contact the company to clarify, but I received no reply, so I can’t confirm either way.
Pricing and Support
iBiz Network’s prices are okay; certainly not the cheapest on the market, but only slightly more expensive than similar companies in Thailand and elsewhere.
Domain names always cost extra, but you do get an SSL certificate. Plans can only be bought on one-year terms, which is quite a commitment, but you get a 15-day free trial, and a 30-day money-back guarantee to entice you in.
Unlike most shared hosting providers, you will need to create an account first and then make payment by bank transfer. Once we receive your payment, your account will be created right away.
24/7 customer service can be accessed by email, telephone, and “Line” (which is a free video call and messaging app). My own customer service experience was not super. When I sent an email during regular business hours on a weekday, I received no response within 24 hours.
Luckily, the iBiz Network website contains lots of tutorials and help documents to help you support yourself while waiting for customer service to reply (if at all).
