Intelligent Hosting sells small business website hosting. Judging from the copyright notice on its simple “old school” English-language website, it has been in business since 1999.
Features and Ease of Use
Intelligent Hosting sells all the usual hosting services. Its shared hosting plans come with these core features:
- 99.95% uptime guarantee
- .com, .net, or .org domain names available
- Multidomain plans available
- SSL secure server capable
- Up to 1000 MB disk space
- Up to 50 GB monthly transfer, with unused data rollover
The servers use robust Intel Xeon processors, with SCSI hard drives and RAID to prevent data loss in the event of a hard drive failure. The servers are housed in what Intelligent Hosting calls a “Class A data center” with five backup generators and N + 1 controls. I can’t tell you what “Class A” means in terms of data center tiers, but I can tell you that there is an above-average 99.95% uptime guarantee.
The list of value-added features is not endless, but there is most of what most of you will need: support for PHP (only version 4), Perl, MySQL databases, phpMyAdmin, and SSI. For SSH access, you would need to upgrade to a VPS or dedicated server plan.
As well as the standard features, Intelligent Hosting also offers a few unusual – and frankly a little bit retro – features such as free SEO tools including a search engine submitter and a search engine rank reporting tool. And who really uses a guestbook these days that allows your visitors to leave their name, location, and a message on your website?
Pricing and Support
This provider’s hosting plans come with relatively low resource allocations, so it’s hard to understand the premium prices unless the price-to-feature ratio has not changed since this company was founded in the early days of the internet. To get a price anything like what you would want to pay, you would need to commit to a two-year plan, with the small consolation that the 30-day money-back guarantee should get you out if it all goes wrong.
You can choose from different plan durations: one, six, twelve, and twenty-four months, and if you opt for longer terms, you’ll enjoy a decent discount. Additionally, with all plans, you will need to buy a .com, .net, or .org domain name, and keep in mind that SSL certificates come at an additional cost.
Technical support is substandard by today’s standards. There is no telephone number, no email address, and no live chat. You can contact the company only by submitting a ticket and hoping that it gets answered. My test ticket submission resulted in an automated email to say that the support team should respond within 24 hours. There was no subsequent response.
There is a superficially satisfactory knowledge base for self-support, but it seems to have stopped evolving in 2011.
