Register.com has been in business since 1994 providing various web hosting services. They were acquired in 2010 by Web.com and has continued to grow. They presently manage over 2.5 million domains and provide outstanding website services at reasonable prices.
Features and Ease of Use
Register.com built a reputation of trust by providing low-cost domain registration and subsequent web hosting. After the Web.com acquisition, they continued to offer a superior product with some killer features that include:
- 300GB or more in storage (Yes, that number is correct)
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Free domain
- 10 or more email boxes
- Windows or Unix hosting
Where most sites provide 1 to 2GB on a basic plan, you get no less than 300GB on hosting plans with Register.com. You also get plenty of email boxes with ample storage, autoresponders, and more.
Being a high-profile hosting company, they offer numerous value-added features to make their product more competitive with higher-priced hosting providers. Those features include:
- Support for PHP5, Python, Ruby on Rails (Unix only), JSP (Unix only), and ASP/ASP.net (Windows only)
- PhpMyAdmin
- Cron Jobs (Unix)
- MS Access and MS SQL database access (Windows only)
Power users and professional website designers will appreciate the advanced features. Also, you have the option to host your site using Windows-based or Unix-based hosting. Most only offer Unix hosting.
While Register.com offers some fantastic features, they are not ideal for rank beginners. A site builder is included in hosting with some drag and drop features, but you will need to know how to code some. For those wanting to use WordPress or other CMS software, there are auto-installers available. You will need to know at least some coding knowledge or be comfortable using tutorials to use this platform.
Pricing and Support
Register.com offers three levels of shared hosting service. Below is a breakdown of the differences between each plan:
| Essential | Professional | Premium | |
| Storage | 300GB | 500GB | Unlimited |
| Domains | 3 | 5 | 10 |
| Email Boxes | 10 | 25 | 25 |
| Email Storage | 20GB | 50GB | 50GB |
| FTP Accounts | 25 | 50 | Unlimited |
| MySQL Databases | 25 | 25 | Unlimited |
The amount of storage offered on these plans is massive. The Essential plan will be more than adequate for most personal sites and even many small business sites. However, if you need to upgrade, you’re not going to pay much more than what the Essential plan costs. I would like to see unlimited domains on the Premium plan, but most of us won’t have that “problem.”
The one caveat to the Essential and Professional plans involves MySQL databases. They are limited to just 300MB each. If you need large databases, then you will have to upgrade to Premium, which has no limits on databases.
Register.com has fantastic customer support with toll-free phone support in the U.S. and Canada, chat and email support. The one catch is they are only open from 9 am to midnight Monday through Friday, and 9 am to 10 pm on weekends.
I reached out to support via live chat and got a response in less than 30 seconds. The agents are native English speakers and extremely knowledgeable. This is probably because they undergo 120 hours of initial training and receive an additional 115 hours of follow-up training each year.
