Starpoint Digital, founded in 2001, is a U.S. based company that provides website hosting along with other internet related services. It owns its own data center and has an English language website.
Features and Ease of Use
There are four shared hosting plans provided by Starpoint Digital. The plans come with the following key features as standard:
- 100% uptime guarantee
- Daily automatic backups
- Free domain registration or transfer
- Up to unlimited subdomains
- Up to unlimited disk space
- Up to unlimited bandwidth per month
Starpoint Digital owns and operates its own data center called “Schaumburg” in Chicago, Illinois in the U.S. There’s an excellent uptime guarantee of 100% advertised throughout the website, but when you read the details, you will actually only receive credits if the downtime is less than 99% (which is extremely low). The network is built with robust Cisco hardware.
The plans use cPanel as the control panel and Apache web server. There are a handful of standard features such as MySQL databases, FTP accounts, and support for PHP. However, it’s less clear whether there are other tools such as SSH access, Cron jobs, or other advanced scripting languages supported (I wasn’t able to get confirmation from support).
There are also daily automatic backups, which is helpful for beginners, and according to the website, you can install any add-ons such as blogs, shopping carts, and content management systems via the control panel.
If you’re ready to scale your online presence, Starpoint Digital also offers dedicated server rentals, VPS, cloud hosting, and co-location.
Pricing and Support
The plans are expensive. You’d be forgiven for thinking you were purchasing a VPS plan. It’s quite hard to justify the expense, especially when the presumed support for value-added features is low.
The prices are displayed in monthly prices and when I tried to check out, I hit a 404 error. It’s hard to tell the reason, whether the shared hosting plans are no longer for sale or its a temporary bug.
I did try to contact support to confirm, however, while the operator picked up, he was busy on the other line and was unable to answer my questions. In fact, although I was more than happy to wait on live chat, he disconnected!
You can reach out for support through telephone, tickets, and email, but unfortunately, there aren’t any self-help documents available to assist you.
