Apollo Hosting: The Way to Go!
Written: Jan 21 '02 (Updated Jan 22 '02)
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Pros: Great features, good technical support, fast servers
Cons: higher prices than other hosting companies with similar features
The Bottom Line: Not the cheapest you can find with the features included, but the high reliability and great technical support makes up for it.
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| Horizons832's Full Review: Apollo Hosting, Inc. |
I currently run two seperate websites with two seperate web hosting providers (see my other review of EZ Publishing). This was my first look at web hosting companies, and I really didn't know what to expect when I first started looking for someone to host my site. I wanted something cheap, but something with features that I wanted as well. I found that the cheap hosts usually didn't include anything "good" with their plans, everything was extra. Apollo had a good mix of features for a fair price: 200MB of space, unlimited email accounts, 2GB of transfer, Perl, mySQL, FTP, FrontPage 2000, and all kinds of other features that I would never use. While the price was not the cheapest I found, I wanted to go with someone that I could trust, and Apollo looked to be the one.
Their site boasts 24 hour technical support, with multiple ways of contacting them (phone, email, chat, etc.). I've had some minor FrontPage and Perl problems in the past and, even though they were my fault, the Apollo technical support people helped by quickly giving me an answer, their support team is definitely effective in my book.
The site that I run is extremely fast, although their FTP can be slow at times. I've never once had a problem connecting to my site, either through a browser, through an FTP client, or through SSH. If you use the "ping" command in MS-DOS to see the ping times of a server, you'll find that Apollo's servers have consistently lower ping times than other budget hosts. In fact, their servers had a ping time of about 1/2 my other host!
I was also impressed with their 5-minute account setup. As soon as I closed my browser after signing-up, I received a welcome email listing my IP address, username, password, etc. The account was set up correctly and I was able to access my site (through it's unique IP address which is included in the plan) right away. I was surprised to say the least. In comparison, I had to wait about 2 days for my other site's account to be set up at EZ Publishing.
Something that everybody wants is a Control Panel now. With Apollo Hosting, you can administer your site with just the push of a button with their extensive control panel, which offers more features than any other hosting company I've seen. You can change email settings, account and billing information, SQL database information, FTP settings, and (if you have a more advanced account) automatically add "sub-name" like horizons832.epinions.com and access merchant information (credit card info, shopping cart software). The control panel has too much to list, but it is very easy to use, and is definitely a nice place where all my account settings are consolidated onto one set of pages.
The only problem I've found is that most things need to be set up through technical support. While this is not a problem given the speed of the support I've received so far, it would be easier if I could do these things myself. Examples are setting up Telnet/SSH access for the first time and creating a mySQL database (you can create one yourself, but after that you must contact support). I usually only waited a few hours when I contacted them about these things.
While Apollo is certainly not the cheapest, I'm glad I went with them if only because of their reliability and fast technical support. I would recommend Apollo Hosting to anyone who wants to get their site seen by the world, either a small personal site, or a larger corporate site (they do offer dedicated servers as well). Whatever you choose, Apollo will certainly be there for you and for your site, they have been for me!
Recommended:
Yes
Monthly fees (US$): 17
Platform used: Linux
Hosted on Secure Server: No
Database used: MySQL
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Epinions.com ID:
Horizons832
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Member: J D
Reviews written: 25
Trusted by: 7 members
About Me:
I like trains
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