WordPress Arena recommends a few hosting companies already but with so many companies to choose from and new web hosting companies opening every day we are constantly on the lookout for potential new contenders. Today we are looking at the web hosting company CometNine.
CometNine is priced on the lower end of the spectrum which made us believe we wouldn’t expect much from them. Boy did they prove us wrong? Their primary offering appears to be shared hosting and also offer WordPress Hosting and Reseller Hosting but sadly we didn’t see any servers on their website. We asked them about this and apparently, this is coming very soon (Q1 2019 was the ETA we got – we shall test these once out and let you know how they are).
In this review, we had their Pro+ shared hosting plan. Their plans start at $3.91 per month on the 3-year billing cycle and go up to $6.28 on the monthly billing cycle. The plan we had (Pro+) starts at $6.28 and goes up to $8.65 on the monthly billing cycle. Just to be clear, with a free domain for life being included those prices are EXTREMELY competitive.
During our review, we couldn’t help but notice how simple things just generally are. From their website to their order process to the actual website control panel, here is what I mean:
- Website: Everything is where you’d expect it to be. Going deeper into that, they don’t complicate things with added plans offering more performance or business class hosting (which at other providers really is just shared hosting with more resources). They only offer 2 plans and even that is kept simple. Only need 1 website? Get Pro. Need more than 1 website in a single plan? Get Pro+.That is literally the entire thought process you have to put behind it. Do I need more than 1 website or not? Resources, features and everything else is the same across the plans. SIMPLE.
- Order Process: Providers competing on price generally have several upsell options for you to choose from cluttering their order forms. It is how a lot of hosting companies go from ‘appearing cheap’ to actually profiting. Not CometNine. They only have 1 upsell on the cart and that is priority support (more on this below) on their shared hosting plans. On reseller, you get 2, like shared priority support is one and the other is a WHMCS license.To conclude on the order process, you get offered things that actually matter and they’re not trying to bank off of you on upsells. SIMPLE.
- Control Panel: This can be seen as a good thing or a bad thing but it did appear to be very default cPanel. If you are familiar with cPanel then this is great, you’ll know your way around and if not well you pretty much get the same as any other provider in this space.It would have been great if they customized the control panel ever so slightly to remove some of that default cPanel clutter but at the same time by keeping the default cPanel options you do know what you’re going to get.
Support was out of this world. Really. We got a response in roughly 24 minutes but it wasn’t a usual ‘We’re looking into this for you’ type response. It was an actual resolution which does mean they got to our ticket before 24 minutes and only responded when they had something meaningful to say (i.e when they solved the issue).
If I had to make one recommendation to CometNine it would be to have an initial response ‘We’re looking into this for you’ just so you know someone is looking into the issue before the resolution response comes in. That way you won’t be playing with your thumbs wondering if someone is working on the ticket or not.
It is worth pointing out (this is really the only actual negative I can see), they don’t offer support over live chat or phone. It is only tickets. Today I’d expect a provider to provide support over multiple channels but the ticket responses are so good I can accept it.
To conclude, if you are looking for a quality hosting provider then CometNine is to be added to the top of your list.
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