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Awesome Bluehost & HostGator Alternative: NameHero Hosting Review

 

Before I get started with this post, I’m going to go ahead and disclose that I AM an affiliate for NameHero. I’m also an affiliate for Hostgator, Bluehost, Arvixe, Contabo and other hosting companies.

I like to think that I can avoid being biased in a review. With hosting, most companies suck, it’s a matter of picking the one that isn’t sucking as much as the others. My experience with NameHero has been a pleasant one so far, I hope that doesn’t change!

The problem with hosting companies, is that today, a company can be wonderful, and in a month from now, they can get bought out by EIG and start turning into shit.

My Problem With Hosting

I have a lot of different sites, on a lot of different servers.

One of my favorite companies for a long time was HostGator. They were dependable, fast, excellent support.

Now, they’re still semi dependable, but if you have a support issue, it’s going to take an hour to get through to someone and chances are they will create a ticket and pawn you off on the next tier of support which will take another 2 days or so to get any kind of response.

I’ve had so many issues with them recently, that I moved to a few different servers.

This blog, is still hosted on HostGator, but it won’t be for long. I expect to move to NameHero in the next couple weeks.

HostGator isn’t the only one in decline though. Arvixe was a company that a year ago was better than HostGator, even when HostGator was excellent. The problem is, they were bought by EIG.

EIG is a company that buys out a lot of hosting companies. They cram as many sites on a server as possible, and chances are if you are unhappy with one host they own, you’re unknowingly moving to another hosting company that they own.

Arvixe was great… then it wasn’t. I had a couple sites hosted there that needed to be moved because of significant downtime. Apparently, they still have downtime issues. Surprise, it’s now owned by EIG.

Bluehost is owned by EIG as well, and while they have still been mostly dependable, they have declined in support and performance, dramatically in the last 2 or 3 years.

ASmallOrange Hosting, was considered to be one of the best, then they were also bought out by EIG. They haven’t deteriorated quite as fast as others, but I have a feeling that is inevitably going to happen sooner than later.

It’s hard to find a hosting company that you can be happy with, and remain happy with. NameHero is NOT owned by EIG. 

Why I Tried Out NameHero for Hosting

I heard about it from a friend, and decided to look into the options they have.

The reason I really wanted to try it was because it is a cloud hosting company, which is really attractive to me. Think about how the cloud has grown in the last couple years, and the advantages it offers with different forms of storage, couldn’t we benefit from it in the form of hosting?

I like the idea of cloud hosting because it’s more dependable than traditional companies like HostGator and Bluehost.

Here’s an infographic, courtesy of NameHero to help show the benefits:

Traditional vs Cloud Infographic

Cloud hosting, certainly looks like the most attractive option. No need to worry about system failures, RAM upgrades, hard drive failure, etc.

You have more flexibility to grow, better performance, and seems like the logical choice.

One thing that NameHero touts in the presale materials is that their servers are up to 9X faster than regular apache servers. In my opinion, that’s an exaggeration but it certainly is faster.

My Experience With NameHero

I’ve had NameHero for a few months now. I’m hosting a few sites, performance is great, uptime is great, support is wonderful.

Most actively, I’m using NameHero for an affiliate site I’ve been working on, and have talked about in previous income reports.

I have never had a performance problem. I never have witnessed any downtime at all.

I did have a few support issues, that most people won’t have. I was just confused on setting up private name servers along with a few other things that have no effect on a website or the hosting itself and more to do with advanced configuration.

When I had those support issues, I was a little upset they didn’t have a number to call on their website. They don’t offer phone based support, just email based support.

To my surprise, their email support is lightning fast. I commented on their response times and they mentioned this:

You’re welcome on the response time. We try to get it within 15 – 25 minutes during the day, sometimes a bit longer at night.

I needed support later on at night as well, around 2AM or so, and received a response in 10 minutes that solved my problem.

The longest I have waited for support to respond is 17 minutes.

As for page speed on their hosting, I have clocked in consistently under a 1 second load. Granted, they aren’t large sites, but that’s pretty good performance!

Shared Vs. Reseller

I don’t use shared hosting anymore. Even though Reseller hosting is essentially “shared” it offers a higher level of protection.

With shared hosting and multiple sites, you run the risk of one site being exploited and then your entire root and file/folder structure also being compromised. With reseller accounts, you can have a separate cPanel and FTP for each domain name, which offers a bit more protection.

The main reason I like resellers though, is because of how much easier it is to manage…and the nice benefit of semi passive, recurring income.

If you handle client websites, a reseller account is a necessity. 

Everyone likes recurring income right? With a reseller account, like I mentioned before, each website will have a separate cPanel, FTP, etc. You pay a flat monthly fee for your account and set amount of total bandwidth and disk space. You then, can charge your clients individually for monthly hosting and maintenance.

Hosting and maintenance is such an overlooked service for agencies and consultants. People think that since hosting is so cheap, why would people pay you larger amounts?

The answer is simple… customer service… knowing that someone else is on top of server issues, making backups, and is there in case a problem arises they don’t have to stay on the phone or jump through a million hoops to have the problem fixed.

99% of businesses I’ve sold to, had no problem paying a $300+/yearly fee, or $50/mo fee. The sweet spot for me was between $350-400/year.

If you’ve sold 10 websites, and they’re hosting with another host, you’re missing out on $3,500-$4,000/year. 20 websites? That’s 7-8K/year… that can replace your mortgage payment, car payment, you could invest the money in your IRA…

It’s not chump change. It’s money you’re leaving on the table if you aren’t offering hosting and maintenance service.

Final Thoughts

One of the reasons I was trying out NameHero, is because I’ve been looking for other hosting companies I can confidently recommend to people.

Everyone is promoting the big companies like HostGator and Bluehost, even though they are under-performing. A lot of people choose to promote them because of the large commissions their affiliate program provides.

Smaller companies like NameHero, will often be exponentially better but don’t give out as much affiliate commission so you don’t have many bloggers or marketers wanting to promote them. I guess it comes down to the almighty dollar for most.

Interested in learning more? Check them out and let me know what you think! 

Have a tip for hosting? Have you tried NameHero? Let me know in the comments below!

 

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