site5.com Reviews

A little over two years ago my former hosting company blocked a website of mine for 48 hours
without notice or any form of communication outside if "Yes, It's blocked" (well there was more, but nothing of use).
This started me once again on a search to find a quality hosting company that was located in the USA (The servers and the company). Thiseliminated a few options and it helped me narrow down the choices between three hosting companies.
They all shared the same speil regarding their servers being fast, loads of 9's in the uptime, nice support, all the standard trimmings.
I contacted their sales team and they were very nice, answered all my questions, and in general relayed the feeling I wouldn't be betrayed as my past host had done (the shutting my site and me out for 48 hours...)
I spent several more hours looking around after that as I didn't want to ever see my site shut down without a valid reason. I spent a good deal of time looking through the forums of all the companies and what set them apart. I noticed two of the companies had hundreds of topics and loads of people posting almost to an extreme... Generally more people is better, but for some reason the smaller Site5 forum stood out as there were quite a few friendly people, the forums were active, and well it made me feel welcome.
I spent several more hours looking at Site5's plans, their terms of service, resource usage policies, and all the other legal junk. I realized they offered something more that my past host lacked, a way to host all my websites under one account! They called it MultiAdmin (now Turbo) and it was a dream come true! The resources seamed reasonable, the price was great, and everything could be accessed from one place! Forget having 6 different accounts! Sure I had some 500 or 700GB of space and 100000GB of bandwidth and other insanity with the other host, but going from 6 accounts to just 1 account and being able to switch between sites... It was PERFECT!
Fast Forward two years and while I have a newer plan with even more space and resources I still have a rock sold host that hasn't shut me down once. Sure, they had a bad spell during my first year of service where others had issues, but during that time my sites all stayed online and worked. Last October the company switched hands to two friends, Ben and Joel. They claim to have been in the industry for years and knew their stuff, but talk is cheap...
Instead of talk what they did was nothing short of amazing. During the first ~8 months of owning the company they managed to finish the migration of all servers to The Planet, Upgrade all the servers to 8GB of ram, Stabilize all the servers, reworked support so tickets are finished before you submit them, standardized all the software, added new items such as Passenger for the rails foke, python addons, and the list goes on.
During this entire time Ben could be seen on the forums daily responding to posts and problems customers faced. He has brought back regular blog posts to keep us informed of what has happened, what is happening, and what is to come.
I might have questioned staying with Site5 during some of the dry spell, but now with the new owners Site5 isn't just another hosting company it's more of a family that I am happy to be hosting my sites.
Ben, Joel, Tom, B&T, and all the other Site5 staff...
Thanks for showing me a quality hosting company!
Hear's to a long future together! Keep up the good work!

I've been a customer of Site5 since 2002
I'm pretty happy with them, and I've recommended them to lots of friends, but it's important for you to know what you're getting.
The good:
- they manage everything for you. The machines are regularly updated, security patches and new features of PHP and Ruby are regularly introduced, there's seldom a library missing that I need. If you hate sysadmin like I do, this is their biggest feature
- the prices are great. I use the multisite with "turbo" option and host more than a dozen websites and two dozen domains off a single group of linked accounts. The whole thing costs me pennies a month on a per-site basis.
The bad:
- they manage everything for you. More than once, site5 have upgraded something under me and broken older software. It's usually a quick fix, but if that's an unacceptable situation for you, managed hosting is not what you want.
- they are not monitoring your uptime. When things go wrong, it's up to you to notice, and immediately start opening tickets and hollering for attention. Their support guys are pretty good but, fundamentally, they get paid the same whether your site is working or not.
So I recommend them as a great managed hosting service, better than any other I've tried, but always go into a managed hosting situation with your eyes wide open about the trade-off you're making: giving up control for greater convenience

I have never had a bad experience with Site5
On the rare occasion that I've happened to need to file a support ticket the problem is solved within MINUTES. The last time I swear I got the "it's fixed" email before I got the automated response email stating I filed my support ticket! I can't suggest Site5 enough. I've had other hosts, but never again. It's Site5 going forward

I am a customer of site5 for the last 2 years and i must say that these guys are really good
Excellent support and up to date services.
I admit that i love Site5. Keep up the good work guys

I have been with Site5 for over two years
Since then new management has taken over and has been really responsive to upgrading the fleet of servers. My server has gone from receiving a credit for downtime every month to never needing credit any more. I do have one con though. The level 1 tech support in chat rarely can fix anything. Tickets that go into support can be handled by level 1 techs and need to be touched by them before it is moved up the chain, thus creating a little lag in response time. I also don't like tickets that have responses like "It is fixed now" without any further details about what was fixed and what the problem was

Site5 is the best cheap hosting company that I've used in 6 years building websites for myself
and for clients. Site5 is reliable, the control panel is the best in the industry, and the support is responsive.
Site5 can also handle traffic spikes when running WordPress and Drupal (unlike many of the larger shared hosting companies).

Always great service, always fast to upgrade
I've been with them for a long time and plan on staying for longer.

I have been with Site 5 for about 3
5 years now. The first 2.5 were great the last year has been hit or miss at best. I moved my sites over to another hosting company about two weeks ago after Site5’s last bout of causing me pain. More about that later. Short take is that I used to recommend Site5 to people all the time and now I don’t. Read my review and decide for yourself whether they are a company you want to deal with.
My ongoing problem with Site5 has been their inability to keep their servers stable. Until I moved two weeks ago I had forgotten what it is like to have a site that does not have at least some downtime a couple times a week. Yes all shared hosting will have some downtime but Site5 excels at down time. I use a monitoring service that queries the server on a regular basis and then sends me an e-mail if it does not get a response. Most downtime lasts only a few minutes but sometimes outages will last a few hours. Lately the server I have been on has been stable with only a couple outages a week and they have all been short. Several months ago I considered moving when I went for probably 2 months experiencing almost daily outages lasting several minutes to hours at a time. About the time I was ready to move things cleared up and I was back to the regular one or two outages a week which I had just come to accept. During this whole period I was putting in trouble tickets if the server was not already on the disabled list. The beautiful part was that the techs would not respond until the problem had either fixed itself or been fixed and then reply with something along the lines of “it seems to be working now.” Pointing to the fact that there had been numerous outages did not bring any real investigation. One thing I will give Site5 is that they are fairly transparent when it comes to their server health. They post when a server is being maintained and usually what the problem was. In my case after two months it turned out to be a drive issue if I remember correctly. I should have taken the hint and left during this bout but since Site5 heavily encourages paying up front and has a no refunds policy I stuck around.
My most recent bout of bad luck with Site5 and the one that sent me packing was their decision to shut down my sites because I had too much traffic. The specific language in their acceptable use policy is “Simultaneous Apache connections may not exceed 50 from one individual source at any given time.” The abuse admin told me it was actually 50 simultaneous Apache connection regardless of whether they were from one or multiple sources which makes this even worse but that is actually irrelevant in my case. I have looked at the web logs for the day in question and to the best of my ability to tell it looks like Yahoo Slurp was crawling my site when the Site5 Abuse admin decided to pull the plug. Yes Yahoo seems to be somewhat aggressive about their crawl speed but all things considered this is something that could happen to any site hosted at Site5. I understand the need for Site5 to protect their server resources so all customers are not hurt but it seems a little ridiculous to shut a customer down because a search engine is crawling their site. I’m honestly surprised I have not had my site taken down before.
Then to add insult to injury when Site5 Abuse shuts down a site for excess traffic they do not monitor to see if the traffic goes down. The customer has to contact them and request that the site be turned back on. The exact wording in the e-mail was “You will need to contact us to have a technician check the server to see if the connections have dropped below 50.” So if you occasionally like to go on vacation just remember that you may have your site down for a while if you get a burst of traffic. Even more infuriating for me was the fact that I sent a request for reevaluation at 9:04 am and did not receive any response until 3:59 PM. That is almost 7 hours with no acknowledgement of any kind. I would have at least liked an e-mail saying traffic is still high but I honestly doubt that was the case since shortly after the pulled the plug I am sure Yahoo moved on. I know for a fact that a little after noon most new traffic should have stopped because I had redirected my DNS by then. Once again Site5 is quick to cut the pipe but slow to work with the customer to restore service.
It seems to me that if I was in the web hosting business I might try to distinguish search engines which cause a fairly short and quick burst of traffic from exceptionally popular sites that are abusing shared resources. I also find it interesting that Site5 takes a shoot first ask questions later approach to traffic management. I have had a couple of friends who had sites that gained enough popularity that they needed to move from shared hosting to a VPS or a dedicated box. Their providers looked at their excessive traffic as an opportunity to get the customer to upgrade not a reason to shut them down without notice. Maybe the Site5 servers are so heavily oversubscribed that they don’t have this luxury. That would also go a long way towards explaining frequent outages. I’m really not sure. I think for me the biggest problems I have with this whole situation is the fact that Site5 gave no warning and then after shutting the site down they ignored me for 7 hours.
In case you are wondering what my traffic looks like and thinking maybe I was really using a lot of resources and this is just what put Site5 over the edge for the last full month I was with Site5 I had the following stats on my most popular site:
Bandwidth: 2.32 GB
Unique Visitors: 30558
There are a fair number of visitors for a small site but as you can see the pages are small and quick to load with only a little over 2 GB of total network traffic. All my other sites combined have well under 5% of that traffic. I also cache all my database entries to help lower the load on the SQL server. We are not talking about a high resource site here. As a side note it does seem that good uptime is important to traffic. I have seen a bump in my traffic since I moved to another provider.
Pros:
Fairly cheap especially if you have multiple sites/domains
Probably good for testing where downtime is not an issue
Fairly quick response to non abuse service requests
Cons:
Unstable
Will shut your site down for “excess traffic” with no notice
Slow response time
If you think you may ever had more than 50 simultaneous server hits (multiple users or one user hitting it really hard) plan on getting shut down
Anyone can take your site down by simultaneously hitting it with 50 connections or potentially by submitting you to be crawled by an aggressive search engine.
They seem to have heavily over subscribed servers.

Great hosting services
This is my 3rd year with them and I'm really satisfied with their services. Great quality support and incredible uptime are their best features for a really competitive price.

Great customer service!

Site5 is a rocking webhost, i am with them for last 5years and never had to look for another host
Last year, wanted to upgrade the account, they just did it smoothly. No data loss. Support is also excellent, less than 15min response. Overall, i give them 99.9/100 :)

After switching hosting providers so many times, I finally found in Site5 what I was looking
for: Extremely few downtimes, excellent price and an amazing customer service.

Outstanding support and uptime
Site5 continue to provide the best value for money of the MULTIPLE hosting services I have tried.
Their ongoing development is a bonus which benefits all their customers and I give the "TWO THUMBS UP!".

Support is always awesome and fast
When they do make a mistake, they always take care of it faster than expected.
Basically they under promise and over deliver on service and support which is really what you are paying for.

Site5 have been a great host
not only friendly and helpful staff, but efficient servers with minimal downtime and excellent features. Super value too!