NetFirms Review

NetFirms Editor's Review

NetFirms, founded in 1998, provides many web hosting and web hosting related services including domain name registrations, shared web hosting, VPS hosting, Ecommerce hosting, and business web hosting.

NetFirms started their web hosting enterprise by offering free web hosting and later turned to budget web hosting as their business model. When NetFirms first switched to budget web hosting, they offered a great deal to attract (and keep) customers by offering $20/year web hosting. This deal has since passed and now they offer typical website hosting that all of the other web hosts listed on customer hosting reviews.

NetFirms is a limited web host provider. They offer plans from 10GB disk space through 300 GB (their business web hosting plan). Their more expensive plans do allow unlimited websites to be hosted but they do cost more than other unlimited hosts that offer unlimited everything.

Editor's Comments About NetFirms Price Value

NetFirms pricing is higher than average for web hosting based on other featured hosts listed on customer hosting reviews. They offer a cheap plan for under $5 that offers very limited service including limited very limited disk space, limited bandwidth, and the allowance to host only one domain.

The other plans are under $9 that require a two year prepay up front. This is considered high by customer hosting reviews for that length of prepay.

Editor's Comments About NetFirms Reliability

NetFirms has pretty good reliability. Though we have seen complaints about NetFirms (impossible to please everyone in this market unless you charge a premium price), we've found NetFirms to be pretty reliable.

Some customers have complained that their servers are slow which may indicate that the servers are overloaded or power users are allowed to resource hog which reduces quality for all customers.

Editor's Comments About NetFirms Control Panel

NetFirms offers their own control panel called XLR8. Based on NetFirms blog post about XLR8, their control panel allows for easy instant installation of Joomla! or WordPress. It allows management of email, billing, domain names, and renewals.

Without being a customer, we haven't been able to find screen shots of their control panel and their description is vague at best. Since we are big fans of cPanel, the worlds best control panel for hosting, we highly doubt their control panel would compare feature-wise. This is something you should consider before purchasing.

Editor's Comments About NetFirms Customer Support

NetFirms customer support has a reputation of being slow to respond to technical issues related to web hosting. Based on our independent review, we've found the customer support options to be pretty good, however, there are too many reviews regarding poor customer support on other websites and resources for us to conclude that NetFirms should receive a 2/5 review for now. Have a good experience with NetFirms, please submit a review and let us know.

• 24/7 toll free telephone technical support
• International telephone numbers for international customers
• Email ticket system
• Knowledgebase - Limited questions and answers for hosting
• Live chat for sales
• System status updates (upper right of support page)
• Video Tutorials
• Company Blog

Based on our review of their customer support options, NetFirms is very proactive with their customers and have their phone numbers and support options in an easy to find place under the 'Contact Us' page. The only thing NetFirms does not currently offer is a discussion forum for their community to express views, seek help, and to help others.