Established on January 11, 1996, Pair Networks has provided many web hosting services, such as shared web hosting, pairCloud and e-commerce. Mainly, we put emphasis on shared web hosting packages from the aspect of price, feature, performance, reliability and customer service.
Located in America, Pair Networks pair has expanded from its humble beginning to impressive numbers. Actually the idea of founding Pair Networks was formed in 1995 when CEO Kevin Martin noticed the profit market. With a 600 square-foot office, the company has been developing to a new situation step by step.
Below are the ratings given to the company’s shared hosting.
Pair Networks Review
Website: http://www.pairnetworks.com/
Reputation
Features
Performance
Support
Price
$5.95/mo
Pricing Policy
There are four shared hosting packages to be chosen from and all of them have different features. Accordingly, these packages are sold with their prices at $5.95/mo, $9.95/mo, $17.95/mo and $29.95/mo respectively. It seems that the first two packages can be accepted, but the last two are much too expensive for the majority of shared hosting users.
To make up for those customers who eventually decide to cancel the service, Pair Networks makes a commitment of 100 days full money back guarantee, up to the date of termination. However, there are some exceptions, including domain name registration fees, which are non-refundable due to registry rules and over-usage fees, for things like disk space and bandwidth beyond account allowances.
Features
To target different level of customers, Pair Networks distributes different packages as follows:
Feature
Package1
Package2
Package3
Package4
Disk Space
15GB
30GB
60GB
80GB
Backups
Transfer
75GB
150GB
300GB
400GB
MySQL Databases
15
30
60
80
Mailboxes
500
500
500
500
FTP Accounts
10
10
10
10
Dedicated IP
SSL
1-Click Installer
$2.95/mo
$2.95/mo
$2.95/mo
$2.95/mo
Price
$5.95/mo
$9.95/mo
$17.95/mo
$29.95/mo
From the table, you can easily find that the four plans have limited disk space, which is not attractive compared with some other leading hosts with unlimited disk space. Obviously, the last two plans have more disk space, data transfer and MySQL databases, which indicates an old saying: you get what you pay for. But the high rates of them, even much higher than some VPS, make them not popular in the shared hosting market.
Furthermore, this company supports multiple programming languages, including PHP, Ruby (with 1000’s of gems), Python, Perl, C and C++. Most of them are popular today, hence Pair Networks does a good job for this part.
Performance
Pair Networks operates its own Internet data centers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, adjoining the headquarters office. Its servers and networks are custom-tuned for speed, reliability, and to be energy efficient. According to the feedbacks from its customers, the network connectivity is OK, and Tier 1 Network Service Providers can basically ensure the web sites load quickly to meet the visitors’ demands.
According to our monitoring statistics, the company’s service can satisfy many people with 628ms in serve response time and 2.5s page loading speed. Of course, the database query performance is not bad, too.
Pair Networks announces that their server and network uptime is well in excess of 99.9% and users’ data can be backed up daily. As a matter of fact, the uptime in excess of 99.9% is not easy to achieve, so you need to take the realness into consideration when making decisions.
Customer Service
Pair Networks claims to provide 24x7x365 customer support with email, phone call and fax, which seems enough in general. But due to lack of live chat which nowadays is the most convenient and easiest way for support, the user cannot get the solution right away in case of emergency.
The most troublesome case is that if the user needs instant help but can’t speak English, he cannot communicate with the representatives on the phone call effectively. So for this aspect, Pair Networks doesn’t show a wonderful picture for consumers. What’s worse, among the 4 plans, users of the 2 cheap ones have no access to phone call support, which is not reasonable.
Conclusion
Apparently, the shared web hosting service from Pair Networks can meet some common requirements for hosting websites and individual users. But to some extent, it is not very appropriate for those webmasters who want to build fast-growing websites with low costs. Considering the customer service and some other respects, the company is not highly recommended.
If you are looking for a reliable shared web hosting provider, based on previous experiences and testing, we’d like to recommend some companies for you as following.