midPhase is a relatively new web hosting company; when they were founded in May 2003 they had zero customers, by late 2005 this number had rocketed to over 40,000. Located in Chicago, midPhase are an exciting young company that like to do things a bit differently; their philosophy would seem to be quite simple – first find out want the customer wants, then offer it to them in greater quantities than anyone else! You’ll see what I mean when you read the next section of this review! They offer the full range of hosting services including budget shared hosting, Windows hosting, VPS, and dedicated servers.
Features
For most of us, shared Linux hosting is the most suitable type of hosting for our website(s). It undoubtedly offers us the best compromise between performance, features, and value. Thus, it is in this sector of the web hosting industry that the “mass market” is to be found. This review will focus on the two midPhase hosting plans which operate within this sector; namely the Mega-PHASE and Pro-PHASE packages (we will refer to them as MP and PP from now on), outlined below is an overview of their most noteworthy features (a full list of features is available on the midPhase website).
Disk Space – The MP allows us 200GB, while the PP sees this quota increased to 250GB. Both of these amounts are very large, and should comfortably satisfy the demands of virtually any user.
Bandwidth – The MP plan comes with 3000GB/month of data transfer, and no that’s not a typo! It is however, a truly ridicules amount of bandwidth (I very much doubt that any midPhase customer has ever come close to exceeding it)! This is of course then surpassed by the PP plan which allows users unmetered bandwidth. If you’re planning on hosting a website that requires a huge bandwidth allocation; maybe your website will include software downloads, or is rich in large music or video files, then it simply does not get any better than this!
99.9% Uptime guarantee – midPhase will give you a free month’s hosting if server uptime drops below 99.9% in any month.
Site Studio website building software – This is basic website creation software that is exceptionally easy to use. So much so, that even someone who knows absolutely nothing about web design will be able to conjure up an effective, fully functional website.
Free Domain – For as long as you host with midPhase they will pay your domain registration fees!
Unlimited domains – This feature is only available on the more expensive PP plan. This is a fantastic feature, and allows you to host an unlimited number of websites on one single hosting account, which delivers superb value for money. Also, it gives uses the best opportunity to take advantage of the unlimited bandwidth on offer. However, the fact that the MP package only permits you to host a single website on your account is very disappointing indeed. Maybe those of you who are certain that you will only require the use of one domain can over look this, but for us it would certainly be a “deal-breaker”! There are too many other good web hosts out there who do offer multiple domain hosting (many offer between 3 and 10 per account), at the same price midPhase charge for their MP plan ($7.95/month). That said, the PP plan is starting to seem like it offers much more in the way of value, even though it is slightly more expensive, at $11.95/month.
$105 Free ad credit – Basically offers you $105 worth of free advertising, in order to get your site listed at the top of the search engine rankings.
E-commerce enabled
Customer service and technical support
midPhase operate a 24/7 toll free phone support service, when we tested them out, by calling them a few times with different technical queries, they came across as proficient and willing to help, though we did have a 10 minute wait to get through once. They also offer e-mail support, this service is not instant but it is quicker than most. In our experience you are likely to wait around 30 minutes for a reply, which is pretty good really.
Performance
Server uptime has proven itself to be very good, and we would definitely consider midPhase to be one of the more reliable host companies. Server speed is also satisfyingly good. The control panel midPhase supplies with its two Linux shared hosting packages, is a heavily customized cPanel. We feel that this customized version is a bit more “clunky” than a standard cPanel, and that midPhase would have been better served leaving it alone. However, control panel preferences are always subjective, and some of you may love it! It’s best to take it for a test drive first before you buy – there’s a full working demo on the midPhase website.
Our verdict
Essentially, we feel that the Mega-PHASE plan has a few shortcomings, most obvious of these is the fact that it only accommodates a single website; and because this plan operates at the most brutally competitive price point ($7.95/month) in the entire industry, it simply means there are better alternatives for most people – namely Bluehost, iPowerWeb, StartLogic, HostMonster, Lunarpages and AN Hosting. On the other hand, if you are willing to pay the extra $4/month for the Pro-Phase plan then there is much more we can say to recommend this option. For anyone who wants to host a resource hungry website, or more likely, many websites that when combined use up a lot of server resources. Then the Pro-Phase package from midPhase has to be your 1st choice, it would certainly be ours if we were in the market for such a hosting solution!
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