Rating:
(3/5) 
Currently rated as #6
What we are looking at:
Price and Cost Effectiveness, Data Center, Connectivity,
Customer Service
General Impressions:
Pros:
- Wide selection of hosting types
- Site builder
- Provides design and programming services
Cons:
- Non-mainstream control panel
- Wide selection is hard on the web newcomer
- "Early cancellation" fees
Price & Cost vs. Features & Support:
StartLogic, like many other hosting providers,
has reduced rates if you sign up for longer time
periods, but their monthly rates are still reasonable.
StartLogic offers many types of plans, so you
are sure to find one that meets your requirements.
They also offer different platforms, such as VPS
and dedicated. One still reasonably unique feature
is the presence of both both Windows
and Linux hosting, but be prepared to spend some
extra money for Windows hosting.
Carefully read StartLogic's User
Agreement (UA). They make it very clear
in those documents that you will not get any money
back for partial months, and they charge a $50.00
"early cancellation" fee, which may mean you owe
them money beyond any refund to which you would
otherwise have been entitled. This has been a
sore note to many, but they do explain this in
their Terms of Use. So you
might want to just pay month to month.
The
fully equipped plans supply a very good feature-set,
and they also offer a good amount of bandwidth,
but storage space seems to be a little lacking
in terms of what is common today. The Windows's
plan in particular.
Servers and Connectivity:
StartLogic's datacenter is located in the geographically
calm city of Phoenix, AZ. Not prone to any large
scale disasters, such as earthquakes or hurricanes,
the well maintained facility is connected to multiple
backbone providers, such as UUNET, Broadwing, and
Global Crossing. HVAC, power redundancy, and fire
suppression systems round out the facility.
Ecommerce:
StartLogic
offers either osCommerce or Agora Cart for customers
who want to dive into E-commerce. OsCommerce is
a common, GPL cart that many hosts provide. Though
it has some basic display configurations, once you've
seen 1 osCommerce cart, you've pretty much seen
them all. Still, it is a functional, sturdy cart
with a lot of useful features.
Customer Service:
Their support is the place I had some problems.
Several times I sent emails requesting information,
and I would not hear back from them for quite some
time. Also, some of the information replied had
nothing to do with the question I asked. However,
when I had serious problems they were fairly quick
to come to a solution.
