#8 Web Hosting - StartLogic Review

"StartLogic has actually gained over 30,000 customers in less than 2 years! They are one of the fastest growing web hosts available today!

$5.95/month (FREE Setup; 2 year plan) Unlimited disk space, Unlimited Bandwidth, Free Domain!

Overview

StartLogic was established in early 2003. As of March 2005, they exceeded Globat's customer base by raking in 30,000 customers in just less than 2 years! They took in over 3,200 new customers in February 2004 alone! Since that time, their customer acquisition and retention has been equally impressive.

StartLogic offers a range of hosting products including shared hosting (both Unix and Windows), virtual servers and dedicated servers. For our concerns here, we are only interested in their $7.50 ProLogic plan which we will be discussing in this review.

ProLogic Plan

The ProLogic plan cost $5.95/month if you pay for at least 1 year in advance (That's $90/year). If you choose to pay monthly instead, the price is $6.95 plus a $30.00 one time setup fee and $8.95 domain registration fee, which to be blunt, is not worth the money. A better glance of the pricing structure and features can be obtained from the chart on your left.

If you have read our iPowerWeb review, you must already know that iPowerWeb's uses vDeck control panel which is developed by their own team. vDeck is only available to iPowerWeb and their resellers. And since StartLogic is using vDeck control panel, we can be certain that they are also one of the iPowerWeb resellers. And based on their number of customers they currently have, we are pretty sure StartLogic is iPowerWeb's #1 reseller.

About Reseller

So what's a reseller? Simply put, a reseller resells hosting services of other larger web host using their own brand. That means the parent web host sell hosting services to the reseller, and the reseller sell the hosting services to the end users. End users are the clients of the reseller while the reseller is the client of the parent host. Thus, it is the reseller that provides customer support to the end users, not the parent host.

One advantage of resellers is server reliability since their hosting infrastructure are usually offered and maintained by large and reputable web hosting firm. The reseller may then focus more on customer support. StartLogic hosting infrastructure is provided by iPowerWeb, which is one of the largest and most successful web hosting company today.

You shall not worry too much on the reseller concepts because it won't affect your hosting experience much. What are more important is the customer support and server reliability. You do not want to end up hosting with a host that has your site down half of the time. You also do not want to wait a whole week just for them to reply your email.

If a host is a reseller, we can't directly tell if it is good or bad. A reseller can be a serious business like StartLogic with tons of customers and employees. A reseller might also be a college student working part time to make some extra money! He might be able to provide better customer support since he only needs to take care a small number of customers. But do remember that he can't dedicate all his time to the business as he needs to sleep and prepare for exam.

Customer Support

StartLogic's live chat support is great. Our test shows that their live chat is staffed all the time. And most important, they can handle all the technical questions we asked. That means all of them are well trained and do understand their products very well. The same live chat team also handles the toll-free support. Their toll-free number is 800-725-8064. You can also choose to submit a support ticket. The support ticket will also be taken care pretty fast by their support staff.

There are also some tutorials posted. Most of them are tutorials on using their vDeck control panel, which is exactly the same set of tutorials at iPowerWeb's website. The information that can be found in their knowledgebase and FAQ is insufficient. There is too little self-help information available in their website. That means if you need to find out anything, you will need to go through the live chat, toll-free number or support ticket.

There are no member forum available. If you prefer a web host with active member forum where you can stick around with their customers and support staffs, you can check out LunarPages or PowWeb. Both of them have built up a very large member forum.

Our Advice

StartLogic is one of the fastest growing web hosts available today. They are doing a great job in customer support and their parent host, iPowerWeb is reputable in handling their servers and network infrastructure. Based on our experience in the hosting industry, we strongly believe that they will continue to do well and prosper in the future.