Newtek markets themselves as a small business hosting company. They are based out of Arizona in the USA and have quite a few different options available to their customers. In reality, I would argue that their hosting services are better suited for medium sized or regional businesses. Though they do have some shared hosting options it is really mostly for email hosting and not full hosting from what I can tell.
They do seem to do a good job with their hosting, but their website is poorly designed and somewhat confusing. It almost looks like it was designed back in the late 1990’s and hasn’t had much of an update since then. Their site doesn’t give much information about their company either, which many people would like to know about before signing up with their services.
Uptime & Reliability
Little Information Here
They don’t provide any type of uptime guarantee. They have little information about their data center. The hardware they use seems good, though for many options it is not known what the hardware actually is. Overall, the reliability of this company is something of a mystery.
When researching for this review I wasn’t able to find very many actual users who had written about their experience, which makes it hard to know with any certainty whether the hosting is stable or not. It seems likely that if there were problems, people would have written about it, but I can’t guarantee that.
Features
Limited Feature Information
Here is another example where this company doesn’t provide very much information to their customers or potentail customers. When you look at their list of hosting options they don’t give much information. Their small plan is a shared hosting service with 5 gigs of disk space and 200 gigs of bandwidth. It limits you to 2 MySQL data bases and 25 email addresses. Beyond that, however, there is no info. What control panel is used? What type of server is it on? What about the data center? These questions are left unanswered for all their hosting packages.
When you move up to their dedicated servers you will get some decent servers (and they actually give you some specs that you’ll need). For example, their higher end dedicated server is a dual Xeon E5-2620 processor running at 2 GHz. It has 16 gig of ram and 50 gigs of bandwidth. This isn’t a bad server at all, though the price is quite high (which I’ll get to in the following sections).
Support
Some Nice Support Options
Their support seems to be one of their stronger points, though even here it is not extraordinary. You can get in touch with them through live chat or email and they seem to do a good job with getting issues addressed in a timely manor. They also have a nice knowledgebase to browse through for self help and other assistance when you want it.
Pricing
Overpriced in many areas
The pricing for this company is quite high in most cases. The shared hosting services, however, are right in line with what the industry charges for the most part, so this doesn’t really apply to that. For the dedicated servers, for example, you will pay $489.95 per month for their nicest option. This is a lot even for dedicated servers. While the specs on this server are nice, they aren’t the highest end I’ve ever seen.
You can get some very nice discounts if you pre-pay for longer periods of time. For example, for the high end dedicated server, which is $489.95 per month when you go month-to-month, it drops down to $279.95 per month when you pay for three years up front. Of course, three year pre-payment is a long time. It doesn’t say whether or not your server will be upgraded during that three year period, but I would hope so.
Summary
Too Much of a Mystery
While this hosting company may provide good hosting (even if you’ll have to pay a premium for it) there is just not enough information available to be able to recommend them to anyone. They really should go through and redesign their website to provide updated information and all the details that customers will be interested in.
Pros:
Cons:
- Very limited information available about the company
- Poorly designed website
- No uptime guarantee
- Prices