Register.com Reviews and Expert Opinion

Uptime & Reliability

99.99% Uptime Guarantee

Register.com offers a 99.99% uptime guarantee if you use one of their unix based systems.  If you opt for a windows based system, that drops down to 99.9% uptime.  In the event that your site is down for an hour or more, you will get credits on your bill.  The first hour of service interruption will only earn you one hour of credit, but each hour beyond that will get you 12 hours of credit.

They do work in a nice datacenter so it is not likely that many customers will experience extended downtime. This is certainly a good thing, but it is not really surprising since they are only offering shared hosting, which typically doesn’t run into too many problems due to the built in stability.

Features

Free domain name with hosting plus standard features

Overall register.com offers all the standard features for a shared hosting company.  The one big perk is that when you sign up for their hosting you do get a year of domain registration for free, which really only saves you $10 or so, but it is nice.

They do support all the major web languages including Ruby on Rails, JSP, ASP, Python and more so you won’t have to worry about that type of thing.  Their control panel is a custom built option, which generally works quite well.

You will have access to a number of extra features including website building, SEO services, and more, but they come with an added price.

Support

Fast support from many places

Register.com boasts that they have 70% of their support calls answered within 50 seconds, which really is quite impressive.  The 24/7 technical support line is available for any types of issues that you may run into with your site.  They also monitor their email box for support tickets.

In addition to these fairly normal support options, they also provide you with many user guides, tutorials and self-help options to choose from.  You can also contact them through Facebook or Twitter where they maintain very active accounts, though this is not the ideal option for technical related issues.  Overall, the technical support is quite good.

Pricing

Typical shared hosting prices

Overall their prices are about average for the services you’re getting.  Since this is a shared hosting only company there is not much variation in the total price.  One somewhat disappointing thing is that they don’t offer some of their other services for free to their web hosting customers.

You do get a free domain, however, so that can help to make it a better deal.  The bottom line here for pricing, however, is that you’re not getting a great deal, but you’re not getting ripped off either.

Summary

Nice for a simple site but lacking advanced features

If you are hoping to avoid any hassle of hosting and registering the domain at different companies, this is a fine option.  For more advanced sites or those that need anything other than basic shared hosting, you may want to look to a higher end dedicated hosting company to get the services you need.

While using this service is easy, and they generally provide great support, it is going to be limited in many ways for larger websites that get lots of traffic.

Pros:

• Free domain name with account
• Very responsive technical support
• Well established company
• Excellent reliability

Cons:

• Limited to shared hosting
• Limited number of databases on first two packages
• Some customer complains about poor customer service (non-technical issues)