NTChosting.com Review

A few years back, I decided to get my own website (Racing Seat Simulators) up and running. At the time, most of my friends had personal blogs, so I decided to get one for myself, too. So I went online and picked the first web hosting company that I saw, which offered web hosting account with WordPress installation. As luck would have it, that web hosting company was NTCHosting.com

Now, most of my friends recommended to start with them and move on to another web hosting provider, since after some time I will find out that the service is crappy, the customer support is almost absent and that there is always someplace which offers the same features, but cheaper. They have been doing that from several years and non of them had found the right provider for them, but still, they believed that they would find it soon - after all, there is a finite number of web hosting providers. And while they jumped from one place to another, moving their websites, dealing with missing backups and god knows what else, I remained comfortably with NTC Hosting, enjoying stable & reliable service, great customer care and constant promotions.

From my first day with NTC Hosting I knew I had found the right place. Let me tell you why.

When I started dealing with web hosting, I knew nothing - I didn't knew how to work with a website, what FTP was, when I saw MySQL I spent some time wondering not only what that was, but also on how to pronounce it right. What I knew was that I needed a website and a domain name, and that's about that. So when I landed on NTChosting.com and I saw that they had a free domain name registration offer with each of their web hosting plans, that meant that I had found a place, which got all I needed. But, since I'm not an impulse buyer, I went on to take a better look at their website and at the services they offer.

Now, after several years in the web hosting world, I know what to look for in a web host provider, and I'm even more certain that, I have to face the choice of choosing a new host, this will again be NTC Hosting.

With each shared web hosting plan, aside from the free domain name I already mention, you will get the following: 1-click hosting app installer, website installer, PHP frameworks installer, free website builder, sitemap generator, .htaccess generator, 300+ free website templates, a wide collection of free Joomla templates and several other tools, all of which are integrated in the Hepsia Control Panel.

Actually, if you look at their website, you will see that the Hepsia Control Panel is mentioned very often - this is their alternative to the cPanel Control Panel, which seems to be everywhere else you look. The Hepsia Control Panel was my first online Control Panel, and to be honest, I can't imagine switching to cPanel.

For one thing, from what I have seen, with cPanel you can work only with one domain at a time, i.e. each cPanel account is just for one domain name. And, you can't actually manage the domain from your cPanel account, you have to go to another Control Panel, from where you will be able to manage the domain and your billing. So, in order to create a simple website, you will have to deal with a) a billing and domain panel b) the cPanel panel c) the site's admin panel. These are 3 panels you have to monitor for even the simplest of sites, with 3 different logins. And with the Hepsia Control Panel, you can manage your domains, your billing and your website from the same place. You can even automatically login into the admin area of a site, if you have installed it via one of the tools available. This makes a total of... 1 Control Panel to manage a website. And you can manage multiple websites from a single Control Panel. For someone, who learn about cPanel later and Hepsia first, the Hepsia approach seemed logical right from the start, and the cPanel approach seemed overly complicated, like something which was designed in the early 90's and left at that.

Some more about the Hepsia panel - it uses right-click context menus for most actions. I honestly didn't knew that that was even possible with a web based Control Panel, but from the moment I found out, I have used them extensively - they matched my working habits from my desktop PC. And - drag 'n' drop file uploads. In the time when my friends used FTP transfers, I was able to simply drag the files from my desktop to my browser and they were uploaded. And the upload speed was pretty fast, too. I haven't seen this functionality in the cPanel or in any of the web hosting I have installed for my website, but I have it in my Control Panel. Do you know how it feels to be the owner of the best product in a given category? It feels good. This is how I feel about the Hepsia Control Panel.

Aside from shared web hosting, NTC hosting.com also offers VPS, semi-dedicated and dedicated servers. When I first visited their website, I had no idea whatsoever what these services were. Well, dedicated servers sounded obvious, but other than that - no idea. So here is a quick overview of each of the web hosting services, now that I know more about them.

Dedicated servers - the name of the service is explanatory - you get a whole server, just for yourself. It's a good solution if you big internet portal, community website, if you deal with streaming video or audio, etc. This is also the most expensive web hosting service, provided by NTC Hosting. I haven't tried a dedicated server for myself, but if they are even close to the quality of their shared web hosting servers, than I can really recommend one.

Semi-dedicated servers - NTC hosting is one of the few providers, which offer semi-dedicated servers. They are meant as a bridge between shared web hosting and dedicated web hosting, and in reality are just bigger web hosting accounts. According to the sales reps at NTC hosting, semi-dedicated users are located on special servers, with only a few users on server. The advantages of this service is that it's really easy to use - you don't have to deal with server administration, like with the VPS and the dedicated servers. At the same time, it offers good value for money in terms of power.

VPS hosting - VPS stands for virtual private servers. You can also find this service labeled as virtual dedicated servers. Either way, the nature of the service is the same - these are virtual machines, created on a master servers. Just like you can run a virtual machine on your desktop machine, you can do the same on a server. The advantage of the service is that it comes at a low price and at the same time, it gives full control over the virtual machine with root access (you will notice root access mentioned a lot. This means that you get full administrator access to the server.) I have had my VPS with NTC hosting for a few months now, I can say that I'm completely satisfied with it's performance.

All of these offered come with the Hepsia Control Panel for free. For VPS and dedicated servers, you can also get the cPanel panel, but a) you have to pay a license fee for it and b) if you ask me, Hepsia is better anyway.

Something else, you will also find to be of the best quality with NTC hosting is the customer care. I have listened not one and two stories, told by my friends, how their help tickets had to wait for days for a single answer, asking them for more details (!) and the they had to wait even more for an actually useful response (!!). Now, you can tell me who that compares with an 1-hour maximum response time guarantee, and an average response rate of 20 minutes (!!!). Plus, the shared web hosting server was really stable. They guarantee a 99.9% server uptime guarantee, and for all my time with them, I had only one major downtime, which was caused by connection problems for the whole datacenter.

So, to sum it up, with NTC Hosting, you can get a good web hosting package, with a free domain name, lots of free tools, part of the Hepsia Control Panel, great customer support team, a 99.9% server uptime and, if you are not happy, a 30 day money back guarantee. If you ask me, this is a great web hosting deal, anyway you look at it.