Netfirms Review 2016

Pros

Good features, Long-term company

Cons

Unequal support given to different plans, Dodgy uptime promise, Conflicting information

Bottom Line

Netfirms provides wide range of features set, but the performance and uptime is not the best we’ve tested

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Netfirms is a web hosting company dedicated to helping small businesses. They offer a narrow range of options for shared hosting services with unlimited disk space and bandwidth.

The company was founded in 1998 and currently hosts over 1.2 million websites. In 2011, the Endurance International Group purchased Netfirms and added it to their growing roster of web hosting businesses.
Once upon a time, Netfirms offered more advanced plans such as VPS hosting, free hosting and more but these services seem to no longer have any availability on its site, which makes Netfirms a shared web hosting service only.

Features
Netfirm offer three main plans that are all Linux-based shared hosting services, Advantage, Plus and Business.

The way the company displays their plans is a little confusing, since the Plus plan is displayed between the other two and there’s more advertising focus on it, but in reality the Plus plan is the cheapest but also the least capable. So keep that in mind when reviewing the plans side-by-side, as Netfirms conveniently offers.

Like most shared web hosting services, the plans’ options scale up as you increase their price. All the plans offer unlimited disk space and bandwidth (remember, unlimited isn’t always unlimited, read the fine print). The lowest cost Plus plan offers one free domain name, the medium Advantage plan offers two and the highest cost plan offers five free domains. This top-level plan also provides the customers with their own SSL certificate and Netfirms also gives top paying customers better access to their support system, something we find a little off-putting.

On top of this, all of their new clients receive $100 Google Adwords credit, $50 Facebook Ads credit, $25 for Yahoo!/Bing advertising plus a free listing on yellowpages.com. New users can also use Ready-to-go-Websites, a drag-and-drop site builder, and a one-click app installer. Common applications like WordPress and photo galleries can also be set up with a click.

Strangely enough, subdomains are chargeable on all plans, and they don’t seem to be particularly well priced either.

According to its website, Netfirms owns and operates all its own data centers and unhelpfully states that all their plans include uptime, though they never detail any figures or promise on the amount of uptime you’ll actually get.

Support
As mentioned previously, Netfirms customer support does prioritize their top-tier clients, though they do claim it is 24/7 for all users. The site’s other contact sections are patchy at best. Their press release sections hasn’t been updated in years and their Facebook page is rarely maintained, though their Twitter account is regularly updated.

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Though the site does offer a money-back guarantee, it’s relatively short at only 30 days. Customers are asked to claim a refund within this 30-day time period, no matter the length of plan they purchased, but there is no helpful information as to how that refund should be claimed.

Summary

With Netfirms’ new slimmed approach to business, one would expect that the company would have focused more attention on the few plans they offer and on building their brand, unfortunately they offer limited and sometimes conflicting information on their website, have a patchy brand and the pricing on the plans is quite misleading. With all the shared hosting sites clamoring for customers, we would suggest looking elsewhere for the best service.