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Starting at / per month
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Started in
November 2003, StartLogic is web hosting provider that’s based in Phoenix,
Arizona State in the US. It was conceptualized and launched by Thomas Gorny
together with his spouse with a vision to get their small online startup business
running. Today, it has grown tremendously attracting over 50,000 customers and
a bunch of tech savvies who are the majority of its staff. They attribute their
success to partnership, networks, and their innate ability find out the exact
needs of existing and new clients.
StartLogic
and iPower are related since they share a common founder and are also part of
the Endurance International Group since 2007. If you’re wondering what EIG is,
well it is a hosting provider with over 20 years of service. It has at least 30
hosting brand names under its umbrella with more than three million websites on
its hold. It owns other hosting providers that we’ve previously reviewed
including Arvixe, HostGator, iPage, BlueHost, and FatCow.
Although
it’s part of EIG, StartLogic enjoy a high level of independence with packages
and plan prices that are way different from the mother company. As of this
writing, the company only offers shared web hosting and VPS packages. Also, its
homepage has very scarce information to guests regarding available hosting
plans. You have to navigate to other pages to view them which is outright
discouraging to window shoppers.
StartLogic’s
datacenter is based in Boston, MA in the USA. Nevertheless, the company doesn’t
solely own it as it is a joint project with other hosting providers. The servers
are manufactured by Dell, a company reputable for its high-end server machines.
The facility enjoys 24-hour security monitoring as well as redundant power
options to cover an outage. Unfortunately, StartLogic doesn’t guarantee server uptime
just like most EIG companies.
When it
comes to hosting, despite its small size StartLogic has quite a lot in its
basket to offer. First it offers the ever-popular shared web hosting and VPS
packages. Again, not only can you register a professional domain name for free,
but also you have access to its powerful website builder. It also gifts
newcomers with a variety of web apps which are accessible on the integrated
Mojo Marketplace. The best part is that they issue you with ad credits worth
$200 which are usable on major search engines including Google, Yahoo, and
Bing. How this benefits you, is the instant ability to push your website up the
ranks of these search engines by advertising.
Furthermore,
your account has access to Google Webmaster Tools which allow you to assess and
improve your web presence on the search engine from time to time. If you wish
to also have an email account for your site, you can set these up too from the
comfort of your account at no extra cost. The good part is that the email
servers support auto-responders and come with inbuilt spam and virus scanners. Excitingly,
you can also integrate popular content management systems which allow you to
set up ecommerce and blogging platforms effortlessly. In short, StartLogic
gives you full control over the kind of business your site purposes on the
internet but with a smooth pickup.
In our
opinion, this hosting provider will work best for startups and medium-scale
online enterprises. Its limited resources and infrastructure are not sufficient
for extremely large or busy websites. It also pleases to know that all its
packages have a 30-day money back guarantee period with no questions asked.
Let’s now review StartLogic hosting packages in detail:
This type of
hosting is StartLogic’s main package with majority of its customers having
their websites on the shared servers. So, how exactly does this type of hosting
work and is it reliable? Principally, upon creating an account on StartLogic
and choosing a preferred plan, a web space is created for you. This space holds
your web files as well as any apps or services that you later install on the
operating environment. Now, to have these files processed the web server, your
web space is linked to a shared CPU, memory unit, and network card, and other
hardware resources needed. Sometimes this setup can lead to degradation of performance
over a while as more users are allowed to share a single physical server. Also,
there’s a huge risk of the “bad neighbor effect” when other users compete for
the same resources that your web files are utilizing.
In our
assessment of StartLogic, we discovered that the cheaper the plan the more
users you share a single server with. So, as you move up the ladder and upgrade
your hosting plan, the more resources your website will have for its operation.
In this respect, if you are running just a simple website with no much traffic,
the cheaper plans will suffice. You might not even notice any significant
performance changes in your normal operation. It’s also worth remembering that
the size of your web files matter too on the shared platform. So, even a simple
website with larger files to serve on its frontend will experience fluctuations
in performance as the demand of hardware resources increases.
If prior to searching
for a hosting provider you had a registered domain name, you can use it on
StartLogic. When creating an account, they’ll conduct a quick look-up on their
database for its validity and link it up to the websites you want to serve. Retrospectively,
if you have no registered domain name, they’ll assist you to create a new one
before you even choose the shared web hosting plan that you want. Albeit domain
registration is free, domain privacy is not. Technically, this protects your
identity and any other information that might be utilized in reconnaissance of
your website by hackers.
The cheapest
pricing plans are for triannual subscriptions. If, however, you prefer monthly
subscriptions you might have to pay sometimes over five times the value of the longer
subscriptions. Nevertheless, activation of your account is instant and they
charge no setup fee to get your account working. Also, they include a free SSL
certificate from Let’s Encrypt allowing your website to communicate with your
visitors’ browsers securely. The payment channels supported are PayPal and use
of Credit Cards.
Express Plan
Costing
$4.50 per month, this plan is ideal for a personal site or blog. The resource
allocations include a disk space of 5GB, a transfer bandwidth of 250GB, and a
shared CPU unit. Also, you can only host a single website for your account and one
MySQL database. The plan supports inclusion of email and FTP accounts with
inbuilt security functions. Unfortunately, for this plan you have to pay $10.99
per year for a domain name.
Pro Plan
This is the
most recommended plan for websites that have graduated from the budding phase.
It has most of the resources unlimited including bandwidth and disk space. The
company gives you one domain name for free and allows you to host any number of
websites on your account. It supports inclusion of up to 25 MySQL databases as
well as 2500 POP3 email accounts. Mostly, the plan is designed to offer
commercial hubs a hosting platform. As such, it boasts a free inclusion of
oscommerce and Agora shopping cart, PayPal payment processor, and Starter
version of ShopSite.
The pro plan
costs $5.99 per month.
Supercharge plan
This plan
works best for websites demanding more speeds and resources for quicker
operations. It offers a smooth transition from Pro Plan in terms of features
and price. It offers unlimited disk space, bandwidth, and slots of number of
websites to host. StartLogic additionally offers three free domain names as
well an upgrade of the commercial packages. Your web data is backed up
automatically using NetApp snapshot manager and you have a choice of server
location. The ShopSite version available for this plan is the Plus version
which includes 50 products up from 15 on the starter version. Moreover, you can
create an unlimited number of email accounts and even utilize the premium
version of the website builders.
This plan
costs $8.99 per month.
Other products
you can throw in your shopping basket while purchasing any of these plans
include:
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WordPress package
This product
is billed on an annual basis at $36 and has all the necessary tools to set up
WordPress in your account. It features WP themes, plugins, customized control
panel, automatic malware detector and remover, and prioritized support from WP
experts.
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Website Security
This tool
costs $19.95 per year and is designed to safeguard your websites against spam,
viruses, and hacking attempts. It runs on a cloud-based virus engine and scans
web files on a daily basis.
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Site Backup & Restore
This add-on
automatically backs up your data to an offsite location allowing your site to
be reinstated to its working state in case of an unforeseen server problem. It
costs $1.00 per month.
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Website Builder
This tool
costs #251 per year and allows webmasters to design websites flawlessly and
quickly without requiring any programming skills. The builder supports drag and
drop functions, contains an image library, and an incredible collection of
templates. Also, you can throw in SEO tools helping you to improve the rank of
your website on popular search engines.
Virtual
private servers are a great upgrade option for those websites that have
significantly high traffic. Usually, these will be websites that utilize
hardware resources 100% of the time thereby needing a dedicated system. Now,
StartLogic provides this upgrade in form of virtual units which share a single
or a cluster of powerful servers. The setup is such that it allows for scaling
or changing of values of the resources by the user. You can choose how much memory
your account will be allocated, the amount of bandwidth you prefer, and even
dedicated cores of the CPU that will serve your websites and services. StartLogic
uses OpenVZ software for virtualization.
The
flexibility that the VPS offer mean you can increase the value of the hosting
platform by controlling resources in accordance to your specific needs. Again,
the resources are somehow dedicated which eliminates the “bad neighbor effect”.
Usually, any activity that your account has running doesn’t affect other users
sharing the same physical server. Also, you can choose an operating system that
works best for your applications. StartLogic supports both Windows and Linux
operating systems which have a wide range of web applications compatible with
them. Due to the cost of licenses, users of VPS running Windows OS attract a
slightly higher cost of operations. Linux, on the other hand, is completely
open source and most of its applications are provided for free.
On
StartLogic servers, you can either choose to have an unmanaged or managed
environment. For unmanaged environments, your account is completely autonomous
and comes with privileged/root access. The root permissions allow you
manipulate all sections of the virtual system giving you an upper hand on
performance and overall experience on hosting. As for the unmanaged
environments, it is StartLogic’s staff that carry out the root functions
leaving you with only the hosting part to worry about. All the system updates,
configurations, and other routine maintenance functions are at the hands of the
staff. Generally, this is the kind of a VPS setup you should go for when you’re
a novice webmaster. It’s not only easy to maintain but also allows you to deal
with the basics which are less time consuming.
Another benefit
of StartLogic’s VPS package is the inbuilt support for various SSL
certificates. You can choose to integrate Let’s Encrypt free SSL or use one
from an alternative provider. The free SSL basically encrypts traffic to and
from your web server which ensures your website is safe from snooping and
spying apps. Like the shared web hosting package, the VPS plans also include $200
bonus for ad purposes on the search engines.
Here are
StartLogic’s VPS plans:
VPSLogic
This is the
starter package providing a simple upgrade from the highest non-dedicated
shared web hosting plan. It can service a website with an estimated traffic of
25,000 visits a month. The number of domains supported are 10. For hardware
specifications, it comes with a single core CPU, 20GB for storage, a memory of
1GB, and 1TB bandwidth. Furthermore, a free version of cPanel is included as
well the choice to unlock root permissions or work with a managed system. This
plan costs $19.99 per month.
VPSLogic Pro
This plan is
ideal for business sites especially the ones with ecommerce services and
products. The resource allocations are quite generous and occasionally the
company has discounts for the monthly charges. The allocations are as follows:
1.5GB RAM, 1.5TB bandwidth, 2 CPU cores, and 40GB storage. You can also create
unlimited number of email accounts with addresses borrowing a part of your domain
name. The maximum number of websites you can host here are 30. This plan costs
$39.99 per month.
VPSLogic Premium
Plan Name | Disk Space | Bandwidth | Currency | Admin panel | OS | Websites | Scripting | Email-Transport | Database | SSH | Databackups | Free Domain | 1-Click Installer | Websites Builder | Location | Price |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Shared | - | - | USD | Admin panel | ![]() |
1 | - | - | MySQL | ![]() |
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$ 2.75 |
On this
section, we shall explore the features which StartLogic put forth regarding
control, performance, customer service, speeds, security, and their policy on
money back guarantee. But before we get started, we feel like users have very
limited options as far as hosting features are concerned. Anyways, here are the
StartLogic features in details:
When
assessing performance, we examine how quickly websites load content to intended
destinations. Also, we check into the overall reliability and the server uptime
that a hosting provider guarantees. For a start, StartLogic doesn’t have any
uptime guarantees although their servers are quite stable on both shared and
VPS platforms. Here are some of the features we noted in our test account that regard
performance and speed:
Few Units Per Server
The inbuilt
server density monitoring software on the cPanel shows the estimated number of
active systems in a physical server. Even on the cheapest VPS plan, the company
doesn’t exceed 8 VPS units. Although the resources are somehow dedicated, many
users on single server would mean quick degradation and frequent downtime
during hardware maintenance routines.
Email Autoresponders
StartLogic
supports creation of email accounts with autoresponders and forwarders. For
scheduled responses on messages the action is almost instant which builds a
good rapport with your visitors.
Lightweight Programming Tools
The default
Linux environments on both StartLogic’s hosting packages, have PHP, CGI, Perl,
Cron, Python, JSP, and Curl already preinstalled. This is a plus for modern
applications that depend on these languages and environments to function
optimally. The good thing is that most of them are set to automatically update
themselves which translates to high compatibility with your web apps and
consequently improved performance.
CDN support
Although VPS
users have no preinstalled content delivery network, StartLogic infrastructure
innately supports inclusion of it. You can install popular ones in your
operating environment including Rackspace, Akamai, Verizon, CloudFlare, Amazon
AWS, and MaxCDN.
Webalizer and AWStats
These two
tools are essential in collecting statistics of the performance of your website
over a particular period. StartLogic has them in your control panel allowing
you view how your site is faring against its competitors. Also, you can collect
other important info on link clicks, search engine ranks, and referrer logs.
OpenVZ Software
This
software is not only lightweight but offers high level of security across the
virtualized systems. It optimizes the physical server to share resources equitably
and instant scalability where necessary. Additionally, it has an error detection
service which reports possible hardware hitches before they become system-wide.
StartLogic
provides both physical and infrastructural security measures against threats.
Here, we explore the major ones:
SiteLock
This cloud-based
security solution scans your web files and applications as scheduled to
eliminate or block detected threats. It also fixes other vulnerabilities
existing in the operating system which would put your web space into risk.
StartLogic has this software on all accounts by default and provides optimal
configurations on behalf of users.
Let’s Encrypt SSL
A secure
socket layer (SSL) guards against spying on data exchange between the web
server and the browser by encrypting it. Now, StartLogic offers a free version
of Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate which obliges your websites to encrypt data
before transferring it to your visitors’ browsers. You can confirm this from
the lock icon available after loading your website on a regular browser.
Automatic Backup
StartLogic
has a daily backup policy for all the web files sitting on its servers. The
idea is to provide a restoration point in case on an unprecedented crisis
leading to data loss. Also, you can download other backup solutions from Mojo
Marketplace to send the backup images to independent cloud drives like Google.
MySQL Database
Besides
being fast, this database management tool is very secure for data storage. You
can lock sensitive elements, synchronize data across various devices, and
delete archaic records very simply. It is the default database manager at
StartLogic
To control
your account settings, apps, passwords, backup programs, and other services,
StartLogic offers vDeck. It has an easy-to-navigate interface that features tabs
and drop-down menus. You can quickly find items that you wish to configure
using the search input or simply scrolling on the categorized icons. With it,
you have control over four main features irrespective of your hosting plan.
These are:
Website management
VDeck allows
you to control the number of websites in your account by allowing you to create
new sites or delete existing ones. Also, you can access various promotion tools
as well as content improvement software including SEO managers.
Email Management
As you’ve
already seen, StartLogic allows you to have multiple email accounts in your web
space. This control tool can help you configure email servers, set
autoresponders, allow spam detection, and mass delete unwanted emails.
Billing Management
Using the
account information tab, you can view your subscription status, billing info,
make changes to payment channels, or renew your account name. This function
assists you keep track of your expenditure on the hosting platform.
Domain Management
This helps
you to view existing domain names, add new ones, and check the limit of the
websites that you can host in your account.
StartLogic’s
support department operates 24/7 but they’re not clear where exactly they can
be reached physically. You can communicate with the staff via live chat,
emailing, and by telephone. Additionally, you can access the knowledge
self-help page where a number of issues are addressed.
The
interesting thing about the support page is the organization of help items. They
are nicely categorized documenting issues ranging from account management,
emails, web files, policies, database configuration, scripting, and website
builders. The knowledge base is excellent for familiarizing with hosting
jargons, understanding how various features work, and troubleshooting common
problems by yourself.
All
StartLogic plans have a 30-day money back guarantee period within which you
cancel your subscription and receive your money in full. However, if you
registered a domain name with them, they will deduct the registration expenses
allowing you to use it elsewhere.
If you
decide to cancel the hosting contract after the trial period, you can still
receive a refund. However, this attracts a cancellation fee of $35 and you must
give at least a 30-day notice of your intention.
On the
shared web hosting plans, StartLogic provides preinstalled languages, scripts,
and application environments. These are useful when your web files have several
executables with dependencies needing these provisions. Moreover, they offer
web design services allowing you to build a website from scratch using their
templates. They have a wide variety of choices covering popular niches
including ecommerce, blogging, photo sharing, video streaming hubs, etc.
Also, users
have access to marketing credits on popular platforms. You can advertise your
website on search engines, social media sites, etc. where potential customers
could be. Lastly, every plan has at least one free domain name.
Although
StartLogic has incredible services, it has its own share of strengths and
flaws. This section points some of these basing judgement from our own
experience.
Decent Uptime
There are no
guarantees whatsoever on StartLogic server uptime. Nevertheless, on our
independent tests, we observed a consistent online presence of 99.8% which is
surprisingly decent for its shared datacenter.
Impressive Load Statistics
The average
load time for a website hosted on StartLogic shared web hosting platform is
440ms. The industry standard is 890ms which puts the web host twice as fast as
most hosting providers.
Long Money Back Guarantee
With 30 days
to assess the performance of StartLogic as a hosting provider, we feel that’s
more than enough time to make an informed decision. The important thing though
is that they give full refunds as long as claims are timely.
Affordable prices for most plans
StartLogic
has very cheap monthly charges for their hosting services. This is especially
observed in their shared web hosting plans which are ridiculously low despite
the impressive features that they offer.
Rich Knowledge Base
Even if you
don’t intend to have an account at StartLogic, you can utilize their
resourceful knowledge base for own improvement. They have nicely researched
documentation on various issues affecting clients on their platform and other
similar ones.
Few options on control
StartLogic
only offers vDeck as the only control panel on board. Unless you’re using a
VPS, you can hardly use an alternative control panel including Plesk and cPanel
which are highly popular.
Lack of clarity on site migration
StartLogic
has no provision on site migration which is an essential function when your
website was already hosted elsewhere. It appears like you’ll have to manually
migrate the web files to your web space. This is especially unfortunate when
your website already has huge files or at risk of data damage.
Limited Live Chat hours
The live
chat works on limited hours forcing users to seek alternative help options
which might be inconvenient or perceptible to delays.
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How long does account registration
at StartLogic take?
Typically,
account creation on StartLogic takes under 20 minutes. Ensure that you have all
the details ready including billing information. Activation is instant on
verifying your account from the registered email account.
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Must I purchase a domain name at
StartLogic for websites I intend to host with them?
No. You can
provide existing domain names when registering an account on StartLogic.
They’ll verify that it is valid and proceed to link it up to your websites when
your web files are ready.
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Is StartLogic ideal for a business
website?
Sure. They
have a variety of options as far as business websites are concerned. They
provide not only ecommerce tools but also the necessary transaction security
that you need. There are even guided steps on using PayPal on your website transactions
from within your account panel.
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Which are best StartLogic
alternatives?
StartLogic
is part of EIG which has a range of better alternatives to this hosting
provider. HostGator, BlueHost, and Arvixe are very efficient since they have
packages for all groups of people. You can have professional or even a hobby
site on these platforms at costs lower than those offered by StartLogic plans.
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What are my options on payment
methods?
As of 2019,
StartLogic supports payment via PayPal and major credit cards. They recommend
renewing plan payment using the method that you provided in your registration
for safety purposes. You must be logged in your account to complete a payment.
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Can I call StartLogic’s telephone
number while outside the US?
Yes. The
contact number can be dialed from any geographical location as long your
network provider supports international calls. The number is toll free in the
US but in other locations the charges might vary.