Who is Acenet, Inc?
It seems easy for anyone with a modest amount of internet industry experience to start their own web hosting company. A new company doesn’t even need the capital to procure equipment necessary to actually and physically host clients’ websites. Reseller programs allow practically anyone to use the server equipment and data center of another company, and sell it as their own “product.”
Acenet, Inc (ace-host.net) is a web hosting company that has been serving customers since 2003. Their website is very basic. They don’t stand behind a lot of flattery sales copy. Rather, Acenet provides a single basic web hosting plan for shared hosting. What Acenet attempts to do is upsell their VPS, and dedicated server hosting plans.
What is lacking from Acenet is the ability to see who operates their data center. This appears to be a web hosting reseller who uses the servers of another company and resells packages to their own customers. While there is nothing wrong with this practice, Acenet offers lots of promises, few details on features, and limited support.
Uptime and Reliability
Acenet promises a 99.95% uptime guarantee. The servers used are top quality, with state-of-the-art Dual Intel Quad-Core processors, RAM chips, and hard drives. But the company offers little more in terms of where the servers are housed and the networking capabilities of their data center, whether owned or resold.
They do provide documented and certified proof of their uptime – in 2008. Acenet has posted three certified letters from a third party monitoring service showing that Acenet had over 99.99% uptime during three months in 2008. How they have done since? No information is provided. However, current customers can view real-time current CPU usage graphs through their control panel at any time.
Price Value
Acenet offers a single shared hosting plan for about $12.97 per month. This small business class plan provides customers with a plethora of unlimited features, including email addresses, hosted domains, and MySQL databases.
Other web hosts typically offer unlimited disk space and bandwidth for the price of $10 or more each month. That has become an industry “standard.” However, Acenet does offer a plentiful 500 GB of disk space, as well as bandwidth that remains unmetered. Although they are note unlimited, Acenet provides an acceptable amount of file transfer and overall space when evaluated by the criteria set forth by other highly ranked web hosting providers. A bonus for customers is a unique IP address offering added safety from risks of other website owners on the same server.
Their VPS hosting plans start at $59.95 per month and go up to $149.95 per month. Dedicated plans are more varied, with 9 plans ranging from $129 per month up to $299 per month.
It is difficult to estimate the true value of all shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting plans without a full list of features, and Acenet is not forthcoming on a full set of features.
Control Panel
One nice offering that Acenet provides their clients is the cPanel control panel. This is an industry leading control panel that gives users plenty of access and control over their web accounts. The navigation is completely configurable with drag and drop ease. Users have full access to control their email accounts, manage databases, set up security features, install scripts and software, and view important web stats all with a few simple clicks.
Customer Support
Acenet states that their customer service is “on hand” 24/7/365. However, telephone support is only during regular business hours Monday through Friday. Customers can access online support through email and an online helpdesk login.
Acenet does offer plenty of online support through their knowledgebase, documentation, and live video demos and tutorials. Clients can browse articles, and learn important techniques in building and managing a website.
Overall Value
Acenet has been in business long enough to know that web owners are pretty demanding with regards to the features they want and customers want to know that a web hosting company has the facilities and the staff to backup their uptime guarantee. As well, customers want to know their problems will be handles quickly and by trained staff.
Acenet is pretty mum on all these accounts. It is clear that Acenet has a reasonable product, but there is no documentation or explanation of any of them. Their uptime guarantee does have certified documentation from two years ago, but nothing recent. While they backup their 99.95% uptime guarantee, they do not share information about their data center. Their customer service is available 24 hours a day, but only via online contact. Phone hours are business hours only. Hosting clients are offered a great account management tool with cPanel control panel. Overall, Acenet receives a 2.5 out of 5 value.
Visit http://www.Ace-host.net for more information.