#8 Web Hosting - StartLogic Review

"StartLogic is one of the fastest growing web hosts available today,
having gained over 30,000 customers in less than 2 years!

ProLogic Plan: $5.95/month (FREE Setup; 2 year plan) Unlimited disk space, Unlimited Bandwidth, Free Domain, unlimited domain add-ons!

PersonalLogic Plan: $3.95/month (FREE Setup; 2 year plan) 60 GB disk space,
600 GB Bandwidth, 10 domain add-ons.

Overview

StartLogic was established in early 2003. As of March 2005, they exceeded Globat's customer base by raking in 30,000 customers in just less than 2 years and 3,200 new customers in February 2004 alone! Since that time, their customer acquisition and retention has been equally impressive.

StartLogic offers a range of hosting products including shared hosting (both Unix and Windows), virtual servers and dedicated servers. For our concerns here, we will be primarily discussing the ProLogic plan which is detailed in the chart to the left. The plan just under this is called PersonalLogic, and is more geared to, you guessed it - a personal website. It contains many of the features of ProLogic minus a shopping cart and eCommerce options, marketing tools, fewer email boxes, script tools and less disk/bandwidth space.

StartLogic also offers several Virtual Server plans starting out at $29.95/month.

ProLogic Plan

The ProLogic plan cost $5.95/month if you pay for at least 1 year in advance (That's $90/year). If you choose to pay monthly instead, the price is $6.95 plus a $30.00 one time setup fee and $8.95 domain registration fee, which to be blunt, is not worth the money. A better glance of the pricing structure and features can be obtained from the chart on your left. Take note too that StartLogic offers $100 in Yahoo Search Marketing and Google Adwords credits too.

If you have read our iPowerWeb review, you should know that iPowerWeb uses vDeck control panel, which is developed by their own team. vDeck is only available to iPowerWeb and their resellers. And since StartLogic is using vDeck control panel, you can be certain that they are also one of the iPowerWeb resellers. And based on their number of customers they currently have, we are pretty sure StartLogic is iPowerWeb's #1 reseller.

About Reseller

So what's a reseller? Simply put, a reseller resells hosting services of other larger web hosts using their own brand. That means the parent web host sells hosting services to the reseller, and the reseller sells the hosting services to the end users. End users are the clients of the reseller while the reseller is the client of the parent host. Thus, it is the reseller that provides customer support to the end users, not the parent host.

One advantage of resellers is server reliability since their hosting infrastructure is usually offered and maintained by a large and reputable web hosting firm, such as the case is with iPowerWeb. The reseller can then focus more on customer support. And StartLogic's customer service is a perfect example of this.

When it comes to having all the hosting bells and whistles to successfully and easily operate your website and maximize its production, what's most important is the customer support and server reliability. We give a thumb's for each of these area's.

If a host is a reseller, it's sometimes hard to gauge whether they are good or bad. A reseller can be a serious business like StartLogic with tons of customers and employees. However, a reseller might also be a college student working part time to make some extra money! If you stick with the reseller's who are established and have a good reputation, like StartLogic, you can bet you will get great service and reliability.

Customer Support

StartLogic's live chat support is great. Our test shows their live chat is staffed all the time. And most importantly, they adequately answered all the technical questions we asked. In other words, everyone we spoke too was well trained and understood their products very well. The same live chat team also handles the toll-free support. Their toll-free number is 800-725-8064. You can also choose to submit a support ticket. The support ticket will also be taken care of pretty fast by their support staff.

There are also some tutorials posted. Most of these are tutorials on using their vDeck control panel, which is exactly the same set of tutorials at iPowerWeb's website. The information that can be found in their knowledgebase and FAQ is somewhat insufficient. In our opinion, there is too little self-help information available on their website. However, as mentioned, they made up for it by staffing a very knowledgeable and helpful team. That means you might be better off going through the live chat, toll-free number or a support ticket.

There are no member forums available. If you prefer a web host with active member forums where you can chat it up with their customers and support staffers, you can check out LunarPages or PowWeb. Both of them have built up a very large member forum.

Our Advice

StartLogic is one of the fastest growing reseller web hosts available today. They are doing a great job in customer support and their parent host, iPowerWeb is reputable in handling their servers and network infrastructure. Based on our experience in the hosting industry, we strongly believe that they will continue to do well and prosper in the future.