Recommended to me by many fellows at cnsw.org, I’ve always been a fan of pair.com when I started in early 2006 into the world of online venture. They rarely advertise online (or maybe I just don’t know), and are hardly heard of by many hosting customers even after they have done plenty of research of the hosting industry. However, they are plainly one of the top 5 best hosting companies you can name in the entire North America.
You know who hosted Barrack Obama’s campaign site? It’s Pair.
Recently they have introduced a lite hosting solution for hobbyist hosting that’s not so demanding in criticalness and support, Pair Lite. With much lower price, I’m rather interested in getting an account. As frustrated as it gets, they currently don’t serve clients from outside of North America. Anyway, I asked the sales team a few questions, they replied to me 8 hours later. I’m quoting the message to share with you the differences between hosting services offered by pairlite.com and pair.com.
pairLite is still going to be on the same hardware, software, and network that currently provide our customers with the uptime they experience with pair.com.
You also have the same staff supporting the customers, and answering their questions.
With that being said, you will be sacrificing the level of support and flexibility that you currently have.
The differences include:
- pairLite does not allow for over-usage. All resource limits are hard limits.
- You are committing to a term-contract when purchasing a pairLite account. Your payments will not be pro-rated like they are with a pair.com account.
- You will not have access to telephone support with pairLite. All support inquiries will go through email.
- You will not have dedicated IP address. You will use a shared IP with this account.
All seems pretty nice. But I don’t what pro-rated is?
Pair Network’s hosting is super however PairLite is not a great alternative. You can get similar or better hosting on the cheap in other places with better features.
Pair Network’s CHI is ancient and difficult to use. Also, there are performance problems all the time (at least once or twice a week). PairLite has no help desk, so all problems have to be solved through e-mail. Now think about it, if you are having problems with your Website, how are you going to contact them? The biggest problem is that if you want to shut down the Network, lots of luck….it took me two weeks and many e-mails. Use someone else, not this Pittsburgh outfit.