Kiosk Web Hosting Review

Introduction

Hello and welcome to this review of Kiosk Web Hosting. Before I jump into the review it would seem only right that I give you a bit of an introduction to give you an idea about what is to come.

Kiosk Hosting is subsidiary of Telco Advertising Ltd and is run by a very friendly chap by the name of Joel Therien. For me, Kiosk was very much an “unknown” in the Hosting world, until that is they teamed up with arguably the most famous online marketer out there – Mike Filsaime.

When Mike Filsaime became a Kiosk customer, and liked what he saw, he started to promote Kiosk hosting and in turn sent a lot of new customers in the direction of Kiosk.

Before I type any more, I’d like to point out that everything I write is all my own opinion as an outsider looking in, I have no connection with Kiosk management and these views are my own conclusions that I’ve drawn from looking at Kiosk over a couple of year. (That should stop my big mouth from getting me into trouble!)

With the biggest (name value – not weight!) online marketer promoting Kiosk, they (Kiosk) quickly gained a reputation as an “Internet Marketer Friendly” web host – what this means I have no idea, surely every host is marketer friendly as long as the marketer sticks within the terms of service?

The plans, prices and features are all geared towards Internet Marketers, but to be honest, I just don’t get it!

Read the review to find out why.

The Price

The first thing that just doesn’t sit right for me are the prices; why are they so high?

I’ll show you an example, and I should just point out that as always, all numbers are correct at the time of writing. If you find an error then please let me know!

Take the lowest package currently offered by Kiosk; the “Silver” package. It comes with just 300MB (Yep, megabytes NOT gigabytes) of disk space and you are only allowed to host 3 domain names on the package. So when you compare it to similar plans from other hosts, how much would you be expecting to pay?

Thought of a figure yet?

If not, let me give you a rough guide, for a plan with just 300MB of disk space in this day and age, anything more than $3.00 per month would be seen as expensive. So how much do Kiosk charge for this?

$18.95 PER MONTH!!

You could buy a high end reseller account for that!

So if the basic package costs $18.95 per month, how much do you think the top level shared package is going to cost? It’s known as the “Platinum” package and comes with 1.5GB of disk space – woooo, we made it into gigabytes!

Again, if you are struggling to come up with a figure let me give you a bit of a guide. The average price you’d be looking to pay a host for 1.5GB of space is between $6 and $12 per month, depending on the other features offered. So how much do Kiosk charge?

$44.95 PER MONTH!!

You could buy a high end VPS, or a low end dedicated server for that!

So if you haven’t already come to your own conclusion regarding the Kiosk shared hosting prices, THEY ARE RIDICULOUSLY HIGH!

But why are the prices so high?

Well, it goes back to a point I mentioned in the introduction. Kiosk is a web host aimed at Internet Marketers, and there is one thing that Internet Marketers love more than life itself:

Recurring Commissions!

Kiosk has one of the most confusing commission plans I’ve ever come across, but marketers love it. It gives them the chance to earn commission on a number of different levels. So most of your $44.95 hosting plan cost doesn’t actually go to Kiosk, it goes to the person who referred you to Kiosk. It’s all very confusing (check out the commission chart I took from the site, confused? – So am I!) and to be honest, I’d rather they charged competitive rates for their hosting packages, rather than charging a stupidly high price to keep their affiliates happy.

The Features/Hosting Plans

I already mentioned a bit about the plans in the previous section. So here’s a quick table showing all 3 of the shared hosting plans that are currently available.

Now there’s nothing there that’s out of the ordinary…well apart from the cost but I’ve already given you my view on that! But what Kiosk do sell you on are all of the “Marketing Tools” and “Webmaster Resources” that are available to all members.

Now I don’t want to be too hard on Kiosk in this review, but in all honesty. The Webmaster Resources consist of a small selection of cheap website templates, and some small javascript code examples that quite frankly can be found for free on Hot Scripts. I’ve taken a screen shot of the website templates, and the code examples so you can see what I mean.

The marketing resources are a bit better though. They provide you with a follow up/autoresponder email system called “SuperSponder”, as well as a 3 seat conference room. What a 3 seat conference room has got to do with website hosting I have no idea, but different strokes for different folks and all that!

But back to the actual web hosting, and a quick mention about the control panel. Behind all of the marketing gimmicks, upsells and affiliate deals lies the Kiosk hosting control panel. Thankfully Kiosk don’t mess this up, they use the very popular cPanel/WHM on all accounts.

If you’ve read any of my other hosting reviews then you’ll know that the cPanel is my favorite hosting control panel on the market, so kudos to Kiosk for using what I believe, is the most user friendly hosting control panel available!

Reliability & Uptime

This is rather a contentious section, because Kiosk has suffered a lot of downtime recently (Back end of 2008) but there is a valid reason for this. However, if you were a customer would you really care if there’s a valid explanation or would you prefer your site not to be down in the first place? One of my favorite sayings I’ve come across in the hosting business is the following:

“There is never a good time to have downtime”

And it’s true!

According to Kiosk (and I have no reason to doubt them), the substantial growth they have seen over the past couple of years has meant that they have outgrown their current custom built datacentre, they literally have too much traffic and their pipe isn’t able to cope with it. This is causing problems with customers websites appearing offline or unreachable at busy times.

They could expand the current (or old depending on when you are reading this!) datacentre, but it would require a big investment in local network infrastructure and apparently it just isn’t feasible.

With that in mind, Kiosk are building a new datacentre in a new location, with much better infrastructure and connectivity options. In theory this should solve the problems they have been having with all of the recent downtime, but only time will tell.

I’ll no doubt come back in a few months when Kiosk have finished moving everything to the new location and update the review, but until then I can’t give it a good score for the reliability. I hate to keep going back to the price, but for $44.95 per month you really should be getting much better uptime than Kiosk hosting customers have been getting the past few months.

Support

The Kiosk support is actually fairly good, especially when you compare them to some other more well know hosts. (*cough* 1and1 *cough*)

The response times to support tickets is usually pretty quick, you’ll get a response in hours rather than days, and the support team are competent in their replies. I did have an issue when I checked to see if I would be allowed SSH access on my account and the support people refused to give it to me, but that’s a fairly common answer when you ask a shared host to grant you SSH access so it wasn’t a big issue for me.

Another Gripe

Now this may seem like I’m slating Kiosk for the sake of it, but there is just something about the general layout of the site that just doesn’t sit right with me. It’s not just that the site looks like it has been designed by a 13 year old who just discovered Photoshop for the first time, but it’s the overall layout and “flow” of things after you do sign up, I’ve demonstrated it in some of my screenshots on this page.
Take the following as examples:

1. When you first sign up for hosting, and you log into your client area, the first thing you see are not details of your new hosting account, but a page full of offers urging you to upgrade your package and purchase some professional blog templates – I just signed up for hosting, please give me my login details, don’t try and sell me something else!

2. When you manage to get past the offers, you move onto a section labeled “Start Here First”, so I clicked on it. To my surprise I was presented with a screen that didn’t show me my hosting login details as expected, but it told me that if I wanted to activate my hosting package, I would have to send an email to their helpdesk! Surely in this day and age they could collect my domain name during the sign up process and then set up the account for me from that information, rather than making each customer fill out another form asking for their account to be created. As I said at the start of the section, nothing seems to “flow” correctly.

3. Another example of nothing flowing as it should is accessing your cPanel or WHM hosting control panel inside the Kiosk members area. You’d imagine that there would be a heading called “Hosting Control Panel” or something similar that would allow you to access your cPanel/WHM but surprise surprise, there isn’t!

To access your cPanel or WHM area, you need to go to a page that has the heading “Affiliate Details”, on this page you’ll find a little icon that you can click on to access your cPanel/WHM, but why is it on a page called “Your Affiliate Details”? It just doesn’t make any sense. Well it doesn’t to me anyway, although I did spend a lot of time studying website usability at college so that could be why it gets on my nerves as much as it does.

Conclusion

Thanks for checking out the review, I suppose if you’ve read through all of the points you can guess which direction this conclusion is heading it. If you haven’t bothered reading and have just skipped to the conclusion – shame on you! But anyway, here are my closing thoughts on Kiosk Hosting.

When choosing a host, it is very hard to look past the price, especially when it comes to Kiosk. I have gone over and over the hosting packages, but I just can’t find a single thing that justifies such a high price tag, especially when you compare it to other hosts that offer more features than Kiosk at such a lower price. As I mentioned earlier in the review, the only reason I can see for charging the high prices is to keep their affiliates happy and for me this is wrong. A web host should concentrate on providing good hosting at a good price for it’s customers rather than focusing on creating a massive affiliate matrix.

Kiosk also markets itself as a “Web Host For Internet Marketers” but in my experience I can’t find anything that can justify that claim. They used to sell the fact that there wouldn’t be any downtime with big launches, but that claim has been shot out of the window with all the recent downtime that they’ve experienced. Not only that but the “marketing tools and resources” that they offer to customers are very, very limited, apart from maybe the SuperSponder follow up system. But in all honesty it would still work out cheaper if you were to use another web host and a professional auto-responder service like Aweber.

So all in all, I don’t think that I could recommend Kiosk Web Hosting to my clients. The price is just too high for what they give you, it seems like they’ve focused too much on keeping their affiliates happy rather than providing a good hosting service for their customers.

I’d recommend you check out my other hosting reviews and see if another host can offer you a better service at a more affordable monthly price.

My Final Kiosk HostingReview Score:

(2 out of 5)

Your Kiosk Score:

(10 votes, average: 3.20 out of 5)
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1and1 Hosting Review

Introduction

In all of my years working online, 1and1 are by far the worst web host that I have come across. 1and1 actually suck so bad, I’ve given them their own “mini-site” here on Dan Reviews. So I’ll do a very brief review here, but if you’d like to see all of my reasons for thinking so badly of them, please read my full 1&1 review.

Price

On first inspection the monthly prices look very reasonable, however 1&1 do have a minimum contract length of 6 months on their hosting packages (3 months on the developer/Pro packages), and you will be forced to pay all fee’s upfront before they activate your hosting account.

However this shouldn’t put you off too much, in today’s competitive hosting market the vast majority of hosts do have minimum contract lengths ranging from 3 to 24 months, very few hosts still use the month by month payment options, and if they do, the prices are usually higher than the 1&1 prices.

So all in all, the prices are very reasonable when compared with other hosts. But to be honest, the pricing would be the least of your worries if you decided to sign up with the devil of hosting companies, read on to find out why.

Reliability

When I was a 1and1 web hosting customer (I still get nightmares about it from time to time…), I suffered very little downtime on my Linux hosting package. Any site downtime that did occur was usually sorted out within the hour and was fixed with a simple server reboot.

Unfortunately the 1and1 internet POP3/IMAP email service wasn’t as reliable as the hosting, back at the start of 2007 I had a lot of problems receiving email to one of my 1&1 email addresses. Messages would take around 8 hours to get through the system so by the time they arrived in my email inbox, the person that sent me the email ended up waiting over 8 hours for a response. This continued for a couple of days, it hasn’t happened since but as you can imagine, it caused a lot of problems for the 2 days that it went AWOL for!

Control Panel

Now this is where things start to go downhill in my 1&1 review. Let me make a bold statement here:

THE 1AND1 CONTROL PANEL IS THE WORST HOSTING CONTROL PANEL I HAVE EVER COME ACROSS!

And that’s saying something considering I’ve also used Godaddy and Yahoo

There are loads of annoyances within the 1&1 control panel that I could review but you would probably get fed up of reading! (I mention them all in my full “1and1 suck” review)

I will though elaborate on one very important thing that I have come across with the 1&1 control panel on more than 1 occasion.

If you wish to cancel a contract, be VERY careful. The 1and1 system requires you to go to a separate website where you can manage your contracts, change or cancel any features or accounts with them. I have had numerous clients that wished to cancel their 1&1 hosting package, but they wanted to keep their domain name with 1and1 – big mistake!

On more than one occasion, the ultra-confusing 1&1 cancellation system has caused a number of my web design/consultation clients to lose domains. Instead of just cancelling the hosting package, 1and1 took it upon themselves to also get rid of the domain name. The domains, although they still had time remaining (meaning they hadn’t yet expired) suddenly had “no registrar”, this meant that for my clients to get their domains back, they needed a new registrar to take over the domain, which would have cost them £80 (about $160) – all because of 1and1′s crazy contract/cancellation system!

Also, you may get a visit from 1and1′s debt collection agency Arvato Finance….

Having transferred a domain name from 1 1and1 account to another, I was very surprised to hear that my client who I’d purchased the domain name for received a letter from a debt collection agency called Arvato Finance, demanding we paid them £9.68 for an un-paid domain name. I go into full detail about this on my blog, so head on over there if you want more information on Arvato Finances connection with 1and1 internet.

Features

If you have no previous website building knowledge and you are looking for a host that provides you with a WYSIWYG site builder, then by all means go for 1and1. However advanced users may become very disillusioned as 1and1 tend to provide more features for the novice web master, rather than helping the experienced clients.

Support

This is where things will start to get just a little bit ugly. A vital part of any hosting review is how the host handles support requests, as a customer you need requests answered in a timely and efficient manner, you would like to know details of any problems, and how these can be fixed.

If this is what you look for from a hosts support department – avoid 1&1 support!

The email and phone support is VERY limited, almost all of my support tickets were answered with a copy/paste standard reply which 9 times out of 10 would have no bearing on the original question I had asked them! If the problem required someone at 1and1 to actually do something with your account, the ticket would have to be escalated and then you would be placed in a queue before anything happened.

The support people that you deal with on a day to day basis really are the frist line of defence, they can read the “resolutions” from their screen but if you actually need any technical service, you will need to escalate your ticket to a higher level of their support department – and I use the term “support” very loosely!

Another Reason Why 1and1 Suck

As if I needed any more confirmation that 1and1 are the worst hosting company in the world, I just went into my domain management area to extend the renewal length of a domain I have with them – I wanted to register the domain for a further 2 years, rather than the standard 1 year.

To my surprise, I couldn’t find a way to do this in my 1&1 admin area, and there was nothing in the FAQ’s regarding my question so I decided to bite the bullet and contact the support team.

I received a reply in just under 12 hours, which is actually quite fast for them, but guess what? It’s not actually possible to purchase a domain name from 1and1 internet for more than a year at a time. Domains automatically renew for 1 year, every year, until canceled.

So if you are looking to secure your domain for longer than 12 months, make sure you don’t use 1and1 to register the domain!

Conclusion

I give a lot more reasons for my dislike of 1&1 in my full review, but for this short review. I will give you the following advice:

If you are looking for a new web host, DON’T go with 1&1 – bigger isn’t always better. Check out my other hosting reviews and you’ll be able to find a much better host.

If you are an existing 1and1 customer, please accept my condolences, and do be careful when trying to cancel any of your contracts!

My Final 1and1 Review Score:

(1 out of 5)

Your 1and1 Score:

(17 votes, average: 2.76 out of 5)
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- If You Still Want To Visit 1&1 By All Means Click Here! -
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