Features and Ease of Use
GreenHosting’s mission is to provide hosting powered by renewable energy. To achieve that, they have to keep the features at a minimum to make the hosting affordable and easy to manage. Hence, most webmasters won’t be impressed by what they have to offer.
To start with, they only offer 5MB storage (remember floppy disks?). Yes, you read that right. 5MB means you’ll have a tough time getting all your data on the website, which is exactly why this hosting service is suited to organizations that don’t have large storage requirements and can afford the premium that has to be paid for these services. You do get unlimited data transfer, though.
Additionally, you get five POP3 email accounts with unlimited email forwarding and email aliases. They state clearly on their website that they don’t offer any support for configuring your email software. You can easily ask for more disk storage and email accounts, but both come with an added charge.
Your hosting account will be based on your choice of a Windows or Linux OS. You get 24/7 FTP access, support for ODBC databases, MS FrontPage extensions, ASP, PHP, and CGI as well as access to detailed statistics about your website’s performance. They have an on-site UPS power backup to ensure decent uptime, but they don’t specifically mention if they take a backup of your data or not. This means you might have to create your own local backups.
GreenHosting will transfer your domain free of cost, but if you have to purchase a new one, you have to inform them about your desired username. If it’s available, they can register it for you, though once again this will be at a hefty fee. In order to keep their costs low, they do not provide any e-commerce services.
Pricing and Support
GreenHosting offers a single shared hosting package only, and this comes with a heavy price tag. They recommend you only use their services if you don’t have large disk space requirements. This is because they only offer 5MB of disk space with an additional 5MB available at a sum with which you can easily buy a whole year’s worth of hosting from other providers. Clearly, we aren’t looking at the best package in the world.
The reason for these expensive charges and lack of features is the fact that renewable energy comes at a premium. Calgary’s ENMAX program is what powers the servers at GreenHosting, and they charge users a monthly fee that’s reflected in the charges at GreenHosting. If you’re a CARE member, you are eligible for a discount of about 25%.
Their customer support is quite limited, with only phone, fax, and email as contact options. Unfortunately, their website doesn’t provide clear information about the timings of their availability, but it seems like they can only be reached during office hours.
