Features and Ease of Use
NETIO sells a range of hosting services from multi-domain plans to VPS and dedicated servers. The shared hosting plans come with these core features:
- Long-term availability of hosting 99.99%
- Daily automatic backups, with 16 points saved
- Domain registration available as an additional cost
- Multidomain plans available
- SSL certificates available
- Up to 40 GB HDD or SSD storage
- Unlimited data transfer
NETIO co-locates its servers in a Tier III data center, MasterDC Praha, in the Czech Republic. It’s always preferable if a host owns its own data center, but it’s great to see it’s Tier III, which means less than 1.6 hours of downtime per year. Also, NETIO commits to maintaining a 99.99% availability rating for its hosting services, although it is not backed up by an SLA.
The plans come with either HDD or SSD storage, so you can choose between the cheaper and slower conventional hard disk drives or pay a premium to get disk read / write times up to ten times faster by upgrading to SSD.
There are plenty of features for you to develop your websites, such as the usual MySQL databases, FTP accounts, access via the phpMyAdmin tool, as well as less common Cron jobs and remote SQL connections. Oddly, while you can select the version of PHP, it is set by default to the older version 5.6.
The situation with beginner-friendly tools is less favourable. I contacted support, who confirmed there isn’t a website building tool or a one-click installer. This means that these plans may be more suitable for expert users rather than novices to website building.
Pricing and Support
The prices are higher than local and international competitors. While the included resources are extensive, such as unlimited domains, mailboxes, databases, and FTP users, I found it frustrating that many add-ons come at an additional cost. For instance, if you require more than two backup points or dedicated customer support, you will need to pay extra.
Plans can be purchased in one, three, six, or 12-month terms. Instead of giving its customers a discount for longer terms, NETIO has instead elected to apply a surcharge for shorter terms, ranging from 5% to 10% extra.
Also, while it advertises a 365-day money back guarantee, if you read the fine print, in reality it’s only a 14-day unconditional money back guarantee. Only if there’s poor performance or repeated outages by NETIO within a 365-day period will the web host give you a refund. In my opinion, poor performance should always be refunded, not only if it falls within one year.
Support is available by telephone and email 24/7. There’s also a relatively active community forum you can peruse. Email support is pretty fast, though: I contacted support by email on a weekday morning and received a reply answering my question in full on the same business day.
