Features and Ease of Use
NSS Group sells a full range of hosting services including shared hosting, which comes with these core features:
- 999% stability of data center
- Online backup services available
- Domain registration available
- SSL certificates available
- Unlimited disk storage
- Up to 350GB network traffic
While NSS claims to be one of the leading Taiwanese providers, I can’t find any online sources to back that statement up. Nevertheless, it does offer some unique value add-ons not found at other companies. For example, it uses Hinet data center in Taiwan and offers a “5 nines” stability commitment, meaning 99.999% as opposed to an industry standard 99.9%. Although notably, it’s not a guarantee, nor is it an SLA.
There is a choice of servers; Linux, Windows, and JSP. The Linux plans support CGI, PHP, JSP, MySQL, the Windows servers support Access, Microsoft SQL, ASP, ASP.net, JMail, AspSmartUpload, and finally, the JSP servers support CGI, PHP, JSP, MySQL, and PostgreSQL database.
For ease of use, there is “Site Wizard” and the plans use Plesk, a reliable control panel, with 37 in built apps e.g., gallery, geeklog, gtchat, mambo, osCommerce, phpAds, phpBB, phpBook, phpBugTracker, phpsurveyor, phpwebsite, phpWiki, pLog, PostNuke, WebCalendar, WordPress, xrms, and so on.
The servers use robust Intel Xeon processors, SCSI hard disks (Linux) or RAID 10 SAS hard disk drives (Windows and JSP), plus there’s a free CDN on all plans.
Pricing and Support
The prices are quite high compared to international companies, however, in line with other Taiwanese providers. You do always need to purchase an SSL certificate, but you get a free .com domain name thrown in.
Plans can only be bought in one year terms, which is strict, however, to counter this, there are some excellent payment terms such as a 30-day free trial, plus an anytime money-back guarantee, which is by far the most generous refund policy I’ve seen.
Customer service is available 24/7 via phone, with various local numbers available including Hong Kong, Singapore, Philippines, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Australia, and the U.S. You can also reach out to them through an online ticketing system or live chat.
In my experience, when I tried to contact support via live chat, the link took me to a confusing client only area and I couldn’t figure out how to use live chat. In the end, I sent an email and unfortunately, despite waiting five business days, I did not get a reply. This is a far cry from it’s five hour response time promise on the website, however, I did email in English, so that could have been an issue.
