I switched to Site5 in February (2010), because my previous web host had been over-selling their hardware, causing my site's loading times to suffer. I chose Site5 because they prided themselves on under-selling hardware. My site's performance immediately improved after the switch, and has remained consistently at this new level.

I've struggled with a number of technical challenges recently, such as learning how to use Mercurial and SSH access. Site5's support has been outstanding, even when the issues were not actually their fault: they are very willing to help even when there's no fault in their systems. Their responses have been fast, friendly, and useful.

Site5 has one killer feature for me: multisite. This allows me to host multiple sites under the same account, where each site is treated with full independence. For me, this simplifies my development and staging subdomains, as these no longer need to live in subfolders of the main site. This gives me a cleaner site architecture, allowing me to manage all three environments from one Mercurial repository. Essentially, multisite allows me to organise my project the way I want.

I've had the pleasure of hosting with Site5 for just over three years now. When I joined they were going through a rocky spell dealing with clients in three different data centers, varied configurations, and overloaded servers.

A little over a year ago Ben Welch-Bolen and Joel Brown took over control of Site5 and made a huge impact. I noticed support became even quicker, outage posts decreased, and the servers just seamed snappier.

Instead of wasting more time let me leave you with one final though regarding their servers. My site runs on an older shared box and recently had a traffic spike. In May it served over 1100 unique visits (over 2200 visits) totaling over 950GB of traffic. In the first two days of the spike just over 320GB was transfered. The remaining 20 or so days of the month traffic ranged from 20-90GB a day.

During the entire traffic spike my site stayed online the entire time. Site5 had it's issues in the past, but the best I can say is Ben and Joel have clearly done an amazing job and if my words aren't enough to express this point then let the numbers speak for me and them.

Kudos to Site5!

I tried many hosts (1&1, ovh, gandi), and site5 is far far away on the top of my list.

best support, best features, best reliability and the price is also perfect !!!

recommand+++

I just had the worst hosting experience of my life. The server was down for 3 days and once it was finally restored the last good back up was over 2 months old! So I lost 2 months of data and bunch of clients. Before you choose Site5 check out their forums and you can read about their issues, just search on the word outage.

Here is a link to my 3 days of hell. http://forums.site5.com/showthread.php?t=26241

The new ownership decided to move servers over to the planet. Since then DNS was improperly set, databases lost data and email is being blocked by major corporations because the new IP's are blacklisted. Currently searching for a new home for my sites and client sites. Stay away from this host. Let the confused offerings on the home page be an indication of the lack of vision.

I am a long-time customer who can't wait to get away. Since their ownership has changed hands, they have become terrible. My DNS was hijacked with no explanation. Support is unresponsive and unapologetic.

I came to site5 several years ago after doing my homework to find a new host. They were fast and inexpensive and offered storage space I could afford. Service at that time was excellent and the users' forum remains one of the most informative and interesting I have seen -- everything is aired there, including the many, many problems customers have with the current site5. I purchased a contract for a few years and so still have some archive material with site5, but moved critical web and email away after the first week-long outage when an entire RAID array died. The techs ended up throwing away the mail queue in the restoration process , a very stupid and costly mistake. Recently, the same server just experienced yet another RAID outage with multiple disks and a controller all fried. The company was just sold to two new owners. I cannot imaging how they could turn things around, but I wish them luck.

I had problems that my ip address got blocked my site5.com. When I asked why they told me I was checking my email too many times from my ip address. After complaining and asking them to stop blocking my ip address and fix their firewall, here is the reply I got from their head of operations:

From: Site5 Technical Support [mailto:customer.service@site5.com]

Sent: 2008-10-23 11:07

To: jacksmusa@yahoo.com

Cc: customer.service@site5.com; matt.lightner@site5.com; jack@ghoulian.com; jacksmusa@yahoo.com

Subject: [Site5 #FQJ-313043]: ghoulian.com

Hi,

From our perspective, the only "problem" is your failure to adhere to our resource usage policies.

As you have indicated that you do not intend to even attempt to bring your usage in line with those policies, I'm notifying you that we will be terminating your service in 10 days, in line with our Terms of Service and Resource Usage Policy documents, both of which you agreed to when subscribing to our services.

You will receive a refund for any unused service at that time, as a courtesy, and your account will be removed.

Please ensure you've procured backups prior to this date, as data will be irretrievable following the deprovision of your service.

I apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Thanks,

Vince.

--

Vince Stratful

Director of Technical Operations

Site5 Internet Solutions, Inc.

http://www.site5.com

Technical Support:

24 hours a day / 7 days a week

Run don't walk from even considering this site! Awful, they misrepresent their pricing and their refund policy. Aggrgh, I hate this company!!!!

Site5 frequently has my site down. We supposedly violated some "Resource Usage Policy" - a policy that I was never told about in the introduction e-mails (I saved all of them). They're slow, sometimes unresponsive.

Look before you choose a host. Site5 is the worst I've had.

I've used Site5 for hosting for the past 3 years. Until recently, I used them for hobby sites. I upgraded to a reseller account and started offering credit card purchase options on one of my sites. That was the beginning of the end. During the first month, the site was down for over a week because of Site5 internal issues. Site5 only offers support via their POS chat system that is supposed to be up 24 hours/day. We were only able to get through on the chat about 1 out of 5 times and then the chat person would tell us to put in a ticket and then the waiting process would start all over again. At writing, I've been trying to get Site5 to release my site to a new hosting company for nearly a week. They finally sent me a link last night to approve the transfer. Guess what, the link is non-functioning and the morons at Site5 can't figure out what to do.

My suggestion: use Site5 if you like terrible customer service, less than 100% up time and if you feel like pulling out your hair sounds like fun.

Extremely unreliable. Server goes down frequently, sometimes for hours, as confirmed by http://www.site5.com/support/uptime and third party reports. Support replies, but does nothing to improve the awful uptime, month after month. Almost daily outages. Guarantee doesn't help much.

Initially Site5 met all my needs three years ago. They were never the fastest host out there, but I could host all the domains I wanted with them on the package I purchased. It was perfect for my needs. Then things got weird. It was like they realized that their servers were bogging down and so they sent out an email along the lines, "We will be moving everyone to new servers to speed things up..." which never seemed to happen.

Since then, I regularly experience downtime a couple of times a week. It mostly seems to be related to their database servers, but whatever it is, it's killing my websites. Their support folks are less than amazing these days. I'll send in a ticket stating, "The database on my server is down right now, could you please fix it?" and then they reply back six hours later stating, "Everything appears to be fine. Let us know if you have and problems again." It's a bit annoying.

In short, they're not great. If you can get a cheap package with them to demo stuff, then they're all right. But, if you want to have a solidly reliable host, stay away. Oh, I've referred a few people to them lately and their whole setup system is really messed up. You don't receive passwords you need and it requires a lot of service tickets just to get up and running. Of course, they already have your money by then, so you're screwed.

I have several sites hosted at site5.com and they have been going down alot over the past 60 days.

I've been with Site5 for one and a half years or so and am happy with their service and support. I decided to go with Site5 because they were cheap and had Ruby on Rails support. My sites don't generate a lot of traffic (I use my hosting more as a development playground) and that's one of the reasons why Site5 is perfect for me.

The Good:

Their interface is beautiful and intuitive. They're using a custom skinned cPanel admin (I think).

Every time I had to deal with their customer service, I've had my problems resolved adequately. When I requested a credit for when my server went down, I got it without questions. Getting SSH access was painless enough.

They're cheap, and their hosting features are just great for the price.

The Bad:

When they merged with another company (I forgot which) about a year go, there were several problems with hosting going down on various servers. I didn't receive a notice at all that my hosting was down -- I had to look at the forums to know there was even an issue. The hosting was down for almost half a day.

If you're looking for a host for a high traffic site, you might want to look elsewhere. The reliability of Site5 is questionable (I don't know how often my sites go down because I don't have a userbase to inform me).

However, if you're just looking for hosting for low traffic personal sites or family sites, Site5 offers an unbeatable value.

I used to love Site5. They have the best control panel around, and their pricing and speed is excellent. Unfortunately, as many others have pointed out, their service over the last few months has gotten terrible. I moved all 10 of my sites to Site5 a year ago and everything was perfect, but my sites and email have been down 8 times in the last 6 weeks. I used to tell everyone about Site5, and now cannot recommend them at all. I'm looking for a new host to move my sites to ASAP.

I found that overall, the price that I paid for the Reseller Reveloution plan to Site5 was acceptable and you get what you pay for. Features, considering the amount payable per month ($14.95) were reasonable, but compared to other reseller hosts offerings, they weren't outstanding.

I found that the reliability was appalling - by the end of the month I had 98% uptime, and after looking on their status website, other servers had been having similar problems. Each time the server went down I sent a support ticket as high priority, and I was responded to 24 hours later making the whole point of reporting such incidents invalid.

Quite simply, the price tag might be good but the service certainly isn't.

Site 5 used to be a great service. The operative word is "used" to be. Over the last 4 or so months their service has bitten the dust. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't have to contact them with severe server issues that don't allow me or my clients to access our email accounts. The sites drag and act lethargic. The customer service, while well intended, are too overloaded to give any serious issue their full attention. Site 5 has grown too big too fast and now all of their customers have to pay for it.

I must say site5 was my first paid host that I signed up with. This was more than 3 years ago.

For the first 3 months everything was PERFECT (Yes, you heard me, PERFECT) no troubles at all. Server was LIGHTNING FAST.

Right after that I started having downtime and performance issues. I needed reliability and canceled.

They were my first love, I was very sad and felt betrayed.

In a few months after that lots of customers left them and it was the end of site5 as a quality hosting provider.

Too bad.

I used to be with Site5. But for the past year or so, the server that I was on would fail, or MySQL dies, or needs to be rebooted at least once a month.

Then recently one of my blog posts became very popular - too popular that my site got locked down. This was after I had tried to optimise the site, and had installed WP-Supercache.

I wasn't angry about that. But I was annoyed that I wasn't told accurately what was going on. The first response that I got was "it needs to be rebooted". The second was "your IP is blocked". And then finally the third was, "We locked down your site". The last response came 16 hours after the fact, and after I had spoken to 3 different techs.

The price and features were good, but everything else about this company is not acceptable. Take your business else where.

I've been with Site5 for years - but as others have pointed out, they've gone through some real growing pains over the past several months. The servers are down a good deal of the time, and while support used to take minutes to respond to your ticket, they now take days. So your site can literally be down for days on end before anybody even gets back with you. I'll definitely be moving my sites to another hosting service. I'd rather spend a few extra bucks and know my site is up and that customer support is there.

I've been with Site5 for nearly two years. I currently have 2 accounts with them, on 2 separate servers, with 14 different websites.

Over the last couple weeks my sites have been down several times due to (a) the server being down once, or "The load has gone up on this server".

While in the past I have been a strong proponent of Site5, in the future I will be warning people of the problems.

I've been with Site5 for many years, and I always recommend them to my friends, family, and clients. I host several sites on there, just because everything is so easy to maintain, plus I host all of my personal sites there as well.

Customer service is nothing less than amazing as well, with incredibly speedy response times. Kudos, Site5!!

I have been very happy with Site5. After using them for several professional projects, I moved my personal stuff there this year. It's been great!

Great pricing and fantastic uptime. Site5's tech support has always been extremely responsive and helpful. I'd definitely recommend their service.

I have several sites hosted through Site5 and have been with them for about 3 years now. I'm very pleased with the features offered, uptime, performance, and support I have received.

Several times I needed help and if I couldn't find the answer at the forums, I emailed support and received a response or fix within minutes.

I have moved several sites to Site5, just to my life easier because Site5 works so well.

I've received excellent support and personal attention from management over the years. Started out with shared hosting and co-locate equipment with them now. Very pleased with my decision and have been with Site5 for a number of years now.

Very happy with the service and very competitive prices. Only been with site5 for about 3 months and the support is not only excellent but the spec of the servers and the up time is far superior to any other host I have been with. Their community forums are also great, loads of support through there too. A very good host indeed! Already recommended it to about 5 friends :)

Like Chris stated a few reviews before, i too am giving only 9's. This is because we expect more and more from site5. They are already perfect IMO. Support is great and so is the forum. I agree that the forums have become a bit moderated, but they have reasons. Too many people blaming site5 for their own mistakes, like not remembering the email they signed up with etc... :p

I havent tried rails out yet, but am going to very soon. The e5 team gives me confidence that i dont have to go to other forums and sites to get my answers :p

I am currently addicted to Site5 forums!!!!

Stopping my rambling and gonna go work on my site :)

Cheers,

Srijit

I've had an overall very positive experience with site5. The only downside in my opinion is that the customer forums over the last few months have become somewhat over moderated in my opinion.