A client a few months ago was signed up with supergreenhosting.com as their Web site’s host. The client had some Web site problems they asked us to fix. We were inspired by the green, zero carbon footprint of the host to provide a review of their service. Noted below are the challenges we experienced followed by the things we appreciated about the service.

On the whole, we give the hosting service 3 LE-s (on a scale of 1 to 5 LE-s).

Challenges:

MENU FLEXIBILITY: You can install WordPress and create a fairly flexible site. However, with their standard site builder software, you can only have 1 level of submenu. You can work around that by creating new menus. These become invisible “menus” and then you can link to these pages. If you organize your files into a main menu, a sub-menu, and then do something like copy files into the sub-menu, your files will no longer show up in the site builder as files that you can edit. The files for the pages still exist, and, if you search your files through the Cpanel backend of the site, you can find them. However, you can no longer edit them in the site builder.

MODULE EDITS: You can enter information into the modules provided by supergreenhost’s site builder, but you cannot customize/edit the code of the module. This was illustrated by the news module in our project. There was a defect in the two-column page display that caused the news module items in the left column to push the rest of the information in the right column to the bottom of the page. A common HTML display issue. We wanted to make some CSS changes and had to perform a workaround based on the HTML end output, and put our CSS tag at the end of the pages on the site, instead of being able to insert the tag into the news module. This explanation may make sense only to those who have delved into HTML, so to summarize, I can say this caused headaches, messy workarounds, and a fragile fix that could easily be broken again with any change in the code at the client’s site. We prefer a more robust approach to fixing site errors.

WEAK TECHNICAL SUPPORT: The site’s support pages and the telephone support (reportedly) were fairly weak. The e-mail technical support did answer my question fairly quickly, but they appear to outsource their tech support, as I was receiving e-mail from an entirely different company/domain. If you use this host, you will do best if you’re very familiar with Web site hosting and with building Web sites.

Things We Appreciated:

GREEN: Obviously, this company gets major kudos from us for having a zero carbon footprint.

PRICE: About $60 annually if you pay for a year in advance. Otherwise a $20 setup fee applies and you pay about $7 per month. Get the year.

PERFORMANCE: The speed and performance of this host were no issue at all, and they did fine in this important area.

SPACE TO CREATE: You can have pretty much as much database and hard drive space as you need, so we rate them high in this category.

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Again, we give the hosting service 3 LE-s (on a scale of 1 to 5 LE-s).