Web Hosting Lab

Page 2 - Globat benchmark results

Globat was established in 2001. As of now, they are hosting around 100 000 web sites. They utilize a technology called B2, which, according to them, guarantees redundancy and backup at the highest possible level. All this sounds very good, which makes Globat a very apt candidate for a review!

Globat is one of the most scandalous hosts. They offer a very huge amount of disk space and bandwidth. They have been frequently criticized namely for these huge plans. As of now, they are offering 1000 GB space and 1000 GB data transfer (I wonder what would happen if I uploaded 100 GB... hmm.. there’s only one way for me to find out :) . I’ve had an account with them for almost a year. Globat's control panel, although much different from the cPanel type CP, is much better arranged and more compact than IPowerWeb's vDeck. First off, they give you good info upon login - temp URL, screenshot of the main domain and nice and neat buttons on the top. Their Control Panel supports the following:

Scripts for installing:

Coppermine, Mambo, phpBB, GloBlog, GloGallery and osCommerce

There are only 6 scripts ready to be installed. The most popular ones are missing. After all, the Fantstico package contains many more of them. Big companies such as Globat must do some work on this feature.

WebSiteBuilder - GloBuild – easy-to-use website builder – it’s good – they have 10 categories with 48 templates, each of which having several color themes. The Website builder works entirely with HTML and doesn’t require additional plugins such as Flash or something else. The bad thing is that if you want to change certain forms via the website builder you must have a more expensive plan account - i.e. you have to pay to use this feature.

Now it’s time to try the support team. Since I’ve had this account for almost a year and because a few days ago I received an email informing me that I have to renew it – I first tried to renew it. My first payment was made via PayPal and I would like to pay via PayPal this time as well. However, I found out that there wasn’t a PayPal renewal form, but only a credit card one. That’s why I decided to open a ticket. If you are a Globat customer you will easily find the link for opening a ticket. Unlike the case with IPowerWeb, the procedure here is even elementary.. Of course, every good thing has its ending. I clicked on the "submit ticket" button and a blank page appeared. Strange.. I opened my email client and saw an email from Globat there. Yeee.. I was very pleased but when I looked at the email I was a bit disappointed and astonished. Here’s what the email said:

"Thank you for contacting Globat!

Your original message was not received.  This is an autoresponder.  You
cannot send an email directly to this email address.  Please use one of
the services listed below."

Of course, I had no idea what was going on.. It said “thank you”, but also informed me that they had not received anything. Strange. OK, I read the entire email and saw the section where the billing staff contact info was. I clicked on the link, which took me to a page, which said "The page you requested cannot be found." Obviously, this link leads to a wrong page. Unlike their prices, which change during holidays (usually they make a discount), they obviously don’t keep the links in their emails up to date, which doesn’t speak well for their service support. I seem to have deviated from the subject. I opened a ticket again, only this time I addressed it to the Customer Support team, and asked how to pay via PayPal. I got a blank page again but I also received an email with the ticket number. I succeeded! Hurray! 54 minutes later I received an answer that I could pay via PayPal, but they obviously didn’t want to tell me how to do that since I got no further information on the subject (that’s why I rate the effectiveness of the tech support 8). To enjoy myself, I opened another ticket and asked them whether their service supports SSH. Their reply was fast – after only 23 minutes I was informed that they didn’t support SSH. Quite interestingly, 3 minutes after the first reply I received another one from some other support staff, which too confirmed that they didn’t support SSH. Probably their system doesn’t indicate if a given support staff is working on a respective ticket, which is why they replied two times to one and the same ticket.

Their @Mail web-based mail made a good impression on me. It looks like a real email client and it’s fast. They obviously use some advanced JavaScript so that everything is loaded fast. But as usual – every good thing has its ending. While I was testing the speed at which the emails were being delivered (fast - less than 20 seconds), I found out I couldn’t open my email. When I tried to open it, an error message occurred, which read like this "MIME::Parser: couldn't open: No such file or directory at /usr/local/atmail/webmail/libs//MIME/Parser.pm line 1174." Apparently, I wasn’t meant to examine this @Mail webmail from all sides.

Pros:
+ they always offer very good plans
+ fast support
+ friendly support
+ stable company
+ they have a website builder
+ easy-to-navigate control panel

Cons:
- exceptionally slow hosting – the scripts are often running slow, which signals that the servers are being overloaded – an overloaded server means problems
- insufficient number of preinstalled scripts
- they do not offer an SSH service

Page 2 - Globat benchmark results