holderhost Review

[Sam]

Website Name: holderhost LTD
Website Link: https://holderhost.com
When was your website founded?: July 2012
Which would you like?: (No Official Review | Standard Review | Advanced Review) Advanced
Notes:
Thanks. 🙂

 

[John]

Re: holderhost LTD

Your Review is In Progress!​

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Thank you for requesting feedback. I have tagged your thread, and will finish an official review within at most 48 hours. In the meantime, you will receive informal feedback from other reviewers and members at Forum Promotion. Once your official review is complete, you will be free to ask questions and receive feedback so long as your website remains only, and this topic remains reasonably active. You will also be able to request a re-review 14 days after this review is completed.

Thank you, and good luck!

 

[MasterA]

Re: holderhost LTD

Firstly, I like your theme. Here are some suggestions:
- I think you should add a favicon to your site, i think it would look nice.
- I think having a life chat is important as customers may want to ask questions before buying. I know it says its coming but I would say prioritise in getting one installed. Before I buy hosting, I would certainly use the life chat at different times and see when they are online as I look for hosts that have staff online 24/7 that can provide technical support.
- This is just my suggestion but I think on the shared hosting page, you should put the search domain below the hosting information as I guess people will look at the hosting package before looking for a domain.

Hope this helps.

 

[John]

Re: holderhost LTD

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holderhost
Review by John123 ​

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First Impressions
[note]========== BEGIN - First Impressions ==========[/note]
When I first look upon holderhost LTD I see a professional hosting company. The loading time is fast. I like the slider interface you have on your front page. It looks professional while at the same time showing holderhost has all of the "bells and whistles" of a modern day hosting company.

You need to put some sort of pricing on your homepage. On average, you have under a minute to convince the user to stay on your site. That means, in under a minute, you must must inform a user as much as possible about your company. A pricing page on your homepage would inform users in a quicker way.
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Good

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Design Quality
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I like the black and white of your theme. It looks professional, while also not looking old and dull. Your logo looks amazing. The black with white trim "fits" within your top left block of the theme flawlessly.

You should add a "load as you scroll" feature. This would give faster load time while giving you more features to add to your site.

Your prices and feature table is off centered. I can't exactly tell certain prices and services on the table. It took me a minute to figure out that you weren't charging $29.99 per month for your basic shared hosting plan. You could fix this by increasing the size of the table. Example
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Average

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Site Statistics
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You need some numbers. How many people use holderhost? Do you have any testimonials/feedback on holderhost? What's the actual up time of holderhost's server? I can't seem to find any of those answers. Those are all questions I would ask if I were looking for a new hosting company.
[note]========== END - Site Statistics ==========[/note]
Poor

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Originality
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Since forums are going downhill, hosting companies are going in the same direction. I've seen less and less hosting companies as forums and blogs are becoming less popular. You'll still have competition, but not as much as in previous years.

Your prices are competitive with the market, not too expensive, while also not looking cheap. You should try to make a .99 cent hosting plan. 99 Cent hosting plans are a very marketable sale pitch, maybe offer a "first month" discount.
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Average

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Site Structure
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I can find my way around holderhost with ease. Finding different services and plans you offered was very easy with your top navigation bar.

You need to move some pricing and plans onto your homepage. Nothing to completely change your homepage, just a few clickable icons with the names of different plans, pricing and space included in the plan. This would make it as easy as possible for your customer to find exactly what they are looking for as quick as possible.

I get an error message every time I try to view your forum. The message reads "holderhost
Sorry, we're currently unavailable. Please check back later." if the forum is not ready to be released to the public, I recommend you hide it from the public. Everything should be fully functional when you put it back into the public vision .

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Average

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Grammar & Spelling
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Honestly, I don’t see any grammar or spelling problems in your site. Everything is written professionally with excellent grammar and spelling. You've obviously taken your time with each and every line to ensure professionalism. This really helps make your hosting company look professional. Great job!
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Excellent

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Final Remarks​

If you can upgrade customer service (get live chat and the support forum running) and give some statistics, you should have no trouble finding success. Best of luck!​

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Your Score​

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[Sam]

Re: holderhost LTD

My apologies for not responding sooner. I have been pretty busy recently. Thank you both for the feedback.

- I think you should add a favicon to your site, i think it would look nice.

We shall get onto that. Thanks! 🙂

- I think having a life chat is important as customers may want to ask questions before buying. I know it says its coming but I would say prioritise in getting one installed. Before I buy hosting, I would certainly use the life chat at different times and see when they are online as I look for hosts that have staff online 24/7 that can provide technical support.

This is a difficult one. I am very wary of hiring people directly because it's difficult to vet them. I don't want to end up with the disaster of a deleted server (which happened to one host here) or some other issue. That leaves outsourcing and again we have to be sure that the company are competent and are good communicators. We are looking into providing managed vpses and rolling out 24/7 ticket support for that (then possibly expanding into full 24/7 support). I do completely agree that full 24/7 live chat and ticket support is a very good selling point and I shall be looking into that!

- This is just my suggestion but I think on the shared hosting page, you should put the search domain below the hosting information as I guess people will look at the hosting package before looking for a domain.

I personally think it's more ascetically pleasing the way it is but I take your point. 🙂

You need to put some sort of pricing on your homepage. On average, you have under a minute to convince the user to stay on your site. That means, in under a minute, you must must inform a user as much as possible about your company. A pricing page on your homepage would inform users in a quicker way.

That's a really good suggestion. We could look into providing a slider for our shared hosting plans on our homepage OR having our most popular plans displayed.

Your prices and feature table is off centered.

Strange as this is how it appears for me: http://imgs.us/image/ZM. 🙁 hmm.

You need some numbers. How many people use holderhost? Do you have any testimonials/feedback on holderhost? What's the actual up time of holderhost's server?

While we don't reveal client numbers we do have multiple leased servers and nodes. I personally hate to see testimonials directly on a webhost's page unless they are linked to a forum/ website. I do take your point. We probably should look at getting monitoring to show uptime stats. I do know that our oldest vps node, that we got in 2014, has been up for over 260 days. Overall - thanks for that suggestion and I shall certainly be seeing what we can display in terms of feedback/ stats.

You should try to make a .99 cent hosting plan. 99 Cent hosting plans are a very marketable sale pitch, maybe offer a "first month" discount.

The biggest issue is that after PayPal fees, you're receiving about 67 cents a month or $8 a year. We do have a small $1.5/mo plan that isn't directly advertised on the site. We put prices up because we want to focus on providing a quality service (SSD Cloud, cPRemote backups etc.). We are still significantly cheaper than the likes of HostGator and others.

I get an error message every time I try to view your forum. The message reads "holderhost
Sorry, we're currently unavailable. Please check back later."

Yes- not sure what to do about our forum as yet. 😛

 

[Cosmic]

Re: holderhost LTD

Cash has been Deducted!​

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Thank you for using the Forum Promotion review service. We have deducted 300 FP$ from your account in exchange for conducting an Advanced Review. You can request another review in 30 days.

To request a re-review, post on the Service Upgrades thread.

 

[MasterA]

Re: holderhost LTD

Also, one more thing is that I think if you use your website theme for WHMCS too, it would look even better. Just a suggestion.

 

[Sam]

Re: holderhost LTD

Also, one more thing is that I think if you use your website theme for WHMCS too, it would look even better. Just a suggestion.

Thanks for the suggestion! We did have the theme integrated originally. It's just WHMCS updates every 5 seconds which breaks it. But we can definitely do something about that.

We've almost sorted out live chat and we've got 24/7 ticket support. 🙂

 

[vonnch]

Re: holderhost LTD

That's nice. Let us know too once Live Chat is up and running already. 🙂

 

[Sam]

Re: holderhost LTD

That's nice. Let us know too once Live Chat is up and running already.

Live chat is up! 😀

 

[Cosmic]

Re: holderhost LTD

Design is pretty good. 🙂 I recommend that you be a lot more upfront with listing your prices. That's the number one thing that people want to know when visiting a hosting company. Remember, good website designs present the information which the user is looking for in as clear and easy to find way as possible. I recommend putting the prices on the homepage, as that's what people will be looking for. I know you have a lot of plans, but pick whichever one sells the best, and advertise that one on the homepage. 🙂

Good luck!

 

[Darwin]

Re: holderhost LTD

Nice design, Prizes are at a very good level and everything seems to be working, keep up the good work 🙂

 

[Sam]

Site URL: https://holderhost.com
Review Type: Feedback Topic + Standard Review:
Extra Notes:

I recently updated the holderhost site and would love some feedback on it!

 

[Kino]

Your Review is In Progress!​

---

Thank you for requesting feedback. I have tagged your thread, and will finish an official review within at most 72 hours. In the meantime, you will receive informal feedback from other reviewers and members at Forum Promotion. Once your official review is complete, you will be free to ask questions and receive feedback so long as your website remains open. You will also be able to request a re-review 14 days after this review is completed.

 

[Kino]

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Holderhost
Review by Kino​

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Design Quality
[note]========== BEGIN - Design Quality ==========[/note]
So let's start off with what I think is the strongest suit your site has - its design. I think right from the get go you are getting peoples' attention. Your name tells us exactly what you are selling, you have big buttons (Web Hosting, Reseller Hosting, etc.) laid out right on top where everyone sees what you are offering and quickly. Then you scroll down a little bit and you see one of your services laid out and advertised very well. You have the crucial bullet points up saying what the package will get you. That works very well and I like the fact that you are advertising your cheapest service. This way people don't know right from the start if there is a cheaper option or not. So even when they hit Web Hosting on the top they will be happy to see the Mini is the best package. I also just wanted to touch on that I really like the quotes from a couple of customers. If you have more quotes maybe you can get a scroller that shows multiple comments. If you leave those two up for too long people might get the wrong idea.
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Excellent

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Business Aspects
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So the first thing I noticed was that you claim you have "friendly and knowledgeable staff [that] are ready to assist you. 24/7." I just tried to get onto the Live Chat with a member of your staff and both questions and sales were both offline. I think you need to be very careful in that sense because customers want exactly what you are advertising. If you are advertising 24/7 assistance then that is what customers expect. In that sense, if I was hosting a site on your hosting and all of a sudden at midnight my unexpectedly went down and you claimed to have the 24/7 service then of course I would be right on trying to Live Chat support. This is crucial in your business. Hosting is a particularly time consuming job and honestly requires someone at attention at ALL times of the day/night. Remember that.

Overall, I think that your entire business aspect is good. You tell us what you offer and give us prices right from the start. Your prices seem fair compared to other sites and I like that you try and sell yourself from the beginning with the homepage and all of the bigger icons on the bottom (Uptime, Servers, Secure, etc.) However, due to your claim about the 24/7 support I will have to give this portion an Average.
[note]========== END - Business Aspects ==========[/note]
Average

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Site Structure
There isn't too much to say here because your site is structured very well. It's plain, simple, and very easy to navigate. This leaves your efficiency very high as customers do not have to go scrolling through pages on pages to find what they need. Right from the start they see customer reviews, what you are offering them, and major points about your services. Excellent work.

Excellent

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Final Remarks​

Alright - overall it's a very nice looking website. Like I mentioned, the viability of your site is spot on, it's easy to navigate, very clear to see what you offer, how you offer, and what incentives people have to sign up for your service. The one critical area that would dissuade me is your customer service angle. The live chat should really be a live chat and if it isn't up you should have something on the homepage saying Live Chat, Live or Offline. I shouldn't have to click on it to find out if its online or offline. Another point, maybe somewhere on the main page you can put something that says Servers: Online/Offline. I know it seems small, but customers would really appreciate it. Overall, 3 stars. You would have had 4 if the live chat was up.​

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Your Score​

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[John]

Cash has been Deducted!​

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Thank you for using the Forum Promotion review service. We have deducted 100 FP$ from your account in exchange for conducting a Standard Review. You can request another review in 14 days.

​

 

[Ash]

Your site looks great but it just doesn't have that professional look for me to be honest. If you look at most hosting sites that are big they will have a nice modern and clean looking site with sliders etc. It just looks like your site was designed quickly because its basic and there's nothing that stands out really. For example look at - http://volact.com or https://uk.godaddy.com/

Your hosting prices are good but like said above maybe some numbers about uptime or customers would be good.

 

[Hugop]

Hey,

Could you explain how the affilate system works? I can not find where the affilates FAQ is listed and the affilate page only shows banners and statistics.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Sam]

Your site looks great but it just doesn't have that professional look for me to be honest. If you look at most hosting sites that are big they will have a nice modern and clean looking site with sliders etc. It just looks like your site was designed quickly because its basic and there's nothing that stands out really. For example look at - http://volact.com or https://uk.godaddy.com/

Your hosting prices are good but like said above maybe some numbers about uptime or customers would be good.

I hate to do this but because you're comparing us with Volact...
- I'm highly doubtful, although admittedly unsure, that Volact have thousands of clients like they claim on there website. If they're lying, that's pretty unethical and not something we would do. We don't reveal our own client numbers. We're small. We have 7 nodes/ servers in total. That's it...
- It took me a minute to find Volact's cookie cutter theme: http://themeforest.net/item/hostme-v2-r ... me/5275274. We wanted to get away from having something similar to everybody else.

Now this is not a put-down of how Collin at Volact does things.... He can run his business however he wants but I am really unsure why you decided to compare us with them. I highlighted how your post read to me. I apologize if I've mis-interpreted it.

Hey,

Could you explain how the affilate system works? I can not find where the affilates FAQ is listed and the affilate page only shows banners and statistics.

Thanks in advance!

Hey Hugo!

Glad you're interested. 😀 The program details are here: http://holderhost.com/affiliates/. If you have any questions (for example about some of the one-off commissions) feel free to flick me a message and I'll get back to you ASAP.

Sam

 

[Ash]

I am not comparing you to them at all. I am just giving an example of a hosting site, most hosting sites use themes similar to Volact or GoDaddy etc. It just looks much more professional and I would be more inclined to buy their hosting as their site looks more professional