5.JaguarPC

Summary

They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but that doesn't seem to be true for JaguarPC. Starting with only two servers way back in 1998, it managed to achieve a 95% annual growth rate in 2012. With thousands of powerful Cisco servers in Houston, Atlanta, New Jersey and even in the UK, JaguarPC is brave enough to guarantee 100% uptime no matter what's happening in the world.

This web host provides shared hosting services as well as both virtual and dedicated servers. Shared web hosting starts at $4.95/month, and, importantly, the renewal price is the same. With hundreds of free scripts to install, free daily backups, free SSL, 24/7 technical support, a site builder and "unlimited everything", JaguarPC seems to be one of the most attractive options on the market. And if you don't like it, you can cancel your account within the first 30 days and get full unconditional money back.

Reliability

The declared 100% uptime guarantee is not empty words – JaguarPC manages the security of its servers very well with super-reliable Cisco and HP networks, dual-redundant power feeds, 10-foot security fences, 12 inch concrete floors and 12,000 gallons of reserve diesel fuel. No matter what is happening in the world, your website will remain firm as a rock.

The actual measurement conducted with the help of the Pingdom™ service showed 99.98%* uptime. This is higher than what many web hosts offer, but it isn't 100%. We aren't seeking a quarrel, but if a company promises 100% uptime and even promises to issue a refund (!) in case of default, one would definitely expect 100%, not less.

According to Pingdom™, the actual response time is 0,322* seconds.

Money Back Guarantee

Like many of its competitors, JaguarPC offers a 30-day unconditional money back guarantee for new clients. The refund doesn't include service fees or the domain name registration fee. If you cancel your account after 30 days you don't get back anything unless you cancel prior to the next billing date.

Ease of Use

We didn't experience problems while setting up the account, but issues were evident during operation. The control panel JaguarPC uses is the popular cPanel. This solution allows tuning up everything you have to with a minimum of clicks, so no surprises here. Unfortunately, the layout of non-typical elements was not brilliant. There are, for instance, no quick-links to billing or to online support, so you have to open the home page and login from there unless you are really observant can find the "Submit request" link in the "Advanced" section that simply sends you to the client's area.

But the worst thing happened when we tested the functionality of the web host control panel. While all standard functions seemed to work perfectly, that is sub-domains and parked domains, e-mail boxes, web log analyzers, and MySQL functioned well, some third party solutions did not open at all! They simply returned a 404 "Requested page not found" error. For example, among two script auto-installers offered by JaguarPC, only Fantastico worked from the start. The other one, Softaculous, produced 404.

Many other links in the control panel worked (or should we say ‘malfunctioned') the same way, including all SEO tools and RVSiteBuilder. Either this was our bad luck, or JaguarPC was having some issues, but this isn't what you would hope for after logging into your brand new hosting account.

We created a support ticket describing the problem and it was soon fixed. After that, Softaculous and other third-party products began to work ok. The huge advantage of the Softaculous installer is its list, sorted by rating and popularity, of hundreds of software applications and scripts you can install. This isn't an achievement of Jaguar, of course, but they do provide this tool and it is utterly handy. Once it works, that is.

We also tried to install several popular scripts to our test account using the Fantastico script installer and WordPress and osCommerce online merchant platform installed effortlessly.

JaguarPC is generally easy to use but may require additional education for third-party scripts and software proposals.

Technical Support

JaguarPC web host offers technical support using several channels: e-mail, telephone, online-tickets, and live chat. When we review web hosts, we usually ask technical support more or less the same questions, how to do this, how much of that can I have, and so on. But with JaguarPC, our standard check of support efficiency and effectiveness was supplemented with a real problem that confronted us.

The issue was the 404 error shown when we clicked third-party options in the control panel. The online ticket we created to solve this issue was answered after 80+ minutes and only after we also reported the problem via live chat. The live chat response was prompt though.

The level of the technical support was higher with our standard questions. We received phone and live chat answers in 1 minute or less, and our online ticket with a typical "how to" question was answered after 22 minutes.

With both the real and the imaginary problems the support technicians were polite and straightforward. All problems were eventually solved.

Conclusion

JaguarPC is definitely better than you might think after reading this review. Not only does it offer an impressive 100% uptime guarantee (no other web hosts in this rating do), it offers decent shared web hosting services for a competitive price with no surprises at renewal time. While not being an absolutely cost effective choice due to the lack of Google advertising credits or free domain names it is still worth considering thanks to the fair price and the clear renewal policy.

The responsive technical support does what it has to, yet you may have to face serious time-lags, especially if your problem is beyond FAQ.

Also, JaguarPC is literally stuffed with delicious scripts and software offered for free, plus it provides free daily backups and a free SSL server. Nonetheless, some software products obviously didn't work and required our effort and the involvement of support to fix them.

For as low as $4.95/month you will get a host as reliable as Fort Knox, a handful of applications, and, possibly, issues you will have to resolve with the diligent but turtle-fast technical support.