Aplus.net offers solid hosting value for individuals and small businesses, backed by excellent customer support. But the company earns poor marks for the weak tools it dresses up and packs into the Control Panel. This reliable hosting company would do well to fully examine its offerings and enhance or ditch dated features, update old information and fix broken links and other small but annoying glitches.
We reviewed Aplus.net's most popular Unix hosting plan - Solo XR. For $9.95 a month, Solo XR subscribers get 1100MB of storage, 45GB of monthly transfer and 400 email addresses.
On the positive side, Aplus.net has a streamlined signup process which only requires about four steps to complete. About 15 minutes after we purchased the plan we were greeted with a number of Emails detailing our new account information and how to get started. As a bonus Aplus.net also gave us accounts for their Web-a-Photo and Web-a-File sister websites.
Aplus would do well to fully examine its Control Panel offerings and enhance or ditch dated features.
Inside the Control Panel, a nice feature when you login is a short list of recently visited pages, which lets users easily pick up where they left off. Also, the Favorites section allows users to customize navigation to the sections they use most. As for speed, Control Panel access is acceptably fast - we weren't tapping our fingers for too long waiting to get to the different tools available. And there certainly are plenty to choose from. The problem isn't the quantity of hosting tools on Aplus.net, it's the quality.
For starters, the Website Creator with its poor graphics and limitations on customization is not something to be proud of, which is unfortunate since many customers will use, or try to use, this application. Some of the lesser tools such as Image Manipulation and Form Mail also left us wanting. Image Manipulation offers limited functionality and the annoying habit of refreshing after each editing selection. Form Mail is a free product from "Matt's Script Archive" that was last updated in 2002. That's like putting your name on a two-year-old term paper you found on the Internet and turning it in - but the result is the same: Grade F.
We did like the Thumbnail Generator, which allows users to easily create small versions of images already added to the site; perfect for a catalogue. And, at the higher-end of the utility spectrum, the HTML Validation Tool is useful for assessing HTML code and website links. The tool pays close attention to code that does not support visual browsers and if you don't include an ALT description of an image, or a table summary, they'll get flagged. But it will identify more critical issues as well and will also assess all links on a published site. One annoying aspect of the validation tool, however, is the fact each assessment report lists problems by their line number, but then doesn't provide line numbers in the display of the source code.
The MySQL setup was easy, but here again, Aplus.net needs to audit the service as we were given a dead link to MySQLtool - the graphical interface for managing MySQL databases. What's more, the MySQLtool GUI is touted in the Aplus.net tutorial. Perhaps Aplus.net should run its HTML Validation Tool on its own Control Panel to check for other dead links. While they're at it, the 2002 tutorial could use an overall audit and cleaning to get it up to date. Combining the Tutorial with the Knowledge Base - rather than offering them separately - would be a nice enhancement as well.
Support is offered through email, chat and phone. To its credit, Aplus.net urges customers to call toll-free or use the live chat feature, rather than submit a support ticket and wait. The support reps we talked to were very knowledgeable and pleasant, with answers to a variety of issues - from getting started to more technical questions about PHP and Perl scripting.
If APlus.net is trying to earn extra credit with the suite of tools it gives its hosting customers, the company should first do its homework and research exactly what it's offering. Sure, the Control Panel is packed with pretty icons that link to a wide range of tools - from a website wizard to code checkers. But the problem is that many of those tools are old or clunky or just plain worthless. Look beyond the stylish icons, and there's not a lot of substance in the Aplus.net toolbox and much of what's there feels jumbled and disconnected. Aplus.net provides solid value backed by excellent support, but the company needs to thoroughly audit the tools it gives customers to understand which should be upgraded and which should be abandoned. Until it does, it earns a failing grade for its quantity-over-quality approach.
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