Review of Superb.Net Web Hosting Service

Superb Internet started in 1994 with an idea – Haralds Jass, then just 14 and in 8th grade, had just invented an online game with a group of friends. It was called ‘Woodlands’, and the goal was a fully immersive online experience. Commercial interest followed, and very quickly Haralds and company realized that existing hosting solutions just couldn’t deliver what they needed. A raft of problems, including unpredictable bandwidth, sudden outages and poor customer service meant that their game was never able to reach the level of market penetration that they had hoped for – in other words, it was ahead of its time.

Instead of giving up and going home, Haralds saw this as an opportunity to address what he found out was a growing demand for high-performance web hosting that was both dependable and responsive to its customer’s needs. And so Superb Internet was born, starting with a $600 loan for server equipment and a small but growing customer base of people who, just like he, had been let down by the lack of availability of fast and reliable hosting services. By 1999, Superb was hosting 10,000 websites, and it is now positioned as a global market leader in personal and business hosting solutions, with corporate headquarters in Vancouver and multiple data centers on both the west and east coasts of the USA.

And now they are offering three months of hosting free when you purchase one of their twelve month shared or dedicated server plans – a very sweet sounding deal we thought, so we decided to take a closer look.
First, we browsed its products to see how they compare with what’s out there. This meant starting with their website, which is well laid out and easy to navigate. Their first thing we looked at was its GridIron web hosting plans. They come in three flavors – Lite, Pro and Max, which offers 2 years of hosting, with domain registration thrown in free, for $14.99 a month, which gives the other big players in the market (GoDaddy comes to mind) a run for their money. If basic hosting is all you’re after – and by basic we mean ‘only’ 20GB storage and unlimited monthly traffic – the Lite option will set you back just $4.99 a month. We’re impressed, especially when that still includes 4 shopping cart packages, 1GB mail storage and – here’s the real kicker – 100% uptime guarantee. That’s 100, not the 99.9999 you’ll see everywhere else.
We’re always curious when people make these kinds of claims, so we thought we’d give it a test drive and see for ourselves. We signed up for their mid-range shared hosting option, GridIron Pro. Signup with a credit card was easy and we were online within an hour. Another hour and we were hosting WordPress and Joomla, and running two shopping carts. The only glitch was getting WP to work, which we found out was our fault (we’d made a typo in the database name). This was resolved in all of 3 minutes through use of their live chat support center. Their representative was quick, courteous and knew what she was talking about – all things that are of paramount importance to the poor newbie who is tearing his hair out and losing earnings for every minute that his site is delayed going live.

We tested site bandwidth as best we could (given our location, about 100 miles inland from the East Coast, and budget constraints), which meant traffic amounting to about 150MB every minute, and had no problem at all. Our site continued loading fast, with no noticeable added latency. And that was without the static content plugin that’s popular with WordPress users keen to maximise their page load times.
We also wanted to test their 100% uptime claim. We’ve been hammering our site fairly consistently for three days so far, with no noticeable downtime. So far, so good.
If they can manage that kind of quality of service with just their shared hosting (which owes its extra robustness to server clustering – this means that when the server that’s powering your site goes down, a backup will take over immediately), then we know who we’ll be looking at first when we’re thinking about hosting our site on a dedicated server.
Curiously, we noticed that their CustomPro Windows hosting is cheaper (starting at $18 a month) than Infinity ($12.50), despite offering lower bandwidth, web space and multiple site count. Superb.Net promo code. We didn’t get the chance to look into this further, but there might be something more to Infinity than they’re telling us.
Superb Internet lived up to its name. And with three months free, they are worth your consideration.