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GreenGeeks Review

GreenGeeks Scorecard
Category Score
Core Features 8/10
Email Features 10/10
Support & Security Features 8/10
Website Statistics 10/10
Administration & Software 10/10
Multimedia Support 10/10
Included Scripts 9/10
E-Commerce 8/10
Overall Score 73/80
Rank #6
Rating 4 Star
GreenGeeks
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Pros: Unlimited domains, subdomains, parked domains, storage space, bandwidth, databases, email accounts, forwards and autoresponders; 30 Day money back guarantee; powered by 100% renewable energy; Full software & multimedia support; $25 Yahoo! Advertising Credit; Free lifetime domain name.

Cons: Phone support M-F: 9AM-Midnight, Sat/Sun: 9AM-8PM EST; No video tutorials, PostgreSQL or international domain support; No Google Adwords credit; Dedicated IP & private SSL not included in plan.

Overview: GreenGeeks offers a respectable cPanel multiple domain hosting plan with a good price. They use 100% renewable energy to power their facilities. While phone support is not 24/7, they have 24/7 live chat and average a same-day support ticket response time. While we would like to have seen more advertising credits and a dedicated IP with private SSL included, GreenGeeks is a good host with an excellent reputation for customer service and reliability. Add to that their green business model and you may just have a winner.

GreenGeeks is our top Drupal web host and are the official Drupal hosts for “Drupal For Dummies”, from the famous “…For Dummies” series of instructional books. They offer extensive Drupal support and services. GreenGeeks also offers a good set of reseller hosting plans for those who need to offer branded hosting to their clients or start their own web hosting business.

GreenGeeks is our top Drupal web host and are the official Drupal hosts for “Drupal For Dummies”, from the famous “…For Dummies” series of instructional books. They offer extensive Drupal support and services. GreenGeeks also offers a good set of reseller hosting plans for those who need to offer branded hosting to their clients or start their own web hosting business.


GreenGeeks Review – Core Features: 8/10

Green Geeks core feature set includes unlimited storage space, bandwidth, domains, sub-domains, parked domains, FTP accounts and MySQL databases. There is no size limit to the MySQL databases. PostgresSQL is not supported. While international domain names (domain names that contain one or more non-ASCII characters such as diacritics (e.g. �) or characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian or Hebrew) are not supported, Green Geeks web hosting does provide 1 free standard domain name for life. This means you can register 1 domain name for free and keep it without annual renewal fees for as long as you keep Green Geeks as your webhost.

Green Geeks supports anonymous FTP and SSH shell access along with .htaccess editing (to manage access to your pages and folders) and custom error pages (so you can keep visitors on your site even when a page doesn’t load). They do not include a dedicated IP address in their hosting plan.

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GreenGeeks Review – Email Features: 9/10

The email features included in all of the hosts we reviewed are essentially the same. Green Geeks hosting provides unlimited POP3/IMAP email accounts, unlimited autoresponders and unlimited mail forwarding/aliases. You also have control over catch-all emails. SPAM Assassin SPAM filtering is also included, which gives you custom filtering and black/white lists. Webmail is included and is compatible with personal email programs (Outlook, Entourage, etc.). Email attachment size on all accounts is limited to 10 MB.

Our Green Geeks review found that they allow mailing lists and include the very popular PHPlist script with each account. While they do have an emails per minute send limit, that number is not given out. They do keep contact with SPAM cop organizations and will suspend accounts from which SPAM is reported.

Be sure to use the throttle function in PHPlist to control your outgoing email rate. Also, if you intend to set up a mailing list it must be double opt in (a functionality included in PHPlist). There is no limit to the number of lists you can have or the number of people on each list. Remember not to max out your emails/hour for just your list or you may not be able to send regular emails. Having a large mailing list is a great way to increase your profits and readership. If your list outgrows your hosting, investing in a dedicated mailing list provider like AWeber is a good idea.

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GreenGeeks Review – Support & Security Features: 9/10

Green Geeks has no setup charge for new accounts and a 30-day money back guarantee if you are not satisfied with their services for any reason. They have a large searchable knowledgebase with video tutorials. They provide 24/7 chat coverage and support / trouble tickets. Their trouble ticket response time is excellent. You will typically get a response in under an hour. At the time of our Green Geeks review, telephone help is available Monday through Friday, 9:00 AM EST to Midnight EST and Saturday – Sunday, 9:00 AM EST to 8:00 PM EST. Their staff is courteous and knowledgeable and can usually assist you with your issue on the spot. We wish they had 24/7 telephone availability like their main competitors and we hope they expand their hours soon.

In addition to free nightly courtesy server backups, you have the option to back up your account from the cPanel administration panel. You can also enable hotlink/leeching protection (to prevent others from displaying your content on their sites using your bandwidth to do it), and password protected directories.

Green Geeks uses Dual Intel Quad Core Xeon processors, 8GB RAM, large RAID 10 storage arrays for maximum performance & redundancy along with 100 Mbps switch connectivity to the Linux servers. They are monitored 24/7 in a technologically advanced data center with redundant UPS, backup power generators and cooling systems as well as a water detection system. The facility boasts an FM 200 fire suppression system with early pre-fire detection mechanisms. The data center is staffed by administrators and security personnel 24/7. Additional security includes biometric and key card security systems with a rack level locking mechanism.

Redundant, top-of-the-line Juniper edge routers and Cisco and Juniper switches enable Green Geeks BGP4 Gigabit connectivity to multiple Fiber GigE Tier 1 backbones. Green Geeks stands behind their service with a 99.9% network uptime guarantee. With uptime monitoring, they have a fantastic track record of maintaining that uptime. In addition to leading edge technology, they also back up their uptime promise with their money-back guarantee.

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GreenGeeks Review – Website Statistics: 10/10

Green Geeks provides all of the standard website statistics for tracking and monitoring your sites. These include raw access logs, error logs, referrer logs, bandwidth usage monitoring and sub-domain statistics. They also include Webalizer and AWStats programs within cPanel to see a detailed graphical representation of all your traffic data.

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GreenGeeks Review – Administration & Software Support: 10/10

GreenGeeks runs the cPanel administration and control panel for your hosting account, the industry’s leading control panel platform. The reason shared hosting users prefer cPanel is its user-friendliness and power. It provides control of everything from script installation and domain modifications to email and FTP. Green Geeks runs the latest versions of all the current web application software, including PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby / Ruby on Rails. Each account has CGI-BIN and SSI capability as well as support for JavaScript and DHTML. Green Geeks allows custom PHP.ini files and has phpMyAdmin for MySQL database management. They have Microsoft FrontPage extensions available and allow uploading sites from Dreamweaver. Green Geeks hosting accounts are WordPress ready.

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GreenGeeks Review – Multimedia Support: 10/10

Green Geeks supports “streaming” audio and video along with Real Audio, Real Video, MIDI, Flash, Shockwave and custom MIME types. Instead of trying to paraphrase for our Green Geeks review, we have listed their streaming content capability directly from their hosting knowledgebase:

Green Geeks does allow our clients to have streaming audio and video files on their web sites so that visitors to our clients web sites can view and hear those audio and video files. You can put a link to any type of audio / video file to play on your website. That link must go out to the location of the file (the direct path of the directory and file) and it will pull up the appropriate player if the visitors browser supports it. This is different however from live broadcasts. Our services do not support true streaming video like ShoutCast as we do not provide a streaming dedicated server. For your convenience, you can upload a media player directly onto your website so that your visitors can play your content.

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GreenGeeks Review – Included Scripts: 10/10

Like many of the other hosts in our reviews, Green Geeks uses the Fantastico script library, which contains multiple free scripts with easy 1-click installation from cPanel. That means you get forums & message boards, form-mail scripts, image galleries, blogs, site builders, content management systems & portals, project management, polls & surveys, FAQs, customer support & ticket generation, shopping cart & e-commerce scripts, a mailing list script, search and a CGI script library. The only script type that seems to be excluded from the Green Geeks script library is chat, but if you need customer service / live support chat applications, these are included.

Some other popular applications available are WordPress, b2evolution, Nucleus, Noahs Classifieds, Drupal, Geeklog, Joomla, Mambo, PHP-Nuke, phpWCMS, phpWebSite, Post-Nuke, Siteframe, TYPO3, Xoops, Crafty Syntax Live Help, Help Center Live, OsTicket, PerlDesk, PHP Support Tickets, Support Logic Helpdesk, Support Services Manager, phpBB, SMF, CubeCart, OS Commerce, Zen Cart, FAQMasterFlex, AccountLab Plus, PhpCOIN, 4Images Gallery, Coppermine Photo Gallery, PHPlist, Advanced Poll, LimeSurvey, PhpESP, dotProject, PHProjekt, Soholaunch Pro Edition, Templates Express, RV Site Builder (included but not in Fantastico Area), TikiWiki, PhpWiki, Moodle, Open-Realty, phpAdsNew, PHPauction, phpFormGenerator and WebCalendar.

GreenGeeks is also the official host for Wiley Publishing’s Drupal For Dummies book. GreenGeeks servers are optimally configured to run Drupal. They also give Drupal hosting customers custom video tutorials as well as where to go to learn Drupal Site Building, Site Structure and Administration Guides. They have even created a GreenGeeks Drupal Quick Starter Guide. That’s why GreenGeeks is the MyMultiHost.com pick for Best Drupal Host.

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GreenGeeks Review – E-Commerce Features: 8/10

Green Geeks does not include a dedicated IP address or a private SSL certificate in their shared hosting plans. A dedicated IP is required if you are going to install a your own SSL certificate. If you have your own web store and merchant account (as opposed to accepting payments through PayPal or Clickbank where they process the transaction and therefore handle the security), and are using shared SSL, your checkout pages would appear in your customer’s browser address bar as “https://secure.greengeeks.com/YourUserName”. A professional and trustworthy web store has their own SSL certificate, which would appear in the customer’s web browser address bar as “https://www.yoursite.com/…/checkoutpage”.

Green Geeks gives you a $25 Yahoo! advertising credit. Unfortunately, that is the only advertising credit you get. We would like to have seen at least some Google Adwords credits, like many of the competing hosts we reviewed. Green Geeks does provide four shopping cart choices that integrate with payment gateways such as PayPal, 2Checkout and Authorize.net. They also provide a variety of free professional website templates for personal or commercial projects.

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4 StarGreenGeeks Review – Overall Score: 73/80

While our Green Geeks review found them to have an all-around decent core plan, friendly and responsive customer service, legitimate uptime claims, hosted web pages load fast, good upload / download speeds and an impressive script library, they do fall short in a couple key areas. Lack of a dedicated IP address, private SSL certificate, no support for true live streaming content, phone assistance (while great) is not 24/7 and offering a very small advertising credit are the main reasons Green Geeks rank is number 6 out of our top 9 hosts. Green Geeks is a good host for personal website, blogs and small businesses that will not rely on search engine advertising dollars for initial exposure or have their own merchant account to sell physical products.

The one feature that makes Green Geeks stand out the most is their commitment to the environment, hence the name Green Geeks. From their site:

Green Geeks pulls energy from the grid just like every web hosting company. In order to compensate for the power we pull from the grid we purchase wind energy credits for the energy we consume from the grid. In fact we replace, with wind power, 3 times the amount of energy used by our servers. So if we pull 1X of power from the grid, we purchase enough wind energy credits to put 3X that amount of clean wind power back into the grid. This allows our customers to say that their web sites are 300% green and are actually helping to make web hosting and power systems greener – not just by covering their carbon footprint, but by covering the carbon footprints of others as well.

But wind power is just the beginning. Green Geeks also has many other programs at the corporate and individual levels to reduce their impact on the environment. Use the link below to visit their website and learn more about their eco conscious company culture. If you feel a responsibility to reduce your carbon footprint or help combat climate change, Green Geeks is the most environmentally friendly webhost in business today and may just be the right host for you.

greengeeks review

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