Website Hosting Overview
TigerTech website hosting offers a variety of web hosting plans ranging from affordable entry-level hosting to business class hosting. They feature competitive pricing, optional month-to-month contracts, flexible upgrade options, no-charge hosting transfer from your old web host, and free WHOIS domain privacy. As a company, they support renewable energy projects as a way of offsetting their own energy footprint. Customers rave about TigerTech’s customer support, reliability, and uptime.
TigerTech Tech Support
TigerTech takes customer support seriously. The feedback on their tech support is overwhelmingly positive. A quick scan of Twitter comments is nothing short of glowing.
“The support at tigertech.net rocks! Kudos for being on the ball guys!” – @JoshAK
“MAJOR props to @tigertech – the ONLY webhost I recommed – After email outage they credited my client & me ONE FULL YEAR” – @holisticgeek
Type of Hosting
TigerTech offers shared hosting plans only. In a shared web hosting service, many websites reside on a single web server. This is an economical alternative to dedicated hosting or managed hosting, where a client leases an entire server.
Backup Solutions
TigerTech makes a nightly backup of your files, email and databases stored on their servers. From TigerTech’s control panel, you can review the backups that have been made for your site, and you can also make extra backups. Backup files can be accessed using FTP or command-line shell. TigerTech does both on-site and off-site backups. The backups visible in your control panel are on-site backups, which are stored on separate servers for redundancy, rather than the same server where your website resides. They also make daily off-site backups for additional protection.
Software
TigerTech hosting plans support MySQL databases, PHP5. Perl CGI, and Ruby on Rails. They offer one-click WordPress installs. They do not support SimpleScripts or similar one-click installers, but they do offer detailed installation instructions for many common applications, such as Joomla!, phpBB, MediaWiki, Movable Type, and more.
Traffic
All TigerTech hosting accounts feature “unlimited bandwidth.” More visitors and larger file size mean you’ll use more bandwidth. Note that “unlimited bandwidth” doesn’t mean you have an infinite amount of bandwidth; it simply means that you’ll never be charged extra for the amount of bandwidth that you use. Per TigerTech’s bandwidth speed policy, they’ll allow sites to “burst” up to 100Mbps (100 megabits per second), which is sufficient for most sites.
TigerTech Reliability & Uptime
TigerTech’s third-party verified uptime is 99.99%. If your service isn’t available at least 99.9% of the time in a given month, they offer a full credit if you contact them about the problem.
Speed
Speed tests for TigerTech hosted websites were not available as of the writing.
Space
The entry-level Silver Plan offers 10 GB of disk space, with Gold plan offering 20 GB and Platinum offering 50 GB. Any plan can be upgraded for $1 per GB per month.
Caching Options
For customers running WordPress, TigerTech recommends using the WP Super Cache plugin. This plugin generates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog, resulting in much faster page load time, and greater site capacity due to decreased load on the webserver.
Statistics/Logging
TigerTech webhosting supports AWStats, a popular web site statistics program which comes preinstalled for all accounts. Raw access log files are available for advanced users.
TigerTech Hosting Price
The Silver TigerTech web hosting plan is $6.95 per month prepaid annually. This package includes 10 GB of disk space, unlimited bandwidth, 50 POP and IMAP email boxes, email virus scanning and filtering, 20 MySQL databases, PHP5 support, Per CGI support, Ruby on Rails, 5% script CPU time, and SSH/telnet Linux shell access.
Upgrade Path
TigerTech lets you switch plans at any time, with no penalty. You can start with the entry level plan, and upgrade as your site grows.
Within your existing plan, you can also upgrade individual services as needed, without having to move to a whole new service level. You can purchase extra disk space, extra POP mailboxes, extra MySQL databases, and extra script CPU time.
Green/Energy Features
One of TigerTech’s goals as a company is to save energy, support renewable power, and offset carbon emissions. They contribute to Carbonfund.org each year as a way to offset their estimated CO2 emission. In turn, Carbonfund.org uses the contributions to fund solar, wind, biomass, and geothermal energy programs.
TigerTech Quality
TigerTech website hosting meets the standards necessary to be awarded level-one “Geek Certified” status. A level one certification through the third-party “Geek Certified” organization is based on the following quality measures.
1 – Customer service response time of 5 hours or less.
2 – Staff with “a thorough understanding of industry terms and standards.”
3 – Automated systems to handle customer support requests.
4 – More than one method for contacting customer support – email and phone.
5 – Detailed and informative website.
6 – Professional company appearance.
TigerTech supports both POP and IMAP email standards, meaning you can get email using email clients that support one of these standards, such as Outlook, Apple Mail, or Entourage.
With TigerTech’s webmail pages, you can send and receive email from any Web browser. This is helpful if you’re checking your email from a library, Internet cafe, or friend’s computer.
Email flowing through TigerTech hosting accounts is automatically checked for viruses using ClamAV antivirus scanner. New virus patterns are updated hourly, so you can be sure you’re receiving the latest and greatest virus protection. While this is helpful for minimizing the email-borne viruses, it is no substitute for desktop anti-virus software, which protects your computer from viruses from other sources, such as software you’ve downloaded.
Domains and Domain Privacy
TigerTech offers free WHOIS privacy for domain names registered with them. This means they publish their own post office box, own phone number, and a specially formatted email address – rather than exposing your own contact information. They also offer the option to disable WHOIS privacy protection for customers who want their direct contact information displayed in the WHOIS record.
Subdomains
All of TigerTech’s web hosting plans offer unlimited subdomains, enabling you to use different host names in the web browser address bar. To create a subdomain, you’ll simply add a new folder at the top level of your website directory. They also support email for subdomains. For example, you may want an email address “[email protected]” to correspond with one of your website subdomains.
Transferring Webhosting From Other Hosts
TigerTech’s transfer service is a useful way to help you get from your old web host to Tiger. There is no additional charge for the service. They also offer to renew your transferred domain name registration when it expires, again at no extra charge. (Most customers transfer their domain name to Tiger as part of a host transfer.) Remember – if you take advantage of the web site host migration service, don’t cancel your service with your old host until Tiger lets you know it’s safe to do so.
User-friendliness
TigerTech’s control panel enables customers to renew domain names, lock or unlock domain names to prevent transfer, update contact information, and more. They can also change credit card information, view website stats for hosted websites, create MySQL databases and email addresses, install WordpPress, and more. Note that TigerTech hosting accounts to not include cPanel, a popular web hosting management tool, but rather their own custom management tool.
TigerTech Guarantee
TigerTech offers a 90-day money back guarantee. Cancel within 90 days of signing up and you’ll receive a full refund.
Cancellation Policy
The TigerTech cancellation policy is flexible. Customers can cancel at any time and receive a full refund of unused prepayments.
