Globat Review
Globat was founded in 2002 and has quickly grown to become one of the larger web hosting companies in the industry today. They are based in Los Angeles, California and currently boast over 75,000 customers. Globat concentrate their efforts into two shared hosting plans; the “Terabyte Extreme ” ($7.95/month for 12 months) and the “Terabyte XS ” ($19.95/month for 12 months).
Features
Below are what we consider to be the stand out features of Globat’s two hosting plans the “Terabyte Xtreme ” (TX) and “Terabyte XS ” (TXS) packages. For a full list of both plans features please visit the Globat website here.
Disk Space – 1000GB for Tx, and 5000GB for TXS. Extraordinarily large amounts of web space which points to huge quantities of overselling.
Bandwidth – 1000GB/month (or 1 Terabyte) on the TX and 2000GB/month (2 Terabytes) with the TXS. Again Globat are overselling resources pretty heavily – don’t expect to actually be allowed to use these vast amounts, luckily chances are that you won’t need to anyway. If your website managed to use up 1% of that bandwidth limit then you would have a website with plenty of traffic.
Multiple domains – This feature allows you to host multiple websites on the same hosting account, 10 on the TX, and 100 with the TXS. This is a good feature and gives you a better chance of utilizing those disk space and bandwidth allocations.
1 Year money back guarantee – However, in Globat’s terms of service it states “If prior to the end of the agreed on Term, Customer cancels the Services for any reason, or Globat terminates the Agreement due to Customer's breach of the Globat User Agreement or Acceptable Usage Policy, Customer will be charged a US$150.00 Breach-Of-Contract fee per domain”
Go Build – Website building software.
$50 worth of Yahoo marketing credits.
Unlimited e-mail accounts.
Unlimited MySQL databases.
Customer service and technical support
O.K let’s start with the positives namely Globat’s staff are very polite; unfortunately that’s as good as it gets. Globat offer 24/7, toll free phone, live chat, and e-mail ticket services, all of which deliver a largely unsatisfactory level of performance. Response times are poor and at times truly awful. There are many reports of customer’s e-mails being completely ignored for several days even after repeated e-mails are sent. In fact this actually seems to be a tactic that Globat employs on purpose when faced with problems it does not want to resolve. Once you finally do get hold of a support operative your chances of finding and end to your problem don’t improve too much because the quality of technical support on offer is way below par.
Performance
First of all, don’t expect Globat to be in any hurry to set up your hosting account, last time we tested Globat they told us that it would take 48 hours (the best hosts take 15 minutes), well that time passed and after repeated calls to customer support it transpired that someone at their end had “forgotten to turn it on”!
Server performance is just about acceptable with server speed and reliability around average for this type of hosting.
The control panel is Globat’s own design, but is most closely related to an H-Sphere. Sadly we rate it even less than a standard H-Sphere, which is saying something!
Our Verdict
There is one aspect of hosting with Globat that we have saved to the end of this review. We really feel that it graphically illustrates the sort of web host that Globat is. Once you have the misfortune to sign up with Globat they make it very difficult for you to leave – let’s say that you sign up for a year; at the end of that year you think that you would be able to move on right? Wrong! Globat will automatically charge you for another year and lock you in with clauses and extortionate cancellation fees. The only way to prevent this (other than not signing up with them in the first place) is to cancel your account more than 15 days prior to your renewal date, but even then make sure that you get some sort of written confirmation.
Obviously we are going to issue you with a big warning to avoid Globat at all costs. However, if you are new to the world of web hosting please don’t let this review put you off; there are plenty of good web hosts out there, and the best place to find the most suitable one for you is right here at Which-Hosting.com, please click here to view our Web Host Ratings Chart.