eStyles Review

eStyles web hosting is an Australian based company that has been in business for over five years now. They are proud of their services and offer a 30 day money back guarantee as insurance, along with testimonials from satisfied customers. eStyles offers other web services to help you develop exactly the kind of website you want and need, but at additional cost. Like other Australian based providers, eStyles is primarily aimed at Australian customers and is proud of that – their servers and customer support centers are all Australian based. Australian webmasters may want to consider this when deciding on a hosting provider.

The problem with eStyles is that they do not offer anything special that would attract customers aside from that. Their prices are higher than those of many competitors’ and they do not offer as many features. They have three packages, all of which include cPanel and the Fantastico one click script installer, weekly data backups, AWStats website statistics, and PHP5 and MySQL 5 support.

The Value Hosting package provides users with 1 GB disk space, 4 GB bandwidth per month, unlimited e-mail accounts and MySQL databases, spam filtering, and nightly backups. This plan costs $8.00 per month or $80.00 for one year. The Business Hosting package offers exactly the same for over twice the cost – $18.00 per month or $160.00 per year. One has to wonder why anyone would choose the Business package over the Value package and the site does not provide any answers. Finally, the Dedicated Server package is $40.00 monthly or $400.00 annually and comes with 10 GB disk space and 20 GB monthly bandwidth, as well as everything else offered with the other two packages.

eStyles also fails on a very important point: If you exceed your disk space or monthly bandwidth limitations, your site is immediately suspended. This is obviously a major problem for any webmaster, as it is almost impossible to predict web traffic. A single spike could result in disaster overnight – the kind of disaster from which almost no business could recover. eStyles notes that they will work with webmasters to alleviate this issue so long as they upgrade to a larger, more expensive, package – an upsell technique some experts have likened to a form of extortion.

The company does provide a lot of other Internet services though, including four tiers of VPS hosting, specialist hosting, domain registration, and search engine optimization (SEO) services. Again, many competitors offer SEO tools and services with their hosting packages and a fair number also offer at least the first year’s domain registration for free.

Even amongst their Australian competitors, eStyles has very little to offer for their prices; there are several Australian web hosting companies who offer better deals with more features. When compared to web hosting providers worldwide, eStyles simply does not stand up.