Apollo Web Hosting review

Friday, June 02, 2006

$13.96 /month

5000 MB Storage

150 GB Transfer

4 Websites

200 Email Addresses

Dedicated IP

Spam/Virus Filter

Design Tools

Shopping Cart

4 Websites Included

Apollo Web Hosting

Apollo Hosting is excellent for personal and small business and ecommerce sites, shared Hosting offers a secure, reliable and affordable way to get your website up and running in only 10 minutes! All the tools you need to build your site, set up an online store, promote and track it are included free. All with a 30 day money back guarantee.

Apollo Hosting has been in business since 1999 serving over 30,000 customers worldwide!

Our corporate offices are located in the high-tech city of Austin, Texas. We are a privately owned company that has shown a profit since we first began in November of 1999. Continued commitment to providing the most powerful Web Hosting tools & the best customer support is key to our ongoing success.

Apollo Hosting was one of the first companies to offer 24/7/365 Live Technical Support Chat and toll-free phone support. Technical Support is completely local; we do not outsource personnel.

Our Total Solutions Hosting which gives you all the tools you need to create a powerful presence on the Internet. Our commitment is to our customers. Offering products and services that no other Hosting company is offering continues a tradition of Apollo Hosting paving the way in the Web Hosting industry.

We are proud members of the Better Business Bureau Online and have strategic alliances with industry leaders such as Microsoft, RedHat Linux, MIVA Small Business, SWSoft, Overture, Cisco & Genuity.

Why Apollo

1: Four Superfast Teir1 Connections

Apollo Hosting maintain four Tier 1 Backbone connection ensuring fast, reliable connectivity. Furthermore our servers are custom-built machines designed for a 24x7 web serving environment. We have a historical 99.9% server uptime. More

2: Lots of Guarantees! Price Freeze, Uptime, & 30 Day Money Back

Apollo stands by its service, and we provide a number of guarantees to back it up. Once you sign up, your rates will not change with our Price Freeze Guarantee. Your site will stay up with our 99.9% Uptime Guarantee. See our SLA for more details. We are so sure that you will love Hosting with Apollo Hosting, that we back up all of our Hosting plans with a 30 day money back guarantee. If you are in any way dissatisfied within your first 30 days of service, we will refund your money*. What's more our 'No Risk Guarantee' means we give refunds on your unused Hosting, after charging you for months already used, should you want to cancel prepaid service.*

3: Live Support 24x7, 365 days a Year - Since 1999

Someone is always available to answer your questions. Chat with our technical support representatives LIVE ONLINE anytime - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year! We also offer toll free support line 7 days a week so if you prefer speaking to someone.

Our tech support is housed in-house, unlike many companies who contract tech support overseas. We're proud to support our local community.

4: Get Traffic Tool Box

Apollo's Get Traffic Tool Box is a suite of software provided directly over the internet designed to optimize and promote your site. Featuring search engine submission, banner impressions, a newsletter, and much more, this is an indispensable tool for promoting your online business.

5: Award Winning Industry Leader

Apollo Hosting has been a member of the Better Business Bureau Online since 1999 and hasn't received one complaint. We have also received several industry awards for the quality and value of our Hosting solutions.

6: MailBoxCop Spam/Virus Filtering Software

Don't rely on your Hosting company to decide for you what should be filtered, and risk losing important email! MailBoxCop gives you access to your own online quarantine where you can view Spam/Virus email that has been filtered. This innovative filter is constantly updated to stay ahead of the most recent threats.

7: Up to 7 Months Free Hosting

We offer large discounts for pre-payments. So if you want to only be billed every 2 years, we will give you a 30% discount, or 7 months free Hosting. We also offer generous discounts for quarterly, semi-annually, and annual payments.

8: Miva Premier Partner & FrontPage Certified

Apollo Hosting has been a partner of Miva Corporation for 3 years and have been awarded the title of 'Premier Partner'. This means that we are trained to support Miva Ecommerce products and our technicians are available anytime day or night to help you with your Miva storefront. After rigorous testing of our servers, Microsoft recognized us as a 'Certified Microsoft® FrontPage® Service Provider'. We have custom configured servers which are optimized to support FrontPage Server Extensions.

9: Feature Packed Plans & Multiple Websites

All Apollo Hosting plans and solutions come fully loaded with a whole host of value-added features and powerful programming tools. From multiple websites on one account, Miva Merchant ($695 Value), MailBoxCop Spam/Virus filtering, and lots of emails to MySQL databases and support for PHP, ASP, Perl and more, Apollo Hosting's plans are feature packed. And with our state-of-the-art Control Panel, all these tools are always right at your fingertips.

10: Upgrade Easily As Your Business Grows

Apollo Hosting grows as your website grows. We offer 3 types of Hosting to meet the needs of a site as it expands. Start at just $6.96 per month and upgrade as your business expands. Most upgrades can be made in less than a day, with no upgrade fees. Many Hosting companies offering a limited selection of plans or only 1 plan can't meet the needs of sites that outgrow their resources. At Apollo, we have the flexibility to provide you Hosting long after other companies offerings would be exhausted.

Data Center

Fast, Reliable Internet Connections

Apollo Hosting customers have direct fiber optic connections with Frontier GlobalCenter, Qwest Communications, and Genuity, a division of GTE. These tier 1 providers service such giants as Yahoo!, Netscape®, Ebay®, and USA TODAY. With these three carriers, our router has up to 150,000 possible routes to send each packet of data. Because your site will actually be on a backbone, you will be provided with one of the fastest, most reliable connections available.

We are also connected to Qwest® Communication's OC192 line which provides us with redundancy and increased routes to Europe, Latin America and Asia.

Industry analysts claim that telecom circuit failure is to blame for nearly 70% of all server downtime over 10 hours. Because of our unique Internet connection, we do not need to connect to the Internet via a telecom circuit as most of our competitors do. Instead, we have independent cables which run from our NOC directly to the FGC and Qwest points of presence. No matter what our client's bandwidth needs are, we have the scalability to meet them.

In early October 1999, we added connectivity from Level 3 Communications®. Level 3 was described in USA Today as "a dream team with a dream network." With the fundamental change in communication technology at hand, they are the first to build an international end to end communications network, based entirely on IP technology. To implement this new technology, Level 3 plans to construct local networks in 50 cities across the United States, all interconnected by an intercity or long distance network that will extend nearly 16,000 miles.

Reliable Connection

Yahoo! also connects directly using Frontier GlobalCenter. If you can reach Yahoo!, you can reach our network. Frontier GlobalCenter's ground-breaking 460 Gbps network runs Border Gateway Protocol to 25 other major carriers through over 25 high-speed private peering arrangements, providing the fastest, most efficient and most reliable network available today

Dedicated Connection

Some web providers operate an additional dial-up Internet service which slows down their connection to the Internet. We are not Internet Access providers - our scalable bandwidth lines are entirely dedicated to Web Hosting!

Fast, Reliable Servers

Our servers are custom-built machines designed for a 24/7 web serving environment. All of our servers are equipped with dual redundant 450-watt power supplies, hot swap Fujitsu drives and force-filtered cooling systems. Our Network Operations Center (NOC) is equipped with standby machines, industry-leading Liebert uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) and a temperature-controlled environment, all located in a secure, monitored facility.

Force Filtered Cooling

All the drives, motherboards, and power supplies in our NOC are in cases with a positive pressure filtered-air environment. Two large fans pull filtered air into the protective case, and the components within are cooled by fans which circulate this purified air. The constant introduction of clean air into the case creates a positive pressure environment ensuring that dust and particles remain out.

Hot Swap Fujitsu Drives

The drives and drive bays of our servers are all constructed from high-grade aluminum, and rest in a Shock Mounted Drive Cage, which adds to the durability of the hardware. We back up our servers nightly. If the industrial grade drive were to fail, all we would have to do is copy the backup (never more than 24 hours old) onto a standby machine which is already on-line. The site would be up and running within a matter of minutes.

Redundant Hot Swap Power Supplies

Each server has dual-redundant hot swap power supplies. If one of these power supplies were to fail, the server would not go down because each power supply is capable of running the server by itself, indefinitely. Meanwhile, alarms would alert our technicians to the problem; they would restore redundancy with one of our spares and then service the failed supply unit. During all this, sites on our network would never be down.

Standby Servers

We keep spares on-line of all CPU configurations. If the server were to experience a hardware failure we would literally turn a key, grab the handle on the drive, pull it out, and insert it into an identical standby CPU. We would reboot the second machine and the server would be up and running again in a matter of minutes.

list of the tools :

1.) Shopping Cart

The heart of any business website, a shopping cart is how your customers browse and request to purchase your products. Ease-of-use is a key element in a user's shopping cart experience. Our plans provide a variety of solutions to meet your shopping cart needs.

2.) Secure Servers

Trust is an integral part of any business' shopping experience. Provide your customers the security they expect when submitting their credit card information online. Our Shared Hosting Plans offer free shared SSL. VPS or Shared customers may optionally purchase a personal SSL Certificate.

3.) Merchant Account

Once your online transactions are secure, you will need a merchant account and payment gateway to charge your customers. Apollo Hosting partners with 2 respected merchant service providers, PayQuake and E-Commerce Exchange.

4.) Marketing

Your store needs customers to thrive. The Get Traffic Tool Box will help you in driving those customers to your site. The Get Traffic Tool Box covers most aspects of online marketing, from newsletters to banner impressions, search engine optimization to submissions.

5.) 5 Step Guide

Our 5 Steps to Ecommerce guide is a quick, easy-to-use tutorial on the basics of selling on the web. It covers everything from shopping carts to SSL. It will provide a road map for your ecommerce endeavors.

Ecommerce & Business Hosting For the Novice Or The Expert

Apollo Hosting makes ecommerce Web Hosting easy. Whether you’re a seasoned player in the world of ecommerce or just starting out, we have the right business Web Hosting plans for you. We provide a reliable ecommerce Hosting solution that adapts to the growing needs of your business. We offer a comprehensive range of tools in our business Web Hosting plans, like the Miva Merchant shopping cart, that make selling on the web a breeze! Our affordable ecommerce Hosting rates allow you to save more money and invest this capital in your business where you need it most.

Selling On The Web Made Easy

Apollo’s ecommerce Hosting solution with the Miva Merchant shopping cart is the perfect ecommerce answer for businesses of all sizes. The Miva Merchant shopping cart is easy to deploy on your existing web site. The user-friendly administrative interface of our ecommerce Hosting tools give you full control over your online store, making it easy to manage and maximize the ROI on your online business. Get ecommerce savvy with Apollo Hosting and start selling on the web today.

visit Apollo Web Hosting