What Is Web.com Hosting?

Web.com is located in Jacksonville, Florida. It’s been in business since 1997. The company went public with its IPO in 2005 (Nasdaq: WEB). Since then, they’ve acquired at least eight other companies to help round out their service offerings. Once-independent companies like Leads.com, Yodle, and Network Solutions are now housed under the Web.com roof.

Web.com claims to have over three million customers, but since the company offers so many diverse products, it’s not clear how many of these customers are on hosting plans.

The executive team is led by Harvard-graduate David Brown, who has been the company’s Chairman, CEO, and President since 2000. Web.com’s approximately 2,200 employees work in the Americas and the United Kingdom.

Sponsorship Agreements

In 2012, Web.com began sponsoring a series of PGA golf tournaments called the Web.com Tour. To support the tour, they’ve started offering small business awards for the local businesses that lie within geographic reach of the cities on each leg of the tour.

Web.com Builder webpage screenshot
Web.com’s website

Web.com Features and Services

Web.com isn’t merely a web hosting company. It offers a wide variety of services that can be attractive to small businesses:

    • Website Hosting
    • Website Building and Creation
    • Domain Registration
    • E-commerce Websites
    • Mobile Optimization Services
    • Industry-specific Tools for Dentists, Realtors, and Others
    • Automatic Website Backup and Restore
    • Custom WordPress Site Creation
    • Website Security
    • Social Media Marketing
    • Business Email Services

Catering to Small Business Needs

If you want to sell products or services online, then you’ll probably want an e-commerce website.

If you just want to hang your shingle out on the web or provide prospective customers with information like locations, menus, or promotions, then you can opt for the less-expensive regular website plans.

Both regular and e-commerce hosting plans come with features that small business owners need, including:

  1. FTP Accounts
  2. Domain Name
  3. Business E-mail Addresses Accessible via Webmail
  4. Configuration for IMAP, POP3, and SMTP syncing
  5. Contact Management
  6. Business Calendar Services
  7. Spam Protection
  8. E-mail Forwarding
  9. Unlimited Data Transfer.

Types of Hosting Available

Web.com has two kinds of hosting plans, either of which can be purchased with a domain name registration.

  • Regular website hosting
  • E-commerce site hosting.

Shared Hosting

Web.com is a provider of only shared web hosting services. While you can choose a generic shared hosting option or one that offers a bit more and is geared toward those launching an e-commerce site, there are no options for other types of hosting.

If your website or traffic levels grow, you will need to look elsewhere for reseller plans, Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting, or dedicated servers.

Web.com provides support for WordPress sites (including a one-click installer to make setup easy), but the company does not offer specialized WordPress hosting packages.

Developer Options

Web.com’s hosting service is targeted to businesses that might need technical assistance, but they also provide a smattering of development tools like:

  • WordPress CMS
  • Joomla
  • Drupal
  • Message Boards
  • Chat Functionality
  • Photo Galleries
  • Project Management Apps.

Web.com’s servers are UNIX-based and are compatible with your business’s existing software if it runs on Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP5, or Perl.

Choose From 3 Regular Website Hosting Plans

Web.com has six tiers of hosting plans for regular website hosting:

  • Essential Hosting
  • Professional Hosting
  • Premium Hosting
  • Express E-Commerce Hosting
  • Standard E-Commerce Hosting
  • Pro E-Commerce Hosting

Essential Hosting: The Basics

This plan is for businesses or entrepreneurs who merely want to have an online presence. This plan is the least expensive and comes with the lowest caps on FTP accounts, mailboxes, e-mail storage, and MySQL databases. You’ll have limited ability to host multimedia files, high-traffic web pages, or create interactive web forms like newsletter signup pages.

Professional Hosting: For Small Businesses and Busy Sites

is for small businesses that want to offer more engaging content types and expect more site visitors. Most businesses will probably opt for this plan since it’s affordable and provides a good deal of flexibility, especially if you’re not sure exactly what kind of content you’ll be hosting.

Premium Hosting: Scale Up

This plan offers more of everything compared to the previous two plans. It’s not clear how much better this plan is compared to the Professional plan for most businesses.

It’s probably only a good choice for businesses that anticipate a large volume of traffic

Selling Online? Here Are the E-Commerce Hosting Plans

If you intend to sell anything through your small business website, you’ll need to go with one of Web.com’s e-commerce hosting plans.

These plans include shopping cart functionality, inventory management, and other features that make selling over the internet easy and secure for both you and your customers.

Express E-commerce Hosting

This plan allows for up to 20 products or services, includes the online store builder, and gives you professional (i.e., domain-based) e-mail addresses.

The transaction fees for this plan are higher than for the Standard and Pro plans. You won’t get e-mail autoresponders and you’ll only get a shared security certificate with this plan. Entrepreneurs just starting out might consider starting with this plan.

Standard E-Commerce Hosting: List Up to 500 Products

Standard E-Commerce will likely meet the needs of most small businesses (and some ambitious solo entrepreneurs) because it offers up to 500 products or services and offers a lower transaction fee.

The best feature of this plan is that it allows you to set up e-mail autoresponders for communicating with your customers based on their behavior and purchases.

Pro E-Commerce Hosting: List Unlimited Products

Gets all the features of the smaller plans above plus unlimited product listings which may suit some small businesses with huge product/service inventories.

It also offers a transaction fee that is lower than the other two plans. A dedicated SSL security certificate is included. You’ll need to do the math to see if this plan is worth the extra cost.

All of the e-commerce plans above come with a bundle of e-mail addresses for you and your employees. You get unlimited data transfer which means you’re free to use large images or multimedia files (like videos) to showcase your products.

Engage With Automatic Recommendations and Upsells

A particularly cool feature of all the e-commerce plans is that they come with automatic product recommendations and upselling. When a customer views Product A, the site will show them additional recommended products based on the transactional behavior of other customers who also viewed Product A.

E-Commerce Payment Processing and Shipping

For an e-commerce site, secure, dependable, and easy payment processing is crucial. Web.com allows your customers to pay with credit cards or PayPal. Depending on what state your business is located in, Web.com’s payment processing system will also add the appropriate tax rates.

Your customers can choose from domestic and international shipping services via FedEx, UPS, DHL, USPS, and Canada Post.

Are There Transaction Fees?

In addition to the monthly hosting fee for an e-commerce site, Web.com also takes a percentage of your sales off the top as an additional requirement for your hosting your site with them. If you choose to offer credit card payments, an additional percentage of those transactions are subject to fees.

View Web.com hosting plans

The Web.com Control Panel

All Web.com hosting packages come with a GUI-based control panel you can use to manage your web server and website, view resource usage, and handle all account and billing-related matters. Web.com plans to ship with either the Plesk Control Panel or the Virtuozzo Control Panel.

Website Creation Tools and Services

Whether you pick one of Web.com’s regular hosting plans or an e-commerce plan, you’ll have the same options for designing your website. If you’ve got good design instincts or prefer strict control over the way your website works, you can opt to use Web.com’s tools and wizards to create your site in DIY mode.

Alternatively, you can pay a little extra to let Web.com handle the site creation based on your requirements and ideas.

Note that the initial setup of your site is free but changes you make further down the line may incur fees.

Do-It-Yourself Website Builder

Judging from Web.com’s website, their greatest selling feature is that they’ve made it very easy to create a website yourself. Their DIY, drag-and-drop wizards allow even the least tech-savvy entrepreneurs to put together a professional-looking website without much hassle. Some of the site-building features you’ll see are:

  • Hundreds of Designs to Choose From
  • Thousands of Images to Use
  • Endless Design Possibilities
  • Drag and Drop Functionality
  • Unlimited Access to Website Coaches
  • A Free Domain
  • A Business Email Address.

Websites designed using the builder come with a free domain name and business email. You can also integrate with other Web.com services/offerings, such as email and social media marketing, SEO and pay-per-click management, and e-commerce/local business listings.

If you do decide to build a website yourself and get stuck, Web.com gives you access to design support experts who can answer your questions.

Get a Custom Website Created

Are you an entrepreneur who strives to be a jack-of-all-trades? With Web.com, you can opt-out of the technical part of website building, saving you time and potential headaches, by using their designers.

After consulting with you about your needs and ideas, Web.com will create a customized WordPress site (or an e-commerce store) in about a week.

There is no up-front fee for the website creation, but be sure to explore the post-launch monthly fees that will be charged to you (they include hosting and site maintenance, among other things).

A perk for small businesses is that Web.com’s custom designs include search engine optimization to help your site get found. Even after your initial design is online, you can continue to contact Web.com’s support team for tweaks and long-term maintenance.

Secure Your Site and Build Trust with SSL Certificates

For small businesses without IT experts to lean on, understanding a hosting provider’s approach to website security is critical from both a technology and financial standpoint.

Warranties Against Breaches

Web.com offers various types of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates. SSL certificates use encryption to protect transactions from your site to the customer and vice versa. They also come with tiered warranties against breaches — from $10,000 to $250,000 depending on the certificate.

Web.com provides shared SSL for the first two tiers of e-commerce hosting plans. Shared SSL certificates are purchased by the hosting provider and protect all of Web.com’s customers housed on all of their servers.

PCI Compliance

The Pro hosting plan provides a dedicated SSL certificate which is unique to your business. All e-commerce plans are Payment Card Industry (PCI) certified.

Add-Ons and Premium Services

Regardless of which hosting plan you choose, you can add functionality a la carte.

Some of these features can be beneficial to entrepreneurs and small businesses but they can also be expensive. Make sure to get a quote in writing from Web.com before committing to any add-ons, then assess whether your business can handle the additional costs involved.

These services include the following:

  • Perfect Privacy
  • Shopping Cart
  • Take-a-Payment
  • Mobile Converter
  • Additional Domains
  • Marketing Services like Leadstream lead generation and SEO

Perfect Privacy

This is what Web.com calls its domain masking service. That means your business’s name, address, and phone number (or the person who purchased the domain) aren’t published on the web for public viewing. It’s not provided for free so you’ll have to ask for it.

Shopping Cart

This functionality can be added to a regular site later after it’s been launched, so you don’t have to make this decision up front. What’s more, you can add a shopping cart to a website hosted outside of Web.com.

Take-A-Payment

This feature from Web.com will allow your externally hosted website to take credit cards.

Mobile Converter

If your company’s website is hosted externally to Web.com and you realize its theme/design isn’t responsive (mobile-friendly), you can purchase Web.com’s mobile converter to update it. Google’s current algorithms downrank sites that aren’t responsive.

Additional Domains

Web.com is happy to register as many domains as you’d like even if they aren’t hosted in its ecosystem. That’s because, in 2011, Web.com purchased Network Solutions, originally the internet’s sole provider of domain names.

Get Marketing and Design Help From Professionals

These are for small businesses that need help marketing and advertising their website. Web.com’s in-house marketers can help you set up and manage a Facebook page, run organic search optimizations, purchase pay-per-click (PPC) ads, and generate leads.