Overview:
Founded in 1998, Hostway is one of the top five Web hosting companies. It prides itself on bringing easy-to-use and innovative products to its customers.
Pros: The company offers both single-user plans and plans for businesses with more than one user. Their single user plans, unlike other companies, offer two months of free service, unlimited number of mailboxes, and no set-up fees. They also offer a free upgrade to Exchange 2007, which is often much more expensive with other companies that offer the same thing. You also get SharePoint for 2 users (40 MB) and free ActiveSync. Their multi-user plans offer the same things for the same price.
Cons: There aren’t many cons about this company, but we were able to find one small one – Hostway only offers 50 MB of public storage, unlike other companies that offer unlimited folders for free. Extra storage will cost you. As well, their extra storage costs are slightly higher than other companies – $5.95 for 100 MB, $49.95 for 1 GB. As well, there is a maximum recipient level of 100.
Detailed Provider Information:
Version of BES: Hostway uses Microsoft Exchange 2007.
Plans and Pricing: Hostway offers six service tiers, and all mailboxes include 7GB of storage. Per user per month, a single mailbox costs $11.95, five cost $10.95, 10 cost $9.95, 25 cost $8.95, 50 cost $7.95, and 100 cost $6.95. Users can send emails of up to 50MB, and all plans include a free download of Microsoft Outlook 2007, plus ActiveSync. An additional 1GB of storage costs $5.95 per month.
BES costs an additional $9.95 per month.
Firewall Protection: As a Microsoft certified company, Hostway ensures that your data and mail is protected by network tools.
Anti-Spam and Virus Protection: The company provides free anti-virus and anti-spam in all of their plans.
Set-up Fee: There are no set-up fees with Hosway..
Other Devices Supported: Hostway supports and is partners with DataViz, Palm, Motorola, Nokia, Sony and Symbian.
Customer Service: You get 24/7 technical support with Hostway, and the Website provides resources.
Backup History Storage: Hostway offers daily backups so that you won’t lose your data. It also offers disaster recovery so that you won’t have to start over if something unthinkable happens to your servers.
Uptime Guarantee: Hostway offers 99.9% uptime guarantee.
Additional Services: Hostway offers Web hosting, domain name management, Web design, online marketing and biz applications.
Fee to Change BlackBerry For Current Customers: We attempted to contact Hostway numerous times to get the answer to this question. However, after waiting on hold for customer service for 22 minutes and then 34 minutes with no response either time and numerous emails asking the question that received no response, we were unable to get an answer.
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Hostway is great unless you use the Exchange Mail. It has been down three times since I got it late last year. Each time it kills my email access for about a week. They haven't lost any emails but they have lost me business!
Our company uses their Hosted Exchange service. It is terrible. We go down for hours at a time. This week we lost 2 days worth of email. Their tech support queue takes over an hour to get a hold of a rookie level support representative. DO NOT USE!
Our email service with hostway.co.uk has been down now for 6 days. Thats SIX days without email. SIX days and they havent been able to fix the problem. It owuld affcet thousands of customers. Of course, their phone support is non existent - our calls transfer to an answering machine. Absolutely shocking service, and an obvious inability to fix the probelm. Incredible.
My exchange has also been affected by this recent outage. I had 7 days without email at all (27th June 08 - 4th July 08) and now we are all still waiting for our folders to be restored - check their status page for their vague explanation. Dreadful support and poor timescale for their two-bit recovery process. I can't understand why there are not more people complaining about this outage. My business has suffered but I doubt I'll get a response if I complain (which I intend to do WHEN they finally restore all my mail folders)