A Review of Globat

Globat (www.globat.com) falls into the category of “medium-sized web hosting company” with the goal of being dedicated to providing SMBs, entrepreneurial mom and pop shops, novices and seasoned webmasters alike with web hosting solutions at low costs. By simply looking over the Globat.com web site, one might conclude that Globat seems serious about accomplishing this goal. Globat states that they’re committed to providing the finest customer service in the industry. Read on for the full Globat Review.

Get me out of Here!

Globat is a web hosting company that provides shared hosting exclusively and attempts to make hosting easy for people just starting out. Founded in 2001, Globat LLC is based in Los Angeles. This Globat review will focus on their web hosting offerings. Globat offers two web hosting plans, as well as design services. They claim to provide web hosting for over 100,000 web sites. Although they may be “Always up, fast, and easy”, I didn’t find their plans to be extremely competitive or their service to be exceptional from my experience with Globat.

Globat Features and Pricing

The company provides two shared hosting plans. The lower level plan offers much more disk space, but a lot less bandwidth than other hosts such as HostGator or BlueHost. It allows for up to 10 domain names to be hosted on the account. On the upper level plan, there is five times as much disk space and twice the bandwidth for more than twice the price of the lower plan. The upper plan boasts the ability to host up to 100 domain names on the one account.

Globat doesn’t charge for setup on either plan, and they offer domain name registration (free for the initial period, $14.95/year thereafter) with a privacy option.

Globat Terms of Service

The lowest available billing cycle that Globat offers is 12 months. Therefore if a customer were to cancel after the 30 day money back guarantee they would be losing the rest of their year worth of hosting that they were forced to pay up front. Not only that, but they will also be charged a hefty $150 “Breach-of-Contract” fee, which by industry standards is absolutely ridiculous. Therefore, by selecting the less expensive plan for the one year, it would be cheaper to wait until the billing cycle runs out than to cancel it. Many hosts will offer a minimum of three or six months for billing, but Globat locks a customer in for at least a year.

The Globat Control Panel

To manage your hosting account, you are required to use Globat’s proprietary control panel called the “Globat Command Console.” It offers just enough to be “commanding” by providing the basic functions for administrating a hosting account. Database administration is provided through phpMyAdmin and web site statistics are trackable with AWStats, both standard applications in the hosting industry. The control panel provides some site marketing tools and resources that are good for beginners, such as a search engine submission tool. The control panel also provides a highly informative FAQ section. Overall, the control panel is easy to use, but not as feature-rich as the industry standard cPanel.

Globat Customer Service

The customer service at Globat did not impress me. Their toll free number is not highly visible throughout the site, unless you stumble upon one of their support pages (which use their old site design). If you don’t happen to find this toll-free number, you’re forced to dial their local number that is provided at the top of their homepage (which is the number they apparently want you to call).

Upon calling their phone number I discovered it was available from 6 AM – 6 PM PT, 7 days a week. Yet this was after 10 PM ET on a Wednesday and I wanted to talk to someone live. I visited their support site that stated that Live chat was available 24/7 so I click on the chat icon only to discover that their operators were offline at that moment. That was 10:20 PM, and so I tried again at around 10:35 PM and saw that it was available. I filled in their six forms and two check boxes and click submit to speak to a live representative. While I had been filling out the form their reps must have left their post again because I received the same message as before, though this time annoyed at my form-filling. Perhaps this does not happen a lot, but 24/7 does not allow for unavailability.

My only option left was emailing them, which I didn’t do that night. I did try their live chat a few days later around 4 PM, selecting sales this time instead. The representative, who wasn’t very professional, assisted me with my basic pre-sales questions. For example, when I inquired about the number of subdomains that were available on the lower level plan I was informed there were none provided, but he stated “I will give you free,” though the support is in-house and therefore not an issue of outsourcing. He threw more deals at me in attempt to get me to sign up by giving me x months free when I signed up for y billing cycle. Although he was nice enough, I wasn’t really impressed with his service. I tried back an hour later with the sales chat and received the same guy. He stated that it was a coincidence. It caused me to wonder about how many employees they had behind this company, yet he used their “100,000 customers” statement to make the point that they have a lot of employees.

Later that afternoon I tried their phone support at about 5:30 PM ET. I was greeted by a professional voice recording , which identified the company as Globat and was promptly provided with menu options. I selected their technical support option and was notified that I was first in line in the waiting queue. A moment later, I was connected with a representative who was easy to understand and answered my feature question without putting me on hold. He even looked up my account to see if the feature was possibly available for me as an option, as it was not standard. The call was placed at 5:26 PM and ended on 5:29 PM. I was glad I didn’t have to wait for a representative and the service was respectable.

Although the service when you get a hold of someone is good, it is not accessible around the clock. It’s not always between the hours of 6 AM and 6 PM when you’d liked to be able to speak to someone live on the phone. Though this support is okay, it’s not as good as hosts like HostGator who provide 24/7 phone support.

After my live chat and phone experiences, I decided to test their ticket support as well. I submitted a ticket at 7:18 PM that same evening and did not receive a reply that night. Two days passed and I still had not received a reply. This conveys to me that if there live chat happens to be unavailable, although they claim “24/7” availability, you might have to wait until the next day or longer to be able to get a response to an issue. Other hosts take only minutes to respond to support tickets; not hours. Globat charges a price that should deliver more availability and quicker response times from their support team. The live chat representative I spoke to told me that many people switch to Globat because they can’t talk to anyone at their old host. Globat certainly has support available most of the time, but many hosts have moved beyond this standard and provide true 24/7 support via phone, email, and live chat.

Summary

The results of this Globat review showed that the company is likely a good choice for individuals who are somewhat new to the hosting industry and creating a web site. They provide a site builder and an accessible, though not extremely powerful, control panel through which to administrate a web site. They provide support which is adequate to most, but at a given moment their 24/7 live chat temporarily might not be available, which may be a customer’s last resort. Therefore, the service does not provide for the most demanding of customers.

Website: Globat