Looking to build a website? Whether you need simple pages with basic business details or a full e-commerce store, choosing the right web hosting service is essential.
Register.com offers hosting for both types of sites, in addition to the domain-registration capabilities for which it is best known.
The service lacks most of the mid- and high-end features (for example, cloud, dedicated, VPS and WordPress hosting) offered by DreamHost, HostGator, and Hostwinds, our overall Editors' Choice award winners.
More importantly, it proved to be unstable in our testing.
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Shared Web Hosting
If you want to get started with the most wallet-friendly web hosting tier, check out shared hosting.
With shared hosting, your website literally shares server space with other sites.
On the upside, that often results in cheap web hosting.
The downside? If your website sees a huge traffic surge, your hosting provider may take the site offline so that it doesn't negatively impact its neighbors by gobbling resources.
Register.com offers three tiers of Linux- or Windows-based shared web hosting: Essential (starting at $14.95 per month), Professional (starting at $18.95 per month), and Premium (starting at $36.95 per month).
When you look at the Register.com page you won't easily find these prices.
Instead, Register.com displays its limited-time promotional prices.
You don't see the true prices until you're checking out, a tactic I don't like.
This is just one of several interface-design choices that left me scratching my head as I searched for a key piece of information or a particular feature.
I'll touch on more such problems later in this review.
If you can overlook the pricing issue, you'll find decent web hosting packages.
Essential offers 300GB of storage, a skimpy 10 email accounts, unlimited monthly data transfers, and a free domain.
Professional builds on Essential by upping the storage and email accounts to 500GB and 25 accounts, respectively.
The Professional tier is Register.com's best plan, with unlimited disk space.
Still, it can't match HostGator ($2.64 Per Month + Free Domain Registration at HostGator) , our top pick for shared hosting.
HostGator dominates thanks to its varied and powerful packages, offering Linux- and Windows-based servers, as well as unlimited storage, monthly data transfers, and email addresses with even its entry-level plan.
No Advanced Hosting Tiers
Sometimes you need more power, expect high-traffic volumes, or just don't want to have a shared web hosting plan because of their sometimes limiting feature sets. As a result, many companies, offer cloud, dedicated, VPS hosting that can supply the muscle your website needs.
Register.com does not doesn't offer any of these basic services, and it also lacks the more niche, but still important, WordPress hosting and reseller hosting tiers.
Sure, you may not need these higher-end or specialty tiers of service today, but what if your site really takes off? While it's always possible to switch web hosting services, why not pick a service you can stick with, one that offers clear growth path right from the start?
Building a Website
As with the shared web hosting pricing information, Register.com's Neo Website Builder requires some hunting to find.
You log in, click My Account, and then click Edit Your Website.
Most Web hosts make their site editing tools available on a higher-level page.
That's not a great start to the experience, especially if you're a newbie likely to be using a website builder on a shared hosting service.
I clicked on Edit My Site to launch the website builder, which has a template-driven interface.
The tool's drag-and-drop functionality is simple and straightforward.
It's easy enough to select a template, modify layouts and colors, add new pages, and publish.
The resulting site was modern looking and slick.
I like that you can add contact forms, social media links, and images, as well.
The Neo Website Builder doesn't have Wix's muscle, but it's a solid tool.
E-Commerce and Security
Register.com's templates make it easy to create a shiny website suitable for businesses, but they don't offer any of the e-commerce functionality necessary to actually buy and sell online.
For that, I installed Magento (Free at Magento) , available from the service's Open Source Application library.
Magento let me create an attractive and functional store in just a few minutes by dragging and dropping website elements.
Magento's store builder has more flexibility than 1&1's Online Store, but it also means there's more business logic to figure out with each step.
Register.com offers many security perks, but if you plan to sell products, Secure Sockets Layer protection is a must.
Thankfully, a license is included with each Register.com plan.
Your customers will be happy to see the security symbol in their browsers' address bars when they visit your website.
If you have hosting elsewhere, but you're looking for SSL, Register.com has four plans.
The entry-level SSL starts at $26.50 per year (with a two-year term), while the highest-end SSL starts at $390 per year (with a two-year term).
Godaddy ($1 Per Month at GoDaddy) offers SSL, too, but doesn't lock you into multi-year agreements; you pay annually.
Unimpressive Uptime
Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service.
While your site is down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services—and they might not come back.
Unfortunately, Register.com didn't do well in our uptime testing.
To measure uptime, I use a website monitoring tool to track my Register.com-hosted test site's stability.
Every 15 minutes, the tool pings my website and alerts me if it is unable to contact the site for longer than one minute.
I look at the data for the most recent 14 days for each site's review.
In my latest tests, Register.com was very unstable.
In fact, it went down several times during that two-week period, sometimes for hours at a time.
This is unacceptable.
On the other hand, Domain.com , a recently reviewed web host, displayed outstanding uptime.
It didn't go down once during the 14-day test period.
Check it out if you want a reliable web hosting service.
To be fair, these two-week test periods are relatively small snapshots of a larger picture.
Still, they can sometimes point out real stability issues.
Customer Service
Register.com offers 24/7 web chat and telephone support—which is good—and a ticket-based system.
I dialed into the telephone tech support on a weekday morning and waited just under five minutes to speak with someone about the differences between Linux and Windows hosting.
The representative explained that Linux-based hosting is good for general web hosting use, while Windows-based hosting is good for those who build sites using Microsoft FrontPage.
I am pleased with the clear response I got.
I later web chatted with a customer service representative on a weekday afternoon to ask how to properly import my WordPress.com (Free at WordPress.com) setup into Register.com.
This time, I waited for less than a minute.
The rep walked me through the steps, and did a good job doing so.
If you are curious about Register.com's money-back guarantee, you'll need to hunt a bit, as it's not readily available.
In fact, I had to Google "register.com money back guarantee" to find the information.
Making your money-back guarantee hard to find is definitely not a best practice for web hosting services.
Register.com offers a 30-day refund window for its hosting plans, which is about average, but nowhere near as generous as DreamHost's 97-day money-back guarantee.
That 30 days applies only to web hosting, however, when it comes to domain registration, the refund period shrinks to just five days.
You Can Do Better
Register.com's web hosting offerings are clearly an extension of its primary business, which is domain registration.
As a result, the site-builder tools, the hosting options, and even the dashboard interface feel like afterthoughts.
If you are already using Register.com for your domain registrar, it may make sense to stick with it for web hosting, to keep everything is in one place.
That said, we recommend looking at our top picks, DreamHost, HostGator, and Hostwinds for an all-around superior web hosting experience.
For more, check out our tips for creating the best website, and our primer on how to register a domain name for your website.
