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Brinkster Overview
Brinkster is trying to push itself as being a master of Cloud servers, which is all well and good, but there’s a clear divide between a desire to be the expert in that area while still providing the best possible web hosting. While the company is certainly good at what it does, there are pieces missing from the service that seem a little baffling. It’s not that the options don’t fit, it’s that’s it’s strange that this was the combination that was chosen.
In terms of actual service, users can generally count on their site being always available, though it may be difficult to find the right information.
Ease of Use
As in most cases, the back end of the server is not that difficult for the average user to figure out. There are a few selections that may lead to questions, but those are easily found out through a number of options covered below.
The initial website itself, however, is not very helpful. It seems that Brinkster would like potential users to contact one of their sales team, since its site doesn’t actually provide very many details, but hardly a page exists that doesn’t encourage the person reading it to open up a chat window and start talking with a representative or fill out a form so that a member of the sales team can call back at another time.
The website is designed to bring in leads, in other words, rather than informing somebody of what they might get from the service and providing the tools to sign up.
Features
Shunning the recent trend of offering “unlimited” things in its features, Brinkster appears to just be offering functionally unlimited features. The difference only really comes up when a business is receiving so much attention that they need more than several thousand gigs of bandwidth per month or more than hundreds of gigs of storage. While this seems like a step backward, the specific numbers that are given on the plans actually reflects the company’s ability to accurately predict the costs of their services and set their prices appropriately. If anything, they’re probably cheaper as a result and most people will never have to worry about hitting their monthly caps.
One particularly nice thing is that all levels of hosting receive the same support, though that makes it less of a “feature.” That being said, there is an enormous difference between the bottom level plan and the next two, and none of them appear to come with email options.
Customer Support
Brinkster’s support options seem to be related to their sales in that it appears to have taken the same infrastructure and just made sure that those representatives could also answer technical questions.
Fortunately, there are plenty of options to do that, including by phone, web chat, and email contact form.
The actual people who answer the questions are unfailingly polite and clearly well-trained in how to handle various problems that users may have. Actually getting somebody’s attention is relatively easy at a variety of times during the day and email requests are responded to rapidly.
Pricing
There are three major plans for website hosting from Brinkster. Both Windows and Linux hosting cost the same, which is good.
1. Level 1 – This costs $11.99 a month if paid on a monthly basis, $9.99 if paid annually, and $7.99 a month if paid two years at a time. It includes 200 GB of space, 2000 GB of bandwidth, FTP access, a web builder, and 24 hour network and web site monitoring.
2. Level 2 – This costs $20.99 a month if paid on a monthly basis, $18.99 if paid annually, and $15.99 a month if paid two years at a time. It comes with 350 GB of storage, 3500 GB of bandwidth, and everything in the Level 1 plan, plus two domain names, a 250 MB MySQL database, and a number of different script functionalities that weren’t present before.
3. Level 3 – This costs $49.99 a month if paid on a monthly basis, $44.99 if paid annually, and $34.99 a month if paid two years at a time. This plan adds the use of a dedicated SSL server and 5 domain names on top of the 500 GB storage and 6000 GB bandwidth.
The Good…
By not making features “unlimited,” Brinkster has managed to price the service more accurately.
The Bad…
The initial website is not very helpful, and there’s a sense that the company is always looking for a hard sell opportunity.
And The Ugly
It’s hard to imagine quality hosting without mailboxes.