According to Netlogistics Open Letter to the webhosting community:
The first is the introduction of a new form of Australia-based hosting, very clearly in the spirit of (yet far superior to!) GeoCities. It is called Revolution, and provides a completely full-featured (even allowing the use of a domain name) hosting solution for non-commercial use (i.e. individuals, non-profits, and charities). There are no ads, nor is there a need to ever link to Net Logistics; it is simply something we hope to be both remarkable and useful, and most of all something consistent with our tradition of Empowered Hosting. Revolution is, effective immediately, available to all.
The second development is one that also relates to Empowered Hosting. Effective today, we are doubling the bandwidth allocations of all Virtual and Reseller hosting accounts. Economies of scale provide us with now substantial savings in both of these areas, and we wish to pass that along to our clients. As a result, the increase in Bandwidth comes with absolutely zero increase in our pricing.
I quickly jumped at the chance to see how well this free hosting account will be performing taking into account server performance, reliability, features, and support. In my reviews I will be covering every major aspect of what it is that end-users are looking for and expect from their free webhosting provider.
To give you a little background of myself and webhosting, I started off back in 2003 when I was looking at developing my own personal site – I tried Geocities and Yahoo as well as others that is not worth mentioned mainly because they no longer exist. Eventually I found the host that was perfect for me, I joined their support forums and later on became a moderator and helped those that I can to get them started in bringing their sites online. The free hosting scene is very much alive and attracts a lot of users mainly because of one word free nowadays end users expect a lot more from these free webhosting providers such as space, bandwidth and other premium features that they think they are all entitled to and is god given right. I won’t go into too much detail this is meant to be a review.
Netlogistics offering:
Features
Space:300MB
Bandwidth:3000MB
Domains Hostable: 1
Domains Parkable: 0
Subdomains: Unlimited
Email Accounts:Unlimited
MySQL Databases: Unlimited
24/7 Support: Yes
@Mail Webmail: Yes
cPanel w/Fantastico: Yes
Ad Supported: No
Link to Net Logistics Required: No
Space
As you can see from the above features Netlogistics are quite generous in their offerings especially with the space and bandwidth aspects. I can only assume that this due mainly to the fact that the speed of internet access has evolved and a lot more data and content can be moved around the web in less time. The webspace offering is very much inline with the rest of the free hosting account out there, there was a time when the maximum webspace available for users did not exceed 50MB but times have changed, harddrives have gotten bigger and cheaper. 300 Megabytes is plenty of space for a personal, non-profit organisation or charities to use.
Bandwidth
The 3000 MB offering is very good, I dont think many personal users would even use 50% of this bandwidth allocation, but I guess that depends on the site that is being hosted. Netlogistics is working on a 10:1 ratio in terms of their bandwidth to space offering. Plenty of bandwidth here to host your high quality digital pictures or short movies on the web.
Support
This is yet to be tested but Netlogistics claim to offer 24/7 support with the free hosting accounts, I find this rather surprising or optimistic considering that you would obviously need paid staff to man these support tickets on a 24/7 basis. I will be testing this feature and measure the response time and report it back here.
cPanel/Fantastico
This control panel is very robust and has become the control panel of choice for many users, it is very simple to use but does not lack functionality. It is truly an all in one control panel which doesnt come cheap so Netlogistics have done well to offer this. Included with cPanel is Fantastico which is a suite of pre-installed scripts that allows the end user to install scripts depending on what feature they want to add to their sites, such as forums, gallery, blogs, content management system are just a few on the list.
MySQL
Websites are no longer just static and more people are now heading to dynamic content to deliver their pages. Netlogistics has offered an unlimited MySQL offering which again I find a little surprising since an average user would only use about 2-5 maximum.
No Ads
The fly by night free hosting offers that I have seen are just a ploy in order to generate traffic and in addition will offer to have ads on the end users page in exchange for the free hosting. Some people dont mind but I personally find them annoying and Netlogistics have done themselves a favour by not forcing ads on the ends users websites.