Cirrus Hosting Review

Cirrus Tech Ltd. Web Hosting Review

Whether you’re a business owner, a personal brand, or a web agency, finding a good web host in Canada is a necessity. You don’t want your site to get bogged down by the weaknesses of your hosting company. When your website crashes, it can be very costly in both financial and emotional aspects.

As an agency that has worked with multiple brands, we know what you need when it comes to website hosting services. That’s why we have taken the liberty to make a review of almost every web hosting service provider out there.

For now, the focus of this review is Cirrus Tech Ltd’s Shared Web Hosting Plans.

An Introduction To Cirrus Tech. Ltd.

Founded in 1999, the company is a family-owned corporation based on Toronto, Ontario. Cirrus Tech hosts more than 100,000 domains and boasts of a 99.99% uptime. Their partners include Microsoft, Dell, Citrix, Cisco, and Parallels.

The company has won many awards. Two of these include HostReview’s award on the top 10 service providers of cloud hosting and Web Host Search’ top pick on a hosting company. Multiple awards given by WebhostDir were also garnered by the company. Such awards include the Best Budget Hosting Plan and one of the 25 most popular web hosting service provider.

Pricing

Cirrus Tech’s Shared Linux Web Hosting Plans are mostly named in numbers: Plan I, Plan II, Plan III, and Dedicated. Prices of the plan vary depending on the payment terms, monthly, annually, and triennially. The month-by-month packages can be seen below:

The cheapest Linux web hosting plan offered by Cirrus Tech is called “Plan I.” It costs CAD $6 a month if you pay month-per-month. It will cost you about CAD $5 and CAD $3 per month if you opt for the package annually and triennially, respectively.

Plan I provides you with 50GB worth of disk space quota. The package also offers you unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth is the rate of transfer of data between the host server and the visitor’s  device. The transfer of data happens every time a person is downloading, uploading, streaming, or even visiting a webpage.

Fortunately, they give you the ability to create multiple mailboxes at a maximum of 100 per hosting account. Meaning, you can create a maximum of 100 email accounts for the website you are hosting in the said package.

They provide features such as mail redirects and mail responders. The former feature means you can redirect emails sent to Account A, for example, to another email account. The latter feature refers to having the ability to automatically respond to an email message after it has been sent to an account.

When it comes to development and actually building websites, Plan I offers support for Perl, Python, and MySQL versions 5.XX. They also allow PHP Support for versions 5.XX to 7.XX. ASP and CGI support are also included.

The good thing about Plan I is they provide you with web statistics allowing you to analyze your data. They provide two platforms used for website visit statistics, AWStats and Webalizer. Using data statistics can be a good way to analyze your visitors and reform your website in a way that makes it more enticing to your target market.

If you subscribe for at least a year, the package allows you one free domain per hosting account. This means, you can only host one website for one hosting package availed. However, you can host an unlimited number of subdomains for this one domain. Although they provide a limited amount of storage space, 50GB is enough for one domain/ website. Transfer or migration of a website is also free is you subscribe annually.

Support Options

Cirrus Tech provides four different options for support:

• You can submit “Trouble Tickets” which you can access through your account’s control panel or by filling up an online support form.
• You can check out the Self-Help Knowledgebase which is updated frequently by the company. The knowledge base includes FAQs, details about their services, and general troubleshooting guides.
• You can also call 24/7 phone support which includes toll-free numbers.
• Finally, you can opt for online live chat support.

The support system of Cirrus Tech garnered mixed reviews. Some are happy with their service stating that their support system is fast and amazing. These reviews even stated that the support team treated them like family.

On the other hand, other reviews stated that Cirrus Tech support was very rude and deceitful. Although Cirrus claims they have a 24/7 support ticket that answered quickly, reviews stated that it took them more than 3 days to respond to a ticket request.

Pros

Every type of product and/or service has its pros and cons. Let’s start with the advantages of Cirrus Tech and its basic hosting plans.

Unlimited Bandwidth

Cirrus Tech provides unlimited bandwidth for Plan I. This means you are not limited in the transfer of data from your host server to the device requesting it.

If you are a website owner for example, you are able to cater to multiple viewers all at the same time since you have unlimited bandwidth capacity. This is a good thing especially if you have a lot of traffic coming to your website.

Multiple Mailboxes

With their cheapest plan, you can create up to 100 mailboxes for your website. This might be too much for one website but you’ll never know how many you’ll need. With the ability to create multiple email accounts, you can create various mailboxes for different departments in your business.

AntiSpam and AntiVirus Features

They provide you with a free spam filter called SpamAssassin AntiSpam allowing you to weed out unnecessary emails from your mailboxes. They also add in Dr. WEB Anti-Virus for extra protection. They definitely take security seriously.

Free Site Builder

Cirrus Tech provides you with a site builder for free in the form of the Parallels Plesk Sitebuilder. While most hosts offer sitebuilders, it’s still very nice to have.

It has a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. Parallels Plesk Sitebuilder also provides you with hundreds of website templates, skins, and tutorials making website construction and customization easy.

Cons

1 Domain Per Hosting Account

Cirrus Tech’s cheapest Linux Web Hosting plan only allows you to host one domain for one hosting account. Most competitors provide more than one domain per hosting account. This is one disadvantage of getting Cirrus Tech’s cheapest account. If you want to host an unlimited number of domains in one hosting account, you must opt for a more expensive plan, the Plan II, which costs CAD $12 a month if you pay month-per-month.

Mixed Customer Support Experiences

The company provides you with a lot of options to contact them for support. However, more doesn’t mean better. Cirrus Tech has mixed reviews when it comes to their customer support feature.

A few reviews state that their support team is rude and it takes at least 3 days to get a response from their ticket. Others claim that their customer support team is one of the best and actually helps you with your hosting problems… bit of a mixed bag.

Conclusion

So as mentioned in our summary, we would strongly recommend having a look at our data-backed country-specific web hosting comparisons.