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PO Box 681242
Houston,
TX 77268
SharkSpace was founded in 2004 under the name SJR Hosting. SJR Hosting was a small company that offered simple shared web hosting plans on the Softlayer network. SJR Hosting was rebranded as SharkSpace in 2006, and today hosts thousands of sites from data centers located in North Carolina, California and Missouri.
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Review
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Sales
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My interest was in purchasing a small shared hosting plan with SharkSpace. There are three ways to get in touch with the SharkSpace sales team, including email, an online forum and a live chat operator. I was unable to reach anyone by live chat over the course of a two hour period, but I did connect with a sales member by email in less than ten minutes. The email sales team was helpful and courteous, and answered all of my questions without hesitation.
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Setup
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I paid for my hosting after signing up online and received an immediate welcome letter and the details for my account. Setup was instantaneous and the introductory email contained all the necessary information to get my website online that afternoon. Couldn’t have been faster!
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Billing
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I paid for my web hosting for an entire year, so I never had to deal with month to month billing from SharkSpace. I was billed immediately after paying and was not charged for features and services that I did not order.
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Pricing
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SharkSpace’s smallest plan, baby shark, costs just $4.95/year for 1gb of space and 10gb bandwidth, which is clearly a bargain. The medium sized hammerhead plan runs $9.95/month for 20gb of space and 500gb bandwidth. SharkSpace’s prices are very low in comparison with other hosts offering similar services.
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Reliability
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The server my website was on during my stay with SharkSpace was plagued with hardware failure during my stay. First, a bad hard drive took my site offline for a day and then a RAID issue caused sporadic periods of downtime over a three day period. While server hardware inevitably always needs replacing, I was disappointed with the lack of communication that came (or in this case, didn’t come) from the SharkSpace staff. There were no updates provided by email or announcements made on their forum until after the situation had been resolved.
My website was eventually moved to a new server, where I experienced no hardware issues at all, though my site was sometimes slow to load or did not load completely.
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Support
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SharkSpace support can be had by email, an online forum, a trouble ticket system and live chat. I was never able to reach anyone by live chat, but ticket system and email support personnel were fast, polite and knowledgeable. The average wait for an email response was only ten minutes. Impressive!
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Uptime
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My premium uptime monitoring service indicated some downtown during my stay with SharkSpace, outside of the previously mentioned hardware issues, but nothing that dipped below their 99.9% uptime guarantee.
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Guarantee
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99.9% uptime guarantee
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30 day money back guarantee
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Terms of Service
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The Terms of Service for SharkSpace can be found online. Highlights include:
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No refunds after initial 30 day trial period.
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Strictly enforced SPAM policy. Offending accounts will be terminated.
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Nonpayment of hosting fees will result in a suspension of hosting account after 5 days.
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Advantages
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Professional and helpful email support staff.
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Very low prices.
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24/7 support
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Easy to use CPanel control panel
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Active online forums.
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Disadvantages
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No communication with clients during interruption of service.
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Live chat possibly not staffed 24/7.
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Possible overselling of services resulting in slow loading pages and sporadic network connections.
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No toll free telephone support.
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