Avoid ProfitHost Like the Plague!
If you have ended up on any sort of internet marketing email list, you are likely to be hammered with promotional emails for ProfitHost. Spoiler: DON'T DO IT! 🙂
ProfitHost is offering a lifetime deal on a cloud website hosting service. At under $20 for the initial (front end) offer, I signed up, and things went downhill from there.
The first issue was that the email to sign in and activate my account never showed up. A very helpful support person did create my account manually, so I chalked that one up to a product launch glitch.
ProfitHost uses their own dashboard system rather than cpanel, which is understandable after cpanel changed their terms and pricing last year. The dashboard is decent, as far as it goes, but doesn't provide any way to set important parameters like maximum upload size, memory allocation, timing durations, etc. I know other ways to set these values, so not the end of the world, but not a great experience if you are just trying to get your WordPress site up and running.
Finally, with a freshly-installed WordPress site ready to go, it was time for basic testing. OMG, the pain! Performance was horrible and erratic, with page load times often hitting 15-30 seconds and occasionally timing out altogether. I discovered that the IP address assigned, and therefore the server, is located in Finland. I'm in the US, and so are most of my clients. People near Finland (in internet routing terms), say in Frankfurt, would see decently fast page loads, but anyone in the western hemisphere would have a sub-optimal experience.
Of course, the actual performance hasn't mattered too much, as the entire service has been offline for large portions of last night and today.
I've requested a refund, but suddenly support isn't responding to my emails.
My recommendation: Stay far away from ProfitHost.
