Namesco

Namesco's website screams "web hosting from £1". It isn't the most professional of starts, which could make convincing clients you should handle their web hosting difficult. However, if Namesco can offer such great deals, what can it offer you as a virtual ISP?

Quite a lot, it seems. Its control panel is simple to use, being both clear and easy to understand. It also offers pricing packages aimed squarely at the web designer; these packages offer full backup capabilities to protect your clients' websites in the event of something bad happening.

However, be aware that Namesco limits the bandwidth to your websites and, although this won't result in a client's site going down if it suddenly becomes popular - as often happens if an article is picked up by a news aggregation site, such as Digg - it may bring extra charges. That said, Namesco will warn you as you use more than half your allowance that month, and you can either pay the extra 2p per megabyte or upgrade to a larger bandwidth package at the end of the month.

Namesco, like many others, places a lot of importance on customer support, and it's impressively open about its response times, publishing them at www.names.co.uk/call-statistics.html. Coupled with the network status pages at www.names.co.uk/network_status.html, it all helps to keep you informed of any issues that might arise.

The company offers free telephone support from 8am to 8pm, Monday through Friday, and 10am to 6pm on Saturday and Sunday. There's no extra out-of-hours support, although of course it monitors server status 24/7. We also found the staff helpful during our tests.

Namesco's extensive range of products means you'd be able to offer your clients almost any online service they need. Its control panel is also one of the easiest to use. Where it falls down - and why it doesn't get an award this month - is the lack of direct out-of-hours support. After all, that may well be the time you decide to update a client's server, and if something goes wrong with the upgrade you're on your own until the following morning.

That said, becoming a virtual ISP is easy with Namesco offerings, and the number of offerings it provides make it well worth a look.

Author: Mark Newton