City Network In 2018: How Would City Network Clients Review Them?

City Network Introduction

City Network is a Swedish hosting company with over 20,000 customers. They were founded in 2002, and now they deliver over 100 million web pages per day.

They pride themselves on being one of the most reliable hosting companies in Europe and on providing an eco-friendly hosting option. Their datacenter runs on wind energy for electricity, and during the winter months it utilizes the naturally cold Swedish weather for cooling.

Services and Specializations

City Network offers a single web hosting package, with optional upgrades for additional disk space or databases. Their plans feature both Windows and Linux servers, and allow you to switch between them with a single click.

The package supports unlimited domains, sub-domains, and websites, and includes daily backups, email hosting, unlimited email aliases, MySQL and MSSQL databases, a custom control panel, and a one click installer featuring most popular CMS tools, including WordPress and Joomla, as well as several ecommerce tools, support systems, forums, and other popular web applications. SSL certificates, email mailing list functionality, and restoring from daily backups are available for an additional cost.

They also offer 4 levels of dedicated servers, based on the processing power, RAM, and hard drive space you need. The operating systems are preinstalled on each server, but you have full control over the software and operations of those servers.

They also offer another hosting service, City Cloud, which provides cloud-based VPS hosting. With Cloud City you can adjust your CPU cores, RAM, and storage to create your own custom service and monthly price. Monthly fees are based on hourly usage, so you can easily size up or down based on spikes or other business requirements.

They also offer an email hosting package, which includes a handful of features not included with standard web hosting, such as an anti-virus filter, spam filter, and webmail. However, it includes the same number of email accounts as you receive with web hosting, and most of the same features, and costs the same as their web hosting package. So unless you desperately need access to webmail or their spam filter, you would be better off getting your email along with the full web hosting package.

Infrastructure

City Network’s main datacenter is located in Karlskrona. This is a dedicated datacenter that they built from scratch. They also use a shared datacenter located in Stockholm. Using the two centers, along with redundant and sometimes triple-redundant systems, they were the first and only Swedish hosting company to offer 100% uptimes to their server and colocation customers.

Internet connections are delivered to the datacenters by no less than 3 ISPs, set up for redundancy from different locations to ensure continuous connectivity. In case of power outages, they maintain UPS backups and diesel generators for optimal performance of all servers and datacenter facilities.

Support and Customer Service

Support is available from 8:00am until 10:00pm during weekdays, and 10:00am to 2:00pm on weekends, via phone, email, chat, Facebook, and Twitter. Support telephone numbers are available for the US and EU.

Their website and support is available in Swedish, Polish, Spanish, and English.

Backups

City Network performs daily backups, which are used for recovery in cases where they are responsible, such as a hardware issue or data corruption. However, if you need to restore a previous backup for another reason, restoration services are available for an additional fee. To avoid these fees, and because it’s a good idea to do anyway, you should consider setting up your own external backup system.

Uptime Guarantee

City Network guarantees 100% uptimes. If they fail to meet those uptimes, customers are refunded 5% of their monthly fee for every 3 hours of service outage.

Billing and Payment Policies

Payments can be made via credit card, bank transfer, or Payex. Late payments may result in accounts being placed on hold or shut down. And if you fail to make a payment for an extended period of time, Network City has the right to terminate your contract.

Downgrades can be handled through your control panel at any time. To cancel, you must first delete all of your site information via your control panel, and then send Network City an email from your registered email address. If you cancel within 60 days of signing up, you will receive a full refund.

Conclusion

City Network takes an incredibly simple approach to hosting. One plan, with add-ons for additional resources as needed. It’s also backed by the best uptime guarantee you can get. Whether you will ever notice the difference between a 99.9% uptime guarantee and a 100% uptime guarantee is hard to say, but if you have the choice, why risk even that fraction of a percent?

Their dedicated server packages offer a high-level of transparency, so you know exactly what you’re getting and what it’s capable of handling. And the ease with which you can move from Windows to Linux, even with their standard hosting plan, is unique. Whether it would be useful or not is hard to say, but if you’ve ever been curious how the other half lives, this would be a risk-free way to find out.

City Network is also a multilingual host, which can be particularly useful for multinational organizations. Just don’t let it throw you. If you reach their page and can’t understand it, scroll to the top of the page and find the appropriate flag.