3 Essentials Hosting Review: A Jack of All Trades? We Find Out.

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3essentials Hosting Introduction

3essentials is a US-based hosting company, located just outside of Raleigh, North Carolina. They have been providing hosting services to small businesses since 2001. They approach hosting with three core principals, key to the small business community: perform, scale, and grow.

To meet these principals, they provide performance, speed, and reliability at an affordable price, while keeping their servers up-to-date and competitive. All of their hosting plans have the ability to quickly scale up or move to newer hardware without needing to start over from scratch. And they provide reliable SLAs and support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to help small businesses continue to grow.

Services and Specializations

3essential is completely focused on the small business community, so they don’t offer your typical range of low-cost, shared hosting packages. Instead, they specialize in cloud-based, virtual private servers.

Their cloud server options come in a variety of configurations, depending on the amount of RAM, core processors, SSD storage space, and transfer amounts you need. Regardless of the option you choose, you can select from several preconfigured Linux or Windows distributions, start from a bare OS, or install your own.

They also offer two levels of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) hosting. Both plans include root and SSH access, unlimited sub domains, unlimited domain aliases, automatic backups, and your choice of Plesk 12 or cPanel. Since these are private servers, both plans include a set amount of system resources. They vary based on the amount of RAM, CPU power, storage and transfer rates you need, as well as the number of domains you can use each plan for.

3essentials also offers 4 ASP.NET plans. These all include administrative access, MS SQL Express, Plesk 12, and regular backups. Like their LAMP plans, these each vary in the amount of RAM, CPU cores, SSD storage, and transfer limits you are permitted, depending on whether you’re looking to host a simple, small office server or high-traffic web applications.


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3 Essentials Reviews by Our Community

Overall Rating from 9 Reviews by 3 Essentials Customers

Support
Quality
Features
Value

Most Helpful Reviews

Jay Greentree avatar
Jay Greentree thursdaychurch.org
Jun 17, 2016

3Essentials is absolutely one of my favorite web hosts of all time. Customer Support is fast at responding and the sales team also is extremely helpful. Every issues I’ve had has been taken care of within an hour or two. The server plans are very easy to upgrade with minimal downtimes during the upgrade process.

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Sudeep K Pavithran avatar
Sudeep K Pavithran gitasudeep.com
Aug 08, 2016

It is been almost 9+ years we are dealing with 3Essentials. Started with a single domain hosting and now we have hosted more than 40 domains with 3Essentials. From this itself anyone can make out how good they are in their service.

Especially Support Service. You guys rock! Thanks for all the help & services,

Sudeep K Pavithran

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Don Wood avatar
Don Wood ncctn.com
Sep 16, 2016

I’ve been a 3Essentials customer for years now. I use 3Essentials as a competitive advantage when I’m talking with a potential customer. I tell my customers that I can support them and if it is a problem that I don’t know how to fix, my hosting company can do so. Their customer support is awesome.

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Additional Hosting Package and Add-Ons

In addition to these hosting packages, 3essentials also offers a number of add-ons to meet specific small business needs. They offer business email hosting packages, as well as inbound and outbound anti-spam services. They have 4 levels of WordPress hosting, each with the Plesk control panel. They also offer SSL Certificates, Microsoft licensing, and a number of hardware and software upgrade options.

They also offer a number of services for developers and self-hosting, including cloud-based development environments and dedicated servers. If you prefer to use your own hardware, they provide colocation services, meaning you ship your hardware to them, and they will set them up on their premises and provide the electricity, internet, cooling, etc.

Infrastructure

The 3essential datacenters are located in Morrisville, North Carolina and Dallas, Texas. Both centers are staffed around the clock and feature Card Key access and Physical ID check security. They are protected by fire suppression systems and diesel generators for backup power, which are tested weekly. They have Gigabit and Multigigabit internet connections from National Tier1 providers, and they maintain SLAs to ensure internet speeds even during high peak usage.

Support and Customer Service

Support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, via chat, email and telephone. Sales and billing teams are available during standard business hours. Free support includes assistances with their hosting platform and server monitoring. For more advanced assistance, or to fix issues with your website or files, for an additional fee their staff can also log in to your control panel and make changes for you. This includes requests to move data files, correct website code errors, deal with website hacking or security issues, upgrade your installation packages, and more.

Security and Backups

3essential hosting provides free backups with every hosting plan. It should be noted though that, per their terms and conditions, these are for disaster recovery, not for restoring customer files. It is strongly recommended that you set up your own automated backups on top of these.

Uptime Guarantee

The 3essentials Service Level Agreement guarantees 100% server hardware uptime, 100% network uptime, and 100% datacenter infrastructure uptime. If they fail to meet these levels, they will credit your account 5% of the monthly fee for every half hour of downtime, up to 50%.

Billing and Payment Policies

3essential accepts Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover. They hold the right to cancel any account if payment is more than 5 days late, and they charge a reinstatement fee. Plans are automatically renewed, and cancelations must be received prior to renewal. Refunds are not available, except when a money-back guarantee is offered.


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Conclusion

3essential takes a business-centric approach to hosting. That means they don’t offer plans that are less than a small business needs (like shared hosting). They provide scalable solutions, a wide range of operation systems for both Linux and Windows needs, and 100% uptime guarantees, so you never have to worry about your site being down. They understand the small business community and provide the features and support that will help your business grow.

ASP.NET Cloud Pro-1G
Disk Space10GB
Bandwidth1TB
Price $16 / mo
Usual price:  Get  % off!
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Cheryl

June 25, 2019

3essentials Hosting services have gone really bad, they don’t provide the same customer support like they used to. They would not help me out with a problem we had with their hosting service for months and now I have finally moved one of my sites away from them, they are not even replying to my requests for the refund I am supposed to be getting. They used to be good and I am a loyal customer for years, but now they just fob me off with copied and pasted responses.