Astral Internet specialise in web hosting and domain names as their primary services with eco, plus,pro, dev, reseller and virtual servers available for a customer to choose from. Prices offered are competitive and match up to other hosting providers in the industry as well as Astral offering extended services such as domain registration and SSL certificates. Overall they provide a solid foundation for any small business to be able to make their mark on the web.
In the footer of the website you will see a few internal site links which will point you in the direction of some important information. Whilst Astral Internet don’t provide a plethora of details regarding uptime and data centres they do offer information on the anti-spam and virus plan they have, this will cost you an extra $8 per month.
Depending on which plan you go with, will depend on the level of features you get, but the tool and feature set across all packages are above average. For instance, the Copper Package will allow you to have 250MB of space, 2GB of data transfer and 1 mailbox, with no setup fee. The Gold plan provides you with 2GB of space, 30GB of data transfer and 20 mailboxes. You can also benefit from 10 MySQL databases.
I thought this section was going to be great because they have a main navigation link to ‘tools and tutorials’ unfortunately when you click this link there are only a handful of tutorials and a few downloads. To further add to issues, the tutorial section is in French, so you may need to brush up on your language skills if you want to get anywhere.
As well as the main packages Astral do house some more expensive packages that start at $45.99 per month for the Dev Package. The Eco, Plus and Pro plan are the entry level option and will set you back starting $5 per month, but you need to be locked into a 12 months agreement for this.
There aren’t many complaints to be had here and you will find the whole experience quite a positive one at Astral. There are a few niggles that creep in here and there, the first being the fact that some of the prices require you to take out a bigger agreement term, and the other being the fact a live chat pops up on the screen when you may not want it to.
That said, everything else passed with flying colours.
It’s a 50/50 with Astral because they do offer some great plans at some even greater prices that are sure to tempt in many business owners. The reliability appears to be average but they let themselves down a bit when it comes to the support functions and contact details. All in all don’t cast your eye away from these guys as they could be the hosting company you need right now.
