I see that I have missed some guidelines, so I’ll add them here:
I am not in any way employed by or affiliated with ICDsoft; I am just a very happy customer.
I have been hosted personally with ICDsoft for about 5 or six years now. During that time, I have had between 1 and 3 separate hosting accounts with them, which were:
Web Design, Web Development, Identity and Social Media Marketing in Boulder, Colorado | Code Junkie LLC (my professional site)
Untitled Document (my personal domain and playground)
Study Buddy | Technical Schools | Trade School | Higher Education at Aicstudybuddy.com (a personal project and graduation requirement which I have since taken down)
I have also signed up two of my clients with this hosting company and have never heard of a problem from them.
I am still hosted under two separate accounts with ICDsoft and was for several years hosted under a third account as well.
I use the economy plan with all of my accounts and also recommend it to my clients. In my experience, even most businesses don’t really need the business plan. The Economy plan (which costs less) has more than enough for any individual or small business to build a great website with.
There are actually very few differences between the economy plan and the business plan. The only major differences are in the number of things you get or how much space you get. With the business plan, you get a lot more storage space, more databases and a few other things. You can see a full listing of what the differences are between the two plans here:
ICDSoft.com - Web Hosting
You essentially get no less features with the less expensive plan, just a little less room to grow and manage a business site (which has never restricted me).
Title: ICDsoft Hosting
General Features: 9/10
ICDsoft offers everything you really need in hosting. You automatically get PHP, MySQL, a control panel, Python, Ruby, direct MySQL admin access, htacces control, email account setup control, automatic version updates to things like PHP and MySQL which are implemented carefully and with notification to you to protect you from problems later. Pear is even installed and works right away with no extra work on your part. You basically don’t have to do anything to make things that should work just work.
I subtract one point because I wish that ICDsoft tried more of the cool, shiny new things other hosting companies are offering like built in analytics reports, cloud hosting, or one click application installs. Also, the free email accounts have a limit of 100 MB each which fills up pretty fast, and the settings on them are very limited.
Customer Support Rating: 10/10
I wish I could rate their customer support higher. It’s really some of the best I’ve ever dealt with. It’s all email which is a little frustrating since you can’t talk to a human, but they make up for it with their extremely fast responses, very polite staff and competence.
I’ve rarely ever waited a full hour to get a response back from support and I’m not sure I can ever remember getting a generic or template response to a support question (even ones that totally deserved it).
Reliability Rating: 10/10
In my six years of using ICDsoft hosting I’ve probably seen any of the 5 domains I’m associated with go down no more than 5 times total. When domains did go down, it was usually very late at night and they were back up in less than an hour.
I’m actually kind of spoiled by ICDsoft hosting. It took me a while after learning on their servers to get used to having to deal with hosting where things don’t just work right right away. Pear just worked with no hassle, I never had to hassle them to install anything, the default PHP settings are well set up to avoid problems that I have to fix myself and things never just break for no reason at all.
Space:
I wouldn’t mind having a little more space on my hosting, but I rarely even need the 1gb I have. When I signed up with ICDsoft, I got 500mb. When they upgraded their servers, they doubled my hosting space for free and emailed me to let me know they did it. 500mb was a little low; I started to run out of space on it. 1gb pretty much handles my business needs and only requires me to clean up my personal domain once every year or two.
Speed:
I’ve never noticed a problem with the speed of my hosted websites. Everything loads pretty quickly, even my single page portfolio site which is essentially 3 pages in one. I’ve never even thought about the idea that it could be faster, and I spend a lot of time thinking about page load.
Bandwidth (Data Transfer):
I don’t think I’ve ever hit my bandwith limit on any of my domains. I think it’s somewhere around 20gb a month on the lowest cost plan. I don’t get enough traffic on any of my domains to need more than that. As I’ve said previously, one thing I would like very much would be expandable bandwidth and hosting, but I don’t really seem to need it.
The good:
ICDsoft offers extremely reliable, full feature service. If you’re new to development and are already overwhelmed by things you don’t know and can’t handle things breaking a lot, this service is great. On ICDsoft, you generally just get what you need right away. You may not get everything you’d really like, but you get everything you need reliably.
ICDsoft’s support is excellent. I think the closest I’ve ever come to being frustrated with them was when I was trying to get them to help me figure out why their service was just doing something right that another hosting company’s service wasn’t at all. The other hosting company’s support was so unhelpful that I ended up resorting to ICDsoft to figure out what they were doing right, and they couldn’t really help me.
The control panel is great. It has a little bit of a learning curve, but overall it has everything you need and then some. Once you figure the control panel out, you have a lot of control over your own domain.
The price is good. I think that ICDsoft costs at most a dollar a month over regular godaddy hosting and it’s just a lot easier to use. I often find myself comparing other hosting companies to ICDsoft when I’m feeling frustrated with them, and a lot of it comes down to them costing more than ICDsoft for less services.
The Bad:
ICDsoft isn’t really exciting hosting. You’ll get everything you need to make exciting things, but you won’t get the new shines that Media Temple, Engine Hosting and others like them offer. If you’re looking for sharp, trendy, exciting hosting then ICDsoft isn’t for you. It’s very low key, everything you need hosting.
Even though you get unlimited email accounts, they’re not very good email accounts really. ICDsoft email accounts are pretty lacking in features and tend to fill up a lot over time. I’ve just recently resorted to forwarding my emails from my main account with them to a gmail account just to back up my business emails. The filter is pretty easy to use, but offers very few options.
My Opinion:
If you need hosting for a small business, an art portfolio, development practice, or something small like that ICDsoft is great. Everything just works and you don’t have to worry about it. If you have older clients, it’s great for them because they’ll never have to deal with anything really. If you’re new to development it’s great because you’ll almost never have to hassle with the server config problems yourself.
If you want exciting, trendy hosting I’d recommend something more along the lines of Media Temple. If you want simple, reliable, cheep hosting, I’d recommend ICDsoft.