Gogvo, (an acronym for Global Virtual Opportunities) originated in Quebec, Canada over ten years ago. The company’s growth led them to seek out a new facility and resulted to a move to San Antonio, TX in 2007. Owning their own data center and providing customers of practically every size options on a variety of products and services, including marketing services.
Uptime & Reliability
Good hosting at their own data center
Gogvo makes a strong case for their reliability; they own the data center and its’ contents outright and thus have the greatest amount of control. Included on their informational page is a note that they have their own generator in case of power failure, something no reseller can offer. One thing I would’ve liked to see is a “Tier x” rating or a partnership with another facility offering redundancy, but these steps represent significant investments that ultimately reflect in the cost to the customer.
Features
Good quality hosting with lots of other options
Web hosting is a big focus for Gogvo, they offer several different packages and highlight their approach to operations as a value-added offer to their customers, emphasizing that low cost is not the only consideration that a business should make when choosing a hosting company.
All web hosting packages include unlimited disk space and bandwidth, subdomains, email and FTP accounts, MySQL databases, and access to the Cpanel control tool. Free account setup and activation is included in a monthly price that seems quite competitive. Gogvo also offers 24/7 support every day of the year, free site builder and management tools, no contract requirements and 99.9% uptime on all packages.
One feature that so far has been unique in my experience is the “marketing” tools. One of the claims Gogvo makes is that they don’t block senders of bulk email. While bulk email is certainly a valid marketing concept, I personally find it most of the bulk mail I receive quite close to, (if not outright) spam
Reseller services are offered with generous allotments; the firm also offers “affiliate” programs that offer lifetime commissions at various levels as a means for customers to add to their income with what appears to be very little effort.
Oddly, VPS service wasn’t listed, but the dedicated server section stated that Gogvo offers “dedicated cloud servers” rather than dedicated physical servers. While some may view this as a misnomer, I believe that it is a valid approach to the needs of many companies who need Infrastructure as a Service, aka IaaS.
Support
Multi-Lingual Tech Support
Gogvo offers year-round 24/7 live support in English, with Spanish, Russian, Polish and Portuguese support available for limited hours. One item that I did not find as part of a service package or on the terms of service page was backup frequency and availability; most hosting companies seem to either list backup as the sole responsibility of the customer or at least encourage customers to maintain their own copy of backup data.
Pricing
Reasonable pricing options
Overall, prices seem to be very reasonably priced, considering the numerous “unlimited” services provided, as well as the 24/7 service that is included with all sales.
Personal hosting is offered at $5.56 per month and includes one domain; for $11.96 month the package is increased to 20 domains.
Reseller packages all include unlimited terms, but pricing is done per customer specifications; something that could definitely be defined a little better on the site.
Dedicated cloud servers are offered at “regular” levels from $59-$159 per month, with a “basic” package that include fewer management options ranging at a flat $25 monthly rate.
Additional memory, storage, CPU, IP addresses, etc are available for each package at reasonable rates.
Summary
Good for most types of sites
While I came away with a few concerns regarding Gogvo’s services, the company seems to offer a lot of product and service for the money spent. Based on their clear customer-service approach, I would be confident that any concerns could be addressed prior to engagement.
Pros:
- Competitive pricing on all services
- Generous space, bandwidth and software
Cons:
- No backup policy
- Service can be terminated without cause or notice according to ToS