Little Oak Web Hosting Review by CashSherpa.com

Little Oak is a web hosting company located in Torrance, California. Founded in 2007, the family-owned business offers Mac-focused services (they also support Windows and Linux), cutting-edge equipment and affordable prices. The company is probably best known in the Mac community for Mac web hosting and hosting RapidWeaver sites. Little Oak Hosting’s cheapest plan costs $80 per year for bandwidth of up to 50GB/mo and 5GB of storage. The most expensive plan costs $320 per year.

Plans

Little Oak has three web hosting plans: Sapling Cloud, Habitat Cloud and Chestnut Cloud.

Sapling Cloud

For $80 a year, you get unlimited websites, 50GB/mo bandwidth, 5GB disk space, 24/7 live chat and toll-free telephone support and 100% Uptime SLA .

Habitat Cloud

Habitat Cloud is quite a jump up from Sapling. It costs $160 a year for unlimited websites, 500GB/mo bandwidth, 15GB disk space, 24/7 live chat and toll-free telephone support and 100% Uptime SLA.

Chestnut Cloud

The ultimate Little Oak web hosting plan is the Chestnut Cloud. For $320 a year, you get unlimited websites, 1TB/mo bandwidth, 25GB disk space, 24/7 live chat and toll-free telephone support and 100% Uptime SLA.

All three plans also come with a pretty extensive list of features:

• Free website builder
• Unlimited MySQL database and users
• POP3/IMAP4 email accounts
• Domain aliases and subdomains
• Domain name transfer and auto-renew
• Free antivirus and firewall protection
• Site traffic analysis
• Shopping cart
• SSL secure server
• Google credits ($100)
• Yahoo credits ($25)
• Daily backups
• Affiliate program
• U.S.-based customer support
• Money-back guarantee for certain services

It’s true that you can get most of these from similar providers like WestHost and SimplyHosting, but what makes Little Oak stand out from the crowd is state-of-the-art technology and its dedicated team. According to WebHostingStuff.com’s Uptime Monitoring, the Little Oak website has an uptime of 99.98 percent. You don’t have to be a programmer to manage your website; the integrated website builder is easy to use. Most tools you will ever need are included in the plan—Joomla, WordPress, MySQL5, PHP5, Ruby on Rails and B2Evolution. RapidWeaver, which many hosting companies don’t offer, is also included.

Little Oak also has an affiliate program for making a little extra cash. Little Oak’s customer service is one of the best out there, and customer ratings are generally positive for reliable service and competent tech support. Besides excellent support and Mac-focused services, I like that you can easily cancel your subscription when things go wrong.

On the con side, Little Oak does not have a blanket money-back guarantee policy. It’s only available to certain customers (at Little Oak Hosting’s choosing). To get a refund, you must contact customer support and ask them to terminate the service. Little Oak is not accredited by the Better Business Bureau (as of December 2012) and credibility relies on feedback from customers. Some customers also complain about slow servers, but these are exceptions.

Pros

Domain name transfer and auto-renew

Mac-friendly hosting and dashboard

RapidWeaver

High quality equipment

Extensive features

U.S.-based 24/7 customer support

Cons

Limited disk space and bandwidth

Relatively young company, relies on customer feedback

Not as popular worldwide as older hosting companies

No money-back guarantee for all customers

Not accredited by the Better Business Bureau

Verdict

For about the same price, you get similar features from other hosting companies, but Mac developers should give Little Oak a try. It has great infrastructure and Mac-focused services, and it’s also recommended by Realmac Software for hosting RapidWeaver sites. But if you need Windows web hosting service at a reasonable price and you want a more established company, there are many other alternatives to Little Oak Hosting.

Visit Little Oak Hosting