Netfirms, Inc., founded in September 1998, has been profitable since the first quarter of 2000. They strive to be the leading provider of small business hosting by offering solutions for all levels of experience, from beginners to web designers, so that they will achieve success on the Web.

Trust, quality and reliability have made them one of the largest, most recommended web hosting companies in the world. They offer web hosting, e-commerce, email and e-marketing services that enable businesses to establish their online presence instantly. Netfirms leading edge clustered hosting technology powers some of the busiest websites on the Internet and enables them to grow. Netfirms servers ensure speed, reliability and dependability

The company is directed by seasoned management with many years of experience in Internet and related technologies. A proven track record of hosting well over 1,000,000 Websites consistently ranks Netfirms amongst the most respected hosting companies in the web hosting industry.

Netfirms offers several plans and the one which falls into our cheap web hosting plan is their Advantage plan. Their plus plan (selling at $4.95) might look attractive but some of the features necessary for small to mid businesses are not available. NetFirms Advantage plan not only has most of the features offered by other web hosts, they also offer Free Starter CD(NetObjects Fusion 7) for you to jump start your internet business.

If you are new to website building, the Starter CD is a good tool to help you create your own templates, add text, photos and links, build your own photo gallery and upload it onto the Internet.

Their two free lifetime domain name also makes their plan more attractive than others. You'll have your own domain name free for as long as you are a Netfirms Advantage or Netfirms Business customer.

One disadvantage for NetFirms plan is that they only offer one year plan, unlike other web hosts which offer plans with different time packages.

You can access their control panel at https://secure.netfirms.com/memberslogin
with the following login info:
username: nfdemo
password: nfdemo

NetFirms has put in a lot of effort to create an extensive knowledgebase and flash demo section that provide answers to over 90% of your questions. However, their search tool always give you irrelevant or inaccurate result.

They also have an online chat . But that is not open for 24 hours like what they claim. We are saying this because in several occassions when we try to look for help between 12am to 5am Eastern Time, they only get back to us after 24 hours or no reply at all.

For their email support , even though they are striving to respond to all email inquiries within 4 hours, a lot of the times they don't. We think that the reason for their slow response is due to the fact that they have so many customers(more than 1 million) that it's somewhat difficult to address all the enquiries.

NetFirms prides themselves to be on the top 500 most visited web site in the world by Alexa. Nearly everyone who is actively searching for good web hosting plan would come across NetFirms at least once.

Sometimes, the prestigious award evaluated by some well-known web sites goes to those with the highest popularity. NetFirms has won several awards like
- Top 5 honor on 2004 at Webhostjunction.com
- Voted Best Web Host for Small Business by 100 Best Web Hosting - 2003
- Named #1 Budget Web Host by WebHostDir
- Receives high praise in review by InternetMagazine
- Editors' Choice Award for the month of October 2003 by Web Host Magazine

Netfirms is recommended by two Books for Dummies publications: Starting an Online Business for Dummies and HTML 4 for Dummies.

Also, they have become so popular that even New York Times is recommending NetFirms.

With over 1 million members, inarguably, NetFirms top the popularity rating on our Top 10 Cheap Web Host Directory.

• Reliability
  Netfirm's cluster hosting technology maintains a pool of servers to handle requests coming to your Website. When a request is received by our network, it is directed to a server within the pool. If any server goes down, the others will pick up where it left off, thus providing virtually endless uptime for your site. Their centralized system checks system health and ‘heals' their infrastructure when problems do occur.

• Speed
  Netfirms uses of superfast connectivity of OC48 via MCI/Worldcom and Telus/Genuity provides tier-1 high quality bandwidth for your website.

Netfirms has a very good track record in providing simple, quality web hosting at a very affordable price. Although the customer service is not very good shape but it is above average. The huge number of customer along with the 30-day money back guarantee backs up Netfirms recommendation.