What is Bravenet?

Bravenet is an all-round hosting and website solutions service. They offer web hosting, website building, domains, and add-ons. They pride themselves on being able to help you increase your website’s traffic and engage with your audience through their services.

Bravenet boast not only about their web hosting, but also their website builder. They make many claims including world class customer support, easy to use products, as well as fast and secure web servers. Naturally, I wanted to find out more and put their services to the test.

Our team focuses on providing quality promotion and marketing tools for you to establish a successful, high-quality, business or personal Internet presence. We are a passionate team who is committed to creating the best user experience for our members.

Visit Bravenet.com (£1.43/Month)

The testimonials on Bravenet’s website show positive reviews from well known companies. The reviews big up their web hosting as well as their services, including website improvements and reliable hosting.

I checked out Bravenet’s social media channels to begin with. This is always a good place to source ACTUAL customer reviews and feedback. It would seem that people are contacting Bravenet via Facebook, however, they don’t actively respond to support requests through this channel.

At least they had the decency to reply to their customers in this way. Even if this isn’t their usual protocol, it’s nice to see them being human!

Their Twitter account doesn’t have much in the way of news. However, when customers have mentioned them on Twitter, they have responded quickly.

Scouring the internet, I found mostly positive reviews about Bravenet. People seemed very happy with their services and tend to be longstanding customers. The only things I could really pick out from their customer reviews were people saying they chose NOT to use their website builder as it wasn’t very intuitive.

Bravenet Server Speed & Uptime

Bravenet offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee on their web hosting plans. Alongside this, they have a 30-day money-back guarantee if you’re not happy with their services. You’ll get a full refund with no questions asked if you’re not satisfied.

I signed up to a shared web hosting plan with Bravenet. I monitored my uptime and performance over the space of 6 months. This allowed me to REALLY understand how reliable Bravenet were, and whether they’re worth recommending to others.

In the last 24 hours, my test website has had a 100% uptime record. Over the last 7 days this averaged out at 99.93% and over 30 days 99.98%. Whilst this isn’t amazing, it’s not bad at all. Plus, they’re honouring their uptime guarantee so it’s hard to make any complaints.

I also monitored my website’s response time. This is an important factor when considering whether a web host is suitable for you or not. My response time averaged out at 720ms which is well below 1 second. It’s advised that website’s don’t take longer than 2-3 seconds to load or else people will abandon your website.

Visit Bravenet.com (£1.43/Month)

Bravenet Features

Bravenet have 4 shared web hosting plans. These plans all offer something different (which we’ll cover in the pricing section), but they do have some similar features.

Some of the main features that Bravenet offer include:

1-click application installs (like WordPress)
Drag and drop website builder
Full website and database backups
User-customisable control panel
Low cost SSL certificates

There’s nothing here that’s shouting WOW, but at the same time, they do include all the features I’d expect to see from a web host. Some of the features did spark some interest though, so I thought it was worth mentioning them in a little more detail.

• Full website backups: Bravenet provide nightly file system snapshots. Each day they run MySQL server backups, and this is all included for free. Granted, not many web hosts offer this service free of charge.
• Website builder: Their website builder has 100s of templates on offer. You can customise every single one of them and should you need assistance, their customer support can help you with their website builder.
• FTP hosting: Bravnet supports Apache 2.4, powered by the latest version of PHP. You’ll get email access through Webmail, as well as anti-spam features and more.

Bravenet Customer Support

Bravenet have a large support center ready to help you with any questions or queries. Their helpful announcement box at the top of their support page alerts customers to any news or notices. Here we can see that their offices are closed today for Thanksgiving.

They have lots of helpful documents if you get stuck. Their Wiki documents are detailed and honestly answered most questions or issues that I had. It’s nice to be able to access information like this if you’re in a rush, or simply don’t want to wait to talk to someone.

Their support ticket system is easy to use. There’s also a simple search bar to view open tickets via ticket number or email. Unfortunately their live chat system is ONLY available once you’re signed up to a paid service. If you have any sales questions, you’re going to be out of luck.

Bravenet Pros and Cons

My experience with Bravenet has been quite positive. However, nothing has really sparked a massive interest with me. Saying that, you get what you pay for. Their services start from just £1.43 per month, so I’m not sure what I was expecting.

On the other hand, other web hosts like iPage are just as affordable and offer a lot more. For me, I feel like Bravenet was lacking a personal touch. Whilst nothing was particularly putting me off, there wasn’t anything inviting me in either. Let’s have a look at my overall pros and cons of Bravenet.

Pros

Pricing: Bravenet’s pricing is very affordable. Starting from just £1.43 per month, you can have a website live in a matter of hours. However, it’s worth remembering that their cheapest plan only offers 50MB storage space. This may be ideal for beginners, but not for those hosting high-traffic websites.

Backups: One of the few features that got me excited was Bravenet’s daily backups. They backup a snapshot of your website files on a nightly basis, as well as a daily MySQL database backup. This is pretty neat as some web hosts will charge for the pleasure.

Ease of Use: Bravenet is easy to use and is ideal for beginners. There’s nothing lavish about their services which makes it a great choice if you’re just starting out. Their website builder is easy to pick up and shouldn’t pose any issues in getting your site live quickly.

Cons

Live Chat: It was quite disappointing to see NO live chat option on their website. Whilst this is available if you pay for their services (fair enough I suppose), it would’ve been nice to have some kind of sales service.

Uptime: Their uptime guarantee is just 99.9%. My test results exceeded their SLAs, but at the same time I always prefer a web host that offers 99.99% uptime guarantee.

Bravenet Pricing

As I mentioned earlier, Bravnet have 4 pricing plans. These range from £1.43 per month to £7.16 per month.

All in all, their plans are NOT outstanding. Yes, they’re cheap, but when you consider the competition, I’m not sure they stand up to much. For example, SiteGround offer the same amount of storage for £2.95 per month compared to Bravenet’s advanced plan. This comes in at £5.25 per month, almost double!

I was quite shocked to see that their Starter plan doesn’t even include 1-click installs. These usually come as standard on cPanel!

Do I Recommend Bravenet?

No, I do not recommend Bravenet. I’ll tell you why, as I think it needs some explanation.

At first I was tempted to say I’d recommend Bravenet if you just wanted to test the waters with your first website. However, the fact that their most basic plan doesn’t include 1-click installs pushed me away. Whilst they are VERY cheap, there’s a reason for it.

Other web hosts like Hostinger are ONLY 99p per month, and they include WordPress and 10 GB storage.

Here’s a quick summary of Bravenet:

Cheap hosting plans
A wide selection of knowledgebase articles
Free website builder
Free blog (and templates)

Couldn’t connect to their live chat
Uptime wasn’t the best I’ve seen
Pricing plans don’t offer much compared to other hosts