Network Solutions Review: More than Just Hosting

Network Solutions has expanded from a technology consulting company in 1979 to provide a web hosting and website building service in 2021. The company was founded in Virginia by Emmit J. McHenry and others as an engineering company with only 30 employees. After all these years, Network Solutions became a Web.com company and one of the largest .com domain names registered with over 6.7 million customers in 2018. A LOT? I KNOW! But we're here to learn all about Network Solutions web builder.

What is it all about?

What features does it offer?

Take a deep breath and join us to find out everything you need to know about it.

Network Solutions offers you the opportunity to decide, do you want to build a website by yourself or let them build one for you? You have the chance to let Network Solutions experts create the website of your dreams just by answering a few questions. If you're looking to do one for yourself, you can choose one of their three plans.

Let's take a look at the plans in details:

All three plans come with a domain name, cloud file storage, and 1 website with unlimited pages.

For now, let's see the e-commerce packages offered:

Overall, using the Network Solutions website is a bit complicated. You'll start by choosing a domain and add the package you want, but the cart's price changes. It's super annoying! Other than that, it's hard to find the package you want to create for your website because their website is a bit confusing.

As said earlier, Network Solutions offer three different plans: Website Builder, Marketing, and E-Commerce. Prices start at $2.95 per month for the Website Builder plan and go up to $4.95 for the E-Commerce plan. All Network Solutions' subscriptions include:

• Domain name
• Cloud file storage
• Support via phone, email, live chat, and forum
• 1 Website with unlimited pages
• Personalized email
• Stock image library

Network Solutions provide a good number of payment methods, including:

• PayPal
• PayFlow
• USA ePay
• CyberSource
• PlugNPay
• The majority of credit cards

If you're a beginner, I think you're looking for an easy-to-use website builder. The good news is using Network Solution's drag-and-drop editor is a piece of cake; you'll need to learn a few things, and you'll be good to go. Everything is straightforward and user-friendly, but you won't find all the features you need to create your website.

To add elements to your site, you'll have to drag-and-drop them anywhere you want. You can edit an element from the editor. The only downside is it might be challenging to edit the element to suit your website's design.

Network Solutions provides excellent support to their customers. They know what they're doing and respond as soon as possible. You can contact an agent via email, phone, or live chat. If you prefer, you can refer to the Support Center, forum, blog, and even watch tutorials. However, contacting support is a better choice as the forum and blog are a bit confusing.

Website Design

To get started, you can choose one of the 200 templates offered by Network Solutions. They're distinguished by different themes, and you can easily customize them. You can add videos, audio, and other features, but you won't fully control adding these features to your site the way you'd want. If I'm honest, there are better templates out there like the ones offered by Squarespace.

Security 

Network Solutions isn't the fully-featured security website builder. It does offer you the SSL certificate for free, but it lacks other security features like DDoS protection, network monitoring, password-protected directories, etc. That's why if you want a secure website builder, you should consider Wix or Squarespace. 

However, the SSL certificate is a useful tool, and not all website builders have it for free. It's essential for online stores to encrypt data like customers' log-in credentials or credit card information. 

Network Solutions Features

What's Included in the Plans?

Compared to other web builders, Network Solutions has basic features. These include:

• Templates: A number of templates to choose from
• Free Domain Name
• Personalized email: To match your domain name & make your brand look more professional.
• Online storage & filing: To share documents and upload media to your website.
• Stock Image Library: A large number of stock images to customize your website
• Basic SEO
• Secure & Reliable Hosting

E-Commerce Features

Even if you're creating an online store using it, you'll get:

• Fully customizable storefront
• Reliable & Secure Shopping Cart
• Add & Manage products
• Shipping & Payment options
• Responsive templates to different devices.
• Social Media integration

Overall, these are plenty of features to get your website up and running in no time. You can add and manage products if you're creating an online store and managing SEO to get a better ranking. However, they're all pretty basic compared to other web builders like Wix, which offers options for hotels and restaurants and all types of websites.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Network Solutions is an affordable web builder that offers a lot more than just a domain name. You can get a personalized email, free hosting, basic SEO, and a stock image library to design your website from. All that, and it's super easy to use, so if you're not familiar with coding, it won't be a problem, and you'll easily create a website and have it up and running in no time. What more can you ask for?