Evo Home Hosting Plan review

Evo offers an absolutely huge number of one-click installs from its control panel. These include 11 blogging apps, 15 content management systems, 10 forums, 10 image galleries and five gold rings. We’re kidding about the gold rings, but you get the picture.

Like Dreamhost, Evo offers a free backup service, only this one isn’t limited to one backup per month. The control panel isn’t particularly well organised, but it’s still a lot nicer to use than Dreamhost’s. Helpfully, it comes with a comprehensive set of video tutorials, which show you exactly how to use all the features. We really liked this feature, and are sure it will save new users a lot of teeth grinding. The service was easy to use and we were able to get our test site online in just a few minutes.

As well as the apps, other goodies include a database wizard, making it easy to install any of the ten MySQL databases you can host under this account (a much more generous number than most competitors), 50 email inboxes and detailed stats on exactly who is visiting your site, where they’re coming from, what browser they’re using and so on.

Also included is RV Site Builder, Evo’s online web design application. This takes a step-by-step approach to building a site, holding your hand all the way. It distinguishes itself by having a huge number of templates, varying from plain to cheesy, but no worse than those in any of the other online web creation tools we've seen.

One thing that bamboozled us was that we were unable to find the control panel on Evo’s website. We could log into our customer area, which showed us all our account details, but to get the control panel we had to click on the link in the mail sent to us when we signed up for the account.

For almost £8 per month, you get 2.5GB of server space and 30GB of bandwidth. That’s not too bad, but we'd expect more web space at this price.