Streamline Plus review

Streamline provides a service that will be perfectly adequate for most users. For £5.86 you get a generous 10GB of server space, unlimited monthly bandwidth, 300 subdomains and 1,000 email inboxes. You also get a .com and .uk domain name thrown in. Both Linux and Windows hosting environments are available, handy if you want to use ASP.NET, and script support includes PHP, Perl, Python and .NET3.5. Even for a fairly substantial small business, this is likely to be enough.

Setting up the service with Dreamweaver was simple. It took us about five minutes to configure our FTP client and put the files to the remote server – and that was our site online. Setting up email was just as easy, though we did have to wait five minutes for our mailboxes to become active: not a big deal, admittedly.

You also get a free site builder, albeit the personal version, rather than the fuller-featured business edition, which costs an extra £3 (or £4 with e-commerce features). Even if you only want the personal version, you have to order it specially. The same is true for the .NET and MySQL support that also comes as part of the package.

The control panel itself is a very odd creature. Half of the functions you’d expect to find there are actually in the Domain Overview, which is accessed from the main Streamline site. To get from there to the control panel you have to enter another password, which felt excessive.

Once you’re in, you’re confronted by a grey panel on a dark-grey page with and even darker grey header: all this crammed into the very left-hand corner of the screen. The only settings are those that allow you to manage your basic domain configuration, your email, any databases you’re running, to view your stats and to apply password protection to your site. This feels like something from ten years ago. We were really surprised by how clunky and limited it was.

Although there are some good things about Streamline.net, it feels like a service that needs some investment in order to put it on the same footing as its competitors.