Intuit Hosting Review

Intuit web hosting aimed at small businesses with its full-featured site builder, good speed and uptime; pricey and limited plan

Intuit, better known as the creators of the popular accounting software Quickbooks, has put its brand on Homestead's web hosting business. There's no substantial difference between Homestead and Intuit.

Both aim at the small business market with two packages: the Website Starter Package at $4.95 per month, and the Website Gold Plus Package at $19.99 per month. The former isn't really worth talking about, as it lacks email addresses and domain registration. The latter is more to the tune of the services we've reviewed here, though we have a major gripe with how Intuit presents these offerings. While they sell you on the $4.95 plan, they aren't up-front about the plan's limitations. Most users will find this plan too anemic and, like us, upgrade.

It's a steep price, and there are a number of limitations. You do get a domain for that price, though domain privacy will cost you $12 per year. Unlike most web hosts, you'll find a limit to bandwidth and disk space. It'll still be enough for most users. The more disappointing limitation is the cap at five email addresses. This is for truly small businesses, indeed.

Intuit's big sell is its site builder, which you can use either online or download as a Windows application (sorry, Mac users). It contains a number of templates, which really vary in quality. You also have access to 250,000 royalty-free images, a useful bonus for non-photographers. The site builders are full-featured and easy enough to use, but don't necessarily surpass the offerings from some of our site building champs like Yahoo! or HostGator. Still, it's easy to add PayPal buy-links, but there seems to be no way to add a blog.

For all its expense, you certainly get what you pay for in terms of speed and stability. See the chart below for details. For uptime, higher percentages are better. For all others, lower numbers indicate better performance.

Intuit Web Hosting test data:

	Intuit	Group Avg.	Group Best	Group Worst
8-Mo. Uptime Score	99.99%	99.87%	99.99%	99.56%
8-Mo. Downtime	35m	7h 45m	0h 20m	25h 18m
8-Mo. Avg. Response Time:	.602s	.498s	.343s	.651s
77MB Download Time	1m 08s	1m 47s	47s	4m 46s

Phone support was helpful and friendly, and necessary to explain incorrect FTP directions in the help documents. Phone support is only given for the first 90 days, however. After that there's email support.

Despite the performance, it was hard for us to tell just what we were getting for $21.00 per month (the cost with domain privacy), though we appreciate that the first month's service is a free trial, meaning they give you a free month for the first year. While the control panel is user friendly and the site builder is nice, neither are better than Yahoo!'s, which comes in at less than half the price. Intuit's web hosting feels like a way for the company to up-sell to its other products (customer management, search engine submission, etc.). If you're already an Intuit customer, you may find an advantage there. Intuit also offers custom website design, but that's an additional fee (you'll have to call for a consultation to get a price).