Pair Networks

A long, long time ago in the earlier days of my career, I hosted with Pair Networks. In fact, I was paying for a pretty beefy dedicated server with them to host my technology blog at the time. I was a customer of Pair Networks for years.

I moved away from Pair as things evolved in the hosting space and with my own website. I simply found I could get great hosting elsewhere for a lot less money, so I moved away from Pair Networks. And since then, I honestly haven’t dealt with Pair in years.

But, more recently, I found myself dealing with Pair Networks again on behalf of a client.

Pair has been around a long time. They say it has “perfected for over 20 years” and I can attest to how long they’ve been in business because I was a customer quite some time ago.

The other thing that stands out about Pair is that they are fully US-based. Located right in Pittsburgh, PA. They don’t outsource any of their support overseas, so you’re always dealing with an American. If that’s important to you, you’ll love Pair Networks.

Support response time is quite fast. I remember it was back when I was using them, and I’ve found it to be the same currently. They advertise an average response time of 9 minutes to a support ticket. That’s impressive, to be sure. With many other hosts (including Cloudways), there is the ability to work with support via live chat and personally I prefer that to a ticket system. Pair does not have live chat support. However, their ticket system is quite fast.

Now, outside of the fact that Pair is all-American and has fast support, the hosting itself is… fine. It is fast, but you’ll find fast hosting in plenty of other places, too. There’s one thing I don’t care for, though…

The interface.

After working with a lot of modern web hosts with modern interfaces, I personally find Pair to be simply archaic. Their Account Control Center (or ACC) is incredibly barebones and simplistic and looks… old. Even their main website looks a little bit amateur, frankly. Nothing about working with Pair looks polished.

Their standard shared hosting plans work well, but they are not managed. You can run unlimited sites, but the way you manage those sites is quite manual and tedious compared to managed WordPress hosting from a company like Cloudways. Frankly, the whole thing is much more nerdy.

They do have managed WordPress hosting, though. It costs more and they limit how many sites you can have. Frankly, I think it is too expensive. Their cheapest managed WordPress plan is $14.95/mo for 2 sites and 150GB of bandwidth on a shared hosting plan. I could go get a dedicated VPS server with Cloudways for less, host unlimited sites on it, and get a full 1TB of bandwidth. Plus, Cloudways has a much better managed hosting experience.

So, that’s the general review of Pair Networks as it compares today.

Solid hosting. Seriously outdated interface. A little on the pricey side. But, all-American staff if that’s important to you.

I’m glad to see Pair Networks still ticking along, but I just don’t see a compelling reason to use Pair today unless you really want to deal exclusively with an American company. They’re very good at what they do, but it isn’t hard to find equivalent hosting, with a far better interface, for less money elsewhere.

Pair is, in some ways, a company that has been around so long that perhaps they haven’t done the best job at adjusting to a rapidly changing world of web hosting.