BrightLocal vs. IONOS Hosting

If you are a local business owner or marketing agency catering to local businesses, BrightLocal is a must have software. It has everything you need to track your local marketing efforts and to identify opportunities to make improvements, all at a very reasonable price point. You can also create nice looking reports to send to clients which are simple to create.

Incentivized

I run five websites off of 1&1 for different outshoots of the company. For our web needs it works perfectly. We have a midgrade hosting package and it works perfectly. I know if issues arose from traffic or storage space 1&1 would have a solution for us.

Incentivized

• When we use BrightLocal's citation building service, I know that we're getting quality citations done right. Their staff will email you with any questions and always double check the information before creating inaccurate citations.
• I love that BrightLocal is very quick about making changes when requested. For example, if we can't find a city on the drop-down list, you can chat them and they'll add it. Or if a report is pulling incorrectly, they'll re-run it within a reasonable timeframe.
• BrightLocal has a lot of different reports that are easy to send to your clients. You can even add them to a web-viewable dashboard so that your client can simply bookmark a link and view their reports when they please.

Incentivized

• Private registration: 1&1 offers free private registration which makes them an automatic favorite.
• Reliable customer service: always someone available when I call in and I have never had my issue not get resolved.
• Easy to use dashboard: domains in one place with DNS settings and other things that can be tweaked. It's easy to add an SSL certificate to domains as well.

Incentivized

• Up and down rankings were not always right on with the local search, but only off by one or two spots
• It felt like it was only used for local SEO, and I know there are more features, just never got to them.
• Didn't seem useful for every single client in the way Ahrefs or Spyfu did

Incentivized

• From my experience, customer services does not know how to address issues in an understandable language
• I feel that they arbitrarily overcharge w/o any explanation
• In my opinion it is really pricey

In over 8 years of operations, we have not had a single outage that affected us.

Incentivized

The email system has not impeded out mail flow in any way, and we do not notice the delays we sometimes see with other systems that include spam/junk mail filtering.

Incentivized

Although their customer support has always contacted me, they have not always been helpful. Many times I've had reports or information disappear with them telling me they had no record of it, even when I had reports that the information was in there. There are times when their system did have bugs and the support was able to help me there. Overall, the support staff is there but they cannot always do much and need to wait for their development team to get back to them which often takes a long time.

Incentivized

Thryv reached out to me about 3 weeks before signing up with BrightLocal. While all of their features were impressive, there were only about 3 features that I would have used. Thryv wanted $200 per month for their service, which I found to be way overpriced for what I was wanting to use it for. I selected BrightLocal because it had the features I wanted at a lower price and then add ons. After using BrightLocal for a week and speaking with Becki, a customer service executive, I have discovered more features that I would use on BrightLocal than on Thryv.

Rackspace I find to be too pricey for the service they offer. Pagely is very much WordPress oriented. I've had downtime with both that I haven't experienced with 1&1.

Incentivized

The scalability of the email solution far exceeds our needs and would be suitable for organizations not looking for an enterprise sized multipurpose solution (O365, Google Workspace, etc).

Incentivized

• BrightLocal's ranking reports have helped us better serve our clients' SEO needs, especially local SEO.
• Reporting is nicely accomplished with their online client report dashboards.
• Negative: some of their software defects are glaringly obvious take forever to fix, creating a number of awkward moments when we talk our clients through their reports.

Incentivized

• 1&1 host our email and domains adequately. We can easily add and remove emails as needed.
• 1&1 also works with our website platform, Memberclicks.

Incentivized