Network Solutions vs. Plone

My experience with using Network Solutions hasn't been great. At best, it has almost feature parity with its competitors at a higher price. But when you tack on all the minor annoyances of being given interstitial ads for their other products or discount offers when logging in or performing a transfer, the all too common bugs where a feature doesn't work, and in my experience support takes at least a half-hour to understand your problem before even attempting to fail at a resolution. It just isn't worth it in my opinion. Go with a service with better support, features, security, and lower price.

Incentivized

The larger your organization, the more appropriate Plone will be. This is not to say that Plone is a worse choice for small websites, only that the minimum investment for a Plone site is certainly higher than for other platforms. If you already use Plone for your site and are looking for a redesign or an overhaul, I would only advise switching to a different platform such as WordPress or Drupal if your organization is downsizing. For any other situation, Plone is the natural choice for your growth.

• Network solutions supports TXT, MX, and CNAME records.
• DNS changes propagate fairly quickly.
• Network Solutions has a web management portal for maintenance of your account.

Incentivized

• Plone is a folder-based system, organising content in a similar way desktop-users are doing for the last two decades. No need to teach non-tech customers some relational-database like paradigm for content management.
• Plone is secure. It is the most secure CMS you can get your hands on.
• Plone is flexible, and makes fast development easy.

• There appears to be no cPanel. This is something that is standard across just about every hosting company and it makes it easy to quickly find what you're looking for however I have not been able to find one in iPage. This makes it a less than attractive option for me.
• Very slow tech support. Getting someone on the phone takes ages and then once they do put in a ticket for you, it might be weeks until the problem gets resolved. Really unsatisfactory in this regard.

Incentivized

• Not everything is configurable or editable by Plone, and when you need to adjust or add custom pieces in, you need to deal with Zope. Zope has an ugly, confusing and difficult UI and structure as a backend.
• Using 3rd party products is difficult to do - there are a few different ways to get them installed, all of which take a bit of luck to get right.
• Building custom products for Plone is not fun. You've got to deal with an archaic framework to tie in that is not well documented (there is documentation about many things, but not great documentation and there are a lot of holes in the documentation).

We have critical systems running on Plone so will need it in the future.

Free to use since its Open source, so we don't have to worry about licence costs.

We know how to use and develop Plone and it has no limits.

The backend for managing your domain is very easy to work thru once you learn where everything is and what it is for if you want to do it yourself. The company has toll free phone support 24/7 that can also make changes for you if you are away from your desktop or have an emergency situation where you can't make the change yourself. This is peace of mind knowing that there is help out there should you need it. You don't have to learn the backend if you want to have the Network Solutions customer support team help you. They are secure and won't make changes for anyone who calls, they authenticate you for your protection every time

Incentivized

Compared to the amount of Plone sites, users and customizations we have in our organization, the amount of support requests and training needed is really small.

The new user interface in Plone 6 is even better, it is super fast, has lots of different blocks for enhancing the page, has flexible layout system and is easy to extend with more features.

Our Plone sites are very robust. We have critical systems on Plone and we have been running sites on Plone for over 20 years with very little unexpected downtime.

Plone is very intensive in its operations, and if not configured well it can be slow. However it is designed and built with speed in mind and with proper use of coding, templates and caching can perform extremely well under high loads. It is capable of scaling to very high load availability environments with no specific coding requirements.

For the most part I've had excellent interactions with the customer support team I've dealt with at Network Solutions. When I've needed help with something like Wordpress, it hasn't always worked out so well but you can pay their techs for 1 on 1 help with these offerings, you just won't have the support for free. I've often been talked to on upsells for services that I particularly didn't need and found the offers to be annoying when the agents kept pushing me on an upsell instead of addressing my issue. It's hit or miss on that, perhaps it depends on the department you speak with.

Incentivized

There are not too many Plone companies in the world. But the ones who are, are high level professionals

I have been participating Plone training and the trainers have always been professional. Materials were good and the instructions clear

Well organized, professional training with good materials and instructions

Based on my experience to date, I would rate Network Solutions easily at the bottom of the list. I have not previously and would not select Network Solutions, but have worked with it as related to sites and clients previously set up there.

Incentivized

Drupal: Plone is cheaper, so with Drupal is more complex to reach the required ROI. However, Drupal has a lower learning curve WordPress: For our necessities it has a more expensive learning curve than plone. Joomla, is easier to use. However, it have some issues on security and web content where Plone is much better

Incentivized

Plone has no limits. We have massive sites and can run them just fine

• Huge time sink for routine activities.
• Higher direct costs than competitors with similar or better features.
• Poor service leading to even more expense of time on the user's side.

Incentivized

• The impact Plone has had at the University of Oshkosh is as follows: this software allows student workers to learn about IT departments and CMS's in a user-friendly way. It gives many students great jobs that look great on their resumes.
• Since there are great training manuals for Plone, there is increased employee efficient in the workplace. Training doesn't take long, and if there's ever a question, the Plone manual is a great tool to refer to.
• If an employee using Plone quits, its easy to find someone to replace them with quick training and great resources.