HostHero is a North American hosting provider, promising fast servers, 99.9% uptime, free domain registration, and awesome customer service. They make bold claims such as having a “Green hosting infrastructure”, but do they live up to expectations? Let’s examine.
PROS- 30-day money back guarantee
- Eco-friendly company
- 24/7 support
CONS- Opaque pricing
- Website definitely needs a makeover
HostHero Pricing & Plans
HostHero offers two web-hosting options: Cloud Hosting, and VPS, with both packages coming with free domain registration, depending on how long you sign up for.
Cloud Hosting
Their Cloud Hosting has the advertised price of $3.95/ month, although as you can see from the image below that only applies if you pay for 3 years up-front, which many people may be hesitant to do with a new hosting provider. The DO offer a 30-day money back guarantee, so that’s some consolation. For those who want to sign up for a shorter period, the price goes up rapidly.
VPS
HostHero’s VPS hosting has a much more transparent pricing system, ranging from $39.95 to $124.95 over 5 levels, all on RAID. The main differences between the plans are disk space – from 10 – 100GB, and the dedicated enterprise RAM, 384mb – 3GB.
The VPS hosting options all come pre-loaded with RAID-10, nightly backup option, uptime monitoring, Cisco firewall, cPanel, and FFmpeg. You also get full root access to the VPS.
HostHero Features
Money Back Guarantee
One of HostHero’s main advertised benefits is their customer service, which has its own section further down in this review, but it is indeed excellent.
As I mentioned before, HostHero offers a “no questions asked” 30-day money back guarantee, which is plenty of time to get yourself set-up/ migrated, but may not be long enough to really test the limits of their servers.
Free Site Transfer
HostHero will transfer your website, free of charge, from your current servers to theirs, which is very useful for those people with limited knowledge of web-development.
SiteLock
HostHero offers easy integration with SiteLock as a paid extra to their hosting. SiteLock has had mixed reviews, but definitely doesn’t hurt, and offers more protection that just SSL.
Unlimited email accounts, accessible through Horde, SquirrelMail or Roundcube.
Premium Backup
As an added extra, HostHero will provide daily backups of your entire site and all your files. The price is $49.95/ year or $99.95 for 3 years, which is actually a pretty good deal when you consider the peace of mind you get from knowing your site is safe, and if anything goes wrong, you always have a backup available.
Eco-Friendliness
It’s always good to see a company doing their bit to limit their effect on the environment. HostHero strives to provide a greener service by recycling and reusing, using Energy Star equipment in their offices and energy efficient hardware in their datacenters, minimising paper use, and offering work from home options to employees, cutting down on travel emissions.
Performance
Hosting Facility
“HostHero utilizes 5 data centers in North America. We have servers in Dallas (central), Seattle (west) and Washington (east) in the United States. Our Canadian data center is located in downtown Toronto. We take security very seriously. Our datacenters are locked off and guarded, and can only be accessed by authorized HostHero staff. Monitored closed circuit televisions and 24x7x365 onsite security teams protect our data centers”
Add to that redundant power sources, Dual Hex core servers, minimum 32GB RAM, RAID 10, and a firewall to prevent attacks, and you’ve got a high performing website host.
HostHero Interface
1-Click Installers
HostHero makes it pretty easy to set up a website even if you have little to no web development experience, with on-click installers for:
- WordPress
- Social Engine
- Joomla
- PHPMotion
- Drupal
- Boonex Dolphin
Customer Service
HostHero offers 24/7 live chat from their website, a ticket system, and a knowledge centre. I tried their live chat and got a response in under one minute, from a helpful and knowledgeable technician.
This is about as good as I’ve seen anywhere.
HostHero Review Conclusion
I liked
- 30-day money back guarantee
- Green company ethic
- Excellent support
I wasn’t so sure about
- Website needs a redesign
- Knowledge base could have more content
I hated
- Advertised price of cloud hosting only applicable to three-year contracts
Despite the fact that the website would put off many potential clients, I found HostHero to be a solid hosting provider, especially for sites with high traffic. If they iron out a few creases such as the disappointing cloud hosting pricing, then they will definitely be a high scoring all-rounder.
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