Lithium Hosting has prided itself on one motto since being founded in 2006: “good web hosting shouldn’t be expensive. With this focus on quality service at a low price, could they be an attractive solution to your hosting needs?
Lithium Hosting also takes a no-nonsense, honest approach to hosting as they don’t claim to offer “unlimited” bandwidth or disk space. While this is a refreshing change from the false promise of unlimited bandwidth and shady business practices that plague the industry, does Lithium sacrifice their service for their integrity?
Keep reading our Lithium Hosting review to find out!
Lithium Hosting Pricing & Plans
Lithium Hosting takes a slightly unique approach as opposed to other hosts, as they offer a free 30-day trial (with no credit card signup!) for you to try out their service prior to purchasing. While the trial’s features (1 GB storage, 25 GB bandwidth) may not blow you out of the water, the fact that you can try out their service at absolutely no risk is certainly welcome.
It’s important to remember Lithium’s pricing structure prior to signing up, as they have some pretty steep discounts depending on the length of your plan. Hosting plans can be purchased monthly, annually (17%), biennially (21%) or triennially at a 25% discount (which amounts to nine months free out of 36!)
Shared hosting plans start at $3 a month for their Economy plan, which gives you two domains, three GBs of storage and 100 GB of bandwidth a month. Lithium offer free site migration for all their plans, although if your existing provider is lacking CPanel there will be a $20 fee to transfer your site. A free domain name is included with the Supreme and Elite packages, while you are also given the option to host unlimited domains, unlimited databases, and e-mail accounts.
Lithium Hosting VPS plans can purchased starting at $18 a month for 2 cores, 20 GBs of storage, 1.5 GB of RAM and 1 TB of bandwidth. You also have the option to have Lithium manage your VPS for you for $45 extra a month, while CPanel can also be purchased for $14.95 a month. We were slightly disappointed to learn that Lithium’s daily backup service for VPS plans will run you an extra $10 a month, which is somewhat expensive considering the cheaper backup services of other VPS competitors (VPS.NET and Digital Ocean for example).
Lithium Hosting has a 45 day money back guarantee in addition to their 30 day free trial, giving you close to three months of trying out their service at no risk! Keep reading our Lithium Hosting Review to find out more.
Lithium Hosting Speed and Reliability
Due to Lithium’s commitment to using enterprise level hardware to power their servers, shared hosting plans are built on Intel Xeon CPUs with 16+ GBs of RAM and a gigabit uplink. These configurations not only ensure top speeds for your site, but an ultra-reliable network as well.
VPS packages are also coupled with Intel Xeon Octo-core CPUs and enterprise-grade RAM forming a powerful backbone for your site. This hardware setup included with KVM virtualization, enterprise class SSDs, and Fast Path enabled RAID controllers mean that Lithium’s VPS plans are both fast and highly scalable.
If you have a lot of dynamic content or have a wide geographical range of visitors to your site, Lithium is partnered with CloudFlare CDN to give your visitors a faster and more reliable connection to your website.
Lithium Hosting Interface and Security
CPanel comes as the standard interface for all plans, with the exception of the unmanaged VPS package, which gives you the option of purchasing CPanel for $10 extra a month. Lithium’s CPanel interface is well-constructed (as we’ve come to expect from CPanel) and gives you quick access to the most important functions of your site, including e-mail, FTP and databases.
If you require a site builder, Lithium Hosting includes RVSoftBuilder to help make your job easier. With hundreds of templates and default styles to choose from, RVSoftBuilder is the one-stop shop for those not necessarily well-versed in web design and development.
Lithium Hosting employs a Hivelocity data center located in Tampa, FL with a Hetzner Online data center also located in Nuremberg, Germany to better serve overseas clients as well. We already mentioned the powerful hardware that Lithium’s servers are built on, but they take their commitment to reliability a step further by ensuring full power-redundancy and data protection for their servers.
The aforementioned CloudFlare is available to protect your site from any spam or injection attacks, while available SSH access and cronjob support means you will always be in full control of what is happening with your server.
If you are running an e-commerce site or require an additional security measure, SSL certificates are available starting at $16.95 a year, which is one of the lowest prices we have seen for a SSL certificate sold through a hosting provider.
Lithium Hosting Customer Support
If we had an issue with any of Lithium’s services, it was their lack of options when it comes to customer support. While they offer 24/7 ticket support coupled with an extensive knowledge base, this does not make up for the speed and importance of dedicated telephone support.
With the additional absence of live chat, getting instant support for a critical issue might be a problem. Lithium also splits their ticket support system into three separate tiers depending on the severity of your issue. While this type of system may help separate and streamline critical issues, it also creates a lack of instantaneous support for any issues that may arise.
If you experience any downtime with your site, Lithium’s 99.7% SLA (Service Level Agreement) is in place to reimburse you should there be any unexpected issues with your site.
As we mentioned earlier, Lithium’s 30 day free trial coupled with a 45 day money back guarantee mean that you have a near-unprecedented, three month time period to find out if Lithium might be the right choice for you.
Lithium Hosting Review Conclusion
I liked
- 30-day free trial
- Affordable plans
- Low pricing on SSL certificates
I wasn’t so sure about
- Only 99.7% SLA
I hated
- Only ticket-based customer support
So, does Lithium Hosting live up to their motto of “good web hosting does not need to be expensive”? Well, we were certainly impressed by their prices and commitment to to providing fast and reliable servers, but not so much by their lack of customer support options.
All in all, Lithium Hosting is a quality provider who gets most of the things right while also stressing a straightforward and refreshing approach to hosting. With a 30 day free trial on top of a 45 day money back guarantee, give them a try today!
Any good or bad experiences with Lithium Hosting? Let us know!