When it comes to providing affordable hosting, MochaHost as well as hundreds of other providers advertise unlimited hosting for low prices. Unfortunately, most of these providers also hide various fees and skimp on important features such as speed, reliability, and customer support. Can MochaHost avoid a similar fate? Read our MochaHost review below to see how we rate their service.
Founded in 2002, MochaHost has combined their 15 years of experience in the industry with a commitment to affordability and tons of extra features. Unfortunately, one can also easily find negative comments regarding MochaHost’s reliability and customer support scattered across the Internet.
So, does MochaHost join the throngs of cheap hosts that disappoint when further examining their services? Keep reading our MochaHost review to find out!
MochaHost Pricing & Plans
MochaHost offers Linux and Windows hosting plans, with the latter being especially attractive to ASP.NET developers who are looking for affordable Windows hosting. It’s worth noting however, that the Windows shared hosting plans will also run you about $1 extra a month.
For shared hosting, if you sign up for their starter, three year plan you can lower your monthly price to $1.95 a month for the term, along with a locked-in renewal rate of $1.95 a month after your term expires. That means for six years of hosting you are only paying $140.40! VPS plans also offer similar discounts depending on the term, with higher rates for shorter terms as well.
As we already mentioned, shared hosting starts at $1.95 a month for their Soho plan, which gives you one domain with unlimited bandwidth and disk space. For slightly better value, the Business plan starts at $2.45 a month, which gives you unlimited domains as well as a free domain name included for the first year of your plan. The Business package also includes a free site builder as well as unlimited MySQL databases.
VPS plans start at $7.98 a month, which includes free site migration, no setup costs, and two free static IPs. With 500 MB RAM guaranteed (up to 1GB Burstable depending on server load), 40 GB of disk space, and 500 GB of bandwidth, MochaHost VPS plans make sense for your growing business. Unfortunately, a control panel is not included with VPS plans, meaning CPanel/WHM/Plesk will run you an extra four or five dollars a month.
Dedicated cloud servers are available to purchase at $19 a month for Altura-3 plan, which includes two GB of RAM, 50 GBs of disk space, and two TBs of monthly bandwidth. Dedicated cloud plans also include a 256-bit SSL for the term of your plan, along with free migration and no setup fees.
If you find yourself disappointed with MochaHost’s service, they have a 180 day risk-free guarantee in addition to their standard 30 day money back guarantee. The 180 day risk-free guarantee enables you to cancel at any time within a 180 day period to receive a pro rated refund for the remaining term of your plan.
MochaHost Video Review
Check out MochaHost’s video on how to use their included SiteBuilder!
MochaHostr Speed and Reliability
MochHost advertises enterprise level hardware and data centers as the backbone of their supposed great speeds. While we aren’t too worried about the performance of their sites, we were more concerned about reliability and up time, an issue that has become quite evident across social media.
MochaHost utilizes Intel enterprise CPUs with up to 256 GB of RAM to better distribute resources, while their Chicago data center has network Points of Presences along with dedicated POPs in Virgnia and California for increased speeds in greater area. They also claim to offer fully green hosting, with servers comprised of energy efficient components only.
MochaHost is the first hosting provider we’ve seen to advertise a 100% up time guarantee, with most providers sticking to a 99.9% or even 99.99% guarantee rather than claiming the full 100%. Unfortunately, while this number may sound attractive to most people, we are quite skeptical on whether MochaHost can really deliver this claim based on the sheer amount of complaints one comes across on the Internet.
While MochaHost does not have explicit CDN support from within CPanel (as we’ve come to expect with most hosts), they are compatible with any content delivery network you want to introduce as long as you handle the install yourself.
MochaHost Interface and Security
For Linux shared hosting plans CPanel comes included, while Windows plans come with WebSitePanel, a popular alternative to Plesk. VPS and dedicated plans unfortunately do not include a control panel, meaning you will have to pay an extra couple dollars a month to use CPanel or Plesk.
We gave MochaHost’s CPanel interface a test run to see how it would compare to other CPanel interfaces we’ve experienced and we weren’t disappointed. Similarily to other CPanel interfaces, we were able to quickly locate and use critical functions of our website such as FTP access, e-mail, and backups.
When it comes to your data, MochaHost thankfully takes the protection of it quite seriously. They back this up with fully redundant network architecture without a single point of failure, along with 24/7 network monitoring, physical security, and weekly generator tests.
MochaHost runs their own web application firewall to filter out threats, while automatic daily backups ensure your site’s data safety in case your site is compromised.
Additional security features in the form of custom cron jobs, hotlink protection, SpamAssasin e-mail filtering are also available, while shared SSL certificates are also available for most packages. Private 256-bit SSL certificates can also be purchased starting at $64.95 a year, although some of the more advanced e-commerce plans include a free private SSL as well.
MochaHost Customer Service
MochaHost’s customer service is what really caught our eye when conducting this review. There is a seemingly endless amount of negative criticism related to wait times and insufficient problem solving. While we won’t judge them right away for what we’ve read about them, the sheer amount of complaints are certainly reason for worry.
Twitter is usually a pretty good source for finding out what people have been saying about hosting providers and MochaHost is no exception. We found a multitude of negative tweets regarding MochaHost’s customer support, further enforcing our belief that their support is not fully up to par.
That being said, MochaHost offers the usual phone, e-mail, and live chat support. While live chat is advertised as 24/7, phone support is only handled through a call-back service, which would explain why there are so many complaints about not being able to speak with a representative.
We gave MochaHost’s 24/7 live chat service a test run to see what kind of response we would get at 6 AM EST, and while we received a pretty quick response to our firewall-related question, it was pretty evident that whoever was responding was not well-versed in the MochaHost’s details. Rather than giving us specifics regarding their firewall, we were advised to install our own anti virus software on our home computer.
As we mentioned above, a 180 day guarantee exists to supplement their standard 30 day money back guarantee, giving you the ability to try them for a longer period of time while still receiving a refund for unused services.
MochaHost Review Conclusion
I liked
- Some of the lowest prices in the industry
- Free domain name with most plans
- Lots of Windows hosting plans
- 100% uptime guarantee
I wasn’t so sure about
- CPanel/Plesk are extra for VPS and dedicated plans
I hated
- Customer support
While MochaHost’s affordability and attractiveness to ASP.NET developers with their Windows hosting plans allows for plenty of enthusiasm when looking at their service, customer support and overall reliability are more than enough reason to be concerned.
Nonetheless, a 100% uptime guarantee coupled with the aforementioned 180 day guarantee means that they might be a viable and cost-effective solution for your hosting needs. If you are looking for hosting for a static page or personal blog that doesn’t generate a lot of traffic, MochaHost might just be the right decision!
Any experience with MocaHost? Let us know in the comments!