Hostwinds Review

Hostwinds isn't best it could be, is it truly so challenging to display complete prices information? However they have fantastic products, solid performance and good customer support.

Pros

• Large variety of products

• Great value

• Above-average performance

• Support site has lots of helpful posts

Cons

• Locating full pricing details can be difficult

• No managed WordPress hosting

• Support site can be intimidating for newbies

• Two-day refund period for memberships under 12 months

Don't know which kind of web hosting you require? Hostwinds does it's best to help by offering you practically every possible choice: shared, company, cloud, reseller, VPS, committed, spending plan Linux, premium Linux, Windows and more.

The Basic shared hosting plan begins at $3.29 a month on a yearly subscription ($ 8.99 on renewal) and includes an unexpected number of functions. These include unlimited bandwidth, disk space, email databases, subdomains and accounts. There's likewise cPanel access, Weebly website builder, Softaculous one-click installs, nighttime backups and a free devoted IP address. Everything you might need.

Hostwinds' e-mail accessory limit is higher than most at 50MB,and while e-mail isn't constantly the very best way to share big files, it's great to have the choice readily available.

The only limit we could see is that basic accounts are restricted to one domain each, but that's the very same for practically every starter hosting account, and it won't be a problem for most of customers.

With such a powerful starter strategy, the rest of the shared hosting variety can't do much more than include support for hosting more websites. The Advanced bundle handles as much as 4 domains for $4.23 a month paid each year ($ 10 on renewal), while the Ultimate plan supports hosting unrestricted domains for $5.17 ($ 12.99 when you restore) and puts you on a server with fewer accounts, ideally enhancing performance.

Hostwinds does not use managed WordPress hosting. Softaculous makes it easy to set up and begin using WordPress on any hosting package, however professional WordPress plans from suppliers like Ionos and Bluehost provide you more (speed optimizations, easy multi-site management, staging, advancement tools).

If you need more resources, Hostwinds' versatile VPS range offers you whatever from 1 vCPU and 1GB starter products to power-packed 16 vCPU 96GB RAM 9TB bandwidth setups. You have the ability to choose from several Linux distros or opt for Windows hosting, there are managed and unmanaged choices, and prices begin with a lowly $4.49 a month.

Dedicated server assistance is a little bit more fundamental, with just 2 base server types, but they're reasonably configurable. When once again, prices are reasonable, beginning at just $67.50 for the initial term, $90 on renewal.

Hostwinds utilized to use a generous 60-day money-back assurance, a huge improvement on the industry standard 30-days, however sadly that's now been replaced by a complex refund policy.

The new guidelines lower Hostwinds' refund duration to 30 days for products acquired with a one year or longer membership, and simply 48 hours for items with one, 3 or six-month billing.

Refunds are now prorated, too. That is, if you use 20 of your one month prior to you ask for a refund, Hostwinds subtracts their value from its payment.

That's truly not so generous, but Hostwinds has at least kept it's large support of payment methods, with choices including cards, PayPal, Skrill and Bitcoin

Account Setup

The Hostwinds website does a bad job of discussing it's strategies. There's little in the method of technical detail on what you get, and users are delegated guess on the prices of some products.

Avoid to the Shared Hosting page, for instance, and you'll discover the Standard plan is $3.29 a month, discounted from $8.99. You're not informed the length of time you must register to get this offer, however, and you can't even view your alternatives in a shopping cart until you've created a Hostwinds account.

That's truly unsatisfactory, and Hostwinds must be more transparent with its prices. If the company does not wish to mess it's item page with a bulky contrast table, add it to another page, and provide users a link. It's not that hard.

If you do decide to create an account (which indicates handing over your name, e-mail, physical address and phone number) you'll normally find the heading rate is for an annual plan.

Most items have decent savings to be had if you sign up for longer periods, and you're not punished too greatly if you opt for month-to-month billing.

Standard shared hosting is $3.29 a month over a year, falling to $2.35 over three years, and is a still sensible $4.23 billed monthly.

Some hosts keep you waiting for hours, but a Hostwinds email with you account details arrives even prior to your PayPal receipt. That's fast.

Customer Area

Hostwinds welcome e-mail includes a link to cPanel and its site management tools, but doesn't discuss it's customer location. This is an essential area for handling your account, so you should inspect it anyway.

The business utilizes the WHMCS platform for it's web control panel, similar to numerous other providers, and experienced users will instantly acknowledge the general interface design.

The control panel has lots of options, many of which you're not likely to need, but it's still fairly simple to utilize. A 'Domain' panel gives you fundamental setup details (momentary domain, nameservers). A 'Stats' panel displays disk and bandwidth usage for the present period. Then there are likewise fast faster ways to common website management functions (e-mail accounts, file manager, database handling) or you can log into cPanel and check out all the choices on your own.

A practical sidebar includes some helpful account management alternatives, consisting of 'Request Cancellation.' Ideally you won't need it, at least for a while, but we enjoy to see the function clearly noticeable (numerous hosts make it really tough to discover).

Wordpress

Hostwinds shared hosting accounts all include Softaculous, a popular platform that makes it easy to install WordPress and 400+ other big-name web applications.

The company doesn't highlight this in it's welcome email or client area, however even hosting newbies will discover it rapidly enough: launch cPanel, scroll down, and a large WordPress icon makes it clear what to do next.

Clicking install gives access to all the crucial setup options: site name, description, admin username and password, auto-update settings and more.

If you face trouble later, there are lots of WordPress-related articles in Hostwinds support site.

Weebly Site Builder

Hostwinds' shared hosting strategies consist of the Weebly website contractor, a template-based web designer with a stack of drag-and-drop widgets and UI elements.

Weebly is an exceptional website builder, and having it readily available here permits you to get a feel for whether its sites can work for you.

But there's a problem. What you're getting here is Weebly's extremely limited complimentary strategy, which includes Weebly branding on the footer and limits your website to just 500MB.

You can upgrade to more capable strategies from within Hostwinds, however from what we can see, you'll pay much the same price as if you went to Weebly direct. Keep in mind, this is an extra cost, you'll still be paying your routine Hostwinds charges.

The service could still be useful in a couple of circumstances. If your strategy supports several domains, for example, the Site Home builder may assist less technical member of the family develop their own small individual sites. There's not a lot of value here for many users, and normally you'll get better results by installing WordPress.

cPanel

Hostwinds' basic shared hosting plans featured a setup of cPanel, the industry-standard platform for establishing and handling your site.

It's a relatively minimalist cPanel setup, without any surprise bonus functions, however no meaningless additionals, either. HostGator's cPanel consists of a Special Offers panel packed with efforts to offer you more stuff, for instance, but Hostwinds' has barely any of that. For the most part, you only get the functions you need.

Top of this list is Softaculous, a user friendly system which can assist you instantly set up WordPress, MediaWiki, PrestaShop and numerous other leading apps.

The File Supervisor enables browsing your web space, producing folders, uploading and modifying files, and generally arranging the site to fit your needs.

Other functions consist of detailed tools for setting up and managing email accounts, dealing with MySQL and databases, including subdomains and, as soon as your website is lastly up and running, producing comprehensive reports on your website visitors.

Customer Support

Hostwinds assistance begins at its guides site, a knowledge base with articles and tutorials for each element of the service.

The website does not make numerous concessions to newbies. There's no upfront list of the most commonly-read short articles, plus the section probably to help hosting newbies comes at the bottom of a list of four and even when you click that link, the very first categories you'll see have very specific titles like 'Developer Guides', 'Apache.htaccess', 'DNS' and 'WHM (Web Host Manager).

Hostwinds has an excellent search feature, and going into a keyword or 2 typically brings up all the short articles you require.

When we ran a search for WordPress, for instance, Hostwinds returned more than 120 matches, with numerous useful short articles on the first page (a general WordPress intro, installing WordPress using Softaculous, installing by hand, setting up a plugin, enabling HTTPS, improving security, and more).

It was much the same story with other searches. From common keywords (' subdomain', 'DNS') to more particular expressions (' import WordPress', 'file consent error'), Hostwinds invariably presented us with associated and relevant content.

Articles are typically high quality, too. 'HTTP Mistake 403 - Forbidden' doesn't simply inform you to check and repair your site link: it describes the most likely causes of the problem, points out that a mistake 403 is provided differently by some web browsers (' the site declined to reveal this web page'), and provides some genuinely beneficial ideas (copy then delete.htaccess, examine file authorizations, shut down any recently installed WordPress plugins). These are complicated topics, the post is written in a very available way, motivating even the greenest of web hosting newbies to dig much deeper.

Even the very best knowledgebase can't manage all your likely questions, however Hostwinds' likewise has assistance available 24/7 via ticket and live chat.

When you open a chat window, within a couple of minutes an assistance agent will provide a handy and in-depth response to your questions.

Opening a ticket in some cases makes more sense, maybe if your concern is more complicated and needs lengthy description. Action times will differ depending upon the circumstance, however in our experience they're excellent, with detailed and useful replies generally showing up in under an hour.

Performance

Evaluating site efficiency is a difficulty because there are so many server, network and other factors involved, but we attempted a couple of tests to get a feel for Hostwinds' abilities.

We began by setting up an easy fixed website on a Hostwinds shared hosting account, then used Uptime.com to monitor the website over a week, checking its accessibility and logging response times.

The results were outstanding, with an average action time of 126ms and a range of 140-813ms.

This isn't going to make a substantial difference to your site, most hosts have a typical reaction time of 150-250ms, however it's still great news, especially considering we were benchmarking Hostwinds a lot of basic shared hosting strategy.

There's another major benefit in Hostwinds consistency. While many hosts have worst-case hold-ups of several seconds, and regular spikes in response time, Hostwinds' slowest reaction time (813ms) was very much a one-off, and for the many part its results were really steady.

Uptime.com evaluates complete, we relied on Bitcatcha's Server Speed Test for a 2nd viewpoint.

The website measured the gain access to time of our server from 10 areas around the globe, The United States and Canada, Europe, Singapore, Sydney, Bangalore and once again, Hostwinds was outstanding, with Bitcatcha granting its highest A+ efficiency ranking.

The results you'll see might differ, if your website makes heavy usage of CPU time or databases, for instance, it may be much slower, but a quick network is a good place to start, and Hostwinds seems to be quicker and more trustworthy than most.

Summary

Hostwinds may not always have the most affordable heading prices, however its feature-packed strategies are excellent value for what you get, efficiency is well above average, and the comprehensive web knowledgebase and rapid live chat assistance are always on hand if you encounter issues.