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9/10 |
| Website: | https://www.hostwinds.com/ |
| Contact: | https://www.hostwinds.com/company/contact |
| Phone: | 888-404-1279 |
| Location: | Seattle, WA |
| Cost: | Starting from $3.29/month |
| Year Founded: | 2010 |
Hostwinds is a great, affordable web hosting company that serves both Windows and Linux users. It offers a wide array of products, including VPS (virtual private server), cloud, shared, dedicated, and reseller hosting options.
Offering nightly backups, 24/7/365 customer support, and hosting plans for businesses of all sizes, Hostwinds should be on your radar whether you’re in the market for a new web hosting company or you’ve never worked with one before.
About Hostwinds.com
Whether your company is a startup or a big business, Hostwinds has a hosting package to suit your needs. PCMag.com named Hostwinds one of their Best of the Year products in 2018, calling it, “one of the best web hosts we’ve reviewed.”
With a decade of experience in web hosting, Hostwinds prioritizes superior customer service and guarantees 99.9999% uptime.
Top Features of Hostwinds.com
Hostwinds currently offers 6 different types of hosting plans:
 1. Shared Hosting |
 2. Business Hosting |
 3. Cloud Hosting |
 4. VPS Hosting |
 5. Dedicated Server Hosting |
 6. Reseller Hosting |
It’s important to note that managed hosting isn’t available on all plans, but your website may not need it. Let’s take a closer look at the hosting plans.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is the best option for your website if you don’t need high-end servers to keep it operational. Shared hosting works by placing your website on the same server as other websites, sharing the server’s resources.
Hostwinds offers three budget-friendly, attractive Linux-based shared hosting plans: Basic, Advanced, and Ultimate.
Basic: Offers unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space, a free dedicated IP address, and free hosting for a single domain for $3.29/mo.
Advanced: Offers all the perks of the Basic plan with the added benefit of hosting 4 domains for $4.23/mo.
Ultimate: Builds on the Advanced plan’s offerings with the added ability to host unlimited domains for only $5.17/mo.
All shared hosting plans include:
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With its growth potential, the Unlimited plan is probably the best choice for most websites. As with most web hosting services, signing up for an annual plan increases your savings.
All shared hosting accounts include Softaculous, a platform that makes installing WordPress and over 400 other popular web applications. Best of all, WordPress support is one of the services Hostwinds offers, making it easy to troubleshoot WordPress woes.
A Weebly site builder also comes with shared hosting plans, allowing users to design their website using its simple, drag-and-drop design. You can also upgrade from a free Weebly site to a more robust one without leaving your Hostwinds dashboard.
It is essential to note the downside to shared hosting plans: as the name suggests, shared plans share server space, so your site could be throttled or taken offline in the event of a massive traffic spike to your website to prevent the entire server from crashing.
Business Hosting
Touted by Hostwinds as 500% faster than traditional shared hosting plans, business hosting servers house fewer websites, meaning your site has access to more coveted resources.
Like their standard shared hosting offerings, Hostwinds’ business plans are available at 3 price points.
Basic: Starts at $5.64/mo, which is limited to 1 domain.
Advanced: Starts at $6.58/mo with the ability to host 4 domains.
Ultimate: Starts at $7.99/mo for unlimited domains.
Business hosting plans provide all the features of their traditional shared hosting plans with increased speed and higher performance thanks to the following:
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Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is a hybrid form of hosting that falls somewhere between shared hosting and VPS hosting. With cloud hosting, your CPU, RAM, and other necessary resources are spread across multiple servers. Because your website isn’t tied down by a single server’s resource capacity, your website will have more consistent speeds.
Cloud hosting is an excellent option for those who plan to run ad campaigns or launch products that could lead to significant traffic spikes, potentially disabling a site hosted on a shared server.
Some features of cloud hosting include:
- Full Management: Customer support is available 24/7/365
- Instant Scalability: Increase your cloud resources at any time in seconds
- SSH Key Management: Create or import your SSH keys
- Custom Templates: Configure the perfect server environment with one click
With Hostwinds’ cloud hosting, you pay for the resources you use, making it more cost-efficient than most plans. Hostwinds allows you to choose the billing cycle that works best for your website, as you can select a billing option hourly through triennially.
VPS Hosting
While VPS hosting costs more than traditional shared hosting, the added security — and decrease in other websites taking up valuable resources — make it a worthwhile investment.
VPS hosting still shares resources, but because they are isolated by virtualization, these servers offer more power. VPS hosting is excellent for websites you expect to receive a lot of traffic from sales or ad campaigns.
Hostwinds offers 10 tiers of VPS hosting for Linux and Windows. There are managed plans that promise all of the power with none of the hassles, for those who may not be as tech-savvy. For proud Linux experts, Hostwinds also offers unmanaged plans.
Plans start offering 1 CPU core, 1 GB RAM, 30 GB SSD disk space, and 1 TB data transfer for $5.17/mo and go all the way to 16 CPU cores, 96 GB RAM, 750 GB SSD disk space, and 9 TB data transfer for $247.69/mo.
All VPS plans include:
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Another noteworthy feature: Many VPS plans support OpenVZ virtualization, while others support KVM virtualization, which boosts server performance.
Dedicated Server Hosting
Dedicated server hosting is a powerful hosting option that sequesters your website on a server by itself. This allows your website to withstand high-volume traffic thanks to its immense server resources.
A dedicated server base plan starts at $90. From there, you select your operating system of choice and add your preferred port speed and outbound bandwidth. As with cloud hosting, you only pay for what you need.
All dedicated servers offer:
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Offering both prefab and customizable servers, Hostwinds’ dedicated server hosting provides up to 128 IPs, and there is an option for unmetered outbound bandwidth, though it can be costly.
Reseller Hosting
For those who want to get into the website hosting business without having to manage servers, Hostwinds allows you to rent server space from an established host and resell it to your customers.
Like the shared and business hosting plans, reseller hosting offers 3 plan options of the same names.
Basic: Comes with unlimited bandwidth and disk space for 1 domain for $3.29/mo.
Advanced: Offers unlimited bandwidth and disk space for 4 domains for $4.23/mo.
Ultimate: Gives you unlimited bandwidth, disk space, and unlimited domains for $5.17/mo.
Benefits of Hostwinds’ reseller hosting include:
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For resellers, white label hosting is an invaluable option starting at $10/mo. With white label hosting, you can set your own price point, and the payments go directly to you.
Criticism of Hostwinds.com
Hostwinds offers users numerous amazing features and easily scalable plans, but there are a few things to keep in mind before choosing Hostwinds for your website hosting needs.
- Limited server locations: There are only 3 Hostwinds datacenters, 2 of which are in the United States. They recently added a third datacenter in Amsterdam, but the location of their datacenters could mean reduced site speed for some international visitors.
- Strict conditions on refunds: They only offer a 30-day refund on Annual, Biennial, and Triennial plans. For Monthly, Quarterly, or Semiannual plans, you submit a request within 48 hours.
Apart from those two weaknesses, Hostwinds is a fantastic option for those in the market for fast, reliable web hosting.
Customer Support
Hostwinds makes customer support a top priority, offering expert assistance to customers 24/7, 365 days a year. They offer a friendliness guarantee, winning them FinancesOnline’s Great User Experience Award in 2018.
As we checked their pricing structure, a customer service representative reached out to make sure we didn’t need help with anything, which speaks highly of their customer service.
Hostwinds offers 24/7 phone, chat, email, and ticket-based support.
Conclusion
Hostwinds has numerous feature-packed hosting packages backed by top-notch customer service, reliable uptime, and affordably priced hosting tiers, offering incredible value for a wide variety of companies and individuals.
While their refund policy leaves much to be desired, Hostwinds’ rich features, including WordPress support and troubleshooting for those with shared hosting plans, more than make up for the few pain points.
With their guaranteed 99.9999% uptime and lightning-fast performance — awarded an A+, the highest performance rating in speed from Bitcatcha — Hostwinds appears faster and more reliable than other hosting services.
Ultimately, Hostwinds is a powerful, attractive website hosting service with all the tools you need to build a fast and functional website.