Hosting24 web hosting review

What started its journey as a personal web hosting company in November of 2004 ended up morphing into 000webhost.com, a free web hosting service. This business chose a new path in 2008, this time as a web hosting company going under the name of Hosting24, and it has been on “an epic ride ever since”. 

Today, Hosting24 exists as a subsidiary of employee-owned word-class hosting company Hostinger and it provides hosting services to over 29 million users across 178 countries, with 15,000 new signups on average every day.

Based in Lithuania, Hosting24 has grown to international proportions offering data centers in the UK, the USA, the Netherlands, Brazil, Singapore, Indonesia, and (naturally) Lithuania, all of them ranked as tier three data center facilities. However, users looking for simple shared hosting solutions can choose between several data center locations from the USA (Asheville, and North Carolina) and one in the UK whose exact location isn’t specified. All of them offer a strong level of security and disaster recovery features, promising that your website will be “safe and sound” with Hosting24.

• Want to try Hosting24? Check out the website here

Hosting24’s official site is visually unimaginative yet it features a pretty-looking and up-to-date blog (well, it is actually a link to Hostinger’s official blog). The site is also very simple to use, and available in several languages in addition to English, including Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, and Vietnamese.  

Social networking enthusiasts can find Hosting24 on Facebook and Twitter, although their enthusiasm is sure to blow out fast when they see that the dust hasn't been brushed off from these accounts in quite a while.

Pricing

Hosting24 offers three simple Linux-based shared hosting plans that come with a custom-made control panel, two that include an industry-standard cPanel, and three WordPress-specific ones. As for advanced options, there are two reseller hosting plans, two for cloud hosting, and six for VPS hosting. All of them appear pretty pocket-friendly at first and are offered at promotional pricing. However, if you dig a bit deeper, you’ll notice that the ridiculously low price applies only if you are ready to commit for four years.

For instance, the entry-level plan appears to cost $0.80 per month ($2.15 upon renewal), but if you want to subscribe for one month only it will cost you $7.99 for that month. Regardless of the billing cycle, this plan will supply you with a single website, 30GB of storage space, 100GB of bandwidth, one MySQL Database, one FTP user, a website builder, an SSL certificate, and a “powerful” control panel. If you also want free daily backups (and yes, you do), you’ll have to go with a “Business” plan or choose either of the cPanel-specific plans.

All Hosting24’s web hosting plans are protected by a 30-day money-back guarantee, which will give you enough time to try everything out for yourself.  

You can pay for Hosting24’s products in various ways, including credit card (Visa, Mastercard, and Amex worldwide; Discover, Maestro, DCI, and JCB for the USA and Europe), PayPal, and cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Dash, Doge and more). However, if you are thinking about paying with cryptocurrency, keep in mind that it will cancel the 30-day money-back guarantee.

Ease of use

After you add the plan you want to the chart, you’ll be asked to choose a billing cycle (one month, one year, two years, or four years), and decide if you want to add a few add-ons: daily backups (for $0.95 per month), Cloudflare Protection (which will cost you $9.95 for a lifetime), and an SEO toolkit (starting at $9.99 per month). Here, you can also register a new domain name, and if you purchased an annual “Premium” or “Business” hosting package, you’ll get it free-of-charge.

If you haven’t done it already, now you’ll have to sign up with Hosting24, and doing so will require your name, email address, and a password. After purchasing your plan, you’ll choose between a European and US-based data center, and verify your email to get access to the hPanel. This panel is Hostinger’s venture into the world of control panels and its somewhat simplistic UI comes off as a cheaper alternative to industry-standard cPanel. If you purchased any of the cPanel plans, instead of hPanel you will be welcomed by an epitome of user-friendliness and utmost efficiency.

With either panel, you can choose to get down to the business of building your online presence, install all the useful open-source apps (like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal) with an automatic installer, or browse Hosting24’s integrated store to upgrade your plan or boost it with new features.

One of these features is a no-code website builder called Zyro, whose bare-bones version you can get for free with all plans. If you want more, you can also purchase a premium membership, and even get a few months for free. Besides this, you can also purchase other hosting products, SEO toolkits, “Priority” support, Whatagraph data analytics, NordPass password manager, NordVPN, and Google Workspace email.

Speed and experience

Hosting24 highlights its aim to supply its users with “the latest speed technology” without going into the details about the speed performance one can look forward to. Nevertheless, the GTmetrix speed test on Hosting24’s official site showed us a stellar speed performance. The site completely loaded in 2.5 seconds with 69 requests and passed the test with flying colors. Taking these results into account with other speed measuring metrics (largest contentful paint, total blocking time, and cumulative layout shift), GTmetrix decided to reward Hosting24’s site with a near-perfect A (99%).

As for uptime, Hosting24 guarantees at least 99.9% of it, which can roughly be translated into 8 hours, 45 minutes of downtime annually. During the two weeks of monitoring of Hosting24’s site, UptimeRobot (our tool of choice) failed to find a single second of downtime. Although the testing period was a bit short, it can be indicative of a general trend, and Hosting24 appears to be doing just fine.

Support

Although Hosting24 takes pride in its 24/7/365 customer support, we should note that some users reported having a hard time getting a response from the support staff, particularly during the weekend. However, we were fortunate enough to receive the right response within one hour after submitting a support ticket with a couple of simple questions. Be that as it may, the support staff is available via live chat and ticketing system.

If you choose to visit the knowledgebase, you’ll be transferred to the one by Hostinger, where you can search for a solution through suitable categories or by utilizing the search box. In any case, there is a massive amount of how-tos (681, as we write) and most of them are easy to understand and follow. Unfortunately, Hosting24 doesn’t offer a community forum.

The competition

Much like Hosting24, Namecheap is a budget-friendly web hosting provider offering a nice variety of hosting solutions with server locations in the USA and Europe. With Namecheap, you don’t need to commit for a few years just to get the cheap price. If you go with the annual plan you’ll get a free domain name regardless of the plan you choose, which isn’t true with Hosting24. On the other hand, if you are looking for a way to upgrade your business with a dedicated server, Namecheap is a way to go.

Although Hosting24 scores more points than HostGator in terms of network and data center availability, HostGator’s hosting solutions are just rolling in features, and they come with a generous 45-day money-back guarantee. This will give you plenty of time to come up with a final decision.

Like with HostGator, Bluehost’s weakest link is the unavailability of data centers outside the USA. However, if this isn’t an issue for you, Bluehost is well worth the look. It is a bit cheaper than Hosting24 (especially at the start), less restrictive with its resources (mainly disk space, and bandwidth), and provides an industry-leading cPanel with all of its shared hosting plans.  

As an amazing alternative to Hosting24 we simply have to mention its proud parent company known as Hostinger. Not surprisingly, their product range is pretty similar, but when it comes to entry-level hosting solutions Hostinger seems to be a bit more generous on features. It is also slightly cheaper but (just like Hosting24) only if you are willing to commit for four years.

Final verdict

Being around the block for over a decade, Hosting24 has grown into a respectable and reliable web hosting company offering feature-rich shared, cloud, reseller, and VPS hosting solutions with an attractive price tag. Although Hosting24 claims that happy customers are its priority, there have been more than a few complaints about the unresponsiveness of the customer support from their former customers (mostly on TrustPilot), which got us thinking, despite our own positive experience.

Nevertheless, all things considered, if you are searching for a trustworthy host that will equip you with everything needed to successfully run a personal blog or small to mid-sized business, Hosting24 is worth a shot. However, if you think that you could be equally happy with a US-based host that is slightly less keen on commitment, both HostGator and Bluehost are excellent choices.

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