Hostwinds Website Hosting Review

Hostwinds Up Close

Hostwinds was founded in 2010 by Peter Holden back in 2010 which makes it a relatively fresh name in the hosting market. Peter has a background in development and the founder/CEO endeavored to bring a solid customer experience which no doubt the company achieves to some extent with 24/7 available human customer support.

The company is an independent web host with its own infrastructure built in three data centers (two in the US and one in the EU). 

Decently Fast Loading Speeds

Loading speeds from the server’s side have a lot to do with how fast or slow a site loads. Bad loading speeds make the experience choppy which neither visitors nor search engines like. Hostwinds offers fast loading speeds that make your web project load fast. It is thanks to Hostwinds’ network of three data centers equipped with SSDs and new servers. 

The company is right there among the fast hosts. The speeds are not comparable to speedsters like InMotion Hosting and Hostinger, yet Hostwinds is faster than most names.

Reliable Uptime

Uptime is the time a website is accessible to visitors whereas downtime is the opposite. Everyone would want their site to be accessible to users at all times. However, there can be instances when a site may face some downtime. However, anything above 99.99% uptime is reliable. Hostwinds surpasses these figures and faces a minimal downtime that won’t have a noticeable effect on your website’s performance. 

Hostwinds backs its claim of an uptime guarantee of 99.9999% with compensation. But it is quite hard to claim in case of downtime because customers have to generate a ticket reporting the problem. If your claim is right, you get compensation of a day’s worth of free hosting. Honestly, this is not the best of uptime guarantees. But the uptime itself makes up for the guarantee.

Knowledgeable 24/7 Customer Support

No matter how tech-savvy you are, good customer support is always a welcoming plus. One thing that really stands out with Hostwinds’ support is that you are not hit by automated responses. A knowledge agent answers your queries which is a breath of fresh air. 

Hostwinds’ support is available 24/7, unlike many other names that offer limited hours of customer service. There are also helpful articles and tutorial videos to help you with different processes. 

To be clear, the company is not a support specialist like InMotion and SiteGround. Yet, the support is good enough to assist you.

Complete Scalability

When your business’s needs grow, you need to scale up your web hosting. Often companies ditch one or all of VPS, cloud, and dedicated hosting. A benefit of starting with Hostwinds is that you can start with shared hosting and later upgrade your hosting without moving to a separate web host. On top of that, you have the option of Linux and Windows OS in both managed and unmanaged tiers.

Explore the hosting inventory and nitty-gritty of Hostwinds’ plans in the following:

Shared Hosting

When you are just starting out with your websites, shared hosting is the one to choose. Why? Because it’s good value for money and gets you most of the essentials. With Hostwinds, it is more like all of the essentials. Even Hostwinds’ cheapest plan comes packed with features that some other hosts offer as add-ons.

You have SSD storage, cPanel, a website builder, free migrations, 24/7 support, a dedicated IP, and unlimited email accounts. On top of that, there’s no cap on storage and bandwidth (in a way). In the web hosting scene, unlimited generally means more than you’d be able to use. However, you can only send 25 emails per hour from your hosted email accounts. This can be an annoying limitation for some users.

When it comes to the duration of plans, you can opt for a month’s hosting to a three-year plan. A general rule that applies to almost every host is that the prices go down with increasing duration. After selecting the plan and the duration, make sure to uncheck add-ons like monitoring and backups (if you don’t need them) to save money.