Hostwinds Review: Hosting For Business On A Budget. We Find Out Whether It’s Good.

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by Dale Cudmore

Last updated: August 7, 2020

Our Verdict: Outstanding Choice for Uptime Guarantee

Hostwinds is an affordable, customer-centric web hosting company supporting both Linux and Windows users. Its plans include shared, cloud, VPS, and dedicated hosting, and WordPress users will find options tailored to them as well.

Sign up with Hostwinds using any of our special links to get maximum savings when you purchase your new web hosting package.

Hostwinds customers have written 25+ reviews with an average rating of 3.0. Customers praise this host’s uptime (which is guaranteed to be 99.9999% or higher) and server performance.

Is Hostwinds the Perfect Host for Your Site?

• Expert Review – read our in-depth review written by Dale Cudmore.
• Customer Reviews – see what real customers say about their experiences with Hostwinds.
• Hosting Plans – compare the plans offered by Hostwinds and see how much they cost.
• FAQs – find the answers to the most frequently asked questions about Hostwinds.

Hostwinds has been in business for about a decade and currently has offices in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Seattle, Washington.

The company’s marketing materials emphasize “superior” customer support and a 99.9999% uptime guarantee.

Their primary market consists of individuals and businesses looking for reliable hosting services at a reasonable price.

Hosting Services

In total, there are 7 types of hosting plans on offer:

1. Shared Hosting
2. Business Hosting (also shared)
3. Cloud Hosting
4. VPS Hosting
5. Dedicated Server Hosting
6. Managed Hosting
7. Unmanaged Hosting

Bear in mind that managed hosting isn’t available on all plans.

Shared Web Hosting

Shared hosting begins at $3.29 per month.

“Shared” vs “Business” Plans

There are 2 main types of shared hosting on Hostwinds. These are labeled “Shared Hosting” and “Business Hosting”.

“Shared Hosting” offers 3 plans: Basic, Advanced, and Ultimate.

It may seem a bit confusing, but “Business Hosting” offers 3 plans too – with the same names: Basic, Advanced, and Ultimate.

What’s the difference (other than cost)?

Business Plans Provide Greater Speed and Performance

The Business Hosting plans come with:

• LiteSpeed web servers
• “Performance-optimized” MySQL databases
• More PHP memory
• SSDs (solid-state drives).

These technologies help your website load fast and reliably.

How Much Better is the Business Plan?

According to Hostwinds, the business plans are up to 500% faster than standard shared hosting packages.

There are fewer sites sharing a server on a business plan – so your account gets more resources.

What’s Included On All Shared Plans?

The shared plans mainly vary by the number of domains that can be hosted. The top plan, which is still affordable has no cap on domains.

All shared hosting plans come with:

• A free domain name
• Use of a cPanel and the Softaculous auto-installer
• Free website transfers
• Unlimited subdomains, email accounts, MySQL databases, and FTP accounts
• A free dedicated IP address and SSL certificate
• Use of Weebly website builder

Cloud Web Hosting

Hostwinds offers an intermediate type of hosting that’s between shared and VPS hosting.

With cloud hosting, you create an instance on Hostwinds cloud servers for your site data to be stored.

Similar to a VPS, you have your own dedicated resources, which keeps your site running at a more consistent speed.

Scalability and Costs

These plans have SSDs available, and can easily be scaled up or down at any time.

This a good option for sites that get traffic spikes – say, from ad campaigns or sales events.

Choose from hourly or monthly billing for these plans.

You only pay for the resources that you use, so it can be more cost-efficient than other types of plans.

VPS Hosting

VPS hosting begins at $5.17 per month with Windows hosting costing more at $7.99 per month.

Customers interested in having more resources to handle additional website traffic should take a look at the company’s VPS plans.

Linux or Windows

Hostwinds’ VPS plans allow customers to select many options including a choice of either Linux or Windows operating systems, varying numbers of CPU cores, and amount of RAM, disk space, and bandwidth.

The following features are standard on all VPS plans:

• 1 GP/s ports
• 99.99999% uptime
• SSD drives
• Free website transfers
• Choice of data center location
• Snapshots and ISOs
• Protection against DDoS attacks

Managed or Unmanaged VPS?

You can also choose between managed and unmanaged variations of each plan.

A managed plan means that Hostwinds will take care of server security, maintenance, and updates for you. You pay a bit extra for this convenience.

Many of the VPS plans support OpenVZ virtualization while some of the company’s “premium” plans offer KVM virtualization which helps with server performance.

The company also has plans hosted on servers equipped with SSDs along with plans dedicated to Minecraft hosting.

Dedicated Servers

Besides VPS plans, Hostwinds offers a set of dedicated server plans for customers needing resources fully devoted to their website.

Dedicated servers prices start at $79.50 per month.

Like the VPS plans, the dedicated plans feature servers with Intel or AMD processors along with varying amounts of RAM and disk space.

All dedicated servers come with:

• 99.999% uptime guarantee
• 24/7 monitoring
• Nightly backups
• Full database management
• Choice of data center locations

Dedicated server customers select a base plan and add on their operating system choice along with their preferred outbound bandwidth (inbound is free) and port speed.

Reseller Hosting

Hostwinds also offers a set of reseller plans. These also offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space and vary by the number of cPanel accounts.

Customers interested in creating their own hosting company or having their own unique brand can white label the hosting plans.

Hosting Plans Summary

Here is a summary of the resources offered by the shared, business, VPS and dedicated server starter plans.

Looking for a deal on quality hosting?
Get a HostWinds plan today at a discounted rate by using this special link. Includes free domain and 60-day money-back guarantee.

Continued below user reviews.

Hostwinds Reviews by Our Community

Overall Rating from 29 Reviews by Hostwinds Customers

Support
Quality
Features
Value

Filter reviews by: Most HelpfulMost RecentNegativePositive

Most Helpful Reviews

Antonio Silva cloudti.com

Oct 16, 2018

I contracted some services with them
they are very poor in the support they canceled my cpanel license without any reason and they did not reimburse me the old BurstNET I was sad because it seemed like a serious company, I ended up getting in the wrong
avoid this company because they are not a serious company

Visit Host Now →

Jap Tan maymomoo.com

Jul 04, 2018

Shared Hosting – Disabled MySQL remote access. I have been to 2 web host and ever since I normally avail a shared host. It’s my first time to encounter a share host provider with a disabled MySQL remote access.

The worst thing is that they don’t even mention this during their pre-sales and you can’t even find a detail of it on their website. I felt scammed!

Visit Host Now →

Ricky Dickson dixonwalther.com

Jan 29, 2018

They have this support ticketing process that never yields results. The front line phone staff have no resources to resolve any issues on a first call resolution basis. All my emails on the dedicated server are yet to send a single email and the issue is not yet solved. I bought a wild card SSL certificate and installing it seems to be some nuclear science to their technicians who they hide behind the wall!

Visit Host Now →

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Control Panel — cPanel and WHM  

Hostwinds offers the latest cPanel for all their hosting plans. (cPanel is a popular brand of control panel. It’s your dashboard which you’ll use to control your account.)

It comes fully stocked with tools like Softaculous Auto-Installer, which allows you to install open-source software like WordPress, PrestaShop, Joomla, and more in just a few clicks.

WHM

For plans that require server management, cPanel’s server-equivalent, WHM, comes with each plan at no extra cost.

Both are the most popular control panels in web hosting and are easy-to-use, even if you have no experience with web hosting.

What Can WHM Do For Me?

More than a few things. Let’s cover the perks:

Reliability and Uptime

The overall reliability of a hosting provider depends on multiple factors.

It isn’t enough to have a powerhouse behind your website – you want your risk of being offline to be low.

Infrastructure and Uptime

Hostwinds guarantees an uptime of 99.999% as a result of its robust infrastructure.

Datacenter Security

The company’s hardware infrastructure includes Tier 4 datacenters in Dallas and Seattle, N+1 cooling systems, and physical security.

Both datacenters are SAS Type II audited. They feature 24/7 armed security and monitoring by engineers.

The facilities include redundant power and the company provides customers with a 100% power SLA (Service Level Agreement).

Technical Support and Customer Service

To go along with its friendly customer support, Hostwinds offers excellent technical support.

Customers can contact the company for help through phone, email, live chat, support tickets, and Twitter. The support team and all support services are available 24/7.

Knowledgebase

One aspect of Hostwinds that stands out to me is that they have a robust knowledge base.

There are hundreds of articles about a wide variety of hosting topics that will help you if you ever run into trouble.

Each article is well written and broken down into simple steps with clear images for guidance.

Billing

Hostwinds gives its customers flexible payment options.

You can choose from a variety of contract terms ranging from monthly plans to triennial plans with longer terms costing less.

Bitcoin is a good option if you’d like a bit of extra privacy for billing, but note that there are no other special privacy features on Hostwinds.

Money-Back Guarantee

Hostwinds has a generous 60-day money-back guarantee on most of their hosting plans.

It applies to:

• Shared hosting
• Business hosting
• Reseller hosting
• VPN Services (different from VPS)

Refunds are not issued through bitcoin or Skrill. If you use one of these payment methods, your refund will be in the form of account credits.

Note: There is no money-back guarantee for VPS hosting.

Additional Services: Email, SSL, and More

In addition to its website hosting-related services, Hostwinds offers:

• SSL Certificates: these are key to your site ranking well with search engines, as well as securing your site. If you don’t have one, you can purchase it from Hostwinds

• VPN: to protect yourself from “exposing” your internet-related behavior to unauthorized parties, you can purchase VPN services

• SHOUTcast: an application that allows you to host your own audio stream – Hostwinds is one of the few companies offering hosting plans tailored for users of this product

• Enterprise Email: if you need reliable email services, Hostwinds offers its Enterprise Email plans, which gets you the specified number of email accounts, along with easy-to-use management tools

• Domain Services: you can purchase a new domain name or transfer a domain you already own to be managed by Hostwinds.

Recommended Alternatives

If you want to comparison-shop, here are a few alternatives.

Liquid Web – Premium, High-Performance Hosting

If you like the high level of customization and hosting options available on Hostwinds, you’ll like Liquid Web.

Liquid Web’s plans are managed, which means that you get assistance at all stages – setup, configuration, and maintenance.

They offer high-performance servers, and you can customize plans however you’d like.

The service and speed are amazing, but the prices are much higher.

A2 Hosting – Cheap and Developer-Friendly

If you want plans that support a greater number of technologies, consider A2 Hosting.

A2 Hosting prides itself on being developer-friendly, so the company supports pretty much anything you could use to build your website.

More, A2 Hosting is one of the fastest web hosts around, even at the shared hosting level.

HostGator – Simplicity and Variety

HostGator prides itself on being an easy-to-use hosting company offering a wide variety of plans.

It’s not the fastest, but its budget-friendly and backed with good customer service.

Bitcoin Web Hosting (BWH) – Privacy and Anonymity

BWH accepts Bitcoin and several other cryptocurrencies.

Their primary selling point over Hostwinds is that they offer a high level of privacy and anonymity.

Similarly to Hostwinds, BWH also offers a variety of web hosting solutions, including shared and VPS hosting and dedicated servers.

Pros and Cons of Hostwinds

Like all hosts, there are both good things and bad things about Hostwinds.

Let me break down the most important pros and cons.

Pros

• A wide range of payment options and services: one of the few hosts to accept Skrill and bitcoin.
• Great support: 24/7 support available through live chat, email, and phone and a great knowledgebase.
• Good customization options: one of the few hosts to offer both Windows and Linux hosting, as well as managed and unmanaged options.
• Emphasis on speed: SSDs and a few other features are available on many plans to speed up your website.

Cons

You also need to look at what isn’t there. Here are the standout weaknesses to me:

• Limited server locations: Hostwinds only has 2 datacenters, and both are in the U.S. Your site will not be as fast for visitors across the world.
• You have to pay extra for SSL certificates: many hosts provide SSL certificates for free now. You need to buy them at an additional cost, and they aren’t cheap.
• Refunds have strict conditions: if you get a refund after buying with Skrill or bitcoin, you’ll be stuck with account credit (which you probably don’t want if you’re canceling). The money-back guarantees also only apply to specific plans and services.

Ready to try HostWinds?
Get online today at a discounted rate by using this special link. Includes free domain and 60-day money-back guarantee.

Summary

Hostwinds offers fast, friendly service featuring a variety of hosting plans ranging from basic shared hosting to VPS and dedicated servers.

Customers looking for a customer-centered host that supports a wide variety of payment options, and is focused on reliable service will find much to like about Hostwinds.

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About Dale Cudmore

Freelance blogger by day, developer by night, Dale is a freelance writer who specializes in technology and digital marketing. He studied Chemical Engineering at the University of Waterloo before becoming a freelance writer.

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