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Saturday, February 27th
HostPapa, a private Canadian hosting company operating in 14 countries and hosting over 500,000 websites, has been in business since 2002. They, like FatCow, use renewable energy sources to power their server farms. HostPapa offers shared, VPS, and reseller hosting.
Price plans follow the usual introductory pricing scheme that most companies in the web hosting industry follow. But HostPapa makes an exception in not graduating its rates according to the term of service the customer selects. Instead of reducing the monthly cost as the term increases, the monthly cost remains flat.
HostPapa offers a mobile-responsive website builder tool priced independently of its hosting plans, but includes it to varying degrees in the plans. Pricing for the website builder is not subject to renewal rates and is:
Customer support includes searching the knowledgebase, video tutorials, live chat, a dashboard, support ticket info, and a network status tool. Security upsells can become quite expensive (between $29.99 and $479.99 per year) depending on the level of care your site needs. And extra web hosting, email, and domain services are also available a la carte.
Automatic website backups are available, but for a fee of between $35.88 and $249.95 billed annually depending on how much space your site needs for being backed up. Their backup pricing is the most expensive reviewed compared to FatCow's price of only $16.95 per year.
Out of all the hosts we've reviewed, HostPapa seems to have the most positive comments by customers using the service regularly. They're not unlike all the other hosts in the fact that there are several customers who have not had such positive experiences.
Some have complained about being ignored in email ticketing while their sites remained down for over a week. Another user complained that phones go unanswered and tickets and chat are the only way to get through to support.
Further complaints involved malware, spam from the company and other entities who seem to have bought customer email addresses from HostPapa, no support at all on Fridays and weekends, and rude customer service representatives.
Reliability of HostPapa sites is very good, with an overall availability of sites 99.94% of the year. However, performance measured by page loading speed was about 40% slower than the industry as a whole.
If you're a business owner, a writer, or a hobbyist, sooner or later you're going to want a website. To have a website, you'll need a web hosting service. There are hundreds of web hosting companies available to host your site, but which one do you choose? And, how do you know what to look for?
The first step in choosing a web host is figuring out how much you want to spend per month in hosting costs. While some web hosts are nearly free when you sign up, there is often some fine print involved. Many web hosting companies will lure you in with cheap pricing at the outset, but then will raise the monthly subscription cost when you renew at the end of a month or a year.
Some web hosting companies will offer you a lower overall cost if you choose to pay up front for multiple years. While some web hosts will seem really expensive compared to other, that's because they're usually offering more value for your dollar in more advanced or innovative features their cheaper competitors aren't covering. Whether you choose a more expensive host will depend on whether those features improve convenience or lead to a better return on investment (ROI).
That leads us to the next decision to make: features. You'll want to decide which features you genuinely need versus which ones you don't really need at all. Aside from the core service of hosting the actual website will be offerings such as web design, do-it-yourself site theme implementation, domain registration, email, eCommerce tools and setup, online advertising to promote your website, website development tools, and search engine optimization (SEO) help. Some of these will be important to you and others will not be necessary.
Security and performance are considerations that often get overlooked in the drive to find the cheapest web hosting available. Cheaper cost to you means the web host is cutting corners somewhere in how they host your site. Often that means "shared hosting", which means your site is put on the same web server as hundreds of others. There are security and site speed implications to this that often are not in your best interests.
Reputation can also be a key factor - web hosts with bad reputations or "fly by night" business practices can hurt your business or position in search results.
Finally, you want to know how reliable and supportive each web host is from the perspective of its customers. How many people are complaining about hacked sites, slow page load times, poor support, and price hikes over time? There will be many, many complaints across all web hosting options, so you'll want to narrow the list of things that are important to you and focus primarily on those as you evaluate options.
Once you have an idea of which web host you want to subscribe to, shopping online will make it easier than ever to find it. To summarize, as you decide which web host should get your business, keep in mind these criteria:
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