When you’re protecting your identity and information online, you need the best VPNs to keep activities safe, secure, and secret. 

One popular use is, of course, using a VPN to block geo-restricted content on platforms like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and BBC iPlayer  - little wonder, then, that we’ve seen a rise in Netflix VPNs and streaming VPNs.  

The privacy tools are also useful for protecting IP addresses when downloading torrents. VPNs for torrenting prevent your ISP monitoring what you’re downloading. 

When looking for a VPN (even a free VPN), we always recommend looking for one that offers everything - letting you stream geo-locked content, while being the fastest VPNs - without any functional gaps. So, how does BolehVPN measure up? 

Despite having a Malaysian base, the tool’s is jurisdiction is in Seychelles. The VPN has over 65 VPN servers across more than 12 countries, including Germany, Japan, Switzerland, UK, and the US. This is a small number of servers compared to leading VPNs in the market offering thousands of servers. The servers are categorized into three groups, each with advantages and disadvantages, based on their intended use: Fully Routed, Proxied, and SurfingStreaming. 

BolehVPN: Pricing & plans 

BolehVPN has a 1-day free trial that allows you to test the software before deciding to make a payment, but it is extremely limited, with only 3 servers available at your disposal. It also comes with five pretty flexible subscription plans: weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, semi-annually, and annually.

The costs are

$3.70 a week, $9.99 a month, $16.99 every two months, $44.99 for six months, and $79.99 for the whole year.

All plans give you access to the same features and allow up to three simultaneous connections, which is small compared to the industry standard (5–7 simultaneous connections).

Payment options include credit cards, PaymentWall, PayPal, and cryptocurrency. All plans come with a 14-day money-back guarantee, which is manageable, but the standard in the industry is 30 days. Some other VPNs even go so far as to provide 45-day money-back guarantees. Keep in mind that refunds are not available if you pay with cryptocurrencies.

BolehVPN: Privacy and encryption 

Nearly all VPN providers in this market try to win customers by claiming to have a no-log-in policy, but they don't go as far as to support their claims by having their software audited by an outside auditor.

According to BolehVPN's no-logs policy, none of your online activity, IP addresses, or other data are logged, but according to the privacy policy, BolehVPN has the right to briefly enable logs if it notices suspicious behavior or receives a specific complaint of torrenting or spamming. This is inappropriate because it may compromise your privacy by recording your data. Despite the fact that the company claims they do not share the logged data with outside parties and that they delete the logs once the problem has been resolved, this is still a cause for concern.

The Seychelles Islands are home to BolehVPN's corporate headquarters. They have satellite offices in Malaysia and Hong Kong. These nations are not a part of the 14-Eye Alliance and are not governed by laws requiring the retention of intelligence. Therefore, BolehVPN is not required to provide information to law enforcement.

BolehVPN's log policy is transparent. The VPN provider releases a security canary once per month. This disclaimer serves to safeguard BolehVPN users in the event that the company is mandated by law to remain silent about any searches, seizures of data, or requirements to log. This is good, but we need the credibility of an impartial VPN audit report to support its assertions.

Although the platform is built on the OpenVPN security protocol, it also provides alternative ones, such as L2TP/IPsec, in case your device doesn't support OpenVPN. Additionally, it uses SHA-2 hash authentication, 4096-bit DHE-RSA keys, and 256-bit AES encryption for encryption.

There is a VPN kill switch feature, which safeguards your IP address and ensures your data is not exposed or made visible. The VPN also permits P2P torrenting. Remember, it’s unlawful to download copyrighted files. Also, there were no IPv4, IPv6, DNS, or WebRTC leaks over BolehVPN when we checked for them. 

BolehVPN: Streaming 

Servers on BolehVPN are separated into three categories based on their intended use: Fully Routed, Proxied, and SurfingStreaming. 

We tested the dedicated streaming servers for US Netflix and BBC iPlayer inside the app, and they functioned well without lagging. Disney+, Amazon Prime, Pandora, and Hulu could all be unblocked, although we found that long-distance servers typically had poor streaming quality.

BolehVPN: Speed and experience 

Depending on the location, connection, and internet service provider, speed can differ from person to person. Fast connections are almost as crucial as the security and privacy of a service. 

Running a series of speed tests, we found BolehVPN’s speeds were irregular. Its long-distance servers gave me contrasting results. like Singaporean servers that provided us with a 32.41 Mbps download speed over an 83.59 Mbps connection When connecting to a distant server, a slower connection speed is typical. The US servers closest to us provided us with a speed of 63.65Mbps. 

BolehVPN: Customer Support  

The support section of BolehVPN offers a number of beneficial installation guides, a help desk area with frequently asked questions (FAQs) and troubleshooting instructions, and email support. Regrettably, there is no live chat option or phone number. 

BolehVPN: Apps 

BolehVPN runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, iOS, and Android. However, neither iOS or Android has native mobile VPN apps. Sabai Technologies, ASUS, and routers are also compatible with it. Moreover, unlike many other VPNs, there are no browser extensions for top browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Edge, or Opera.

There is no alternative to configuring the interface of the Windows and macOS apps to connect to a particular server when your computer starts. You must manually choose the best server because the quick connect option that many VPNs provide is not available.

Both the iOS and Android apps for BolehVPN on mobile are very difficult to set up and lack some features, such as the kill switch and split tunneling. All features are available on the Android app, but it has not yet been made mobile-friendly. 

Alternatives to BolehVPN 

CyberGhost

With a user-friendly platform, CyberGhost is one of the best. with a wealth of practical VPN features. The software never causes your computer to run slowly, is easy to use, and is free. In addition, it provides extensive P2P and torrent functionality and gives you access to more than 1200 servers spread across more than 50 nations. Features of the software include web browsing, anonymous browsing, remote access, DNS leak protection, and more. Up to five devices can be used simultaneously under one account. As a result, you can defend your mobile devices and the computers in your home.

Pure VPN 

Aside from unblocking every website we tried, PureVPN has a reasonably large network and offers all of this for some of the cheapest advertised prices available. PureVPN excels at unblocking, has lots of features, and is good value on longer-term plans.

Express VPN

ExpressVPN excels in every area, including speed, security, stable and user-friendly apps, unblocking geo-restricted websites, avoiding censorship, excellent privacy and security credentials, a ton of features, and customer support, so we would suggest it to both new and experienced VPN users.

NordVPN

NordVPN is one of the major players in the virtual private network market. It provides all the security and privacy features that customers should expect from a top-notch VPN. NordVPN is based in a country that values privacy and is incredibly fast and easy to use. 

Verdict

BolehVPN can grant you access to the most well-known streaming services, particularly those that are only available to US citizens. Due to their difficulty in use and navigation, the apps are inappropriate for novice VPN users. 

In addition to having a limited number of servers, they haven't had an independent auditor visit to check their servers for logs, so in comparison to other options, we won't fully recommend this virtual private network. 

Most of the best VPNs on the market claim to be able to unblock geo-restricted content on streaming platforms like Netflix and the BBC - and that’s the big boast made by VPNLand, whose website proudly boasts that it’s a “premium stealth VPN with dedicated IPs for BBC and Netflix.” So, we decided to give it a try. 

VPNLand, a virtual private network service in Canada - a country that belongs to the 5 Eyes, 9 Eyes, and 14 Eyes surveillance alliances; a group of nations that gather intelligence data from their various regions of the world and automatically share it. This is a bad location for a VPN, especially one billing itself as a “stealth VPN”. The service claims to have over 700 VPN servers located in 13 countries and 10,000 IP addresses around the world. 

VPNLand: Pricing & plans 

VPNLand's price starts at $100 per year for the annual VPN account. This offers access to all of VPNLand’s servers. The monthly VPN account costs $15 a month for the same features as the annual VPN account. 

There is also the option of customizing plans to meet the needs of individual customers; for example, an account for poker players is available for $75 monthly. 

Unfortunately, there is no free VPN option here. There isn’t even a free trial available, and refunds are only given if the service doesn't work. You must provide valid proof to confirm that fact before receiving a refund.  

VPNLand: Privacy & encryption 

According to VPNLand's privacy policy, no logs are kept, and it does not keep track of DNS requests, but it may occasionally see its customers' real IP address in diagnostic logs. However, it claims not to collect any device-related data. Keep in mind that these assertions should not be taken at face value as no VPN audit has been undertaken and claims independently verified by an auditor.

Since VPNLand is based in a country that’s part of the "14-Eyes Alliance", if asked, it may disclose your personal information. We advise looking at our suggested alternative to this VPN if you are concerned about your privacy and anonymity online. AES (128–256 bit) encryption and a variety of VPN tunneling protocols, such as OpenVPN, L2TP, PPTP, and SSTP, are employed by VPNLand. 

VPNLand: Streaming 

Despite VPNLand's claims of being a streaming VPN - and specifically name-checking itself as a VPN for Netflix and BBC - when we looked for information on how to do so on the website, it only directed us to the page of another VPN service. 

VPNLand: Speed & experience 

For all its promises of being one of the fastest VPNs out there, the reality is far harsher, and slow. So slow, in fact, that we were unable to fully test it because our account was never activated, despite paying the price. If we’re being generous, we believe this service is no longer fully operational - but, regardless, the practice seems highly questionable. According to existing users, download speeds are average or below-average.

 VPNLand: Apps 

VPNLand has tools for Windows and Mac, as well as mobile VPN apps for Android and iOS. You can even enable it on other platforms like Linux, or VPN routers through third-party applications or the firm’s manual installation guide. 

VPNLand: Customer support 

Email and support tickets are the two support channels that VPNLand customers can use to contact customer service. Customers can also get assistance via live chat and phone during business hours. On the service provider's website, there are useful troubleshooting guidelines, so you shouldn't have any trouble resolving common VPN issues on your own. However, we were unable to reach customer service. 

VPNLand: Alternatives 

You can try any of our alternative VPN services as we are not sure if this VPN is active at the time of this review.

NordVPN

NordVPN has been available for more than ten years. You can access your preferred websites without any restrictions and take advantage of online security that meets military standards. Additionally, it has a 30-day money-back guarantee, doesn't log your data, and supports multiple concurrent device connections.

Read our full NordVPN review

Surfshark 

The service has a user-friendly app, unblocks all streaming services, is lightning-fast and loaded with cutting-edge features that are simple to use.

Read our full Surfshark review

ExpressVPN 

ExpressVPN is based in a privacy-friendly jurisdiction, is quick and safe, unblocks major streaming platforms, supports torrents, doesn't log your data, has thousands of servers dispersed throughout the world, and is simple to use. has a 3-month free trial and allows for five connections at once.

Read our full ExpressVPN review

IVPN

IVPN has a no-logging policy that has been independently audited, provides a unique blend of power and usability, is relatively priced, and has servers in 45 countries.

Read our full IVPN review 

Verdict

In theory, VPN Land has some good qualities to offer - it unblocks Netflix, BBC iPlayer, and other geo-restricted streaming channels, and bills itself as a VPN for torrenting. It even allows up to 10 simultaneous connections. However, this is not the case in practice.

We observed that the provider’s website was very slow and had no security certificate. Our account was never activated. Customer support remained silent. All in all, a poor user experience.  

To avoid all these issues - and at roughly the same price - we strongly recommend checking out superior alternatives.

iPage is a budget web hosting company with close to 25 years in the business, and more than a million websites on its platform.

iPage is owned and run by Newfold Digital (formerly known as Endurance International Group), the company who also owns big-name hosting competitors like Bluehost and HostGator.

• Want to try iPage? Check out the website here

What hosting plans does iPage offer? 

iPage offers simple, low-cost shared hosting, aimed at small, low-traffic personal and business sites.

A website builder range provides an easy way to create a site, then customize its content by dragging and dropping. The top website builder plan also supports creating a web store.

WordPress hosting plans include extra features to optimize WordPress speed and security.

iPage doesn't offer more powerful VPS, dedicated or cloud server products, making it unsuitable for large business sites, or any web projects where speed and reliability are important.

Next, we'll break down the various iPage products, find out what they have to offer, and whether they could work for you.

iPage shared hosting

Shared hosting is a technology where several websites are hosted on the same physical server. This keeps prices low because the cost of the server is spread across many accounts. But the websites also share the same CPU, RAM and network connections, and if the sites get busy, that means everyone takes a big performance hit.

iPage's shared hosting is as simple as it gets, with just one plan. It's seriously cheap at $1.99 a month over three years ($7.99 on renewal), but still has a reasonable feature list. There are no storage or bandwidth limits, for instance. The plan allows you to host unlimited websites (a welcome touch, as most plans at this price only support one). There's a free domain, free SSL, a bundled website builder, 1-click WordPress installation, unlimited email addresses and more.

That's reasonable for $1.99 a month, but there are some issues here. The plan doesn't offer backups, for instance, and it costs from $2.27 a month to add them, more than doubling the price. There's no free migration, and your hosting management tools are below par. iPage uses a horribly basic 1-click WordPress installer, for example, which doesn't begin to match the top-notch Softaculous installer often used elsewhere. And its own control panel, where you'll create email accounts, work with files and more, is short on features and awkward to use.

There are potential setup complications, too. Sign up and the website insists you register a new domain or transfer an existing domain to iPage; unlike almost all the competition, there’s no option to use a domain managed elsewhere. We asked support, they said this was possible but they'd have to manually create the account for us (a hassle, and not an option most users would even realize existed.)

Compare all this with Hostinger. It's a very similar price (from $2.99 a month over four years, $6.99 on renewal), but includes backups, offers a free WordPress migration, has a far better WordPress installer and control panel, and was much faster in our tests (more on that, later). Hostinger is a far better choice for budget shared hosting, but if you need extra power and are happy to pay for it, our Best Shared Web Hosting guide has more ideas.

iPage WordPress hosting

IPage's WordPress hosting plans improve on its shared hosting by preinstalling WordPress, a collection of themes and plugins, and a custom WordPress control panel. The company says its WordPress platform 'has been designed to increase load speeds by up to 2.5 times', and the premium plan ($6.95 a month initially, $10.49 on renewal) throws in specialist WordPress support, SiteLock-based security and automatic malware removal.

This is fair value - you can sometimes pay more for standard shared hosting - but the feature list is a little short. 

As an alternative, IONOS' 'One' WordPress plan has very basic specs (10GB storage and supports just one website) but it includes staging, daily cloud backups and smart WordPress plugin updates, and it's priced at $18 billed monthly (no long-term contract required.) 

And if you don't really need these more advanced features, after all, IONOS WordPress Essential plan supports one WordPress site, 25GB storage and 10 email accounts, and includes a free domain and wildcard SSL certificate, all for just $3 billed monthly. (Again, that's the standard deal, so you won't see a drastic price hike once the first term is up.)

IPage's VPS hosting plans are relatively ordinary: there are just three, they're Linux only, and even the starter product (1 core, 1GB RAM, 40GB storage and 1TB bandwidth) is priced at a mid-range $19.99 for the first term, renewing at $24.99.

These are managed plans (iPage looks after the technical management of the VPS for you), so the prices aren't bad, but you'll get more options and control elsewhere. Hostwinds has ten main plans, in managed and unmanaged, Windows and Linux flavors, and if you know what you're doing, you can get an unmanaged 2 core, 1GB RAM, 30GB storage and 2TB bandwidth plan from as little as $8.99 a month.

It's a similar story with iPage small range of dedicated servers (just three plans). They're a little underpowered - the $119.99 Startup plan ($149.99 on renewal) gets you a 2 core CPU, 4GB RAM, 500GB disk space and 5TB bandwidth - but they don't really stand out in any way. A company like InterServer has a wider choice of servers, more configuration options, and you can find more powerful setups priced from $80 a month billed monthly.

Does iPage have a website builder?

iPage has a simple website builder which aims to make it easy to create a small personal or business website. The company bundles a free version with its shared hosting plans, and we gave it a try.

The builder began by asking us what our site was about (music, food, technology etc) and whether we needed a blog. We chose a name and a free cover photo from the iPage library. There were options to tweak fonts, colors and navigation style, add a logo or contact details, but we skipped all that and our site was ready in seconds.

The free version is limited to six pages, but still created a decent site. It added Home, Menu, About and Contact pages for our restaurant site, and a simple blog. We could add sections such as maps, images, forms, videos and more, then preview and publish the results in a couple of clicks.

The website builder has a couple of paid options, too. 

The Business plan supports unlimited pages, adds tools to analyze your web traffic and offers phone support, and is priced from $6.99 billed monthly.

The Ecommerce plan adds the ability to create an online store, with unlimited products, PayPal and shipping integration, and comes with priority support. It's priced from $12.99 billed monthly.

The free website builder is a worthwhile addition to iPage's free shared hosting plan. It's easy to use and could be enough to create simple, low-traffic personal and business sites. But we wouldn't pay to upgrade. The site designs are relatively basic, the editor isn't as polished or powerful, and the e-commerce plan doesn't have the features to build a quality web store.

If you're looking for a website builder and you're serious about selling online, consider Wix. Templates are top quality, there are loads of pre-built page sections and elements, and it's very easy to use. And if you need to upgrade to a web store, it doesn't compromise on functionality: there's as much power here as in regular stand-alone ecommerce platforms. Prices range from $16 a month for personal sites, to $59 for the top-of-the-range Business VIP.

Is iPage easy to use? 

iPage offers shared hosting, the simplest and most straightforward hosting type, which should give it an immediate usability advantage. Unfortunately, it doesn't work out that way.

One key problem is that iPage uses its own control panel and auto-installer tools. These are limited, with fewer features than the best alternatives, less reliable and more awkward to navigate.

Many hosts use Softaculous as an auto-installer, for instance. This can install WordPress and 150+ apps, has all kinds of options to ensure you get the setup you need, reliably installs apps (often in seconds) and can help you manage your app afterwards.

iPage's installer works with WordPress and its own website builder only. It has no significant setup options, doesn't delete a previous WordPress database by default, has left us looking at a 'Setting up' message for more than an hour, failed to properly install WordPress once, and doesn't have any management options (beyond deleting your installation).

This may not matter much to everyone. If you've a simple site, and once you've created it, you'll spend minimal time adding content or making changes, hosting management tools aren't so important. You might spend 15 minutes finding out how to do something, but that's about it.

But if you're a web hosting newbie, or you've a more complex site to build, maybe a blog where you'll regularly add new content, then iPage's usability issues could become a problem.

How fast is iPage? 

We measure hosting performance by installing a template WordPress site on a test account, then using various tools to measure server response times and how quickly the page loads. 

GTMetrix analyzed a test page and calculated how long it took for the main content to load (technically speaking, that's a value called Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP). A low LCP makes your site feel snappy and more responsive, encouraging your users to stick around.

IPage's LCP was slow at 1.6 seconds, the longest wait we've seen in our last 15 hosting reviews. Most providers are somewhere in the 0.6 to 0.8 second range, significantly faster.

K6 is a website load testing service which measures how a site responds when it has several users active at the time. IPage coped better here, and our site handled up to 25 requests a second. But again, average response times were lower than average at 1.119 seconds. 

Put it all together and iPage is slower than most of the hosts we've tested. With no high-powered or dedicated hosting, you can't upgrade to improve the situation, either. But although this makes iPage a poor choice for any kind of heavy-duty web project, it's still fast enough for personal or small business sites where you might not see 100 visitors a day.

What is iPage's support like? 

iPage offers support on the website, via live chat, and telephone (7am to 12am Eastern Time, seven days a week). That's probably enough to get by, but the best hosts do better, with a 24/7 phone line and ticket or email support, too.

We opened a live chat window to see how the service performed. A window prompted us to choose a topic, then select a category from an annoyingly short list which didn't cover our test question. We made a best guess, and entered a description of our fictitious problem in an 'Additional Information' box.

Hitting Next submitted the question, and an agent arrived very quickly, within seconds. What happened next depended very much on the issue.

iPage support had no problems with our simple technical and product queries, providing speedy and accurate replies, with occasional links to relevant help pages. Ask an unfamiliar question, though, and it's a very different story. 

iPage offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, but we couldn't see any document explaining how this works. And so we opened a text window and asked if the guarantee was described anywhere.

'Are we facing an issue with slowness or the control panel', asked the baffled agent? No, uptime, we explained again. 

He asked for a few minutes to research the problem. Finally, he returned. 'I'd like to inform you about bandwidth', he said, going on to explain what iPage means by unlimited bandwidth. We thanked him, and left.

Our problem here isn't that our agent didn't know the answer (this probably isn't a topic that comes up often), as much as he clearly didn't even understand the question, despite us explaining it twice. Perhaps that's less likely to happen when troubleshooting web hosting issues, but it doesn't give us much confidence.

Final verdict

With no VPS or dedicated server hosting these days, iPage is all about its shared plans. These have rock-bottom prices, but they're also poor performers, awkward to use and missing some key features. IPage might work for the simplest sites, or to learn WordPress or some other web technology, but it doesn't have the power or features to handle anything more serious. 

iPage FAQs

ScalaHosting is an experienced Dallas-based provider with 15 years of experience in the web hosting business. 

ScalaHosting's range includes everything from shared hosting for simple sites, and VPS for more demanding business projects, to custom-built managed clusters (a group of servers handling the same site) with the power to manage even the largest websites. 

• Want to try ScalaHosting? Check out the website here

ScalaHosting shared hosting

ScalaHosting's starter shared hosting plan looks a little basic, with only 20GB storage and support for a single site. But otherwise, it delivers everything we'd expect - free domain, free SSL, free site migration, unlimited bandwidth, a 1-click WordPress installer, live chat and email support (not phone) - and some welcome extras, including remote backups of your sites for the last seven days.

It's reasonably priced, too, at $2.95 a month over three years, $6.95 on renewal.

Upgrading gets you more CPU resources, support for unlimited websites, hacking protection, priority support, and SEO advice to (hopefully) raise your Google ranking. The price jumps to $5.95 a month over three years ($8.95 when you renew), but that's fair for what you're getting.

ScalaHosting only has total of 16 hosting locations, including Amsterdam and Singapore, similar to that of A2 Hosting. Adaxially, all ScalaHosting's shared hosting plans use NVMe storage (which isn't used by many of its competitors). These type of disks are at least ten times faster than a normal SSD.

On the whole, these are quality shared hosting packages, easy to use, with all the key features you'll need, and fairly priced for what you get. A smart choice for hosting newcomers, or for small to medium personal and small business sites where speed isn't critical.

ScalaHosting WordPress hosting

ScalaHosting's WordPress plans look identical to its shared range, with the same features (as we discuss above) for the same price (from $2.95 a month). But that's not necessarily a problem, because there are decent shared plans, and there are some useful WordPress-related features, too.

The company says it will migrate as many sites as you ask for free, for instance. Many providers limit you to one, a few don't offer free migration at all.

ScalaHosting's servers are optimized for WordPress performance, with custom security rules to block '99.9% of the web attacks.'

The support team go beyond the usual server problem-solving to help you with more WordPress-specific issues, such as troubleshooting plugins.

All plans get daily backups covering the last 7 days (something we don't always see with budget WordPress offerings), while malware scans and removal keeps your site and visitors safe.

If you're looking to learn WordPress, or use it to build a small personal or business site, ScalaHosting's range more than covers the basics for a very low price. But if you're more interested in features than rock-bottom prices, WordPress, IONOS and A2 Hosting have powerful specialist plans with more powerful WordPress tools and valuable business and other extras.

ScalaHosting VPS hosting

ScalaHosting's VPS (Virtual Private Server) plans give your website more resources than shared hosting, significantly improving load times, and avoiding the slowdowns you'll often see with shared plans.

Prices look relatively high at $29.95 a month for a 2 CPU core, 4GB RAM, 50GB SSD system, but you're getting a lot for your money. Unmetered bandwidth; free migrations, domain and SSL; daily backups; WordPress backup, cloning and staging; malware and hacking protection; and no need to buy a cPanel license, because the cPanel-compatible SPanel is thrown in.

If the standard four plans don't suit your needs, you can build your own by choosing whatever mix of CPU sores (2-24), RAM (4-128GB) and storage (50GB-2000GB) works best.

There's even the option to host your VPS with Amazon AWS, instead of ScalaHosting. They're more expensive, but have far larger networks and can host your server in data centers around the world.

These aren't plans for casual users or bargain hunters, but if you're working on a heavy-duty project for medium to large or business-critical sites, ScalaHosting almost certainly has a VPS for you.

 How fast is ScalaHosting? 

We assess website speed by using a tool called GTmetrix to calculate how long it takes to load and display the main content of a page (a figure known technically as Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP). The lower the LCP value is, the faster your site pops up in the browser, and the snappier and more responsive your site feels.

ScalaHosting delivered an LCP of 0.730 seconds. That's fractionally slower than average, but still within reach of big names including GoDaddy (0.667 seconds) and GreenGeeks (0.692 seconds), and much better than budget providers such as Domain.com (1.5 seconds) and iPage (1.6 seconds.) Overall, ScalaHosting's shared hosting delivers decent performance which should cope with small to mid-range personal and business sites.

Reliability is another important element of hosting performance. Your website might download almost instantly, but if it's regularly down, your visitors won't be happy.

We assess reliability by using Uptime.com to check a test website every 5 minutes for 14 days, logging any passes and fails. Scala Hosting's result was easy to calculate because it had no failures, scoring a perfect 100% uptime. That's what we'd expect for a short test, but it's a good start. We've left the Uptime.com test running, too, and will update this review from time to time with longer-term results.

 How easy is ScalaHosting to use? 

ScalaHosting's web dashboard is clear and intuitive. Log in and your hosting plan is displayed up-front. Common tools are easy to find, often just a click or two away. A 'launch cPanel' button gives you speedy access to cPanel's many hosting management tools, and the company uses the excellent Softaculous as its 1-click WordPress installer, another usability plus. We've installed a lot of test WordPress sites, and Softaculous is faster, more configurable and reliable than anything else.

We did notice a surprising security issue. Although the dashboard's 'launch cPanel' button logs you into cPanel, it doesn't establish an encrypted HTTPS connection. It's HTTP-only, which left our browser displaying a 'not secure' error. If we accessed cPanel via unprotected public Wi-Fi, that may allow others to intercept our communications and perhaps steal sensitive information.

This must be some temporary issue relating to our account, we thought, and opened a support ticket to ask. An agent replied in four minutes, but the news wasn't good. The dashboard automatically uses a URL beginning hydra.vivawebhost.com:2082, and he explained we had to use hydra.vivawebhost.com:2083 to get a secure connection, before adding: 'I will report that to our developers and they will check if this can be fixed so you will be redirected to a secure connection from your client profile as well.'

In other words, while you can securely log into cPanel via other URLs, try it from the dashboard and it creates an insecure connection as standard. Your browser should clearly warn you of the problem, so hopefully users will notice and try a different login route, but that really shouldn't be necessary. Web hosts have access to some very sensitive data, and customers have the right to expect more attention to security details than we see here.

 What is ScalaHosting's support like? 

ScalaHosting offers 24/7 support via its website, live chat and ticket/ email.

The web knowledgebase is smaller than average but the company makes up for it with its YouTube knowledge channel. For example, the Hosting section has only 304 articles to cover shared, VPS, and reseller hosting, domains, DNS, security, email and more. There is useful content here, but it's mixed with generic 'how to' advice, and a weak search engine can make it tricky to find what you need.

Fortunately, if the website can't help, accessing the support team is quick and easy. Our live chat sessions generally got a reply within a minute, and the agents gave accurate and helpful responses to our test questions. 

Using tickets can make more sense for complex problems, and ScalaHosting performed well here, too. Replies were helpful and detailed, and arrived in anything from four to just under 40 minutes.

Final verdict

ScalaHosting's shared plans aren't the fastest we've seen, but they give you plenty of power for your cash, and could work for bargain hunters with personal or small business sites. The real highlight here is the company's professional and highly configurable VPS hosting, which has the power to handle serious business-critical sites. 

ScalaHosting FAQs

Opting for free web hosting often means accepting a lengthy list of restrictions, but browse the Byethost website and you might be left thinking it's better than some commercial products.

The company boasts about its unlimited data transfer, MySQL databases, addon and parked domains, for instance. There's 5GB of web space, the excellent Softaculous platform gives you automatic installation of WordPress and hundreds of other popular web applications, and there's a free website builder (with platforms) if you need it. It's ad-free, too.

This isn't quite as good as it looks. Although your site doesn't have a fixed bandwidth limit, it's limited to 50,000 hits a day. A 'hit' is a single file, so if your web pages refer to ten files on average (images, CSS or scripts), that translates to a maximum 5,000-page views a day. That's a lot for a small site, but it's not 'unlimited.'

Is it the best website builder? Don't get your hopes up (more on that later).

• Want to try Byethost? Check out the website here

There are other limits elsewhere, although they're less of a surprise: you're restricted to one FTP account and five email addresses, and you can't upload files larger than 10MB.

The service does give you free SSL certificates, but they're self-signed, which means visitors will see security warnings until they explicitly trust your site. That might work for a site you'll use with friends and family, but it won't impress anyone else.

Byethost does at least give you access to the key hosting technologies and tools you'd expect: PHP 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 7.0, and phpMyAdmin; DNS management for CNAME, SFP and MX records; FTP access; email accounts, custom forwarders, web mail, cron jobs, redirects, custom error pages, and more.

By default, your site will be a subdomain of byethost32.com (mysite.byethost32.com), but there are plenty of other domains to choose from: iblogger.org, is-best.net, my-board.org, mydiscussion.net, synergize.co and more.

Paid hosting plans lift the restrictions of the free products, and are available from $4.99 a month.

Setup

Creating your free Byethost website starts at the official signup page. This advises completing the process with Firefox, saying that 'Internet Explorer' is not recommended - wow, you don't say? - which suggests to us that it's not been changed much for a long, long time. But it's otherwise straightforward: choose your subdomain, password and site type (personal, business), hand over your email address, complete a Captcha and submit the form.

We created a test account, and the site redirected our browser to a URL on an entirely different domain, ifastnet.com, Byethost's parent company. That looks a little odd, especially as the page is plain text, with absolutely no reference to Byethost. The poor impression was confirmed by the outdated instructions on how to whitelist email addresses, as they covered Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN, and AOL 7.0 and 8.0, released way back in October 2002.

Whatever our concerns with how the signup process looks, it appeared to work well, presenting us with a 'confirm your email address' link. After clicking, a Welcome email arrived with our control panel, FTP account and MySQL credentials and URLs. But although we successfully used these details to log into our account, we noticed problems elsewhere.

The email gives you a plain HTTP link to the control panel, for instance. Follow that and you send your login details, including your email address, in plain text. Your browser should warn you about that, but we would expect a professional hosting provider to avoid this kind of mistake.

The email pointed us to a working knowledgebase for support issues. This does have some articles, but they're not all up-to-date (many are five or more years old.) It also has an HTTP URL, this time because it apparently doesn't have an SSL certificate (hardly encouraging for a web host).

(We noticed another sign of age in Byethost's Twitter link at the bottom of the page. It pointed us to the page for SecureSignup.net, the previous name for Byethost's parent company, and hasn't been updated since 2014.)

Byethost has at least fixed the video tutorials since our last review, as the links now work and there is some content available. It's very basic, though - topics include how to log in, create or delete a database, update or change your email - and is unlikely to help with most issues.

Creating a website

Byethost users manage their hosting through VistaPanel, which the company says is a 'specially designed control panel.' Sounds good, but the reality is a bit disappointing, and it is little more than regular cPanel with a custom skin and a slightly different selection of tools (it uses Monsta as the file manager, for instance).

If you're familiar with cPanel (and maybe if you're not), uploading a static site to your web space is easy enough. We opened the file manager, followed the prompts to choose our root folder and dragged and dropped our files. They were uploaded within seconds, and the site was instantly active.

Byethost's site also offers a website builder, but this was much less successful. The problems started with an insecure HTTP-only launch page, and continued with a poorly displayed set of templates. These appear in blocks of six, with no option to filter by site type (personal, business, blog and so on), forcing you to keep clicking 'Load more themes' to work through the list.

Each template has a 'Live Demo' button, but clicking this displays an error message 'Oops! Demo configuration is not setup.' Well, thanks.

Clicking Continue prompts for your domain name and FTP credentials, in order to upload the site. That makes sense, but it's insecure, as your login is being sent over an HTTP connection.

We tried to continue, anyway, but received a 'This page isn't working' error message (HTTP error 500.)

It's not all bad news, though. Byethost free hosting also includes the excellent Softaculous, a powerful platform which automates the setup of WordPress, PrestaShop, Joomla and hundreds of other apps, with the absolute minimum of hassle. 

Performance

Good support is a vital element in the best web hosting tool, especially when your service is as flaky as Byethost. But, in our experience, it's not something you'll generally get from a free service.

Byethost's free plan doesn't include live chat, but you're able to raise support tickets from the VistaPanel dashboard. We've had helpful responses in under an hour, too, beating the service you'll see from some commercial providers.

Free web hosting is never going to offer the best speeds, but it can deliver better performance than you might expect, and we run our test sites past multiple monitoring and benchmarking tools to see how good they really are.

Uptime.com automatically checked our Byethost server over a period of a week. Uptime was 100%, but average response times were a little slower than most at 325ms (typical shared hosting plans manage 200-400ms.)

Dotcom-tools website speed test simulated loading our site from 16 locations across the US and Europe. Load times were slower than usual at an average 1.2 seconds, close to twice the speed of the top commercial competition, but comparable with other free hosts (Infinity Free averaged 1.3 seconds, Free Hosting No Ads hit 1.5 seconds.)

There was better news with our final test, when Bitcatcha's website speed checker tested our website speed from 10 global locations and rated it A+ for 'exceptionally quick.'

Our own subjective experience wasn't as positive, and we would rank Byethost as a mid-range performer at best. It's good enough for simple tasks, though, and if you're interested in Byethost, it's well worth creating a simple site and trying it out for yourself.

Final verdict

Byethost has an impressive sounding feature list for a free service, but there are lots of catches (the bandwidth and disk space aren't as 'unlimited' as the website claims), and the dated content and various website issues are a concern. This web host might be worth a try if you need its specific features, but beginners should look elsewhere. Just bear in mind that the competition, even in free, is ferocious.

Opting for free web hosting often means accepting a lengthy list of restrictions, but browse the Byethost website and you might be left thinking it's better than some commercial products.

The company boasts about its unlimited data transfer, MySQL databases, addon and parked domains, for instance. There's 5GB of web space, the excellent Softaculous platform gives you automatic installation of WordPress and hundreds of other popular web applications, and there's a free website builder (with platforms) if you need it. It's ad-free, too.

This isn't quite as good as it looks. Although your site doesn't have a fixed bandwidth limit, it's limited to 50,000 hits a day. A 'hit' is a single file, so if your web pages refer to ten files on average (images, CSS or scripts), that translates to a maximum 5,000-page views a day. That's a lot for a small site, but it's not 'unlimited.'

Is it the best website builder? Don't get your hopes up (more on that later).

• Want to try Byethost? Check out the website here

There are other limits elsewhere, although they're less of a surprise: you're restricted to one FTP account and five email addresses, and you can't upload files larger than 10MB.

The service does give you free SSL certificates, but they're self-signed, which means visitors will see security warnings until they explicitly trust your site. That might work for a site you'll use with friends and family, but it won't impress anyone else.

Byethost does at least give you access to the key hosting technologies and tools you'd expect: PHP 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 7.0, and phpMyAdmin; DNS management for CNAME, SFP and MX records; FTP access; email accounts, custom forwarders, web mail, cron jobs, redirects, custom error pages, and more.

By default, your site will be a subdomain of byethost32.com (mysite.byethost32.com), but there are plenty of other domains to choose from: iblogger.org, is-best.net, my-board.org, mydiscussion.net, synergize.co and more.

Paid hosting plans lift the restrictions of the free products, and are available from $4.99 a month.

Setup

Creating your free Byethost website starts at the official signup page. This advises completing the process with Firefox, saying that 'Internet Explorer' is not recommended - wow, you don't say? - which suggests to us that it's not been changed much for a long, long time. But it's otherwise straightforward: choose your subdomain, password and site type (personal, business), hand over your email address, complete a Captcha and submit the form.

We created a test account, and the site redirected our browser to a URL on an entirely different domain, ifastnet.com, Byethost's parent company. That looks a little odd, especially as the page is plain text, with absolutely no reference to Byethost. The poor impression was confirmed by the outdated instructions on how to whitelist email addresses, as they covered Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN, and AOL 7.0 and 8.0, released way back in October 2002.

Whatever our concerns with how the signup process looks, it appeared to work well, presenting us with a 'confirm your email address' link. After clicking, a Welcome email arrived with our control panel, FTP account and MySQL credentials and URLs. But although we successfully used these details to log into our account, we noticed problems elsewhere.

The email gives you a plain HTTP link to the control panel, for instance. Follow that and you send your login details, including your email address, in plain text. Your browser should warn you about that, but we would expect a professional hosting provider to avoid this kind of mistake.

The email pointed us to a working knowledgebase for support issues. This does have some articles, but they're not all up-to-date (many are five or more years old.) It also has an HTTP URL, this time because it apparently doesn't have an SSL certificate (hardly encouraging for a web host).

(We noticed another sign of age in Byethost's Twitter link at the bottom of the page. It pointed us to the page for SecureSignup.net, the previous name for Byethost's parent company, and hasn't been updated since 2014.)

Byethost has at least fixed the video tutorials since our last review, as the links now work and there is some content available. It's very basic, though - topics include how to log in, create or delete a database, update or change your email - and is unlikely to help with most issues.

Creating a website

Byethost users manage their hosting through VistaPanel, which the company says is a 'specially designed control panel.' Sounds good, but the reality is a bit disappointing, and it is little more than regular cPanel with a custom skin and a slightly different selection of tools (it uses Monsta as the file manager, for instance).

If you're familiar with cPanel (and maybe if you're not), uploading a static site to your web space is easy enough. We opened the file manager, followed the prompts to choose our root folder and dragged and dropped our files. They were uploaded within seconds, and the site was instantly active.

Byethost's site also offers a website builder, but this was much less successful. The problems started with an insecure HTTP-only launch page, and continued with a poorly displayed set of templates. These appear in blocks of six, with no option to filter by site type (personal, business, blog and so on), forcing you to keep clicking 'Load more themes' to work through the list.

Each template has a 'Live Demo' button, but clicking this displays an error message 'Oops! Demo configuration is not setup.' Well, thanks.

Clicking Continue prompts for your domain name and FTP credentials, in order to upload the site. That makes sense, but it's insecure, as your login is being sent over an HTTP connection.

We tried to continue, anyway, but received a 'This page isn't working' error message (HTTP error 500.)

It's not all bad news, though. Byethost free hosting also includes the excellent Softaculous, a powerful platform which automates the setup of WordPress, PrestaShop, Joomla and hundreds of other apps, with the absolute minimum of hassle. 

Performance

Good support is a vital element in the best web hosting tool, especially when your service is as flaky as Byethost. But, in our experience, it's not something you'll generally get from a free service.

Byethost's free plan doesn't include live chat, but you're able to raise support tickets from the VistaPanel dashboard. We've had helpful responses in under an hour, too, beating the service you'll see from some commercial providers.

Free web hosting is never going to offer the best speeds, but it can deliver better performance than you might expect, and we run our test sites past multiple monitoring and benchmarking tools to see how good they really are.

Uptime.com automatically checked our Byethost server over a period of a week. Uptime was 100%, but average response times were a little slower than most at 325ms (typical shared hosting plans manage 200-400ms.)

Dotcom-tools website speed test simulated loading our site from 16 locations across the US and Europe. Load times were slower than usual at an average 1.2 seconds, close to twice the speed of the top commercial competition, but comparable with other free hosts (Infinity Free averaged 1.3 seconds, Free Hosting No Ads hit 1.5 seconds.)

There was better news with our final test, when Bitcatcha's website speed checker tested our website speed from 10 global locations and rated it A+ for 'exceptionally quick.'

Our own subjective experience wasn't as positive, and we would rank Byethost as a mid-range performer at best. It's good enough for simple tasks, though, and if you're interested in Byethost, it's well worth creating a simple site and trying it out for yourself.

Final verdict

Byethost has an impressive sounding feature list for a free service, but there are lots of catches (the bandwidth and disk space aren't as 'unlimited' as the website claims), and the dated content and various website issues are a concern. This web host might be worth a try if you need its specific features, but beginners should look elsewhere. Just bear in mind that the competition, even in free, is ferocious.

GreenGeeks is an American web hosting provider with 55,000 customers, managing 600,000 websites, and a lengthy 14 years of experience in green hosting.

The company goes well beyond the simple energy-saving tricks of other web hosts. It calculates its energy consumption each year, then pays for three times that in green energy and puts it back into the grid. That's not just carbon neutral, it's carbon reducing.

If that's not enough, GreenGeeks has another simpler and more straightforward way to showcase its economic credentials: for every hosting account set up on the platform, the company plants one tree.

What types of hosting does GreenGeeks offer? 

GreenGeeks offers low cost shared hosting, ideal for personal users and simple business websites.

WordPress and WooCommerce hosting allows you to build anything from a personal blog to a small web store.

VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting is a powerful technology which gives your site access to more CPU, RAM and other system resources. It's a smart choice for large or high-traffic sites, where top speeds are vital, and downtime could be a disaster.

GreenGeeks also offers dedicated server hosting, where your server gets an entire site all to itself for the maximum performance.

Next, we'll break down GreenGeeks' various hosting types, find out what they have to offer, and which might be the best solution for you. 

GreenGeeks shared hosting

Opt for shared hosting and your website is stored on a single web server along with several others. The benefit of this scheme is it's easy to use, and because everyone shares the server costs, it can be very cheap ($2 a month or even less.) But the disadvantage is all sites share the server's CPU, RAM, network connection and more, reducing speeds.

GreenGeeks starter shared hosting plan more than covers the basics, with 50GB storage, unmetered bandwidth, free SSL, a free domain, a free migration to import your current  site from another host, nightly backups, and top-quality industry-standard hosting tools including Softaculous to automatically install WordPress and 150+ other apps, and cPanel for all your other hosting management needs.

It's a decent package with enough power for personal users and small websites, and is priced low in the first year at $2.95. But costs jump to $10.95 on renewal, at little more than the best of the competition.

The mid-range plan adds unlimited storage and support for unlimited websites, along with on-demand backups (save a copy of your site whenever you like) and a WordPress repair tool. It's more capable, but at $4.95 a month in year one, $14.95 on renewal, it's still priced above average.

The Premium plan is aimed at small businesses with high traffic sites or web stores. It adds extra resources and high-end business-friendly extras, including premium SSL and smart object caching (a clever technology which uses the Memcached and Redis tools to accelerate website speeds). It's a capable package, worth considering for demanding sites, and looks fairly priced at $8.95 a month in year one, $25.95 on renewal.

GreenGeeks WordPress hosting 

WordPress is one of the most popular website creators around, and it's easy to see why. Its huge range of add-ons can handle the most advanced of business and web store projects, yet it's also accessible enough for home users to build simple family sites.

GreenGeeks' WordPress hosting is essentially the shared hosting plan - same names, same prices - with a little extra focus on some helpful WordPress-related features.

The plans include free migration of your WordPress site from a previous host, for instance. You get daily backups, with automatic updates of WordPress and its plugins. GreenGeeks uses the LiteSpeed server and LS Cache plugin to optimize speed. Unusually, the company doesn't just offer to scan your website for malware: the website says it'll help clean your site if anything malicious shows up.

The malware pledge is unusual for a budget hosting plan, but otherwise there are no real surprises here. If you're happy with GreenGeeks' shared hosting and only need the WordPress basics, these plans have you covered. But if not, take a look at IONOS. It starts from only $0.50 a month in year one ($8 on renewal), but other plans have more advanced features, and the WP Pro range uses VPS hosting to accelerate performance and support business-critical sites.

GreenGeeks VPS hosting 

VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting is a system which divides one physical server into several smaller private pieces. Each gets its own set of server resources, not shared with other users, making for a far more powerful setup. A good VPS can run a large blog with hundreds of thousands of visitors monthly.

GreenGeeks has only three VPS plans. The cheapest is $39.95 billed monthly for 2GB RAM, 4 CPU cores and 50GB RAM. The top-of-the-range plan has 8GB RAM, 6 CPU cores and 150GB SSD storage for $109.95 billed monthly.

There are a lot of positives here. These are managed plans, which means GreenGeeks maintains the server for you (updating the operating system, installing security patches, monitoring the service for issues.) A strong set of features includes free SSL, a free migration, cPanel server management and the excellent Softaculous to automatically install WordPress or 150+ other apps. All plans have a generous 10TB bandwidth allowance, and prices are low considering what you get.

If you're looking for a lower to mid-range VPS, or new to this type of hosting and unsure exactly what you need, GreenGeeks is well worth considering. But with only three plans, and no configuration options, there's not a lot of choice, and many users will be better off elsewhere.

Hostwinds has a far wider range of plans, including budget $4.99 a month unmanaged setups ranging up to far more powerful 16 CPU core, 96GB RAM system. There's a choice of operating systems (including Windows), and a speedy 1Gbps network connection. If you're a seasoned VPS user with a demanding website, or you'd like more of an upgrade path if the site outgrows your first VPS, Hostwinds may be the better choice.

GreenGeeks dedicated hosting

Opt for dedicated hosting and you get a web server for your site alone. That means no more sharing resources with others, no unexpected slowdowns because a neighboring site is suddenly busy: you just get the best speeds your hardware can manage, all the time.

GreenGeeks has only four dedicated plans. They start with a budget 2GB RAM, Intel Atom 330 Dual Core CPU system for $169 a month. At the top of the range, a 16GB RAM, 6-core Xeon E5-2620 2.0Ghz, 2x 500 GB SSD is $439, again billed monthly.

These prices are higher than most, a surprise considering how GreenGeeks offers such great deals everywhere else. We found we could save $100-$150 a month or more on some plans by choosing comparable servers at Hostwinds.

As with GreenGeeks' VPS products, its dedicated hosting range is a little small. It covers the lower middle range of the market, but there's plenty of gaps elsewhere. IONOS has some value unmanaged deals for experienced users, for instance, with prices starting at under $50. Or if it's power you're after, Liquid Web has dedicated servers for enterprise users, with as much as 32 cores and 128GB RAM.

Does GreenGeeks have a website builder? 

GreenGeeks' shared hosting packages include a free version of Weebly Site Builder. At least, that's the idea. It's not installed by default, and we didn't see it mentioned in the dashboard, so many users may never even realize it's available. But if you raise a support ticket, GreenGeeks will activate the free version for you.

Weebly works much like many other website builders. Choose a starting website design from a selection of around 100. Then customize basics like colors and fonts, if you like. Or just drag and drop blocks of content onto the page - text, photos, forms, maps, more - and then add your own text and photos, just as you would in any other editor.

This is easy to use, and has a few more features than we'd expect for a free tool. There's no limit on the number of pages your site can have, for instance. You can even create a tiny web store for up to five products. 

Weebly Free is a fun app, and could be perfect for, say, allowing your kids to build their own personal sites. But the basic templates, limited features and Weebly ad on each page footer mean this isn't something we'd recommend for serious use. And although you could pay to upgrade, Weebly isn't the best website builder around, and we'd recommend you consider some alternatives.

HostGator's Gator website builder is priced from just $3.84 a month for the first two years, for instance ($7.68 afterwards), but it's easy to use, with a gorgeous stock image library, and also supports a simple web store with a maximum of three products.

Wix is a power-packed alternative with far better templates, vastly more features, a well-designed editor and the ability to create truly professional business sites. It's also way more expensive, but a free plan gives you plenty of time to try before you buy.

Can I build a web store with GreenGeeks? 

GreenGeeks has a WooCommerce hosting range which is very capable of building a top-quality web store (WooCommerce is one of the best ecommerce platforms around).

As with GreenGeeks' WordPress range, though, this is really just the shared hosting range underneath, with the same names, features and prices.

This isn't necessarily a problem. The plans can automatically install WooCommerce for you within seconds, and it really does have the power to handle even the largest and most demanding stores. But because these are general-purpose shared hosting plans, GreenGeeks doesn't offer you any helpful ecommerce extras or specialist WooCommerce support. That makes these more suitable for experienced users with some ecommerce experience, who are happy to set up and learn WooCommerce largely on their own.

If that's not you at all, there are other options. As we discussed above, website builders are not only the easiest way to create a site, but many also support adding a web store. Most builders have only a fraction of the power of WooCommerce, but they're enough for many stores. HostGator's Gator website builder and Hostinger's website builder can build basic stores from a few dollars a month, while GoDaddy and Wix cost more but include many extra features.

How easy is GreenGeeks to use? 

The GreenGeeks control panel launches with a simple startup wizard, giving you useful advice on migrating or building your site, then getting it up and running.

Elsewhere, the control panel is refreshingly simple. Technical language is kept to a minimum, and sensibly-named options in a left-hand sidebar (Hosting, Domains, Security, Support) make it easy to find what you need.

Even when you drill down to more complicated areas, GreenGeeks does its best to keep life straightforward. Create an email account at DreamHost, for instance, and it prompts you with 12 options, including some you may never know existed (do you want to get daily warnings if your Inbox is nearly full?) GreenGeeks just asks you to enter an email address and password. You can still tweak more advanced settings, they're just not displayed up-front.

Best of all, GreenGeeks provides users with top-quality, industry-standard tools to manage all the most complex tasks, including Softaculous to automatically install WordPress and other apps, and cPanel to keep it running smoothly.

Hosting can still be tricky at times, and you'll have the occasional complicated challenge to overcome. But that's the same with every provider, and GreenGeeks does a better job of simplifying the process than most.

How fast is GreenGeeks? 

Web host performance matters, even for simple and low traffic projects. If your site is slow or regularly down then you'll annoy your visitors, and some may leave and never come back.

To find out how a provider performs, we sign up for a shared hosting package, set up a simple WordPress site using a standard template, then run various tests and compare the results with others. (Although this gives us useful information, keep in mind that we're comparing basic shared hosting plans; our results can't tell us anything about a provider's VPS, dedicated or other plans).

We measure a host's uptime by using Uptime.com to check our test website every five minutes over 14 days. GreenGeeks scored a perfect 100%, which means Uptime.com was able to access our test page every time it tried (that's zero fails out of 3,744 tries).

Uptime.com also logs how long it waits for the server to respond to a request. GreenGeeks was speedy at 0.302 seconds (some providers took a second or more), and even better, response times were very consistent, varying by only 0.032 seconds across all 3,744 tests (only GoDaddy and SiteGround scored better in our last 15 tests). That's good news, as it suggests GreenGeeks' shared servers aren't overloaded, and they have enough resources to cope with the websites they're hosting.

We check website performance by using GTmetrix to load a test WordPress site and calculate how long it takes to load the main page content (in technical speak, it's called Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP). The lower your LCP, the snappier and more responsive your site feels, and the more likely it is that your visitors will stick around.

GreenGeeks' LCP was a decent 0.691 seconds, similar to top names like Bluehost (0.603) and GoDaddy (0.667), and far ahead of budget providers such as Domain.com (1.5 seconds) and iPage (1.6 seconds).

Finally, we use the online service k6 to measure how our test WordPress site handles many visitors at the same time. GreenGeeks fractionally underperformed here, with our site able to cope with a peak 19 requests per second and an average of 15 (most providers managed a peak 20 and an average of 15). But that's not a difference you're likely to notice in real life, and overall GreenGeeks performed very well.

What is GreenGeeks support like? 

GreenGeeks offers 24/7 support via live chat, ticket, telephone and a website knowledgebase.

The support site isn't very well organized, and it can be difficult to find the content you need. Fortunately, there are some useful all-in-one tutorials. 

For example, the Getting Started with GreenGeeks guide links to articles on registering and setting up domains and DNS, creating email accounts, building your website, and managing your bills and accounts. That's good to know and will point you in the right direction, but these articles are often short, and may not include all the information you need.

If the knowledgebase leaves you confused, then you can always contact the support team. We raised some test questions to see how it performed, and the results were excellent. 

Live chat responses were quick and helpful, and even opting for ticket support (often more appropriate with complex problems) didn't leave us waiting for long. GreenGeeks' free Weebly version isn't enabled by default, for instance, and you must raise a support ticket to 'activate' it. 

We did, and GreenGeeks read our request, activated Weebly and replied to let us know, all in just a fraction under 50 minutes. That's a very acceptable response time, and suggests to us that GreenGeeks has plenty of support staff available to deal with questions as they arrive.

Final verdict

GreenGeeks' has excellent shared hosting, with the features and speed to handle most personal and many SMB sites. It's weaker on WordPress and ecommerce, and the VPS and dedicated hosting plans don't have the power for the most demanding sites, but there's still plenty to like here (and of course helping to save the planet is pretty important, too). 

GreenGeeks FAQs

Founded in 2001, InMotion Hosting is up there with some of the very best web hosting providers, and has over 570,000 customers around the world. 

What types of hosting does InMotion Hosting offer?

InMotion Hosting has low-cost and easy-to-use shared hosting plans, ideal for low-traffic personal and small business sites.

Its managed WordPress hosting supports running anything from simple family blogs to heavy-duty business sites, while hosted WooCommerce and Prestashop plans can help you build a professional web store.

If it's raw server power you're after, VPS (Virtual Private Server), dedicated and cloud hosting plans cover everyone from expert personal users to international corporations.

There's a lot to consider, but next we'll look at some of these hosting types, find out what they offer, what they don't, and whether they could be a good choice for you.

Shared hosting 

Shared hosting is a system where your website and many others are stored on the same web server. Sharing both resources and costs means shared hosting can be slow, but it's also very cheap, and can be a good choice for smaller sites.

InMotion Hosting's shared hosting starts with its Core plan (from $2.29 a month over three years.) This doesn't include a free domain or backups, and only supports 10 email addresses (most accounts have no limit). But it allows you to host two websites, where other starter plans often allow only one, and elsewhere there's free SSL, a free domain, unlimited bandwidth, malware protection and 1-click WordPress installation, while the excellent cPanel has everything you'll need to manage your site.

Three more powerful shared hosting plans support hosting unlimited websites, handle as many email addresses as you need, and have some unusual speedup features (ultra-fast NVMe storage, for instance, something we rarely see with shared hosting.) Still no backups, though. They're priced from $4.99 to $12.99 over three years.

Billing isn't as flexible as we'd like. The top Pro plan has a monthly payment option, but everything else is only available in one, two or three year terms. (There are similar issues with other ranges.)

Unsure about signing up for long-term contracts? Us too, but InMotion Hosting offers more protection than most with a 90-day money-back guarantee (three times the industry standard 30 days), plenty of time to be sure if this is the right package for you.

These aren't the cheapest shared hosting plans around, especially if you must have backups (add from another $2 a month.) But it’s also very easy to see why. The company hasn't taken shortcuts to hit a low headline price: this is solid and reliable shared hosting with top quality features, and all the power you need to handle small to medium personal and business sites. 

If price is top of your priority list, though, take a look at Hostinger. Its $2.99 a month plan supports unlimited websites, includes at least weekly backups, and although it doesn't have InMotion Hosting's extra speedup technologies, our shared hosting tests show Hostinger is still a good performer.

WordPress hosting

WordPress is the world's favorite website creator, a one-stop tool which can build anything from simple personal sites to busy web stores and the most heavy-duty business-critical projects.

InMotion Hosting's shared plans have an automatic WordPress installer, good news if you're just looking to learn the basics. But its specialist WordPress hosting range goes further, with server-level speed optimisations, extra security to keep hackers at bay, automatic WordPress updates and more.

Prices start at only $3.99 a month over two years ($11.99 on renewal) for the WP Core plan. It's limited to two websites and ten email addresses, and there are no backups, but InMotion Hosting suggests a WP Core site could handle 20k visitors a month, more than enough for many users.

The $7.99 a month WP Launch plan adds offsite backups, and support for unlimited websites and email addresses, and enough resources to support 50k visitors a month, making it our budget pick. 

If you need more, a WP-VPS range gives you extra system resources, and the power to handle very demanding sites (or lots of smaller ones.) Prices start at $19.99 a month over three years ($59.99 on renewal.)

These are capable plans, fairly priced, with the power to handle (at the top of the VPS range) perhaps a million visitors a month. But the WordPress-specific features are much the same as you'll find with other providers. If you're after real WordPress power, WP Engine offers genuinely Premium themes, intelligent updating, smart performance optimizations, page speed testing and more.

VPS hosting 

Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting is a mid-range option which gives your website more server power, for a little extra cost. You're likely to see better and more consistent speeds, with fewer of the slowdowns that often happen with shared hosting.

InMotion Hosting has four VPS plans. These start at $19.99 a month over three years for a 4GB RAM, 90GB SSD storage and 2 CPU core server, and range up to $59.99 for 16GB RAM, 360GB storage and eight core system.

Although these prices are more expensive than some, that's because they're stuffed with valuable features. Every plan gets a free domain, free migration, at least two dedicated IPs, five cPanel and one WHM license. They're fully managed (InMotion Hosting keeps the VPS updated and running for you), and all plans come with Launch Assist, two hours with a VPS expert to help you set up and optimize the server, migrate a previous site, whatever else you need.

These are powerful products which could work for many levels of user. The Starter plan is ideal for mid-range sites which have outgrown shared hosting, or demanding projects which need more resources (a busy photography site where users can explore many image galleries, for instance.) Upgrading to a more powerful VPS may help with sites where consistent performance is critical - a web store where just a brief slowdown might drive customers away - or if you need to host multiple sites on the same server.

If you don't need InMotion Hosting's level of VPS power, take a look at IONOS. Its plans are more basic, but then they start at just $2 a month, and that could work for experienced users who know exactly what they need.

Consider Hostwinds, too. Its VPS plans have more configuration options, there are more powerful servers at the top end of the range, and there's Windows VPS hosting on offer if you need it.

Dedicated hosting 

Opt for dedicated server hosting and your site gets the full power of a server all to itself. No more unexpected slowdowns because a neighboring site is suddenly really busy, because there are no neighboring sites: the server is entirely yours. If you're running a large business-critical site, where speed matters, even when you're really busy, dedicated hosting is a must-see.

InMotion Hosting has five dedicated hosting plans. These begin at an affordable $139.99 a month (billed annually, $169 on renewal) for an managed 4 core, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD system, and range up to a hugely powerful $539.99 ($619.99 on renewal) Dual Intel CPU, 192GB RAM and 2x2TB NVMe SSD monster. That'll cover most sites and requirements, but if you're unhappy, a 'Build your own' plan allows you to choose whatever CPU, RAM, storage and other features work for you.

These aren't the lowest prices around, but as with other InMotion Hosting products, that's because the company isn't skimping on the server specs. There's a 1Gbps network connection, for instance; unmetered bandwidth; at least 50GB free backup space; free cPanel and WHM licenses, free SSL, free website migrations, and more.

The closest we can get to a disappointment is you can only buy servers in US data centers. Many providers can host your server in other continents, important if your main audience is elsewhere in the world.

If location isn't an issue, InMotion Hosting's dedicated products offer a capable full-featured service which can handle some of the most demanding business and speed-critical tasks.

If you're more interested in the budget end of the market, check out IONOS, where very basic dedicated plans start at $47 a month. But if it's power you're after, Liquid Web is more expensive, but has more plans and add-ons, and data centers in USA and Europe.

Does InMotion Hosting have a website builder?

InMotion Hosting includes the BoldGrid WordPress Website Builder for free with all its WordPress plans. Choose a prebuilt starter site from 200+ industry-specific designs, drag-and-drop blocks (text, pictures, videos, forms, more) onto the page, and you can customize them with your own text and photos just like any other editor.

BoldGrid is easy to use, and a handy site-creating alternative if regular WordPress feels a little too intimidating. But it doesn't have a lot of features, and is really only suitable for creating small-scale sites.

HostGator's Gator website builder is also simple and seriously cheap (from $3.84 a month), but even the most basic plan supports a tiny web store and email campaigns. At the top of the market, Wix has great templates, stacks of features, an intuitive editor, and the power to handle almost any web task.

How easy is InMotion Hosting to use? 

InMotion Hosting's customer account panel looks more appealing than most, with the usual text links replaced by 30+ colorful cPanel-like icons. Unfortunately, many of these are for functions you'd use rarely, if ever. Add another credit card; buy or transfer in a new domain; buy a Sucuri website security package; read InMotion's GDPR statement. These should be tucked away in a menu, not permanently taking up valuable screen real estate as though you might need them every day.

There's a separate set of icons for each hosting package you have, but they share a similar problem. There are some useful shortcuts, for example to launch cPanel, or Softaculous to install WordPress or hundreds of other apps. But many of the others are less helpful. How often do you think you'd use functions like 'Request Email Limit Exemption' or 'Simple CSR Request for 3rd party SSL', for instance?

Fortunately, you don't have to spend long in the account panel. One click launches Softaculous, you can have WordPress ready to go within a minute or two, and the excellent cPanel has all the email, file, database and other management tools you need to get your site running smoothly.

How fast is InMotion Hosting? 

We began our performance tests by signing up for an InMotion Hosting shared plan, then setting up a simple WordPress website based on a standard template.

Next, we measured our server's uptime by using monitoring service Uptime.com to check the site every five minutes over 14 days. InMotion Hosting managed a perfect 100% uptime, with a speedy server response time of 0.340 seconds (that's third fastest in our last 15 tests.)

We measure website speed by using GTMetrix to access a test page, and calculate how long it takes to load the main content (a figure technically known as Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP.) The lower the LCP, the more snappy and responsive your site feels.

InMotion Hosting scored an LCP of 0.610 seconds, fourth fastest in our recent tests, and less than half the time of budget shared plans from Domain.com (1.5 seconds) and iPage (1.6 seconds).

Measuring the load time of a single page is useful, but we also use k6 https://k6.io to discover how a site performs when it has 20 visitors accessing a page at the same time.

Our server did a good job, handling a peak of 20 requests per second without difficulty, and averaging a mid-range but very acceptable 15 requests per second.

These are positive results, but keep in mind our site was hosted on a shared plan. Our figures can't tell you how InMotion Hosting's VPS, dedicated or other plans might compare to the competition.

What is InMotion Hosting's support like?

InMotion Hosting offers 24/7 US-based support via phone, email and live chat, a web Support Center and community forums.

The website has a 5,000+ articles, guides and tutorials on the full range of hosting topics, way more than you'll see with most providers. The search engine doesn't do a good job of sorting its results by relevance, so it might take some scrolling to find what you need, but there is a lot of detailed and helpful content to explore.

Ticket support wasn't the fastest we've seen, with replies to even relatively basic product queries taking around four hours. These typically pointed us in the right direction, though sometimes didn't have all the details we'd expect.

Fortunately, live chat gave the best results. We found responses were speedy and helpful, and the agents were able to give us useful answers to any extra questions we asked.

Final verdict

Whether you're a total website newbie or a big business running a huge and high-traffic web store, InMotion Hosting has a fast and feature-packed product which can help. A must for your web hosting shortlist.

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