If you feel it is time to upgrade your shared hosting to one of the best VPS providers, Bluehost looks like a good place to start. With its managed VPS offering, you potentially get the benefit of the performance boost that comes with a VPS without the headache of supporting the website software yourself.

To find out if Bluehost’s managed VPS option is as attractive as it looks, we’ve evaluated it, comparing the plans and pricing options, the server infrastructure, and features. We also assessed performance of Bluehost VPS hosting with benchmark tools, and spent some time with its site building tools, which are aimed at anyone launching a small business website.

How does a managed VPS differ?

A Virtual Private Server plan typically comes in two flavors: managed, and self-managed. The former means the host will provide assistance with issues such as setup or implementing updates of security software, while the latter leaves everything up to you.

If you have experience of managing web servers on a day-to-day basis, the self-managed option is probably more appropriate. For everyone else, a managed VPS is the smart alternative, particularly if you’re scaling up from shared or cloud hosting.

NOTE: Bluehost offers self-managed VPS and managed VPS plans. These are closely positioned on the site’s menu, so be careful which one you select!

Bluehost plans and pricing

Three managed VPS plans are available from Bluehost: Standard NVMe 4, Enhanced NVMe 8, and Ultimate NVMe 16. Each plan is more expensive than the previous, with a growing server hardware spec. The names relate to the spec – for example, Standard NVMe 4 reflects a server with 4GB RAM. All servers have virtual CPU cores (as expected with a VPS) and NVMe storage.

Plans are available as a monthly rolling deal, or for 12 or 36 months with appropriate discounts. These plans come with free cPanel (depending on selected term), and Let’s Encrypt SSL is included. A premium SSL certificate is available, but at extra cost, as is Sitelock security. Unmetered bandwidth, and two dedicated IPs are included in the price, and all plans have a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Building a website with Bluehost

Creating a website means first manually attaching the domain with the hosting, something that may seem unfamiliar if you're used to shared hosting, as it doesn't typically require customer input.

Two options are available for building a website. You can install WordPress and use the included WP builder, or employ Sitejet. This is a cPanel-based solution that is useful for a quick start, but (certainly based on its implementation at Bluehost) results in somewhat generic sites. However, the website editor offers good control over the layout, and compared with WordPress, Sitejet is a simpler solution for quickly creating an attractive website for your business.

Speed and performance

We installed a WordPress site on our Bluehost VPS and ran a couple of benchmarking tests, first with WordPress Benchmark (a plugin you can install in WordPress) and then with YABS (Yet Another Bench Script).

Bluehost support for VPS customers

Various support options are available, from a dedicated telephone team to live chat. There is also an AI-powered chatbot, although I found this didn’t provide accurate information regarding Bluehost’s VPS plans.

I ran into some problems with the hosting. The instructions for this did not match what I was seeing, so I spoke to a support assistant (following a brief and fruitless chat with the BLU chatbot, which left a lot to be desired when I asked it about setting up a website, too). Unfortunately, the agent seemed too concerned with delivering cookie cutter answers than delivering a swift answer to my specific concerns.

Bluehost also provides a searchable knowledge base and a free WordPress course in conjunction with Yoast, the SEO company that is part of “the Bluehost family.”

Final verdict

Bluehost’s features and helpful customer support make its Managed VPS plans extremely attractive. I’ve used VPS hosting several times over the years, and seen it evolve from the self-managed options to the state where more hosting companies offer managed options.

Meanwhile, the testing demonstrates that Bluehost’s Managed VPS is ideal for WordPress hosting. While there is a considerable difference in price between the two options, its Managed VPS is priced as a logical progression from its higher performance WordPress shared hosting for their business. That makes it a smart option for anyone looking for first-time VPS hosting.

HostMetro is quite a novel player in the web hosting market. Although the founders of the company had a significant amount of prior experience in this business, HostMetro was launched in 2012 in the US. Not surprisingly, their main office is situated there, in Chicago specifically. Curiously, they specialized in shared hosting solutions only. Their main aim (as they claim) is to provide affordable, easy to create, manage and maintain websites and hosting accounts. Apart from the US, HostMetro has managed to develop a considerable customer base in the UK, India and Taiwan.

Their one-and-only data center is deployed in Elk Grove Village (near Chicago) and, according to them, it offers network connectivity, redundancy in power and day-and-night security monitoring. To provide all of its users with a consistency of high speed, HostMetro’s network infrastructure features 10GB per second connections, which is always good to see. In addition, to further guarantee reliability and speed, their servers are run by dual quad-core Intel processors that possess 96GB of RAM and support RAID-protected storage and SSD drivers on their MySQL database servers.

• Want to try HostMetro? Check out the website here

HostMetro’s main website feels modern, refreshingly original in its visual design and (as you'd expect) user-friendly. All information about the company and their products are presented in a clear manner, and while it doesn’t go into details at times, it does provide a decent amount of information on everything required.

Even though HostMetro lacks an official blog, their social network accounts (Facebook and Twitter) seem to be doing well, creating new content on a day-to-day basis.

• Also check out our roundup of the best shared hosting

Plans and pricing

When HostMetro declared it will provide affordable pricing, it seems they weren’t exaggerating, since their hosting plans start at quite attractive $2.95 per month. Additionally, the prices are fixed from the moment of sign up, so there are no additional (nor hidden) fees nor price hikes upon renewal to shake you up. In addition to the basic shared hosting plan labeled as “Mega Max”, there is an advanced one called “Super Max',' as well as one for those who want to try out email hosting.

All of these plans share a number of common features including: unlimited email hosting and email accounts; a plentiful of disk space and bandwidth; a domain registration and website builder, both of which are charge-free.

The billing cycle is somewhat flexible and users can choose to be charged on an annual, biennial or triennial basis, and they can do it by using all major credit cards or PayPal.

If HostMetro’s services don’t meet your expectations, there is a money-back guarantee which can be granted upon request within 30 days from the original purchase.

Ease of use

Users moving from another host should know that HostMetro provides charge-free website migration services, but with certain limitations. First, the size of the website mustn’t exceed 3GB, which is needlessly inflexible although it is above the average website size. Second, all site transfers need to be requested within 30 days from creating an account with HostMetro, which is another thing you should bear in mind.

Creating an account with HostMetro is rather refreshingly uncomplicated in terms of one’s user experience. The first decision you’ll have to make is related to your domain: do you want to register a new one (which is free of charge for new users), transfer an old one (given that you have it) or update your nameservers while leaving it with your current manager. After this, you’ll be asked to choose a billing cycle and, if you didn’t intend to commit for a year at least, you might be bummed out by the lack of option for monthly billing. On the bright side, whatever you decide, the price will be locked (due to price lock guarantee), so you won’t have to worry about unpleasant cost-related surprises.

Two additional features you can choose while on this page are Anytime backup (which will cost you $19.95 annually) and an SSL certificate. This might be a letdown if you, like many of us, are used (i.e. being spoiled rotten by other providers) to getting this completely free of charge even with the cheapest plans. With HostMetro it will take $20 for each year, which is good to have in mind in advance. However, ID Protection is cost-free, for a year at least.

To finish creating your account you’ll be required to provide a considerable number of personal information, create a password and select a method of payment, after which you’ll proceed to apply it.

Since industry standard cPanel is provided with all (and when we say “all”, we mean “both of”) HostMetro’s shared hosting plans, you won’t have much choice in the matter. Nevertheless, because there is a consensus that cPanel is one of (if not the one) most user-friendly option out there, this is a bright spot. From there, WordPress is one-click away, as well as other helpful applications. Alternatively, HostMetro includes a website builder with all of its plans.

Speed and experience

Although HostMetro doesn’t promise much about the speed, GTmetrix, a test that monitored speed performance of their main website, has presented us with remarkably promising results. What is more, GTmetrix conclusively rated the performance with an A (97%), which is something we seldom see. The time it required to complete load the page, the requests, total blocking time, largest contentful paint and all other core web metrics were all above the average. Hence, the positive results we got were hardly surprising.

As for uptime, HostMetro offers a 99% guarantee (which is not much), and has a policy to grant one free month of hosting to every customer, provided that their annual uptime falls below the guaranteed percentage. However, after observing the uptime of HostMetro’s main website for a month, UptimeRobot failed to record any downtime at all, presenting us with a flawless performance. Fortunately, those with no such luck  can still get a free month as an apology.

Support

Looking for help on HostMetro’s website will introduce a couple of options and, more importantly, cartoonishly cute Mega Man’s long lost brother, which is (we assume) their incomprehensibly underutilized mascot. On the other hand, HostMetro’s support team is available round-the-clock and can be reached in a number of ways: by email, support ticket, live chat and telephone. The latter is, however, open during the working days only and from 8AM to 8PM (CST).

As an alternative, all are invited to visit HostMetro’s knowledgebase, which features more than 200 articles on various subjects divided into 18 different categories (cPanel, database questions, e-commerce, FTP, security and so on). Among these, there is a category entitled “Video Tutorials” and it provides more than a 100 step-by-step video guides covering many important issues related to cPanel and website management, which is quite commendable. Whether you are a complete beginner or a veteran webmaster, we are sure you’ll find HostMetro’s knowledgebase pretty handy.

The competition

Dedication to shared hosting is one of the traits that HostMetro shares with its fellow US-based host known as PowWeb. While HostMetro offers two plans of different sizes, PowWeb puts forward its one-and-only hosting plan. Although PowWeb includes an SSL certificate with the plan, the price hike after the initial phase might catch you off guard. No such problem should occur when dealing with HostMetro, since the prices are locked following the sign up process.

Like many of its competitors dedicated to shared hosting, One.com tries its best to provide everything to meet the needs of its customers. Despite that, when it comes to customer support One.com falls short in comparison to HostMetro. In addition, while One.com aims to be newbie-friendly, they don’t offer free domain registration, while HostMetro does.

In comparison to HostMetro, HostGator has much more to offer, both to individual bloggers and various sized businesses. Both hosts are beginner-friendly and offer several self-help options, but HostGator adds a free SSL certificate even with the cheapest plan and a 45-day money back guarantee to boot.

Bluehost is another US-based host and one that can offer the same and more in comparison with what HostMetro can. Both of them are beginner-friendly and entry-level shared hosting plans with both hosts being uncannily similar together with their available billing cycles. Even so, more ambitious users are more likely to find a permanent home for their websites with Bluehost, since it offers more hosting types and definitely more than two different-sized hosting plans.

Final verdict

HostMetro is among the very few web hosting providers that offer a price-lock guarantee, so their customers wouldn’t have to suffer an unpleasant surprise of facing a price spike after the initial period. Even popular hosts like Bluehost might strike you with the price spike that doubles the amount you originally paid, if you happen to forget about that fact. HostMetro’s hosting solutions are somewhat limited, but they are also feature-packed and can provide everything that is necessary for a simple website or a small business. Those who are trying to find something more ambitious will have to keep searching and (perhaps) take a look at hosts such as HostGator, Bluehost or Dreamhost.

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HostRocket might not be as famous as some of the bigger companies in the industry, but they have been around for more than two decades, which presents a considerable experience in the field. Founded in 1999 and located in an area known as New York’s Tech Valley (Clifton Park) today they provide web hosting services to approximately 50,000 websites from their US-based data centers. On top of that, HostRocket offers services such as dedicated server, reseller, collocation, e-commerce and application hosting to a large number of customers from all parts of the world. 

Being a private company, HostRocket has certainly come a long way from its humble beginnings, and all without usage of venture capital, funds from outside investors or bank loans. Right from the start, they put a great emphasis on achieving a perfect balance between quality and affordability of their services. Although it all sounds good, HostRocket’s main website in its current state doesn’t inspire much confidence. Its layout, bleak color palette and overall style, together with a rather rough presentation of their services, feel outdated, uninspiring and not very user-friendly.

• Want to try HostRocket? Check out the website here

HostRocket’s customers are able to choose between four data centers, of which three are in the USA (each in New York, Chicago and San Jose), and the last one is found somewhere in the Netherlands.

The “About” section of the website provides a decent amount of information regarding the company and its data centres. However, HostRocket doesn’t have an official blog at the moment.

Plans and pricing

In comparison to other international providers, HostRocket’s prices for most of its plans are well above average. Fortunately, pricing of the most basic entry-level plan doesn’t fully fall into this category and will get you a free domain name as well. However, as the website is not intuitive enough nor is the presentation of their services linked to hosting, you might find yourself disoriented more often than not.

The monethly shared hosting plan costs $12.56, but the charge will drop significantly if you choose an semi-annual plan ($9.43 per month) or even more so with an annual one ($8.38 for each month). As if this wasn’t enough, all plans shorter than the annual have additional setup fees, which can considerably drive up the price.

With each of these you will gain unlimited website storage, bandwidth and websites as well as unlimited e-mail accounts, all of which sounds pretty good. 

All of HostRocket’s hosting plans include a 30-day money-back guarantee, which will give you plenty of time to make a final decision. 

As for the types of payment, HostRocket accepts credit cards exclusively.

Ease of use

After selecting a hosting plan and its billing cycle, you’ll need to register a new domain (which is free for the first year) or to transfer an existing one to HostRocket. After this, you can check out the details regarding your plan and confirm the billing cycle once more, before proceeding to their shopping cart. If you have selected anything below the annual billing, this is where you notice that setup fees can cost one a small fortune, $29.99 at this point. If you’re lucky enough to have a promotional code, you may validate it here and apply it to your order. 

Creating an account with HostRocket is a simple yet needlessly lengthy procedure when taken with the checkout process as a whole. After providing HostRocket with your personal data and coming up with a password, you can go ahead and select a card type with the required information, as it is the only available method of payment. In addition, if you want to receive marketing notifications via SMS, you may choose so by leaving a checkmark.  

Once the entire process is finalized, you’ll have to wait an hour or two before being able to enter your newly-created website. After finally logging in to HostRocket's site, you’ll find yourself in a completely standard account management from where you can see your plans, domains and tickets, among other things.

Clicking on your hosting account will make a simplified control panel pop up. This panel will allow you to manage e-mail accounts and fire up a dedicated File Manager which is used to upload files for the website you want to create. As an alternative, if you are somewhat accustomed to cPanel, you can log into it and manage all aspects of your website from there. Using Softaculous you can have more than 250 applications installed without a hitch (such as WordPres, PrestaShop, Drupal, Joomla, Magento and more) and get things moving.

Speed and experience

As usual, we monitored the performance speed of HostRocket’s main website with the help of a test made possible by GTmetrix. And, to our satisfaction, it showed rather positive results. To completely load the page, it required merely 3.7 seconds, which looks even better in comparison to the average result of 8.1. Additionally, it took 51 requests, which is, again, pretty good in contrast to the average of 89. In the end, GTmetrix concluded that HostRocket’s website is worthy of a firm B (82%).

HostRocket promises a modest 99.5% of uptime and, according to UptimeRobot, is likely to deliver on its promise. The above mentioned test run for more than a month and recorded just one instance of downtime that lasted for 4 minutes. Thereby, the uptime in general was 99.98%, which is a bit better than promised. As for response time oscillations, there were barely any except for the referenced one, leaving an impression of stability.

Support

When customer support is concerned, HostRocket's landing page features a “Support” menu which can take you to account management, knowledgebase, an option to submit a ticket and a choice to “contact them”, which is essentially the same as submitting a ticket. In addition to this, customers who choose a dedicated, reseller or colocation hosting type may get in touch with the support team via telephone which is available from 9 AM to 9 PM. However, there is a personnel at your disposal day-and-night in case of emergency. Additionally, there is a so-called “FAQ System”, but going for it will merely take you to their knowledgebase.

HostRocket’s knowledgebase is well organized into ten relevant categories and all of them are packed with a number of articles. However, if you can’t see what you’re looking for among them, there is an option to browse through the base by using the search box. The articles themselves are written in straight-to-the-point manner and seem to be helpful enough. Five of them are highlighted as the most popular ones and they cover some important topics for newcomers, such as creating an index page using .htaccess files, domain registry, creating e-mail accounts, using control panel and uploading files to one’s website. 

Overall, HostRocket’s customer support seems to be very informative and helpful, so the only thing that is really lacking in that department (apart from the official forum) is the absence of live chat feature.

The competition

TMDHosting is one of HostRocket’s US-based competitors and an ambitious one to boot. Both of them offer free domain registration for first-time users, but each additional domain registration with HostRocket will cost as much as $20 for each year, which is twice the amount than what is found with most providers, TMDHosting included.

Hostgator includes all the essential features with all its plans, such as: SSL certificates, SpamAssassin and automatic backups, which isn’t something HostRocket will provide you with. Another good thing is HostGator’s website builder, which all users are entitled to without any charge. On the other hand, HostRocket does provide virtually unlimited everything (storage, bandwidth, websites and e-mail accounts) with its hosting plans.

While HostRocket tries to target all businesses regardless of their size, HostDime is more geared towards larger businesses and their needs. Although the latter can also supply a small business with everything, too much of a good thing might not be equally good for the budget.

Bluehost is another well-known host which offers a whole array of services, features and options in general. However, it doesn’t provide a monthly billing for its plans (which HostRocket does) although, honestly, these plans tend to be on the expensive side.

Final verdict

Truth be told, having in mind the fact that HostRocket hosts over 50,000 websites at this moment is a testament to their reliability and good performance. Their plans, for the most part, include many unlimited features and offer a decent value for money, yet there are exceptions. Their shared hosting isn’t bad in itself, but customers who go for a monthly or semi-annual billing system, will be taken by surprise with the charge for additional setup fees. 

Although HostRocket represents a pretty fair price-performance ratio, there aren’t many things that make them stand out among competitors like Bluehost, Hostgator or DreamHost. All of them can get you this and better without breaking the bank.

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Based in Arizona (USA), StableHost was established in 2009 by a rather small but passionate team that has since grown to some 15 people today. Privately-owned and with more than a decade of experience, StableHost has specialized in providing powerful, reliable and secure web hosting solutions in all shapes and sizes. They can help you create a personal blog or start a small business all the while supporting much larger enterprise-level businesses. StableHost’s products run from domain registration and basic shared hosting to dedicated servers, VPS and reseller hosting. At the moment, they have multiple data centers in the US, Europe and Asia.

Back in 2018, they became a part of Miss Group, one of the fastest growing hosting companies on the market and a driving force behind many providers and hosting-related brands, such as Miss Hosting, 4 UK Host, Professional Hosting and Funio, among others.

• Want to try StableHost? Check out the website here

StableHost’s main website design is quite simple (but not simplistic), user-friendly and predominantly colored green, which makes it easy on the eyes. Apart from English language, users are able to select German, Spanish, Swedish and Vietnamese, and as far as we could see the translation is done fully and in a professional way. The only thing that does not meet this criteria is customer feedback at the bottom of the page, but to be fair, pointing out this as a flaw is basically nit-picking.

The official blog stylistically resembles the rest of StableHost’s website and it seems that its only use over the past few years amounted to advertising the company’s products and offering occasional holiday discounts beyond a few updates about the company itself. It appears the blog has been gathering dust since April 2018, so we hoped to find better results in other aspects of their website.

Plans and pricing

All of the available hosting options are reasonably priced, meaning they are affordable enough without the need to compromise on quality. This is particularly true for the shared hosting Starter plan, which offers 50% off the price during the first year of use. This plan starts at $6 (regular price is $11.99) and gets you unlimited disk space and bandwidth, plus a website builder.

If this doesn’t suit your needs, there are more ambitious plans and other hosting options. Reseller hosting starts at $10.99 per month and includes 20GB of disk space and the ability to host up to 10 clients. VPS pricing starts at $11.49 and is recommended as a step up from shared hosting.

StableHost offers a 45-day money-back guarantee, which is longer than we usually see. However, this goes for no more than 7 days for a dedicated VPS. 

You can pay for StableHost’s products with credit cards or PayPal.

Ease of use

Creating a new account and purchasing a plan with StableHost consists of four rather straightforward stages. The first thing to do after choosing a plan is to create a new domain (some names are free for the first year) or transfer an old one. If you want, you can add AlphaSSL for a few extra bucks. The second thing you might notice is that there are more than a few data centers to choose from: Chicago and Phoenix (USA), Frankfurt (Germany), Stockholm (Sweden), Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Valencia (Spain) and two servers in Singapore (Singapore).

ID Protection is listed as an additional free-of-charge service, which you’ll enjoy, they promise, for a lifetime. Additionally, SSH (Secure Shell) access can be yours for additional $2.50 (for life). It should be pointed out that it will come pre-selected, so if you don’t want it, make sure you deselect it before proceeding.

After this, you can select a payment method and continue with providing StableHost with the expected personal information (name, e-mail address, phone number and so forth). The only thing that sticks out is a possibility to choose a preferred currency: USD (US Dollar), EUR (Euro) or KR (Swedish Crown), which is a nice touch.

After making a payment, you’ll enter the fourth (and last) stage of the process, after which your newly-created website should appear (at least in 10 to 20 minutes).

All of StableHost’s plans go with the popular Linux-based cPanel, so you’ll be able to manage all aspects of your website at ease, even if you don't have much prior experience with this control panel. Softaculous comes pre-integrated, so many useful applications such as WordPress, PrestaShop and Joomla are just mouse-click away. And if you prefer, you can use a user-friendly Site.Pro website builder with a drag-and-drop interface that will provide you with tons of themes and templates and an ability to change and customize the design as much as you please.

Speed and experience

Speed test provided by GTmetrix and performed on StableHost’s main website presented us with pretty average results. The time it took to completely load the page was 6.7 seconds, which actually looks a bit better when compared to the average result of 8.1. What's more, it required 75 requests, which surpasses the average of 87. However, the conclusive performance score was C (74%), which is exactly the average result.

Considering that StableHost promises 99.9% uptime, we had no choice but to put it to the test. After monitoring StableHost’s main website for more than a month, all with the help of UptimeRobot, we got a stable result. Not a second of downtime was recorded and although there were a few major oscillations in response time, this is unlikely to escalate into a problem.

Support

As far as we can tell, StableHost’s knowledgebase has a decent amount of articles on various topics from technical support to politics. Since technical support is mostly related to the topics of our interest, we inspected further and found an additional division into subcategories covering a broad range of essential topics and potential issues. Most of these articles go directly to the point and offer step-by-step solutions. Some of them offer links to video tutorials as well.

Speaking of these, we should mention that there should be a self-help option on StableHost’s website titled “Video Tutorials”. However, choosing that option will get you nowhere since the link appears to be dead.

When customer service is concerned, StableHost offers all of the expected contact channels: e-mail, ticket, live chat and telephone. The e-mail based support is available around-the-clock for all the users, while the 24/7/365 telephone is reserved for those with high-end plans.

After reading a couple of customer reviews and then trying our own luck with the live chat support, we’ve got an insight into the disreputable reputation it has gained in the recent years. The agent we’ve got in touch was kind in every way, but we didn’t get a straight answer to our question. Instead, we were presented with a link to their article, which we could probably find ourselves. When all is said and done, the live chat support isn’t bad in itself, but it didn’t help us save time.

The competition

StableHost is a smaller company than Hostgator, and yet it manages to offer a whole range of hosting choices, customizations and features. Both present a great value for money, offer good performance and a decent (although far from perfect) customer service and feature a generous 45-day money-back guarantee. However, if you are trying to save a buck, Hostgator might be a better option.

Krystal Hosting is a fellow independent host, yet from the UK. Much like StableHost, they offer a free website builder with all of their plans and Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate, but they go a step further with the refund policy. While StableHost’s money-back guarantee is valid for 45 days, Krystal Hosting allows its customers to change their minds for up to 60 days after the purchase.

Bluehost is the master of ease of use and is a difficult web host to compete with. In all fairness, StableHost does give beginners everything they need for a good start. Still, what Bluehost adds to the mix is its enhanced cPanel with an extremely newbie-friendly interface and this should make a buyer’s choice a bit easier.

Just like StableHost, HostRocket is a US-based host offering a variety of hosting-related services, good performance and industry standard cPanel with access to many popular apps. Despite this, its above-average prices and ridiculously expensive “additional” setup fees might take you by surprise, and not in a pleasant way.

Final verdict

StableHost is more than a capable web hosting provider in its own right but it’s hardly a match for bigger hosting companies like Bluehost, Hostgator or Hostinger, which can offer similar plans at more attractive prices. However, if you want to support an independent, honest and quite likeable host with a decent variety of products, enough data centers to choose from and guaranteed stability, give StableHost a chance.

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HostNoc is headquartered in Ontario, Canada, but has offices in the US, the UK and the UAE as well. It has been serving individual customers and businesses of various sizes all over the world. Being founded in 2016, HostNoc is a rather young company, and yet it managed to become one of the more popular web hosting options out there. Next to basic shared hosting, they offer cloud hosting, VPS and dedicated servers, all packed with numerous features and first-rate cyber security.

HostNoc’s main website features a nice-looking intuitive interface and feels user-friendly at first, but fails to provide more relevant information about the host itself. In addition, information on locations of HostNoc’s data centers are not available at the moment. There are a decent number of languages to choose from, but the translation is only partial, so the users who are not familiar with the basics of English language at least may feel slightly deceived.

• Want to try HostNoc? Check out the website here

On the other hand, HostNoc has an official blog and a pretty good one to boot. You’ll be able to search the blog using the search box, or browse articles sorted by date of publication or by topics. In addition, the archive is also available, in which all the articles are classified by the month of their publication. The oldest one dates back to August of 2018, so we can safely conclude that’s the time the blog was created. These articles appear to be informative enough and the blog seems to be updated on a weekly or biweekly basis at the very least.

When it comes to social networks, HostNoc is present on Facebook and Twitter and both accounts appear to be active.

Plans and pricing

HostNoc’s pricing system appears to be pleasingly transparent. Users are able to choose between a few pre-made plans (their number depending on a hosting type) or create a custom plan, whichever suits their needs. With shared hosting plans, as an example, the price will vary depending on whether you choose Windows or Linux as an operating system. The Windows Essential shared hosting plan packs more extra features, so it will cost you a bit more.

It is important to note that HostNoc frequently offers hosting at discount prices that go up to 50% of the original price. Even though there is no free trial, the money-back guarantee is valid for 30 days after the purchase, so you’ll have enough time to make a final decision.

As for paying methods, HostNoc accepts credit cards and PayPal.

Ease of use

The plan you choose will appear in the View Cart section, where you’ll be able to go through all the specifications and details before proceeding to checkout. Before that, if you want a new domain name, you can check its availability and add it to the cart as well. It’s necessary to note that the price for a new domain, although reasonable, will be calculated for the whole year.

Before finalizing the purchase you’ll be required to add your personal information (albeit pretty regular ones), generate a password and select a paying method. In addition, you may leave any further notes related to your purchase and choose if you want to join HostNoc’s mailing list.

The shared hosting plan will provide its users with a standardized control panel: Plesk for the Windows users and cPanel for Linux. If you have any prior experience with either of these, you’ll have no trouble finding your way around. Even with unmanaged plans, the script installation is automated, and by using Softaculous, you’ll be able to install software like WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Drupal and Prestashop, among others, with a single click.

Websites you need to host are run on SSD storage which is supposed to offer top-notch performance. Failures and breaches involving data stored on disks should be prevented by the provided RAID configuration. To offer additional safety, the provider will give you around-the-clock infrastructure for monitoring paired with security mechanisms that feature antivirus protection and a shield against DDoS attacks.

Speed and experience

As reported by the speed test run through GTmetrix, HostNoc should offer a reasonably good service, at least judging by their main website. It took 10.2 seconds to fully load the page which doesn’t look too good in comparison to an average of 8.1, but it’s nothing too extreme. Additionally, the loading of the site required mere 39 requests which looks outstanding compared to an average of 89. In conclusion, GTmetrix rated the speed of HostNoc’s official website with an A (93%) which is an excellent result, especially when compared to the average grade, which is C (77%).

As expected, HostNoc offers an uptime guarantee of 99.9%. During our uptime test of their main website which ran for two weeks, we did not manage to record any downtime at all. However, there were a few oscillations in response time, but nothing worth worrying about.

Support

If you get stuck somewhere along the way, you can always consult HostNoc’s first-class and well-documented knowledgebase which will provide you with thorough step-by-step guides and solutions for issues you may encounter, pictures included. From there, you are able to search the knowledgebase with the help of the search box, by one of the categories, or by selecting one of the most popular articles (if the issue you have is a common one).

However, to enter HostNoc’s knowledgebase you need to be a registered user, which may be a reasonable decision on their part, but doesn't seem to be a necessary one.

As an alternative, you are able to contact HostNoc’s customer support via telephone, live chat, ticket, e-mail or online contact form. The support is available round-the-clock and is responsive once you are registered on the website.

At the moment, HostNoc doesn’t appear to have a support forum.

The competition

When comparing the two, the first difference you’ll notice is that Tsohost is a UK-based provider while HostNoc’s main office is in Canada. Both offer a whole variety of options and customizations at budget-friendly prices, with plans often offered at a significant discount. However, Tsohost throws a free domain name in the bundle, while HostNoc doesn't.

When it comes to being beginner-friendly, both HostNoc and Hostgator both pass the test without any doubt. They offer good value for a quite affordable price and have enough hosting options for most customers. At the same time, each Hostgator’s plan includes a free website builder which might be decisive for some users.

Similar to HostNoc, Certa Hosting provides relatively cheap hosting options with a wide range of features and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Another similarity they share, and not a good one, is not providing any information regarding the location of their data centers.

Bluehost is another big competitor to HostNoc, offering everything HostNoc does and even more at pretty much the same prices. In addition, Bluehost offers a free SSL certificate with all of its plans to ensure the safety of visitors to your site, which is a good thing to have.

Final verdict

HostNoc claims their goal is to lower the burden on their customers while providing them with maximum service at a budget-friendly cost. Based on what we saw, we can conclude with certainty that they are well on their way to achieving that. Although they offer a good value for money (particularly for small to medium-sized businesses), some aspects of their offer as well as their main website could be improved. If you are not sure if HostNoc is the right choice for you, you can’t go wrong with Hostgator or Bluehost as more than suitable alternatives.

• We've also highlighted the best web hosting

4 UK Host is an experienced web hosting service, now owned by Miss Group, the company behind StableHost, nameISP, https.se and other hosting-related brands.

The host has four main product ranges: Shared Hosting, Value VPS, SSD VPS and Dedicated Servers. There's a focus on value, although there's real power available here, too. Dedicated servers start at £54.99 ($65.99) a month on the annual plan, for instance, but you can opt for a 2 x Xeon E5, 40 CPU core, 256GB RAM monster for £389.99 ($467.99) a month, if you can use it.

The baseline Shared Hosting 4UK-10 plan looks like great value, with unlimited bandwidth and 12 months for free. A one-year free trial, really? There must be a catch, we thought. And there was.

Drilling down to the details, the plan is relatively basic, with just 1GB disk space, one email account and no MySQL databases. And although it's advertised on the site as £0.00 a month, the comparison table shows it has a £14.99 ($17.99) setup fee. That's equivalent to £1.25 ($1.50) a month.

• Want to try 4 UK Host? Check out the website here

There's better news further up the range. The 4UK-30 plan gives you 15GB disk space, unlimited bandwidth, a free domain name, 10 databases, unlimited emails and FTP accounts, and support for hosting up to three websites. Prices range from £4.99 ($5.99) billed monthly, to a more competitive £3.54 ($4.25) a month billed three-yearly.

Support is available via live chat, 24/7. There's also telephone support, albeit for limited and slightly odd hours (7am-4pm).

Although the website doesn't make a big deal of any 'money-back guarantee', the small print makes it clear that's exactly what you get. 'If you are not satisfied within your first 30 days we would be happy to provide you with a full refund' (subject to the usual exclusions, like domain name registrations).

While these prices aren't bad, there are better deals around. Hostinger's shared hosting has fewer limits and can be 20% or more cheaper, or you could opt for a VPS and still save money (prices start at $3.95.) But beware, you'll have to subscribe for up to four years to get the headline prices.

Setup

Signing up with 4 UK Host starts by choosing your hosting plan, then entering whatever domain name you'd like to use. The latter can be something you register now, for free with some plans, or a domain you own already.

All plans may be billed monthly, or every one, two or three years. You'll need to pay yearly or longer to get a free domain name, and longer subscriptions get a 10-15% discount.

There aren't a lot of extras, especially for the more basic plans. Our 4UK-20 Shared Hosting plan came with free local backups, for instance, but 4 UK Host offered us remote weekly backups from £3 ($3.60) a month. Backups are important, but that's more than you might be paying for your main hosting account, which isn't going to appeal to bargain hunters.

The 4 UK Host registration form asks for a lot of personal data, including an email address, name, physical address and telephone number.

The form also asked for our 'Organization number / Personal number', but didn't offer any hints to what this was, or why the company needed it. We just entered a memorable number, assuming it would be treated as a second password, and the website accepted it.

Payment options were card or PayPal. We tried PayPal, but ran into a problem: the website hung for minutes, but no PayPal window appeared. Eventually we gave up, restarted the process, and went to pay via card. As we were about to do that, an invoice for the first aborted payment appeared. We gave up on our second payment, without entering any details, but, too late: an email invoice for that payment arrived, too.

Issues like this can happen with anyone, and we're not attaching any blame to 4 UK Host. But it did give us an opportunity to test how the company's systems could cope with unexpected events.

There were no obvious ways to help us solve this problem. The emails and invoices didn't explain what to do if we had problems. The web console displayed our two invoices, but had no way to cancel or delete them. An 'Open Ticket' option pointed us to a near useless web knowledgebase, where searching for 'invoice' gave us only two irrelevant hits: 'Passing Values to Offer URLs' and 'How those the price model work' (not a typo, that's the real title).

While that's bad news, 4 UK Host regained our respect with the quality of its live chat support. We opened a session, explained what had happened and asked for the company to activate our first order, and cancel the second invoice, and gave our two invoice numbers.

We expected to wait for an age, and possibly then be forced to answer an avalanche of questions (what's your name, your order number, your email address, your PayPal transaction ID, and so on). But instead, after two minutes an agent responded; after nine minutes, they told us they were checking; two minutes after that, they told us they'd activated one account and deleted the other invoice.

We didn't have to answer a single further question, the agent just did as we'd asked, and all in under a quarter of an hour. That's great support performance, especially for a very basic shared hosting package.

Creating a website

The 4 UK Host account management system is based on the industry standard WHCMS platform. That's generally good news, as it's a capable system, and if you've used it with another host you'll immediately feel at home.

Choose your hosting package, and WHCMS provides various shortcuts to help you get started. A link to the File Manager enables uploading an existing site to your web space, for instance. Experienced users get shortcuts to the MySQL Databases and phpMyAdmin modules, and you can create email accounts for your new domain by filling in a couple of boxes (email account name and password).

One further click takes you to a standard cPanel console, where you'll find the full set of site creation and management tools.

4 UK Host's Site Builder is a simple BaseKit-powered template-based website creator. It doesn't have the power of the high-end competition, and the bundled version is limited to just three pages, but that could be enough for simple tasks. Your three pages can at least have some rich content, with support for image galleries, custom forms, videos and SoundCloud clips, file links (Dropbox, PDF), basic social media integration and more.

4 UK Host shared hosting includes Softaculous, too, for automated installation of WordPress, PrestaShop, Joomla, and hundreds of other popular apps. It's one of the best user-friendly installers around, and not something you'll always get with the most basic shared hosting. (Some providers use simpler installers with fewer features, maybe supporting just a handful of applications.)

Once your site is up and running, you have access to all the usual cPanel site management tools, covering everything from FTP accounts, subdomains and aliases, to email forwarders, autoresponders and in-depth site metrics (Webalizer, AWStats and more).

We did have an issue with the web knowledgebase, which was short on content and poorly organized. Articles are in multiple languages, for instance, and if you search on a technical term which is identical in both ('DNS') then you'll get multi-lingual results.

Knowledgebase issues are much less important when you have decent live chat support, though, and overall, 4 UK Host provides a capable set of features with everything you need to build and run a quality website.

Performance

It's tricky to measure the performance of any web host. The results you'll see will depend on the type of site you're running, the resources it uses (CPU, storage, database), where your visitors are, when they visit, and other factors besides.

We attempted to get a baseline idea of a server's performance by measuring it over time with Uptime.com. Average response times were fractionally below average, though by so little you're unlikely to notice (50ms). 

4 UK Host response times were relatively consistent, too, with no downtime, and no major spikes which might indicate an overloaded server.

Dotcom-tools website speed test measured the load time of our test site from 16 locations across the US and Europe. This second test broadly matched the results of the first. 4 UK Host achieved mid-range speeds only, but the difference wasn't significant, and our results showed consistent speeds over time.

Put it all together and 4 UK Host delivered the performance we'd expect from decent shared hosting; not outstanding, but good enough, and reliable throughout the duration of our review.

Final verdict

4 UK Host wasn't outstanding at any point during our review, but its products are generally well-specified, live chat support was good and we saw consistent and reliable speeds. Worth a look – check it out and see if the company has a plan which suits your needs.

• Also check out the best web hosting services.

ProfesionalHosting is a popular Spanish provider with over 17 years of experience in web hosting and domain registration.

To be clear, the company has absolutely nothing to do with Professional Hosting at 'professionalhosting.com.' And that matters, because the other provider is very, very different to this one. If you're typing its name somewhere, rather than following our links, be sure to type one 's' in 'profesional', rather than two.

However you arrive at the site, you'll find a huge range of products. You can get regular shared hosting, custom plans for specific web apps (WordPress, Magento, PrestaShop, more), along with a variety of VPS offerings. On top of that there are assorted dedicated servers (Windows, Linux, Elastic Cloud), video and streaming servers, and supporting services such as remote backup, email marketing, SSL certificates and more.

• Want to try ProfesionalHosting? Check out the website here

The company is largely focused on the Spanish-speaking market, claiming on the website that 'in our hosting you will have the best support and service in Spanish.'

There is an English language version of the site, but it's a little more difficult to use than it should be, thanks to some inconsistent and incomplete translations.

As we write, for example, the VPS link on the English language site takes us to a Spanish page. There's a language selector at the top, but choosing English just takes you to a 'Page not found' message – in Spanish! We could still find our way around with the aid of Chrome's Translate feature, but that shouldn't be necessary.

Brush these hassles aside, though, and you'll find an impressive set of products, where even the most basic plans are well-specified and ready for use.

Shared hosting starts at €6.19 ($7.29, £5.31) a month on the annual plan, for instance. Not a big outlay, but it gets you 3GB hard drive space, unlimited bandwidth, a free domain, a Plesk control panel (a powerful alternative to cPanel) antispam, daily backups, and free SSL via Let's Encrypt.

There are four plans in total, but picking just one, Plan WEB + enables hosting up to 10 websites, offers 10GB disk space, and throws in a free year of a professional SSL certificate, all for €15.44 a month ($18.18, £13.48).

You can get hosting for even less, but it often comes with hidden flaws and catches. ProfesionalHosting isn't cutting corners to get a low headline rate, and even its low-end plans should be able to handle some major tasks.

And even if it turns out that the company doesn't live up to its promises, you're protected by a 15-day money-back guarantee.

Setup

Signing up at ProfesionalHosting works much like any other host, at least in principle. But in real life, translation issues make it a little more complicated for English speakers.

You must opt to check out by clicking the 'Contract' button, for instance. The shopping cart icon makes that a relatively easy guess, but when you start the purchase process, even the English language page has a Spanish description of the money-back guarantee.

There's more confusion on the account registration page. Not only does this ask for your name, email address, physical address and phone number, it also demands your 'CIF/DNI' (a national ID number), and further asks '¿Como nos ha conocido?' (which means 'how did you hear about us?').

You can ignore that question, but not the demand for a national ID number. That's bad news if you don't have one, although the website can't validate it, so you can enter whatever you like, and no-one is likely to notice. (You're probably violating a 'be honest about your personal data' clause in the small print, but if you don't have the requested data, there aren't many other options.)

We completed the purchase process, handed over our cash, and three follow-up emails arrived – in Spanish, obviously.

This wasn't quite the hassle you might think. The final welcome email was easy to identify, and even if you don't speak a word of Spanish, it's easy to pick out the Control Panel URL and credentials, FTP login, nameservers, email servers and more.

Logging in took us to the main Plesk control panel, a one-stop platform for configuring and managing your account, domain, website and more. The Plesk interface can use multiple languages, but for some reason, ProfesionalHosting's shared hosting plans are available in Spanish only. You must choose VPS or higher to be able to run your console in English. It's annoying, but once again, Chrome's Translate feature was just about good enough to save the day.

Creating a website

Plesk's main website management screen includes tools to create and manage your website, email and FTP accounts, databases, subdomains and more, as well as key metrics on your visitors, which pages they're visiting, and a breakdown of your bandwidth use.

An automated installer tool makes it easier to set up WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, PrestaShop, Magento, phpBB and more. Its choice of 21 apps doesn't get close to the 400+ you'll get with Softaculous, a platform commonly provided with cPanel, but if you're happy with WordPress (or one of the others) you're unlikely to mind.

The installer is configured with Spanish speakers in mind, for example offering us no less than nine Spanish language options for our test WordPress setup (Spanish, Spanish from Chile, Spanish from Peru, and so on). But there are plenty of other options, this time, and ours had English selected by default.

Our general shared hosting package didn't include a website designer. As with the missing Softaculous, that's bad news for some, but won't matter to the majority.

There's no shortage of ways to manually set up a website, though. The File Manager uploaded our test site with a quick drag-and-drop, Let's Encrypt support allows even hosting newbies to quickly assign a free SSL certificate – and experts can play around with everything from FTP accounts and databases to PHP settings, DNS, and even Apache and web application firewall (ModSecurity) settings.

It's a capable set of tools, especially for the most basic shared hosting package in the range. It would be even better if ProfesionalHosting allowed shared hosting packages to be set up in English, but Chrome Translate got us through most issues, and overall it's a likeable service.

Performance

Websites can fail for all kinds of unexpected reasons, and whether you're a total newbie or an old hand, it's vital to choose a web host with top quality support.

ProfesionalHosting offers 24/7 support via telephone, live chat, email and ticket, and for really stubborn problems, can even connect to your system via TeamViewer for a closer look.

This all sounds good to us, and the company handled our test query well. An agent responded within three minutes, didn't waste time with more questions or authentication (what's your username, your email address, your account number, your domain), and just gave us an accurate and helpful answer, immediately.

Language remains an issue for international users, with the opening chat screen displaying its instructions in Spanish. But we got through that in seconds, and there were no problems afterwards: we posted in English and got an English-language reply.

To complete the review, we ran a couple of performance tests.

Uptime.com monitored our site over time. Response times were a little below average, but that could be because ProfesionalHosting's Spanish servers were located further away from our testing locations. The difference was small, anyway, and there was no downtime during our review.

Dotcom-tools website speed test benchmarked the download speed of our test site from 16 servers located around Europe and the US. This is more relevant as a speed test, and here ProfesionalHosting performed a little better, with downloads running around 10% faster than average.

Final verdict

Not the cheapest service around (and using Plesk rather than cPanel won't appeal to everyone), but ProfesionalHosting's products are top-quality and fairly priced for the excellent features you get. But if you don't speak Spanish, the constant translation issues can be a major irritation.

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The story of Mochahost began in 2002, when its future founders recognized a profound need for high-quality web hosting companies and decided to launch one of their own. Founded in San Jose, Mochahost’s key objective was to strike a balance between “top-of-the-line” services and a pocket-friendly price, and, at the same time, cover everything from personal blogs to large businesses.

Today, their main office is in New York, and they seem to have expanded beyond a US-centric strategy. In the past, their only data centers were in Texas and Illinois. Now they offer a choice of eight locations covering Texas, Canada, the UK, India, Singapore, Germany, Mexico, and Australia.

We first reviewed Mochahost in 2021, and a lot has changed since then. Where a visit to their site then was like a blast to the past (as in, the early 2000s), it's now caught up with the times and sports a simpler look in trendy colors.

• Want to try Mochahost? Check out the website here
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Plans and pricing

Like most other hosting companies, Mochahost offers potential customers a range of plans to choose from. Unfortunately, while its website may be more up to date, its hosting plans seem to lag a bit further behind.

Mochahost's primary offerings are shared and VPS hosting, with a couple of WordPress-specific plans thrown in. There are no Cloud hosting plans nor dedicated servers available here.

Yet being somewhat entrenched in the past isn't always a bad thing, since it means Mochahost is also one of the few remaining service providers that still offers Windows web hosting in both the shared and VPS space. Because of this, Mochahost can offer relatively niche hosting solutions, such as Java Tomcat hosting.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting plans at Mochahost start with the Soho plan at $3.99/mo on a 1-year term, with renewal prices on that plan hiking up to $12.99/mo. At the high end of that spectrum is Mocha, costing $9.99/mo and $20.99/mo on renewal. These prices aren't exactly low, but Mochahost is relatively generous with resources and provides cPanel access, Imunify 360 security, free SSL, free weekly backups, and free site migrations.

The problem is that several competitors are offering similar freebies and resource levels at much lower prices. For example, with just a bit less storage space, HostPapa comes at a much better price point. Personally, unless Mochahost offers stunning performance figures for its hosting plans, these prices seem a bit too high to be excellent value for money.

WordPress hosting

As if in retrospective shame of its high shared hosting prices, Mochahost throws $1/mo WordPress hosting plans in your face. The problem is that the dollar deal is only valid for the first month and renews at $14.99/mo (Lite) to $99.99/mo (Business).

Most of the freebies on Mochahost's WordPress plans are similar to those on its shared hosting plans. The only advantage beyond those is that if you sign up for the Starter or higher plans, you get WP Rocket included. That's about $59/year in value, which isn't enough to offset the monthly hosting charges here.

To put things in perspective, Cloudways hosting plans start at around $14/mo for cloud hosting ($11/mo if you're willing to forego their premium servers), with a custom server management dashboard. It also doesn't restrict you to a specific number of WordPress sites. At Mochahost, you'll need to be on their Pro plan or above to run more than a single site.

Windows shared hosting

Windows shared hosting plans at Mochahost range from $4.45/mo to $8.45/mo. We won't debate this pricing, since, as we all know, a considerable portion will go to Microsoft for its operating system license.

Resource allocation is similar to the Linux shared hosting plans we discussed earlier. You also get the comparable Windows hosting tech stack, meaning Plesk instead of cPanel, plus MS SQL/MariaDB, and all the .NETs you could want. The one point you'll want to be aware of is the relatively low memory allocation. On the cheapest Soho ASP.NET plan, all you get is 300MB.

Plus, since these are relatively niche plans (yes, it sounds a little weird to consider Windows hosting as niche, even today), you also have a narrower range of data center locations to choose from: either in Europe or the US.

VPS hosting

As with its shared hosting plans, VPS at Mochahost comes in both Linux and Windows variants. The same price adjustments apply, with Linux VPS plans slightly cheaper. The lowest-tier Linux VPS costs a mere $24.38/mo for a 1-year term, renewing at $48.75/mo thereafter. For that, you get 2 CPU cores, 4 GB of RAM, 80GB NVMe, and unlimited bandwidth/mo.

Impressively for the price, Mochahost also throws in cPanel (most hosting companies today charge separately for this on a VPS). For specs, the VPS plans at Mochahost seem like a relatively good deal, especially for managed plans.

There's also a lot of leeway for scalability since their top-of-the-line VPS comes with a whopping 64 CPU cores, 128GB of RAM, and 960GB NVMe storage.

Ease of use

When creating an account with Mochahost, the first step is to select a hosting type, operating system, and a plan, and there are a whole lot of them. The next step is choosing a billing cycle, and this is where you’ll see details on the price and the plan’s key features. There, you can choose whether you want to be billed monthly, annually, biannually, or triannually.

To finalize the creation of your account (and your order), you’ll be required to provide Mochahost with some standard personal information. Then you’ll set a password, choose a preferred payment method, and complete your purchase.

The best part about Mochahost plans is that they all come with recognizable control panels, either cPanel or Plesk. These are industry-standard and help you manage your hosting server easily and quickly.

Speed and Reliability

For testing, we put the spotlight on Mochahost's Soho plan, which is the entry-level tier on its shared hosting list. We then uploaded a standard test WordPress website and ran WordPress core benchmarks and a load test to see if it holds up well under stress.

Aside from speed, it's notable that Mochahost offers separate uptime guarantees of 99.9% and 99.95% for its shared and VPS hosting services, respectively—nothing super-impressive, but just about meeting industry norms.

On WordPress core tests, Mochahost shared hosting did reasonably well with an overall score of 6.8 (out of ten). The scores were not dragged down in any specific area, meaning it offers a relatively well-rounded experience across CPU and memory, the filesystem, the database, and other elements.

The key takeaway here is that while these are relatively strong results, they aren't the best we've seen by far. As an example, SiteGround is a host with comparable shared hosting prices to Mochahost and scores much better in core WordPress benchmarks.

Mochahost also performed well under Siege, a tool we use to send an increasing user load to hosting servers. At 5, 9, and 15 concurrent users, Mochahost held its own and achieved a 100% success rate on every transaction attempted. This is pretty impressive, since most of the hosts we test start indicating some degree of failed transactions even at the 9-user mark.

One notable point, however, is that despite a 100% success rate, the longest transaction time increased from an initial 2.67 seconds at the 5-user load to 12.21 seconds at the 15-user load. This means that while all requests were processed, users on a real-world site would likely experience longer wait times as load increases.

Still, it's a fair cop overall and one that somewhat justifies Mochahost's steeper-than-typical price tags on its shared hosting plans.

Customer Support

Like most web hosting companies today, Mochahost uses a chatbot as its first line of defense in customer support. From what we've seen, the chatbot scans a knowledge base and, if an answer isn't found, hands you over to a customer support representative.

We tested the process and were impressed that the handover from the chatbot to a real-live agent took just a minute. This stands in stark contrast to some hosts, where it took hours for a real human to respond to queries.

Aside from live chat, you can also get assistance by submitting a support ticket (for existing customers), or calling a phone support line.

Aside from the support channels that allow you to talk to them, Mochohost also offers a relatively decent knowledge base. It's wiki-style and easy to navigate, but primarily covers how-to documentation. That means you can easily find out how to get things done, but you'll likely need to contact their support team if you're facing an actual problem.

The competition

HostGator is Mochahost’s fellow US-based rival, with data centers within the USA. With a full range of hosting options and features, competent support, and pricing, both can offer a bit of something to suit everyone’s needs. However, HostGator's pricing is lower even on renewal.

Bluehost and Mochahost are both suitable for newcomers and veterans alike, although neither host is without its flaws. With Mochahost’s cheapest plan, you won't get as many valuable features as with Bluehost.

Final verdict

Mochahost isn't one to promise you the moon and stars, and its plans are certainly not in the cheapest tier. However, its hosting servers perform well even under load, assuring potential customers of a firm, but a steady-performing website, so long as you don't create problems with your own designs and code.

There is a shortcoming in the lack of cloud and dedicated server plans. Yet Mochahost more than makes up for this with robust VPS offerings that go beyond the dedicated server plans offered by some hosts.

Finally, if you need Windows hosting for some reason, then Mochahost is one of the few places where you can still find these plans.

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