HostiServer Review – a Great Managed Hosting Provider

HostiServer is a managed web hosting provider offering VPS and dedicated servers with 24/7 managed support. We’ll review them and their services in detail below.

HostiServer – basic info and features

First, let’s start with a short introduction. Who HostiServer actually are and what they do.

They’re a team of experienced admins and web hosting techs with server locations in the US and Europe. They provide 24/7 support via online chat, tickets, and phone. They’re a great choice if you need a managed server with support and help from professionals.

Here are some of the features and offers of HostiServer:

• Free setup – meaning they will prepare your server for you – including installing and configuring software. So if you need to speed up your server and websites, they’ll help you out. If you need to install WordPress, they’ll help you out.
• Free migration – they will migrate all your data from your old web hosting provider for free. And migrating a VPS isn’t as easy as migrating a shared hosting account, so this is a handy feature if you don’t want to spend time migrating your server.
• Free monitoring – they’ll monitor your servers and take action when and if needed. So you don’t even have to worry about and monitor your servers 24/7.
• KVM virtualization – they use KVM for their servers, which is quite rare considering that most managed hosting providers use OpenVZ.
• Free CDN – they offer CDNs as part of their services, but you get one for free with their servers.
• Free backups – similarly to CDNs, they offer backups as part of their services, but you get them for free with their servers.
• No control panel by default – some managed server providers usually force cPanel on all managed servers. Sure, it makes their job easier, but not everyone wants to use cPanel. If you do want to use cPanel or a control panel like Webmin, you can ask their support team to install it for you.
• …and more. We won’t even mention stuff like SSDs, server scaling, and multiple IPs. That’s pretty much standard with any managed VPS provider.

Overall, they offer great features for a managed server provider. You don’t see this combination of features in every provider so that’s a plus.

HostiServer’s pricing

What everyone wants to know. Considering their features and the fact that they offer managed KVM servers – they’re actually pretty cheap. And there are no hidden fees or first-term discounts, which is great.

Here are 3 of their managed VPS hosting plans:

• SSD-20 – 2GB RAM, 2 Core CPU. 50GB SSD, 3TB Bandwidth – $19.95 per month
• SSD-40 – 4GB RAM, 2 Core CPU. 80GB SSD, 4TB Bandwidth – $39.95 per month
• SSD-80 – 8GB RAM, 4 Core CPU. 120GB SSD, 6TB Bandwidth – $79.95 per month

Currently, they have a $150 promo – where they’ll match anything you pay up to $150. So if you pay $150 you’ll get $300.

Use their 15-day money-back guarantee to try them out. If you don’t like them, request a refund.

They have more plans, even an option to configure a custom plan just for you, but these 3 plans will give you an idea of how affordable they are.

Their dedicated servers, backups, and CDNs are also quite cheap considering their features, but we’ll mainly focus on their VPSes in this review.

HostiServer benchmarks (speed test)

Before going any further, we must mention that this is in no way a sufficient benchmark – it’s just to get an idea of what kind of speed you’d get on a simple WordPress website. If you really want to test their servers you should run a benchmarking tool or just test your apps on the server itself.

Their support team installed LEMP + WordPress on their cheapest 2GB RAM VPS, and without any configuration or further tweaking by us, we got these results at Webpagetest.org:

The default WordPress homepage fully loaded in 1.349 seconds. This is pretty good, even when compared to specialized managed WordPress hosting providers. You’ll get a much better result if you ask their support team to optimize your server and your website.

You can view the full results here.

Their support team

We already mentioned that they offer 24/7 support via phone, chat, and tickets. We mainly contacted them via tickets. Their responses were pretty quick. An average of 20 minutes, including finishing a request like “install LEMP + WordPress”. This kind of a response time and friendliness is top-notch. Though it’s pretty standard in most managed hosting providers, it’s still good to know. The process of installing LEMP + WordPress itself lasted about 15 minutes.

The support team is the most important part of a managed hosting provider, which is why we decided to write a special section just for this.

What we don’t like about HostiServer

If you don’t really need a VPS, they’re overkill. If you’re using a simple website without much traffic, or a static website, getting a VPS (even their cheapest one) would be overkill. It would be great if they offered shared hosting too, or a cheap 256MB RAM VPS for people that don’t really need a powerful VPS.

Personally, we’ve never had the need to use servers from Asia, but they don’t offer any server locations other than US and EU.

Their client area (dashboard) is a custom-made client area by them, which has all the basic features you need like a ticketing system, billing, monitoring etc. However, they don’t have any extra features like 1-click installs, staging areas, and what-not. You can’t directly control the servers yourself – like reboots, configurations, etc. They are working on improving their dashboard though. And at the end of the day, they are a managed server provider, so you don’t even need to access the server yourself.

Conclusion

After our thorough review, the conclusion is that they are good for what they offer. They are cheap, they have great managed support and they may be a perfect fit for you. Go through our review and our notes, and if you like them, you should definitely try them out.