American hosting company 24Shells was founded back in 2003. Its servers sit in the U.S.A. and the U.K., and its English-language website (which prices plans in U.S. dollars) sells shared hosting, cloud hosting, reseller hosting, virtual servers, dedicated servers, colocation, and domain registration.
Features and Ease of Use
The three shared hosting plans were there one minute (accessible from the home page) but then gone the next. At the time of this review, they can still be found by doing a Google search for “24Shells web hosting”, so maybe the disappearance from the home page isn’t permanent.
These Basic, Advanced, and Premium shared hosting plans differ in disk space, hosted websites, and monthly bandwidth, but they all provide unlimited FTP accounts, MySQL databases, external domains, subdomains, and email accounts. You also get:
- cPanel control panel
- Easy application installer
- Free website builder
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- Cron jobs
- CloudLinux OS
- Free domain (with annual billing)
Hosted websites sit on the CloudLinux operating system, which isolates you from the adverse effects of other hosted users, so you should get the resources you’re entitled to.
Hosting accounts are managed via the cPanel control panel. Its user-friendly interface makes it easy to manage your website files, FTP accounts, databases, email accounts, and domains.
To help you create a professional web presence without having to be a professional web designer or developer, 24Shells provides a free website builder with several readymade templates that you can customize via a simple drag-and-drop interface.
Pricing and Support
I was surprised to see that 24Shells’ prices are quite high compared with the average American and international prices, so you should easily find alternative hosting plans with higher features at lower prices. The only billing cycle is annual, and there is no money-back guarantee or free trial. However, you could get a month’s free credit if this host fails to meet its uptime guarantee.
Advertised contact channels include live chat (the link doesn’t work), telephone, ticket, and email. Unfortunately, I failed to summon any pre-sales support. On the plus side, the self-support knowledge base might answer some of your questions:
