Belarusian company BayCenter LLC has been providing hosting services since 2009. Although it appears to be continually improving its offerings – now with high-speed clustering on SSD disks for the VPS / VDS hosting services – this provider’s website is very old-fashioned and available only in Russian.
Features and Ease of Use
BayCenter offers all of the services you’d expect from a web host: shared website hosting, domain name registration, SSL certificates, plus VPS and dedicated server rentals for when you’re ready to scale. Hosting plans come with the following core features as standard:
- Daily data backups, plus storage of daily, weekly, and monthly copies
- Domain registration available for purchase
- Up to ten add-on domains
- Free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates
- Up to 15 GB SSD disk space
- Unlimited monthly traffic allowance
As already alluded, BayCenter offers all the essential features you need to host your website. For example, it supports PHP and MySQL, and you can one-click install popular CMS programs such as Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal. But beware that these features aren’t available in the base plan.
Your control panel choices consist of Billmanager (in Russian), ISPmanager, or the VDSmanager virtual server control panel. I confirmed with customer services that you can choose to use a control panel in English.
Considering that this is a no-frills provider, it’s refreshing to see daily automatic backups included in the hosting plans. You can also restore a daily, weekly, or monthly copy if required. Although this may not be the most exciting feature, it’s surprising how often this is an added cost.
Pricing and Support
Whether you go for a one-month or a two-year commitment, you will find that BayCenter’s hosting prices are very affordable. You get an SSL certificate thrown in for free, but you’ll have to buy a domain.
Although there is no money-back guarantee, there are plenty of sign-up incentives that include free website migrations, a 7-day free trial, and a 20% discount on domain names.
Support provision is a little confusing. While some technical support is available 24/7, certain issues are dealt with only during working hours on weekdays. To make matters more confusing, some support is free (for website access, website transfers, and CMS installation) whereas other issues are billed at an hourly rate.
When I tried to test the supposedly-online live chat, I got an automated reply (see below) telling me to leave my email address. The good news is that I got an email response the same day, and it fully answered my questions in English.
