CityWideHost was established in 2005. With a variety of affordable web hosting and webmaster services, it aims to provide small companies and enterprises with everything they need “under one roof” for a robust web presence.
CityWideHost’s website is in English, but some of its support ticket and order pages can be translated into 25 additional languages.
Features and Ease of Use
CityWideHost offers four shared hosting, four reseller hosting, and three VDS (virtual dedicated server) plans along with customized dedicated server options. It also offers web hosting add-ons such as SpamExperts email filtering, SSL certificates, and SiteLock security.
If you are just starting out with your online presence, one of CityWideHost’s four (Linux) shared hosting plans will be your best bet. These plans differ in terms of web space (50 MB to 1 GB), monthly transfer (5 GB to 75 GB), email accounts (1000 to unlimited), and add-on domains (3 to unlimited). All these plans come with:
- Unlimited parked domains
- POP3/IMAP/SMTP for email delivery
- Private cgi-bin with Perl support
- 24/7 FTP access, PHP support, and phpMyAdmin
- Custom error pages
- SSI and SSL support
- Password-protected directories
- Detailed web stats
- Multilingual RVskin control panel and personal cPanel
CityWideHost offers the Softaculous one-click installer, an online SiteBuilder for easy website creation, and Cron jobs for scheduling tasks. If you need to build a simple brochure site or an e-commerce website, you can benefit from CityWideHost’s web design services and ready-to-build applications for Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.
Although CityWideHost backs up all accounts nightly (presumably for disaster recovery purposes), it emphasizes that customers are responsible for their own backups (presumably for rollback purposes) and that it won’t be liable for any loss of data.
CityWideHost provides no uptime guarantee, but its FAQ page gives a glimpse of how its robust data center joins together thirteen different Tier I backbone providers to make one of the industry’s best network infrastructures.
Pricing and Support
CityWideHost’s shared hosting plans are pretty affordable on monthly billing cycles and are even better value on annual plans with two months worth of free hosting. All four shared hosting plans can be bought using PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, Discover, Amex, and Bitcoin, and can be paid for in U.S. or Canadian dollars.
You receive a 15-day money-back guarantee, allowing you two weeks to determine if this host is truly the right choice for you.
Support staff can be contacted either via an online form or a ticket system (addressed to the sales/support/billing teams). When I asked a few questions via the online form, I received a reply within fifteen hours even though it was a weekend:
The FAQ section should answer almost all the common questions you may have, and the video tutorial page has links to tutorials in English and Spanish. If you are new to cPanel & WHM, you can get help from the development guides and resources, but this provider’s knowledge base (on its purchase portal) is empty.
