Founded in 2012, Bulgarian company CyberHour offers affordable offshore hosting. It provides more than 12,000 customers (10,000 of which are “happy”) with more than 13,000 hosted domains. The website is provided in American and British English, Bulgarian, and Greek.
Features and Ease of Use
Cyber Hour sells a full suite of hosting services. Its shared hosting plans come with the following key features as standard:
- 99% uptime SLA
- Daily backups retained for one week
- Domain registration available at additional cost
- Up to ten add-on domains
- Free SSL certificate
- 20 GB, 30 GB, or 40 GB SSD disk space
- From 350 GB to 900 GB bandwidth
CyberHour’s servers are colocated in the Sofia Data Center (SDC) in Bulgaria. Although the company doesn’t own its own data center, you can take comfort from the fact that this Tier III data center should mean less than 1.6 hours downtime per year.
There is a compensation-backed uptime service level agreement of 99.9%. However, this comes with the caveat that “credits will be made available to each client on a case by case basis” so you can’t be sure what compensation you’ll get.
CyberHour makes a big thing of the fact that it is an offshore host for “security-conscious enterprises around the world,” with data protected by Bulgarian law. While I don’t know exactly what this means in practice, I think it’s safe to assume your data is safer from prying eyes (even government ones) than if you were hosted in one of the “Five Eyes” countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States. In this context, some (but not many) of you might be interested to know that CyberHour hosts some of the most popular adult websites! And they don’t keep any logs.
security conscious enterprises around the world
The plans come with some beginner-friendly features such as a QuickInstall tool for one-click installation of popular programs, and a drag-and-drop website building tool with pre-built templates.
The situation for advanced coding features is a little less straightforward. Although I confirmed via live chat that PHP, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, and Cron jobs are included in the shared hosting plans, you’ll need to choose a VPS plan if you want support for any advanced coding languages or root access.
Pricing and Support
Given the relatively low level of features in the shared hosting plans, I’m surprised by the premium price point. The lowest ‘Base’ shared hosting package comes with three domains, 20 GB SSD storage, and 350 GB bandwidth, which is more than enough resources for everyday users. However, the price is high for so few expert features, and you’ll need to upgrade to the VPS plans for more.
Plans can be bought on terms ranging from one month to three years. The prices reduce a little if you purchase a longer term, but certainly not sufficient for me to do so. SSL certificates are included, but domain registration is an added cost. There is a minuscule three-day money-back guarantee that doesn’t give you much time to decide if you made a mistake.
Sales support is available Monday to Friday during slightly later-shifted business hours, and you can contact them by live chat, ticket, or email. 24/7/365 technical support is available only via the control panel.
While the company’s live chat was supposedly online, I tried to reach out to them. Surprisingly, a chatbot prompted me to enter my email address and message, so I followed its instructions and provided the required information.
Unfortunately, the first time I contacted support, I never heard back despite waiting for around 48 hours, so you can only hope that the technical support team is more responsive when your website is down. Fortunately, an operator did pick up the second time I tried to chat, and then answered my questions.
There is a relatively active community forum on the website, which might offer a better way of solving any problems rather than contacting the company itself.
How much does CyberHour cost?
CyberHour offers plans from $6 to $21. The price depends on which type of hosting plan you choose. You can see the updated pricing table (updated weekly) below.
Which CyberHour plan should I get?
My recommendation is to start with a cheaper plan. You can always upgrade later on. CyberHour can help you with the migration to a more expensive plan. The increase in visitors many times takes longer than expected and you shouldn’t pay a lot of money until the need arises. Of course, your needs may vary, and you can consult with a hosting expert from CyberHour here.
How good is CyberHour’s customer support?
CyberHour is not ranked as one of our top web hosts. But that can also be a result of CyberHour being a small, under the radar, hosting provider. There are advantages to a small hosting company – as a customer, you are more important to them. You can also check out our comparison of the most popular web hosting services here.
