ERC Hosting is a Netherlands-based hosting company that has been in operation for over 20 years. It specializes in standard web hosting, WordPress hosting, and web design services. It also offers additional services such as cloud backups, WordPress maintenance, Office 365, and VoIP. Its website is slightly confusing to navigate, but quite informative. Services and support are primarily available in Dutch.
Features and Ease of Use
Even though ERC Hosting offers more than one type of hosting, it seems to focus more on marketing its standard web hosting (shared hosting) services. Let’s take a look at some of its key shared hosting features:
- Free SSL certificates
- Unlimited bandwidth (with all but the starter package)
- Website builder
- SSD storage
- Extra disk space available (at an additional cost)
All packages come with Installatron, which allows you to easily install apps without having to pick up any programming or web design knowledge.
At first glance, it seems that ERC Hosting tends to cater to beginners, since you’ll be able to take advantage of services such as having WordPress or OpenCart pre-installed for you during checkout. However, the checkout flow is also rather confusing if you’re new to hosting, as you’ll have to specify just about every aspect of your hosting package yourself. For instance, you must list how much disk space and bandwidth you’ll need up front — which would be difficult to gauge right from the start.
Other than that, you’ll have the DirectAdmin control panel available with all packages. Similar to cPanel and just as intuitive, this allows you to easily manage your website. It comes with a comprehensive toolset to adjust your hosting, emails, backups, FTP accounts, and more.
It’s also worth mentioning that ERC Hosting’s uptime history is quite impressive. The company has maintained an overall 100% network uptime over the past few months. However, there’s no apparent uptime guarantee with this provider.
Pricing and Support
ERC Hosting offers four standard shared hosting packages: Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Diamond. All four plans include free SSL certificates, but they vary in other features including the number of databases and email accounts. On the downside, the company doesn’t provide a free trial or any money-back guarantee, so you’ll be using ERC Hosting’s services at your own risk and expenses. Domain registrations are also an extra charge with ERC Hosting.
If you want to sign up for a subscription, ERC Hosting accepts PayPal, iDEAL, direct debit, and bank transfer.
I must admit that I wasn’t at all happy with ERC Hosting’s customer support. I opened a support ticket with several questions about features not mentioned anywhere on the website — and then received a pointless response a week later referring me back to their website.
The knowledge base and FAQ section are quite limited, unfortunately. However, there are a few helpful tutorials available on the website that could be useful while waiting for the somewhat lackluster support team to respond. Alternatively, you can save yourself the trouble and simply give them a call on their support line to receive all the assistance you require.
