Founded in 2007, Polish hosting provider Hekko (short for Hekkonet) provides shared website hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated server hosting, and reseller hosting plans. The company also offers domain registration, SSL certificates, and SEO services. It has a customer base of several thousand. Hekko’s data center is in Gdańsk, Poland. The company’s website and services are offered in Polish.
Features and Ease of Use
Hekko offers four levels of regular shared hosting. These are the Student, Start, Business, and Pro plans. The entry-level Student plan includes a relatively small amount of data and features: 2GB of disk space, hosting for one domain, one MySQL database, and three email accounts.
Customers with greater requirements may opt for the Start or Business plans instead. The Business plan features 50GB of disk space, hosting for unlimited domains, unlimited databases, and unlimited email accounts.
All of these plans include unlimited monthly data transfer. The plans include all of these features as standard as well:
- Free 14-day hosting trial
- Free SSL certificate
- Free domain with all but the Start hosting plan
- Website backups
- Extended 28-day backup available for higher-tier plans
- Anti-DDoS attack mitigation
- LiteSpeed Web Server
- Free website migration service
The Start, Business, and Pro hosting plans all include a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt. Additionally, premium SSL certificates are available for purchase and include Thawte SSL 123, RapidSSL, RapidSSL Wildcard, GeoTrust QuickSSL Premium, Certum Commercial SSL, and SuperFAST SSL Wildcard.
Hekko doesn’t explicitly state an uptime guarantee, but it does host its customers in a Tier III data center in Gdańsk, Poland. This means that you’ll have a minimum uptime of 99.982%. The data center facility also has two fiber optic ring connections and redundancy of network devices. Protection systems are in place for fire prevention, and there are redundant electrical supply and cooling systems.
Pricing and Support
Pricing for Hekko’s shared hosting plans is affordable and fairly competitive with other European and international providers. The second-tier Start hosting plan is particularly great value for small businesses, since it comes with a free domain registration and SSL certificate. You’ll also find that the initial pricing is heavily discounted during the first year.
If your business is heavily reliant on its online presence, however, I’d recommend at least the Business hosting plan. This gives you access to extended backups and a dedicated helpline — otherwise, you’ll only have access to customer support during business hours on weekdays.
All shared hosting plans come with a 14-day free trial, allowing customers to test out the service before they pay.
Hekko also offers a loyalty program and a barter program. The loyalty program rewards customers with a 2% discount for each additional year they host with the company, topping out at 20%. The barter program offers customers a 20% discount on service in exchange for placing a Hekko banner advertisement on the customer’s website. Customers with websites drawing more than 1,500 unique visitors per month are qualified for this program.
Customer service is slightly disappointing. This is handled only via telephone and contact form, with telephone support available from 8am-6pm on weekdays (Polish time). A dedicated hotline is available as an add-on purchase.
Unfortunately, I never received a response from customer support at this company after I reached out to them. They did send an automated reply acknowledging my message, but I didn’t receive any further communication. It’s possible that the lack of response was due to customer support being available only in Polish, while I had emailed them in English.
How much does Hekko cost?
Hekko offers plans from $40 to $99. The price depends on which type of hosting plan you choose. You can see the updated pricing table (updated weekly) below.
Which Hekko plan should I get?
My recommendation is to start with a cheaper plan. You can always upgrade later on. Hekko 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 Hekko here.
How good is Hekko’s customer support?
Hekko is not ranked as one of our top web hosts. But that can also be a result of Hekko 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.
