Host-it has been in business since the early days of the world wide web (1995), since when it has grown substantially through acquisitions. Together with parent company Nuco Technologies, Host-it now offers a wide range of services including virtual hosting, dedicated servers, network support and rack space, colocation, web development, and connectivity solutions.
Host-it owns and operates its own data centers in the U.K., so understandably, its website is in English. But as is common with hosting providers, the purchase pages and client area can be switched into 25 additional languages.
Features and Ease of Use
Host-it offers two types of virtual hosting plans: Home User Plans and Business Hosting Plans.
The Home User Plans are ideal for personal static sites or email-only hosting. If you already have a domain name and just need a professional email address, the Email Only plan (with 2 GB monthly bandwidth and three POP3/IMAP mailboxes) should suffice. For more disk space, bandwidth, FTP accounts, and mailboxes, you should go for the Home Budget or Home Standard plan.
All of Host-it’s Home User hosting plans come with:
- Bandwidth monitoring
- Admin panel
- Virus scanning
- Spam filtering
Some additional features of Host-it’s plans are:
- Custom error pages
- DNS zone manager
- Website builder
- IIS virtual folders
- MIME type editor
- SSD storage
- RAID 1 to RAID 10
- Free ‘budget’ SSL certificate (with others on offer)
The Business Hosting Plans are better if you need more disk space, bandwidth, and additional resources, and this provider also offers several database options (MySQL/MS SQL/Microsoft Access) and developer tools (Adobe ColdFusion, Adobe Dreamweaver, and ASP/ASP.NET).
Reseller hosting plans and specialist hosting (e.g., for ColdFusion, Sellerdeck, Magento, and WordPress) top off Host-it’s hosting offerings.
This provider’s SLA guarantees 100% network uptime for customers of its Gold virtual hosting plans (and above) and its Silver VDS/VPS plans (and above).
Pricing and Support
Host-it’s virtual hosting plans are priced competitively, and you can pay for them using credit cards (one-off or regular payments) via PayPal, Sage Pay, or other methods including GoCardless direct debit.
Host-it offers billing cycles from monthly to triennially, with a 30-day money-back guarantee so that you don’t need to worry too much about making a long-term commitment.
You can reach out to the support staff via telephone, email, Skype, support ticket, live chat (during office hours) and even fax. I got some good answers quickly when I tried the live chat:
Host-it has an impressive collection of self-help tutorials that I’ve come across, making it a great resource if you prefer to support yourself. So, you should have everything you need to get started.
