Launched in 2014, New Zealand-based HostBee is a relatively new hosting provider with a lot to offer, including shared hosting, WordPress hosting, business hosting, reseller hosting, VPS, dedicated servers, and domain registration.
HostBee’s nicely designed website is in English, and its cute bee logo might appeal more to beginners than experts.
Features and Ease of Use
Some of the features you can look forward to with HostBee’s shared hosting plans are:
- Unlimited bandwidth
- 99.999% uptime guarantee
- Daily cloud backups
- DDoS protection
- Website builder
- cPanel
The cPanel control panel, which comes as standard with all hosting packages, makes it easy to manage your website. And the bundled Softaculous installer helps you install CMS and other software – such as WordPress, Joomla, PrestaShop, Magento, and Drupal – with a single click.
Besides providing a website builder so you can create a web presence without technical expertise, HostBee also employs a team of web designers and developers who can assist you with your website creation. The support team can also migrate your website from your previous hosting provider for free.
Pricing and Support
HostBee’s three quirkily-named shared hosting packages (Small Hive, Medium Hive, and Huge Hive) differ in disk space, email accounts, MySQL databases, addon domains, and parked domains. These averagely-priced plans are not the cheapest around.
You can make payments in New Zealand dollars via credit card on a monthly, semi-annual, or annual basis, with a discount for committing to longer than a month. The account gets activated instantly upon payment.
Customer support is available via email, support ticket, or live chat. Unfortunately, live chat was unavailable at the time of writing this review, so I submitted a support ticket and sent an email instead. I received a reply within a couple of hours:
To complement the one-to-one support, this host’s knowledge base contains a surprising number of articles.
