American host HostChive was founded in Texas in 2011. It has an English language website and a handful of social media profiles which are all inactive.
Features and Ease of Use
HostChive offers a range of hosting services which come with these features as standard:
- Daily, weekly, and monthly data backups
- Free domain name with annual plans
- Unlimited add-on domains
- Free SSL certificates
- Unlimited disk space and bandwidth
Hosting is managed via the popular and easy-to-use cPanel control panel. The included one-click installer includes 400 scripts for CMS, e-commerce and other apps, so you can set up your website with little-to-no technical knowledge.
At the more expert end of the scale, developers get support for programming languages such as Ruby and Python, plus Cron jobs (to schedule scripts) and SSH access (for secure access to your server). You also get the usual PHP and MySQL databases.
You’ll be pleased to hear the performance is assured by the use of SSD storage that is much faster and more reliable than traditional HHD storage.
Pricing and Support
Hosting plans are advertised at substantial discounts of up to 75%, but it’s not clear how long the discounts last. You get a 30-day money-back guarantee that gives you a month to get out if you change your mind, and the lowest plan allows you to try before you buy (for free) for 30 days without paying a penny. You also get free SSL with all hosting plans and a free domain with an annual plan.
So far so good, but now for the bad news. The website crashed whenever I tried to purchase a plan, and many of the other links on the website lead to empty pages. Given what I just said, you might not be surprised to learn that the support pages are also unreachable, so you can’t submit a support ticket or read the knowledge base.
You should be able to access the supposedly 24/7 support through telephone, email, or live chat, but when I wanted to try it, the live chat was offline. The blog is one of the few things that work, but I can’t tell you how up-to-date it is since the entries aren’t dated.
