Founded in 2003, Hostens is a website hosting company based in Lithuania. It’s part of the much larger Interneto Vizija, which has more than 100,000 customers across Europe. Hostens owns and operates its own Tier III data center, and its modern website is available in English, Estonian, Latvian, Russian, Ukrainian, Indonesian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese.
Features and Ease of Use
Hostens is a full service hosting provider that offers shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS plans, and domain registration. The shared hosting plans come with the following features:
- 99.95% uptime guarantee
- Daily and weekly automatic backups
- Domain registration available
- Up to 100 websites
- Free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate
- Up to 60 GB disk space
- Up to 4 TB monthly bandwidth
Hostens owns and operates its own data center, which is located in Vilnius, Lithuania. The center looks immaculate, and it is built to Tier III specifications, meaning less than 1.6 hours of downtime per year. Note, however, that this vendor’s 99.95% uptime guarantee falls short of the Tier III 99.982% target.
Since Hosten’s own website is so easy to use, I’m surprised there is no website builder that would allow this company’s customers to easily achieve the same thing, but customer services confirmed to me that this feature would be “coming soon.” But beginners will be happy to see the Installatron one-click installer that helps you install popular programs with no technical expertise.
There are plenty of features for experts since all plans come with the PHP, Python and Ruby programming languages. You also get MySQL databases with remote connections and the phpMyAdmin management tool. Unusually for shared plans, you can even schedule Cron jobs and get SSH access.
Hosting plans use SSD storage (for faster read/write speeds) and CloudLinux (which isolates you from noisy neighbors in a shared hosting environment).
Pricing and Support
Hosten’s hosting plans are good value for money, especially for a provider with its own Tier III data center. Domain names cost extra, but – hey! – you can’t have everything, and you do get a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate for free.
Hosting plans can be purchased on three, six, twelve, and twenty-four-month terms, with a deep discount when you purchase a longer term up front. There’s also a generous 30-day free trial that allows you to try before you buy.
You can access 24/7 support via live chat, email, or ticket, and there’s also a substantial knowledge base on the Hostens website. When I contacted the support team early one weekday morning, the operator picked up immediately and answered my questions politely in English.
