HostingSource has been providing website hosting services since 2006. This U.S. company has two data centers, in New York and New Jersey, and a website in American English.
Features and Ease of Use
HostingSource is a full-service host offering shared hosting, VPS packages, dedicated servers, and cloud hosting. As standard, you can expect to find the following core features:
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- Daily automatic backups
- A free domain name
- Unlimited add-on domains
- Unlimited disk space and bandwidth
Beginners get a free website building tool with hundreds of templates, plus a one-click installer for 60 programs, including the usual suspects such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento.
Developers also get plenty of features, including phpMyAdmin access, FTP access, MySQL databases, and Cron jobs. Advanced programming language support is provided for Python, PHP (the slower version 5), and Ruby on Rails.
In addition to good features, you also get great resource allocations: unlimited disk space, bandwidth, domains, email accounts, and MySQL databases. This is a boon if you don’t want to worry about exceeding your quotas.
Pricing and Support
At first glance, HostingSource’s prices seem really cheap, especially when you consider the unlimited resources. One caveat is that you have to sign up to a three-year term to get the best prices, but the 30- or 45-day money-back guarantee (it depends which part of the vendor’s website you believe) should make you feel better about making such a major commitment.
Another caveat is the fact that the price increases as you progress through the checkout process because many of the apparent inclusions actually turn out to be optional paid extras. Daily automatic backups cost extra every year, SSL certificates come with a one-off cost, and “Advanced Site Protection and Performance Accelerator” (whatever this is) also bumps up the price.
When you’re done, the final price could be twice what you were expecting to pay.
24/7 customer service can be accessed via telephone, ticket, email, or live chat, and there is a small knowledge base containing about ten articles. Since this vendor’s website put a few questions into my mind, I tried to get them answered via live chat. Despite being number 1 in the queue, no one ever answered:
How much does HostingSource cost?HostingSource offers plans from $1.99 to $39.99. The price depends on which type of hosting plan you choose. You can see the updated pricing table (updated weekly) below.
Which HostingSource plan should I get?My recommendation is to start with a cheaper plan. You can always upgrade later on. HostingSource 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 HostingSource here.
How good is HostingSource’s customer support?HostingSource is not ranked as one of our top web hosts. But that can also be a result of HostingSource 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.
