Founded in 1999, Hostmatrix is an Australian company with servers in Sydney. It offers domain services and hosting plans but not Virtual Private Servers or dedicated servers. As such, it’s better suited for small business websites and personal blogs. Hostmatrix’s website is available in English with a focus on Australian businesses and individuals.
Features and Ease of Use
Hostmatrix offers three hosting plans with the following features:
- Free SSL certificates
- Five, 10, or 15 websites
- Weekly offsite backups
- 200GB, 400GB, or 600GB bandwidth
- Up to 30GB storage
Hostmatrix advertises its plans as WordPress hosting plans. However, the features that it provides lead me to believe that you can host websites built outside of WordPress, as well. In fact, there are no specific WordPress hosting features on offer such as automatic upgrades of themes. You can still get automatic upgrades but unlike most WordPress hosting plans, you’ll have to set it up yourself.
This company provides Softaculous for the automatic installation of WordPress. It also works for many other CMSes. During installation, you can set it to automatically upgrade the WordPress core, theme, and plugins. However, you have to ensure that this is set, otherwise, you’ll have to do the upgrades yourself.
The control panel is cPanel and it comes with lots of features that are relevant to both beginners and experienced users. You can use it to manage your website files, create and manage domains and DNS zones, create unlimited email accounts, and more. Email accounts are placed in separate outbound servers to prevent IP blacklisting.
Hostmatrix uses solid state drives with CloudLinux to ensure top-notch shared hosting performance that you can enjoy to the fullest without being affected by excess usage of resources by other customers. Data is redundant as the SSDs are on RAID.
Despite the use of CloudLinux OS, one disadvantage of shared hosting is that if there’s a DDoS attack on one customer and you’re on the same server, it will affect you as well. Going for a dedicated server will prevent that, but it’s overkill for a simple website. Plus, that doesn’t take out the risk of the DDoS attack coming for your domain. Hostmatrix does well in this with a DDoS protected network from Black Lotus.
Pricing and Support
Hostmatrix offers low prices for its services, and you can pay for one month or three months at a time. For longer durations, there are six-month, one-year, two-year, and three-year options available. It doesn’t have many upsell options – only domain and ID protection for that domain.
This provider doesn’t offer free domains, so if having one is necessary for you, please consider exploring other options. However, opting for alternatives means you’ll be foregoing numerous fantastic features. These features encompass complimentary auto-renewing SSL certificates, DDoS protection, and CloudLinux.
Also, Hostmatrix provides free cPanel account transfers to its servers. That includes not only the website files but also your emails and email accounts. You can downgrade or upgrade between plans at any time from your Hostmatrix account.
There’s no free trial to try out the service for free, but there is a 30-day money-back guarantee that assures you of your money if you aren’t satisfied.
Customer support is available through email, ticket, and – if you’re willing to go that route and are patient – a P.O. box. Unfortunately, there’s no phone support or live chat for faster support, but in my experience, I got a reply not long after I sent my email.
