Indian hosting provider HostOnion was founded relatively recently in 2017. It offers a variety of hosting solutions, including shared hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated servers, and domain registration.
All of HostOnion’s servers are located in France and the Netherlands, and its English-language website presents prices in U.S. dollars.
Features and Ease of Use
HostOnion’s three shared hosting plans begin with the Basic plan that is free for the first month. The more advanced Deluxe and Premium plans provide unlimited storage and monthly bandwidth but different numbers of hosted websites.
These features are common across all plans:
- Free SSL certificate
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- Free domain with annual billing (but not on the Basic plan)
- Weekly backups
- cPanel control panel
- Softaculous installer
- Free website builder (except for the Basic plan)
- Free website migration (except for the Basic plan)
The popular cPanel control panel provides a user-friendly interface for managing website files, FTP accounts, domains, subdomains, email accounts, and other aspects of your hosting. The control panel incorporates the Softaculous installer that helps you install a plethora of popular apps — such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, PrestaShop, Typo3, and phpBB — with a single click.
HostOnion offers not only apps for creating a CMS-backed website but also provides a free website builder featuring hundreds of ready-made templates. With this user-friendly tool, anyone can build a professional web presence through a simple drag-and-drop process, eliminating the need for being a website designer or developer.
Pricing and Support
HostOnion’s prices are comparable with competitors. You can choose to be billed monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, or annually, and the 30-day money-back guarantee should make you feel better about taking the annual option (because you could get out early if anything goes wrong).
Within India, you can pay by PayPal, bank transfer, or Instamojo, but anyone outside the country has to use PayPal.
While the website itself contains plenty of information, the knowledge base is relatively bare. And although the contact channels include telephone, ticket, email, and live chat, contacting this company wasn’t easy. I received no responses via live chat (or any of the other contact channels):
