Hoststar is based in Switzerland but also has a branch in Austria, and it has been in business since 1996. This vendor has registered 110,000 domains, and it serves 80,000 customers from data centers in Austria, Switzerland, and Germany. Its website can be switched between the English, German and Italian languages.
Features and Ease of Use
Hoststar offers three shared hosting plans that feature high-performance storage: 60 GB SSD on the StarEntry plan, 80 GB SSD on the StarBiz plan, and 120 GB NVMe on the StarPlus plan.
Some of the features you’ll enjoy with the shared hosting plans are:
- 99.9% uptime SLA
- Daily backups
- Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates
- 30, 50, or 80 add-on domains
- Unlimited traffic
In addition to the storage space for your website files, Hoststar also provides cloud storage for the backup and storage of documents, images, and other media files.
The drag-and-drop “Designer” website builder helps you build your website in three easy steps from pre-built templates. It also features SEO options, a blog module, a developer area for modifying the HTML and CSS, and an e-commerce module with payment gateways.
As an alternative to building your website in the way just described, you can use the one-click installer (accessible from the “My Panel” control panel) to install a popular CMS such as WordPress.
From a programming perspective, you can configure PHP and Perl, but there is no support for Python.
Hoststar employs server-side and web application firewalls to shield you from attacks and manipulations. They also ensure that all web hosting customers have permanent anti-DDoS protection in place.
Pricing and Support
Hoststar provides low price hosting services, but they’re not low quality, thanks to the uptime SLA, hardware, firewalls, and applications. There are no activation fees, and you can scale your hosting up or down as you need to.
Domain name registration isn’t free, so you’ll find the cost of your domain added at the checkout. Although monthly prices are advertised, you can’t purchase plans on a monthly billing basis. Fortunately, the 30-day money-back guarantee should get you out of your minimum annual commitment if you’re not entirely satisfied within the first month.
Technical support is not 24/7. The telephone hotline is limited to working hours on weekdays and Saturdays, and other channels are restricted to weekdays only. The 12-hour response time is pretty slow in an age when most vendors offer instantaneous live chat. Unfortunately, I received no response at all to my exploratory email as a pre-sales prospect customer.
You can give Hoststar’s staff access to your device via TeamViewer, and you can access various self-support resources (which are in German unless translated):
