iHosting was established in 2002 with the aim of meeting the increasing demand for hosting services in Chile. Today, the company has its own data center in Viña del Mar (Chile) and has more than 3,500 active clients. Its Spanish language website offers a range of hosting and data center services along with SSL certificates, Office 365, and Microsoft Azure solutions.
Features and Ease of Use
iHosting offers three types of hosting: Basic, Premium, and WordPress. In this review, I focus on the Basic Hosting that is further divided into four plans: Plan S, Plan M, Plan L, and Plan XL. From entrepreneurs and small companies just starting out, to individuals looking for hosting plans to suit their personal projects, these plans offer everything they need to get started.
Some of the features included in Plan S are:
- 14 GB transfer per month
- 400 MB disk space
- 1 database
- 1 CPU Core / 256 MB RAM
- Free SSL certificates
- 10 mailboxes
- Weekly backup
- Unlimited subdomains at a low cost
- Antispam/Antivirus
Although the company doesn’t offer an uptime guarantee, a live chat agent quoted annual uptime of 99.98%. High reliability is achieved with multiple levels of redundancy, robust internal security, and the use of multiple paths for energy backup, firefighting, and air conditioning.
As your project or business grows, you can switch over to the Premium Hosting plans to enjoy:
- cPanel control panel
- Cloudflare CDN
- E-commerce features such as shopping carts and WebPay
- Mail cluster to reduce spam (via blacklists and filters)
- Servers with redundant network interfaces, RAID 1 hard drives, and redundant power supplies
Unlike other hosting companies that are removed from the physical operations by at least one level, having its own data center is a key feature of iHosting that allows the vendor to manage much more than mere data usage.
Pricing and Support
The entry-level hosting plans are very reasonably priced. They are all annual plans that can be paid for online via WebPay Plus, Servipag, and Banco de Chile. If you pick one of the Premium or WordPress plans instead, you can choose either the monthly or annual payments.
iHosting provides prospective customers with a 5-day “test time” to try before you buy, which should give you some confidence when deciding whether to commit to an annual plan.
You can contact iHosting through phone (in Santiago and Viña del Mar), an online form (during working hours), or social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook (although the company doesn’t actively engage on these platforms).
You can seek 24/7 support by logging into the client portal as an existing customer, but if you prefer to support yourself, you’ll be disappointed because iHosting provides no FAQ page and no knowledge base.
I tested this provider’s live chat as a prospective customer to inquire about any hosting trial periods and expected uptime. I received a prompt response that correctly answered my questions in English:
