Instra Corporation has been in business since 1999. They’ve grown from an Australian domain registrar to become a worldwide supplier of website solutions. They have:
- Customers in more than 200 countries
- Offices in New Zealand, Europe, and Australia
- Servers located in the U.S., U.K., Australia and Hong Kong
Their website and support are available in English.
Features and Ease of Use
Instra Corporation’s shared website hosting comes as standard with the following core features:
- 99% uptime guarantee
- Daily automatic backups
- Domain registration available
- From 1500MB to 7500MB disk space
- From 5000MB to 35,000MB monthly bandwidth
Instra Corporation has a global DNS infrastructure with servers colocated in Los Angeles, London, Hong Kong, and Melbourne data centers. Although they don’t own these data centers, they do commit to only working with data center owners that meet the following specifications:
- Tier 1 upstream providers
- UPS and generators in case of power outages
- N+1 air conditioning systems and network equipment
- 24/7 security and monitoring
Their uptime guarantee is a little low at 99%, although they do claim it’s backed by a service level agreement (which I couldn’t actually find on their website).
Instra Corporation offers four shared hosting packages: Economy, Premium, Business, and First Class. The Economy package comes with 1500MB web space, 5000MB monthly bandwidth, and 30 email accounts. The Premium package has 3000MB web storage, 10,000MB monthly bandwidth, and 30 email accounts. The Business package provides 5000MB web storage, 20,000MB monthly bandwidth, and unlimited email accounts. The First Class package affords you 7500MB web storage and 35,000MB monthly bandwidth.
You have to dig deep into each plan to understand which features are included. For example, RVsitebuilder is only available with the three highest price packages, whilst the Softaculous one-click installer is available in all plans but with a different number of installable apps depending on the plan: 5 apps for the Basic plan; 230 apps for the Premium, Business, and First Class plans.
For advanced users or developers, all plans come with unlimited FTP accounts, support for PHP, Perl, CGI, and Python plus Cron jobs.
Pricing and Support
Instra Corporation’s prices are a little higher than the international and local competition. While even the basic package includes pretty high resource levels and is likely more than enough for most everyday users, you’ll need to upgrade to the higher plans if you require the website building tool or more than five installable apps. Domain registration and SSL certificates cost extra on all plans.
24/7 technical support is provided for existing customers by telephone and email. You can contact them via telephone and email for any other inquiries, and they offer support 24/7 from Monday to Saturday morning. Considering the size of the corporation, I find their customer service options a bit limited, and I’m disappointed by the almost non-existent FAQ section on their website.
