Reviews and expert opinion One.com

No Frills, but What’s the Catch?

One.com, founded in 2002 by Jacon Jensen in Denmark, is one of the leading European website hosting providers. It has more than 1.5 million customers in 149 countries, and offers its website in 14 languages, including German, Spanish, French, English, and Danish.

At first glance, it appears to be a budget brand, with a no-frills approach to hosting. The range of plans is really simplistic—there are two shared hosting plans, a website builder plan, WordPress plans, and email hosting packages.

While it’s not a big deal to have a simple website or hosting solution, once you dig deeper, you might get a surprise with the prices. But, how important is all of this? Does One.com offer the features you need? Is it good value for money?

This review is going to dig into the data—load speeds and uptime, customer service response speed, and ease of use—to find out everything you need to know about One.com.

Ready? Let’s dive in.

Best for Beginners

One.com is targeting customers who need a basic, no-frills setup. This means you won’t get every feature possible, and, despite targeting beginners, the support you’ll get from One.com is quite limited.

To put that in perspective, the plans come with a free SSL certificate, automatic backups and restore, and a website building tool, but not a content delivery network (CDN) or any help with migration—two features that are often included free with shared hosting.

Those are the basics. Now, let’s move on to the more interesting features offered by One.com.

SSD? Yes, Please!

One.com uses SSD storage instead of the more common HDD, meaning your website should load ten times faster. However, that’s about all the information I can find on this so-called “high-performing infrastructure.” There isn’t even an uptime guarantee advertised, but I’ll dig into that later.

Hosting Plans Keep It Simple

The packages provided by One.com are simple and straightforward, which can either be a pro or con depending on your requirements. Advanced users likely won’t find enough developer-friendly features, but for beginners, the plans offer all the basic features you’ll need.

Quick-Start with Tools for the New Guy

Again, pleasing newer website owners, the plans come with One.com’s own website-building tool and a one-click installer for WordPress. The website tool comes with templates pre-installed, and it’s mobile responsive, so you can start your website easily, with the knowledge that it will look right no matter how your visitors access your site, whether through mobile or desktop.

E-commerce Immediately

If you’re planning to set up an e-commerce store, One.com offers plenty of features for you. For example, there’s integration with PayPal and Stripe so you can accept payments on your website, a free SSL certificate, and you are able to add unlimited product pages.

As a beginner-friendly host, One.com is designed to be easy to buy, set up, and maintain. Its plans are so simple that you only get two choices of shared hosting plans and three WordPress-specific plans.

Create an Account

I decided to go for the cheapest of the three WordPress-specific options. It’s a pretty comprehensive plan, coming with 200 GB SSD storage and the option to host multiple websites (for an additional fee).

I’m pleased with the resource quotas, but there was a problem when I wanted to use a domain that was registered elsewhere: I’d still need to pay for a One.com domain.

While the process to create an account is easy, I had to wait for a verification text, which took forever (okay, about ten minutes).

Connect a Domain and Install WordPress

To test out One.com, I created a WordPress website and connected it to a domain. I was impressed by how easy and fast it was to do. One.com uses a custom control panel (no cPanel for you), which can sometimes be a risk for providers. But One.com makes the navigation simple and streamlined. Read more about my experience here.

Keep Your Site to Yourself with Staging

These plans come with a simple one-click installer for WordPress, as well as a (small) library of ready-to-go templates. A nice added touch is a staging environment, which means you can build on a temporary domain before pushing live to its actual domain. Perfect if you want to make sure your visitors only ever see the 100% complete site.

Plenty of Disk Space for Most Sites

The plans include nearly everything you need, from a domain name to unlimited bandwidth and email accounts. Even the disk space is generous, ranging from 50 GB to 200 GB for the shared hosting packages and from 200 GB to 500 GB for the WordPress plans.

Backup and Restore

All of the plans come with automatic backup and restore. I needed to check with customer support, but your data is backed up daily, and you can request a restore up to a week back. While this doesn’t sound like a huge feature, it’s often an added cost with some providers, so I’m always pleased when it’s included as standard.

Stellar Results, but There’s a Catch

After I’d created a WordPress website, I put it through a Sucuri page load speed test. The results were excellent, especially for a budget brand. Nearly all of the locations connected in less than 200 milliseconds, with only one close to 600 milliseconds.

The speed results are great, but what about its uptime? Therein lies the problem.

One.com doesn’t offer any kind of uptime promise, guarantee, or service-level agreement (SLA). This may not matter to you, but it’s kind of an anomaly in the website hosting world and it will likely be a big turnoff for high-volume websites or serious e-commerce stores.

Having said that, it does have a system status page on its website, which, at the time of writing this review, didn’t show any major issues with downtime. There aren’t many negative customer reviews online, either.

Limited Ways to Get Help

Customer service is quite minimal. But that’s not always a bad thing. If you want to speak with an agent, you can contact the team 24/7, but only via live chat or email. Or you can refer to a small but satisfactory knowledge base.

While I was creating an account, I did need to contact customer service a few times. Each time, I was immediately greeted by a bot and had to manually request to speak to a human. A little annoying, but it only took a couple of minutes to be transferred to an actual person.

All of my questions were answered professionally and politely. Granted, it’s not the world’s best customer service, but it did the job just fine.

At first, it seems like an amazing deal. Hosting for less than a dollar a month, but take it with a bit of skepticism. The best prices are only available for your first term, and upon renewal, your price is three times more expensive in some cases.

In the end, you wind up at a similar price point to most other hosts, but you’ve sacrificed a feature or two to benefit from the great introductory prices. That could be a compromise worth making for you, but I’m not so sure.

To make the situation worse, you can’t sign up for a month-to-month plan. Therefore, what appeared to be cheap monthly payments is now an annual lump sum. Ouch.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. One.com offers a 15-day money-back guarantee, so you can get started relatively risk-free. If you do decide to try One.com, you can pay by credit card or PayPal.

Cancellation & Refunds

Canceling was easy and could be done directly from my dashboard. There’s a useful how-to guide provided by One.com, and the entire process was completed in less than five minutes.

However, as I was within the 15-day money-back guarantee and the cancellation process didn’t confirm whether I would be refunded automatically, I did need to contact customer service to confirm. I’m glad I did, because it turned out that the agent needed to manually refund my payment. Nevertheless, the money was returned to my card in full on the same business day.