Founded in 2010, Orion Telekom (hereafter simply Orion) is a Serbian company that provides hosting services in addition to telecommunications. It’s website is in Serbian.
Features and Ease of Use
In terms of hosting services, Orion Telecom offers shared hosting, virtual private servers, domain registration, and reseller hosting. As standard, the shared hosting plans come with the following key features:
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- Choice of SSD or HDD storage
- Backups and restores
- Free domain registration with some plans
- 1, 5, or 10 add-on domains
- SSL certificates at an additional cost
- 5GB to 15GB disk space
- 300GB to 700GB monthly traffic
Using Serbia-based servers, Orion offers a choice of three SSD hosting plans and three HDD hosting plans. The latter are cheaper because HDD storage is less reliable and has slower read/write times than SSD. As well as choosing between SSD and HDD storage, customers can also choose between Linux or Windows operating systems. And there is a 99.9% uptime guarantee on all plans.
All of the plans are pretty substantial. For both the HDD and SSD versions, the resources range from 5GB to 30GB storage with 300GB to 700GB monthly traffic. Subdomains are unlimited, and you can get one, five, or ten domains included according to the plan.
Linux plans come with the cPanel control panel, Apache Web Server (for speed and performance), and support for PHP 5 (but not the far faster version 7). Windows plans use Plesk as the control panel and support ASP as well as the Microsoft .NET Framework.
Beginners will benefit from the RVsitebuilder website building tool that comes with all plans. It includes 500 readymade templates, a WYSIWYG editor, integrated galleries, blog, newsletter, and much more. All plans also include a premium Softaculous installer one-click installer for more than 350 popular applications including WordPress, Joomla, and Magento.
Pricing and Support
Prices are in line with most local and international competitors, and you can keep the cost down by opting for slower HDD storage (rather than the faster SSD storage) while still benefiting from all the other resources and features. It’s nice to see free domains for one year, but do bear in mind the additional cost of the SSL certificate that seems to be quite pricey compared with everything else.
You can add Whois protection at the checkout for an extra fee, but – unlike many other hosting companies – Orion doesn’t bombard you with lots of extra add-ons. You can buy hosting on one, two or three-year terms, which is quite a commitment when there is no monthly payment option and no money-back guarantee.
You can reach customer service through email, telephone, and live chat. Customers with “Premium Client Status” receive 24/7 customer support, but it’s not as clear what kind of support everyone else receives. When I visited their website, the live chat option was available, but unfortunately, there was no response from the support team.
