RIPNET or “Russian Internet Provider” was founded in 2005 and has been providing Russian website hosting ever since. It uses a Tier III data center and its website is available in Russian and English. It calls itself a large and reliable provider of the Russian Federation, however, it’s not clear from the website how many customers it has.
Features and Ease of Use
RIPNET offers a range of hosting services, including shared hosting which enjoys the following core features:
- Weekly automatic backups (more can be configured)
- A free .ru domain name for one year
- Up to 30 add-on domains
- Free SSL certificates available
- Up to 20GB disk space
- Unlimited and without ratios 100 Mb / s traffic
RIPNET uses a Moscow-based data center, SAFEDATA. The center is Tier III, which means you should experience less than 1.6 hours of downtime per year, however, make sure to note, there isn’t an uptime SLA displayed on the website.
Backups are configured to run automatically on a weekly basis, but you are allowed to configure more frequent schedules if that’s important to you. It’s also a little disappointing that only version 5 of PHP is supported and not the twice as fast version, 7.
Aside from that, the support for experts is quite good. You can schedule Cron jobs to keep your site running smoothly, you are allowed SSH access, and Python is supported in all of the shared hosting plans. There’s even a bonus Cloudflare CDN included.
There’s a website building tool, which you can demo before you buy a hosting plan. Granted, it doesn’t have the best interface, but it is free with all plans. Plus, more than 200 popular programs such as WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal are included in the control panel.
Pricing and Support
The plans are well-priced, especially when you consider the value-added features for both beginners and experts. The plans can be purchased in one, three, six, and twelve-month terms.
As well as a discount on the monthly price when you pay for a longer term upfront, in annual plans you also get a free domain name. There isn’t a money-back guarantee, but if you cancel, you get a prorated refund for any unused time, which is unusually generous.
If you require customer service, you can access help documents and FAQs, and also reach out through telephone, tickets, and emails. However, it’s a bit confusing because to ask pre-sales questions, you are instructed to log in and submit a ticket!
I managed to find an email address, which was hidden on the website and directed my questions to it. I got a reply, within minutes of sending my original email. The operator was friendly, polite, and answered (nearly) all of my questions in full. I say nearly because I asked whether there was an uptime guarantee and they answered “yes” but didn’t tell me the uptime percentage.
