Located in Argentina, SMWebGroup has been providing website hosting services since 2003. It currently has more than 2500 customers, 30 employees, and offices in Buenos Aires and Mendoza, Argentina. The SMWebGroup website is available in Spanish, Russian, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and English.
Features and Ease of Use
SMWebGroup provides shared hosting, dedicated servers, VPS, and domain registration. The shared hosting plans come with the following core features:
- 98% uptime guarantee
- Automatic backups
- Unlimited domains and subdomains
- Up to 50 GB disk space
- Unlimited bandwidth
This web host has more than 2000 square meters of space in data centers located around the world; in Argentina, the U.S., Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. The data center in Argentina is owned and operated by SMWebGroup itself, which should be good news for response times to technical issues.
The servers use RAID configuration and redundant power supplies to mitigate the risk of data loss. There is an above-par 99.98% uptime guarantee, although there is no SLA as far as I can see.
Hosting plans come with good resource levels, including unlimited domains, subdomains, MySQL databases, and bandwidth. I couldn’t get support to confirm if there is a website builder and/or a one-click installer, but I can tell you that there is support for PHP, MySQL databases, and SSH access (with dedicated servers). The SMWebGroup website also advises that the hosting is “compatible with Google Apps.”
The web hosting plans include the cPanel control panel in both English and Spanish, which is definitely a bonus for Spanish speakers.
Pricing and Support
The three shared hosting plans include similar feature sets and resource allocations apart from the disk space that increases from 5 GB to 50 GB. The lowest plan is a reasonable price if you don’t need more than 5 GB disk space, but the two higher plans are expensive considering the little additional benefit.
As well as paying a relatively high price for the higher plan, you’ll also need to pay extra for a domain name and SSL certificate. There is no money-back guarantee and no free trial, so you need to be confident about your commitment.
24/7 customer service can be accessed by phone, email, and live chat, except that the live chat was offline when I tried to take advantage of it. So I sent an email instead, which had still received no reply after several days.
SMWebGroup’s website advertises video tutorials to set up your hosting. And the FAQ link leads to a knowledge base containing more than 100 articles about hosting:
