Russian company Top Hoster (or Tophoster) claims to offer high-performance hosting on modern servers located in Ukraine. Apart from its four professional hosting plans with MySQL, it doesn’t do anything else, which is somewhat unusual these days when most other hosts typically also offer domain registration, SSL certificates, a website builder, and a one-click installer.
Top Hoster’s Russian-language website doesn’t say much about the company’s history, and I’m slightly suspicious of the poker-related content (in Indonesian) that is inserted apparently at random into the website. I don’t know if this is malicious injected content or merely inappropriate embedded advertising.
Features and Ease of Use
Top Hoster’s four shared hosting plans are Start, Simple, Acceleration, and Master. With these plans, you get:
- 2 to 15 hosted domains
- DirectAdmin control panel
- 1,500 MB to 10,000 MB disk space
- Unlimited traffic
- Unlimited mailboxes and FTP accounts
- Unlimited MySQL 5 databases
The user-friendly DirectAdmin control panel helps you manage databases, domains, DNS records, and FTP accounts. However, there is no mention of any of the usual beginner-friendly features such as a website builder or one-click installer. So, it looks like you’ll need to know how to create or code a website from scratch.
There is a 99% uptime guarantee (which is below the industry average) that should refund your payment for any month in which availability falls below this level. I couldn’t find any further details or an SLA on the company website.
When your business starts to grow and you need to upgrade your hosting, you might be disappointed to find out that this provider doesn’t offer VPS or dedicated server plans.
Pricing and Support
Top Hoster’s hosting plans are competitively priced, and you can pay for them via WebMoney once you’ve chosen a tariff and registered your details. This may be easier said than done since the registration form returned an error when I tried it.
Billing cycles range from monthly to annual, with discounts of up to 15% for the yearly commitment. If you’re nervous about making such a commitment, the 30-day money-back guarantee may provide the reassurance you need.
Customer support can be accessed daily from 9 am to 10 pm, Moscow time. There is a ticket system for priority communications, and a customer feedback form, but the latter returns a “404 Not Found” error. Therefore, I couldn’t contact the support team.
Self-support resources seem to be limited to a DirectAdmin documentation page.
