Tropical Server is a Granada-based Spanish company offering web hosting solutions for open source portals. It mainly targeted its services at Mambo and Joomla users.
After beginning to offer Joomla hosting in 2006, this provider added other CMS software over time, including WordPress and PrestaShop. It has provided Moodle hosting packages since 2015.
Tropical Server also offers domain registration and transfer services, and a staging (or test) environment for WordPress, Joomla, and PrestaShop websites. The Tropical Server website supports Spanish.
You can check out our top web hosting comparison to see which host would fit your needs best.
Features and Ease of Use
Tropical Server provides four shared CMS hosting plans for each of WordPress, PrestaShop, Joomla, and Moodle. In each of these categories, the plans vary in terms of disk space (5-40/50 GB), databases (1-10), RAM (2-5 GB for PrestaShop, and 1-4 GB for others) and disk speed (2-10 Mbps for Moodle and 10-40 Mbps for others).
With all these plans, you get
- cPanel and CloudLinux
- LiteSpeed Web Server
- Free SSL certificates
- SSD/NVME disks
- Antispam, firewall, anti-DDoS, and Imunify360
You also get more than 700 WordPress templates for free with all WordPress hosting plans.
Cloudflare CDN and Railgun assure superior loading speeds, and the image optimizer helps you avoid poor image optimization that would otherwise slow down your website.
Its services use NVME technology for faster data access than standard SSD disks. You can use three different speed tests (GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insights, and Pingdom) to check page load speeds, except for on the Moodle plans, or visit the company’s test subdomain to test the load yourself.
In addition to offering shared CMS hosting plans, Tropical Server provides VPS hosting for WordPress, PrestaShop, Joomla, and Moodle, along with reseller hosting, managed VPS, dedicated servers, and elastic cloud hosting services.
Tropical Server offers the industry-standard 99.9% guaranteed uptime.
Pricing and Support
Tropical Server’s shared hosting plans are pricey. Even the most basic WordPress plan is almost double the industry average, and then you have to add on 21% VAT. However, to put this into context, we’re talking about specialized CMS hosting on SSDs rather than vanilla shared hosting on HDDs.
Hosting plans come with a free domain (.com, .org, .net, .eu, or .is) for the first year, but you’ll have to pay for your domain as an independent service in the subsequent years.
All plans are payable annually in euros via PayPal, bank transfer, or credit/debit cards. If an annual commitment makes you uncomfortable, you can seek solace in the 30-day money-back guarantee that allows you to change your mind within the first month.
You can reach out to Tropical Server’s technical and customer support via telephone, support ticket, and live chat. For self-help, you can tune into the company’s Help Center with a limited number of nicely arranged tutorials. Its regularly updated blog is also worth reading.
I found the live chat agent friendly and helpful when I took the customer support for a test drive:
