Vercaa Hosting Review [2024]: Is It Worth Your Money?

An All-Rounder With Plenty to Offer – Except Fast Loading Speeds

Vercaa strikes a balance between value, usability, and helpfulness. All Vercaa’s services are cloud-based and managed, making them a bit pricier than your average budget unmanaged shared hosting. However, updates to Vercaa’s website suggest it will be expanding its offerings to dedicated and VPS hosting in the future.

With such low prices for managed services and generous discounts in place, Vercaa appeals to those looking to upgrade to managed cloud hosting for less. Vercaa offers unlimited resources like SSD storage and email accounts on low-tier plans – and, in the case of its premium plans, unlimited website creation, too. If you design or manage multiple sites, these resources on a cloud-based plan might be particularly appealing.

This host is particularly friendly to NGOs, humanitarian organizations, and students, who receive a generous 50% discount.

But if you’re looking for power or scalability, you won’t find it here. Vercaa hosting plans cap at 4 GB RAM, 6 cores, and 250,000 visitors per month. With typical site loading speeds of over 2 seconds, it’s also one of the much slower hosts that we’ve tested (and we’ve tested a lot). Only near its main French servers were loading speeds satisfactory at around 1 – 1.5 seconds, making it a great choice for EU hosting.

 Before you make your decision, let’s take a deeper look at what Vercaa has to offer. I’ve tested all aspects of its hosting services, from account creation to website setup, support, plan features, and more.

Value for Money and Usability Are at the Forefront

Although Vercaa is a cloud hosting service, it offers a lot of the same user-friendly features you’d expect from shared hosting, making this a very accessible choice if you’re unfamiliar with cloud hosting. For example, you’ll get a free cPanel control panel with Softaculous, which gives you access to 1-click installations for WordPress or other CMS software – and that’s just with the basic Starter plan.

More expensive plans include a free domain name, a free paid Comodo SSL (for 1 year), and speed optimizations. Of course, all plans also feature dedicated resources ranging from 1 GB – 4 GB RAM and 2 to 6 cores.

Sitejet Website Builder

While Vercaa offers its own website builder bundled into a plan, you can get access to the Sitejet website builder through your free cPanel account. With over 100 templates, AI-assisted content creation, free stock photos, and drag-and-drop elements, it’s an easy (and free) way to create your website with zero coding or UX design experience.

Alternatively, you can create your site using WordPress (or any other content management system). The Softaculous installer gives you access to hundreds of the top CMSs and web apps. You won’t need any coding knowledge to get your website up and running.

Free Website Migration

As part of its hosting service, Vercaa offers free website migrations. The number of free migrations varies per plan – basic tiers usually only include 1 free migration, while pricier options include a maximum of 3 free migrations. Since basic plans limit you to one website, this shouldn’t be an issue. Beyond these limits, paid website migrations are available too.

If Vercaa can’t migrate your site within 24 hours, you’ll be eligible for one year of free hosting.

SiteLock Scanner Subscription and More

Vercaa Hosting’s plans include a pre-installed 36-month SiteLock Scanner Lite subscription. During checkout, you can add the Lite subscription to your order for free or upgrade to a more advanced SiteLock plan. The Lite plan includes automatic daily malware and vulnerability scans, as well as access to the SiteLock Trust Seal deployment tool.

The SiteLock Trusted seal assures visitors that your site is safe, secure, and malware-free. The subscription also includes the use of SiteLock’s firewall, which checks traffic and blocks visitors based on security rules. Additionally, Vercaa offers a suite of security tools of its own, including a Web Application Firewall (WAF), two-factor authentication (2FA), 24/7/365 server monitoring, and more.

LiteSpeed and CloudFlare CDN Caching

With CloudFlare CDN caching on all plans, your Vercaa-hosted website can load faster worldwide thanks CloudFlare’s network of 70+ locations. Select Vercaa hosting plans (the pricier options) also include LiteSpeed caching, which speeds up the delivery of dynamic website content.

Vercaa Hosting Features at a Glance

Easy To Set Up and Configure… but Lots of Control Panels To Navigate

If you’re a veteran of shared hosting plans, Vercaa Hosting’s sign-up process and dashboard will be familiar. Not only are your options simple and streamlined, but they’re also limited to fewer choices, making the process fast and stress-free.

With pre-installed software and tools and 1-click installers, you don’t need to be tech-savvy to  set up a site, either. However, with separate Vercaa, cPanel, Softaculous, SiteLock, and WordPress control panels and dashboards active, I felt like managing all of them (and remembering where the setting I was looking for) was a bit of an exertion.

Creating a New Account With Vercaa Hosting

After selecting a Vercaa plan, the host will ask you to register a new domain or use an existing one. There are no server location options, choice of resources, or other custom selections. You simply choose a plan, your preferred billing cycle, which add-ons you want, and pay. During checkout, you’ll also set up your username and password for your Vercaa Hosting account.

I appreciate that none of the optional paid add-ons were pre-selected, even the free SiteLock Scanner Lite subscription. The risk of unknowingly adding unwanted services is minimal. Conveniently, the two payment options are debit/credit cards via PayPal and Stripe, which are both world-renowned, secure, trusted payment platforms.

After paying, you’re conveniently redirected to your Vercaa dashboard. When I signed into my Vercaa Hosting dashboard, I was also greeted with a mini tour of all its features, which was very helpful. While the signup process is quick, you generally have to wait for your server to be set up before creating your site.

Vercaa advised me that my server could take up to 48 hours to propagate. However, it was up in under 2 hours, allowing me to create and publish my site that same evening. That said, Vercaa’s emails went to my spam folder, so I wasn’t aware of what was going on at the time.

Connecting a Domain and Installing WordPress

If you bought or got one for free with your plan, your Vercaa domain will be automatically linked to your website. You can also transfer a third-party domain during signup, but you’ll need to redirect your third-party domain nameservers yourself. Since these settings are in your domain provider’s dashboard, Vercaa can’t do this for you – but you can receive guidance on the process, or you can ask your domain company to do it.

I tested Vercaa’s Basic web hosting plan, so WordPress wasn’t automatically installed during setup. However, Vercaa’s general web hosting plans do include the WP Toolkit (more on that below), which automatically installs WordPress for you. You can also install WordPress using Softaculous in cPanel, which is what I chose to do.

If you opt for one of Vercaa’s WordPress hosting plans, WordPress should come pre-installed. These plans may limit you to hosting WordPress sites only, though – so consider this option carefully.

The WP Toolkit

The WP Toolkit is cPanel’s 1-click WordPress installer, and it’s included with all Vercaa web hosting and WordPress plans. In cPanel, if you choose “WordPress” from the “Choose a starting point” pop-up message, it will automatically install it for you. You can also select the Sitejet Builder to create a site. But doing so hosts your site on the Sitejet Website Builder CMS, not on WordPress.

Here you can manage your WordPress plugins, themes, and backups. Especially useful if you manage multiple WordPress sites, this tool allows you to conduct mass updates, stage and clone websites, manage search engine indexing, and more – all from one intuitive dashboard.

1-Click Instant and Passwordless Logins

Directly from your Vercaa hosting dashboard, you can log into your cPanel control panel, SiteLock dashboard, and more – no password required. Additionally, cPanel also offers a passwordless login to Softaculous. All great news if you’re the person who always misplaces or forgets their passwords like me.

20% Partner Discounts + $75 Grasshopper Credit

As part of your Vercaa hosting plan, you get access to 20% discounts with Vercaa’s partner brands, including SE Ranking, WP Rocket, Sitecake, and iSenseLabs. Plus, you get a $75 Grasshopper credit to spend on a dedicated business phone number.

Performance Is Where Vercaa Falls Short: 2+ Second Loading Times Aren’t Good!

The entire reason you’d choose to upgrade to cloud hosting is to gain better loading speeds and global performance. In my tests, Vercaa fell short here. France achieved the fastest loading speeds – unsurprisingly since Vercaa’s data centers are here – and nearby in the UK and other neighboring EU countries.

Outside of these regions, performance and speed dropped significantly. Otherwise, uptime was great, only dropping when I performed some critical site maintenance.

GTmetrix

During my tests, I monitored Vercaa Hosting’s performance in the US. Unfortunately, it didn’t do great, only scoring a B rating with GTmetrix. You can probably do better, especially since Vercaa is a cloud hosting service that should perform consistently and faster worldwide.

Despite slower-than-average US loading times, Vercaa’s service was very consistent. Loading times rarely spiked throughout the entire testing period, which is rare. We can probably attribute this to Vercaa’s cloud infrastructure, which has more resources to share among its users than a shared server.

As you can see, performance is best where Vercaa operates its data centers. Beyond Europe and the UK, performance is unacceptably slow for a cloud service. If you’re serving a local audience, 1 – 1.3 second loading times are perfectly acceptable. Beyond that, less so. That said, Vercaa Hosting plans do include CloudFlare CDN but you’ll need to ask support to activate it for you. Activating it should drastically speed up site loading times worldwide.

UptimeRobot

If you’re looking for a reliable service, Vercaa is a surefire option, scoring 100% uptime in our UptimeRobot tests. I didn’t count the downtime experienced as it occurred from my own meddling. The host also has a generous SLA in place which compensates users for 1 month of free hosting per 0.99-1% instance of downtime.

Excellent Support – Exactly What You’d Expect From a Managed Service

Vercaa Hosting offers a wide range of support channels, which are available 24/7/365, including live chat, phone, and ticket.

Live chat and phone support channels are monitored consistently, and ticket responses should appear within 24 hours – although at times it only took a few minutes for me to get a response. Noticeably, Vercaa offers a much more comprehensive level of support than many hosts I’ve tested. Vercaa support doesn’t just answer inquiries and offer guidance but also completes numerous administrative tasks.

For example, the Vercaa support team will set up your website for free and handle the troubleshooting, installation, and upgrade of open-source applications, SSL certificates, web applications, plugins, and more. Support will even recover a hacked site for you. Unmanaged hosts charge extra or don’t offer any of these services, as they commonly expect customers to complete these tasks on their own.

Overall, I found Vercaa’s support very hands-on, jumping in to fix issues immediately after I reported them. As I first installed WordPress using the WP Toolkit, then deleted and reinstalled it using Softaculous, there were some issues with my domain name and site indexing. I lodged a ticket, and the Vercaa support team handled the issues amazingly quickly, and effectively.

When I contacted Vercaa support via live chat to ask a few questions about its services, the agent replied instantly. They were also very professional and helpful. So it seems Vercaa doesn’t just make promises but actually delivers on the quality of support it promises.

Vercaa also has a Knowledge Base on its website, which both customers and non-customers can access. It features hundreds of tutorials covering the most popular CMSs and Vercaa Hosting-related issues and topics. Additionally, there are a limited number of video tutorials available on Vercaa Hosting’s YouTube page. Vercaa also advertises a Vercaa University site featuring news and updates, but it did not load for me.

Expect Prices to Reflect Managed Services

Though its hosting is slightly more expensive, it is important to remember that Vercaa hosting is a managed cloud service, which is a step up from shared hosting in terms of power and infrastructure. In general, Vercaa’s managed cloud services are quite affordable compared to other competitors. Having put it to the test, Vercaa truly delivers on the “managed” aspect, which is not always the case when it comes to these services.

I appreciate that Vercaa’s plan tiers include the same level of managed support, too. The only features you’re really missing when choosing one of the lower-cost Vercaa plans are certain benefits such as LiteSpeed web servers and a free domain name. Vercaa also offers equally generous discounts for all its plans, from Starter to Elite – provided you choose an annual or longer payment term, that is.

Overall, I think the mid-tier PowerUp and Prodigy plans are the best in terms of value. PowerUp is ideal for individuals or small businesses as it includes a free domain and 2x speed optimization for a few dollars more than the basic Starter plan. Prodigy is great for agencies, developers, and web designers. It allows for unlimited site creation and includes 10x speed optimization and LiteSpeed caching.

Additionally, Vercaa hosting commits to a slightly above-average 45-day money-back guarantee and uptime of 99.99% in its SLA. If your uptime falls below 99.99% – but not less than 99% – you’re entitled to a free month of hosting. If it falls below 99%, you’re entitled to a free month of hosting for every 1% of downtime. (It’s generous, but a refund would seem more fitting as getting free hosting from a provider that can’t maintain uptime is a bit counterintuitive.)