Hostwinds should be on your radar if you want a powerful and flexible web hosting service. Hostwinds offers a variety of shared, virtual private server (VPS), dedicated, cloud, WordPress, and reseller hosting packages aimed at both small businesses and larger corporations. Hostwinds’ feature-rich VPS and reseller offerings earn it our choice in those categories.
Shared Hosting
Hostwinds offers three Linux-based shared hosting plans: Basic, Advanced, and Ultimate, all of which are attractive and cost-effective. Unfortunately, Hostwinds does not offer any Windows-based hosting plans. The Hostwinds’ prices have risen slightly, but they are still relatively low. Basic (beginning at $8.99 per month) includes unlimited monthly data transfers, storage, a free dedicated IP address, and the ability to host a single domain. Advanced ($10.99 per month) expands on Basic by allowing you to host up to six domains. Ultimate adds the ability to host an unlimited number of domains for $12.99 per month. If you want a Hostwinds shared hosting package with room to grow, there’s no reason to choose anything other than the Ultimate plan unless you’re on a tight budget. Hostwinds, like other web hosting companies, offers discounts if you sign up for multiple months or years.
Our Choice for shared hosting, HostGator, gives small and medium-sized businesses more room to grow their online presences. The Hatchling plan (which starts at $10.95 per month) includes unlimited disk space, bandwidth, databases, and email addresses, as well as support for one domain and third-party applications like content management systems and e-commerce platforms. HostGator’s Baby plan (starting at $11.95) expands on Hatchling’s offering by allowing you to host an unlimited number of domains. The top-tier Business plan (starting at $16.95 per month) also comes with highly specialized features like a free dedicated IP and an SSL certificate upgrade. You can also choose between Linux and Windows-based servers with HostGator. You’ll appreciate the Windows option if you need to run Microsoft-specific scripts.
VPS Hosting
VPS hosting is for people who want to build their websites on servers with more processing power than shared web hosting. Your site will still share server space with other sites, but there will be far fewer competing for resources with VPS hosting. VPS hosting is more expensive than shared hosting, but it’s well worth it if you anticipate a lot of traffic. VPS sites are also more secure because virtualization isolates some of their resources.
If you need VPS hosting, Hostwinds has four tiers of fully-managed Linux and Windows-based plans to choose from. The cheapest managed Linux VPS hosting plan starts at $10.99 per month and includes 1GB of RAM, one CPU core, 30GB of SSD disk space, and 1TB of monthly data transfers, while the most expensive plan starts at $50.99 per month and includes two CPU cores, 6GB of RAM, 100GB of SSD disk space, and 2TB of monthly data transfers. Windows VPS hosting offers the same hardware capabilities as Linux VPS hosting, but at a higher price (from $16.99 per month to $56.99 per month).
There are also a number of unmanaged hosting plans available, including Linux and Windows. The lowest tier of unmanaged Linux VPS, for example, starts at $4.99 per month (for 1GB of RAM, 30GB of disk space, 1TB monthly data transfers, and unlimited email), while the highest tier costs $328.99 per month (for 16 CPU cores, 96GB of RAM, 750GB of disk space, 9TB monthly data transfers, and unlimited email). The unmanaged Windows VPS plans start at $10.99 per month (for 1GB of RAM, 30GB of disk space, 1TB monthly data transfers, and unlimited email) and go up to $376.99 per month (16 CPU cores, 96GB of RAM, 750GB of disk space, 9TB monthly data transfers, and unlimited email). In short, Hostwinds’ VPS plans are flexible and powerful, outperforming those of most of its competitors. As a result, Hostwinds is our preferred web hosting provider for virtual private servers.
Dedicated Hosting
You can choose from a variety of customizable or prefabricated Linux or Windows dedicated servers from Hostwinds. Dedicated hosting is a powerful hosting option that puts your website on its own server. As a result, your site has access to a lot of server resources, allowing it to handle a lot of traffic.
Prefab and customizable server prices start at $75 per month, but depending on how you configure them, either type of server can cost much more. You can get up to 3TB of hard drive storage or 1TB of SSD storage (per drive bay, with a maximum of four drives depending on your server option), 96GB of RAM, and unlimited in-bound monthly data transfers with the configurable servers. Outbound data transfers start at 10TB, with unmetered outbound traffic incurring an additional scaling cost of up to $750. You could easily spend nearly $1,500 per month if you max out everything. The dedicated server options provided by Hostwinds are excellent.
However, Hostwinds’ dedicated packages fall just short of AccuWeb’s. AccuWeb’s dedicated servers can be configured with up to 512GB of memory, 8TB of storage, and 50TB of monthly data transfers, regardless of the plan you start with. As a result, AccuWeb Hosting’s dedicated hosting plans outperform the previous category champion, Hostwinds. AccuWeb is now our go-to provider for dedicated hosting.
WordPress Hosting
If you want to build your website with the WordPress content management system, you’ll be happy to know that you can do so on both regular Hostwinds servers and the company’s WordPress optimized servers. Hostwinds’ WordPress plans start at $8.99 per month for one hosted domain, unlimited storage, and monthly data transfers (the $12.99 Ultimate plan adds unlimited domains).
Starting at $2.99 per month, the Linux-based A2 Hosting offers four excellent WordPress hosting tiers, with unlimited storage and monthly data transfers starting at $5.99 per month. The Managed package, which costs $41.99 per month and includes unlimited databases and websites, is the most expensive. Additionally, you will receive a free SSL certificate across the board.
Cloud Hosting
Hostwinds also provides cloud hosting, which is a type of web hosting in which CPU, RAM, and other resources are distributed across multiple servers. It differs from traditional hosting, which relies on a single server. The benefit is that your site isn’t reliant on the resources of a single server.
Cloud hosting plans from Hostwinds start at $4.99 per month for 1GB of RAM, a single CPU core, and 1TB of monthly data transfers. The most expensive plan, with 96GB of RAM, sixteen CPU cores, 750GB of storage, and 9TB of monthly data transfers, costs $328.99 per month.
These are solid options, but DreamHost and 1&1 Ionos remain in our choice. DreamHost’s packages start at $4.50 per month (for 512MB of RAM, 100GB of storage, and unlimited monthly data transfers) and go up to $48 per month (for 4 CPU cores, 8GB of RAM, 80GB of SSD storage, and unlimited monthly data transfers). 1&1 Ionos, on the other hand, offers enterprise-level clients incredibly powerful cloud hosting packages.
Reseller Hosting
Check out Hostwinds’ excellent reseller hosting packages if you want to start your own web hosting business but don’t want to deal with managing servers and other infrastructure issues. Reseller hosting entails renting server space from a well-known provider and reselling it to your own customers.
Hostwind’s reseller plans are similar to its shared hosting plans, with unlimited email, storage, and data transfers starting at $8.99 per month. Dedicated and VPS hosting packages for Linux and Windows are available, as well as shared hosting for Linux only. The servers have the same amount of RAM and storage as those supplied directly by Hostwinds, which is not always the case. Hostwinds also allows you to brand the servers you rent, as well as providing 24/7 technical support.
Web hosts like A2, GoDaddy, and HostGator also offer good reseller plans, but Hostwinds goes above and beyond with stacked specs in a variety of server categories. As a result, we recommend Hostwinds for reseller hosting.
Building a Hostwinds Website
Weebly is the website builder included with Hostwinds’ hosting packages. The website builder is provided by Square, an e-commerce platform, and allows users to quickly create a website, blog, or online store. For your planned site, there are hundreds of themes and styles to choose from. Users can drag and drop site elements like text, images, dividers, videos, maps, and more in Weebly’s builder. Weebly also optimizes your site for desktop and mobile devices, making it simple to create a website that anyone can access.
E-Commerce and Security
The Magento eCommerce app is part of Hostwinds’ Softaculous library. Website Monitoring is available on Hostwinds’ shared and reseller plans, and it monitors your site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If your site is down, it will automatically submit a help ticket on your behalf. You can also purchase ID Protection for $5.00 per year, which hides your name and address in the Whois registry.
Excellent Uptime
The uptime of a website is a critical aspect of the web hosting experience. Clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services if your site is down, and they may not return. Hostwinds, on the other hand, is extremely dependable.
The tool pings website every 15 minutes and sends an email if it can’t contact it for more than one minute. In our latest tests, Hostwinds went down zero times during the 14-day test period. It proved far more dependable than TMDHosting’s unreliable web hosting service.
Good Customer Service, Short Refund Window
Hostwinds provides customer service via phone, webchat, and ticketing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. On a weekday evening, we tested the chat support, and we never had to wait more than a minute for a Hostwinds representative to respond to my questions. I was accurately explained the differences between shared and VPS hosting by the person on the other side of the chat window.
Hostwinds used to offer a generous 60-day money-back guarantee, but that is no longer the case. Instead, the company provides refunds to customers who request them within 72 hours of placing an order. Most companies offer 30-day money-back guarantees, but this falls short. You don’t have much time to decide whether or not you want to stay with the company with such a short window. Furthermore, the cancel button is difficult to locate. You must go through the account management section if you decide to leave Hostwinds.
The Way the Winds Blow
Despite its limited refund period, Hostwinds is still one of the best web hosting services available. It offers excellent customer service, consistent uptime, and reasonably priced hosting tiers that appeal to a wide range of individuals and businesses. More importantly, in the reseller and VPS subcategories, Hostwinds is our top pick. If you’re looking for dependable, all-around Windows hosting (something that Hostwinds lacks), AccuWeb is a great option.