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Hosting Insiders Overview
The Hosting Insiders website looks like a parked domain, and there’s no other way to say that. However, the context around which its unlimited features are provided matters, and the more exploration is done of Hosting Insiders, the more it’s clear that the company is as bargain basement as their poorly designed website implies. This is not to say that it is necessarily a terrible company, but rather to suggest that it is probably not a great idea to trust said company with incredibly important websites. For secondary landing pages and smaller sites, it’s probably a decent place to host for a tiny price, but not for a main website.
Ease of Use
Simplicity is at least one of Hosting Insiders’ high points. While their website is not very good looking, it’s at least easy to see and understand. There are plenty of links to start purchasing their service; the company lays out the price very clearly, and goes into great detail on what is being offered right on the home page. While this is also a bit disorienting to look at, it is certainly manageable. Within the hosting interface, cPanels is the standard and Hosting Insiders seems happy to use it. That’s not a problem at all since it’s the best hosting backend interface around. It’s intuitive, presents options plainly, and can be customized to a fair extent. Ease of use is not an issue in the slightest.
Features
The features that Hosting Insider offers are summed up quite nicely in the word “unlimited,” which is pasted in large letters all over the website to remind customers exactly what the unique selling point for the company is. It’s probably easier to just list everything that is unlimited that comes with the basic package: storage, bandwidth, email addresses, hosted domains, MySQL databases, PostGresSQL databases, and subdomains. There seems to be no indication on the website or in the backend that there are even soft limits to these, so it appears Hosting Insiders doesn’t expect large amounts of traffic or huge websites.
The use of Fantastico De Luxe as an installer seems like the company going with a favorite since it’s pretty far out of the mainstream, but it’s not a bad system by any stretch of the imagination and will get the job done. Some of the lesser mentioned features, like the HTML editor and a choice of visitor stats viewers are nice, though the company goes a little far in listing things like a file manager or a Java clock as features. There’s a certain amount of overreach to look impressive, and Hosting Insider could have held back a little bit and still been fine.
Customer Support
This was not impressive in the slightest. Considering how unreliable the service is, one would think that the customer support structure would at least be fairly robust. Instead, there is a contact email address for support and the ability to put in a support ticket in cPSupport on the back end.
Having submitted two support tickets, one through each method, it was surprising and disappointing that the first took over 24 hours to get a response on the email side. When the response did come, it seemed like a form letter and asked for details that were provided in the original communication. The ticket submitted through cPSupport received no response. Hosting Insiders also specifically doesn’t have an uptime guarantee, which is worrisome, especially considering the sluggishness on loading and no information on what the server farm is actually stocked with.
Pricing
This is another place where Hosting Insiders falls. Hosting Insiders provides a single plan that has almost unlimited everything and advertises this plan on their front page as being “$1.99 a month”. This is astonishingly low, especially since there is no contract length. There is, however, an asterisk that is referring to a note far, far below on the main page. In tiny print, the potential user is informed that that is an introductory price for the first two months, at which point it jumps to $6.99, then assures users that since there is no contract, they can simply cancel after two months if they don’t think it’s worth the higher price. The problem is that $6.99 is not unreasonable for what’s being offered, so the deception is entirely unnecessary. While it may be a little much for an unreliable service, so is $1.99 a month. So is $1.99 a year if it can’t be counted on. This is just baffling.
The Good
Offering one plan with unlimited everything is an excellent idea when done correctly.
The services are generally easy to use
The Bad
Hiding the actual price so people will assume that the introductory price is correct is highly misleading.
And The Ugly
The service is slow, unreliable and the lack of an uptime guarantee is a red flag