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HostMonster Overview
HostMonster is at the cutting-edge of hosting features, but it’s not easy to determine whether the price jump above the average is worthwhile. On one hand, it comes with some incredible features and bonuses that certainly will save you money in the short term and can help get your business started. On the other hand, the power that comes with many of their plans is clearly designed for established businesses that are going to need that sort of a robust structure to handle a lot of traffic.
In other words, it is in many ways like a race car being sold to someone who doesn’t know how to drive. That being said, there is a certain amount of cleverness in this sort of structure that companies planning ahead can find themselves in a position not to have to change providers when things start picking up.
Ease of Use
The website is not terrible, but it could have been a little more intuitively designed. It appears to be trying to steer potential users toward a purchase, which is not necessarily a bad thing and is, in fact, the point of a website, but it takes a bit of work to find the prices and plans.
The back-end is fairly easy to use. There isn’t a whole lot unique that’s about it – with the standard suite of available applications, an easy to navigate cPanel-style interface, and an intuitive design. All in all, even newcomers should have little trouble using this.
Features
HostMonster offers some of the most unlimited features of any other hosting provider, including storage, hosting, email boxes, email forwarding accounts, site transfer, add-on domains, parked domains, and subdomains. While other providers will have a handful of these, HostMonster offers them all, which can be great for established or growing businesses.
It also offers not only the standard advertising credits for search engines and stock photos, but also Twitter and Facebook advertising credits. This is really forward thinking, since social media PPC is showing itself to be a worthwhile investment for a lot of people.
Beyond those, the e-commerce options are highly varied and incredibly useful, including a number of shopping carts, high level encryption, and an SSL secure server. Add search engine submission for pages, and this is a really remarkable list of features.
Customer Support
One of the things that HostMonster wants to be known for is its customer support, so it’s clear the company has put a lot of money and effort into getting this right. 24/7 support is a major benefit to working with HostMonster, especially since it also offers 24-hour monitoring of the servers and can find information on what problems the servers are having and how to fix them as soon as a user calls.
There is a phone support line as well as email support and live chat, which also comes with an “average wait” to let users know the most effective way to contact at any given time.
The service techs all seem to know what they are doing and excel at both setting expectations for how long a solution might take and working with customers who may be distraught or otherwise unable to be rational at a given moment.
Pricing
HostMonster offers four VPS hosting plans. For the most part, they don’t change in features much, which is a good thing. Rather, what the user is paying for is power, speed, and bandwidth. Otherwise, everything else remains the same.
It should be noted that the first month of any given plan is half off as an incentive to try, and then it increases.
1. Standard – This costs $29.99 a month and includes a terabyte of transfer, 2GB of RAM, and a single core processor.
2. Enhanced – This plan is $59.99 and bumps up to 2TB transfer, 4GB RAM, and a dual core processor.
3. Premium – For $89.99 a month, users get 3TB transfer, 6GB RAM, and a triple core processor.
4. Ultimate – This plan provides 4TB transfer, 8GB of RAM, and a quad-core processor.
The Good
More unlimited features than any other hosting provider.
Customer support is really above par.
The Bad
It’s not clear whether services are tailored for new businesses or established ones.
And The Ugly
It’s difficult to find the prices, implying HostMonster wants to try to make a sale without telling people how much it is.