HostNine Overview

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HostNine claims that it is on “a mission to do better”, and it seems that the company is taking that slogan very seriously. The service is impressive in comparison to other companies that provide this kind of hosting. HostNine is inexpensive, offers a good menu of plans and are reliable with a solid guarantee. The customer-first attitude is not a gimmick; you see a lot in hosting companies where the sales focus is often on equipment or statistic to value ratio, so seeing this from HostNine is, in a word, refreshing.

Ease of Use

Users should have no problem getting all their data in place and getting up and running with HostNine. If so, the customer service reps are easily to get ahold of in times of need.

Features

What HostNine wants you to know is that it has “Enterprise level hardware.” Considering the prices of some of its plans, it’s really pretty amazing that the company is able to support that level of equipment. On almost every page of their website, you can see a comparison between HostNine and their nearest competitors regarding whatever kind of hosting you’re considering and credit should be given to the company for not only being honest when they don’t stand up in a particular area, but also for being triumphant so often.

One of the most often overlooked benefits of a good hosting service is the idea of multiple datacenters. Most companies have two; HostNine has four spread out over the world. The centers themselves have advanced security, both cyber and physical, are consistently manned, have the latest in fire suppression technology and they are constantly looking for ways to upgrade.

Perhaps most impressive of all is how easy they make it to switch between plans. This includes going from a shared hosting plan to a Cloud VPS to a dedicated server and back. Again, HostNine’s attention seems to be on serving their customers, so they want you to very easily be able to switch plans until you find the one that meets your needs. Moreover, they want you to be able to change if your situation does and you need more or less than you already have.

Customer Support

HostNine’s customer support is known to be quick, helpful, and manages to explain some complex concepts without much difficulty at all. Being able to call and speak to a person during at least some hours is a nice ability and one that many will appreciate; though, having 24 hour access to somebody through chat is arguably the greatest feature of the company’s customer service. Perhaps the only concern is the apparent lack of online documentation to try and solve your own problems. While it’s nice to be able to talk to highly-trained people, sometimes it’s a lot quicker to just be able to run a quick search and fix whatever is wrong by following a well-written guide. HostNine might want to consider such a system.

Pricing

This is where things really start to shine for HostNine. Again, on every page, they have a matrix that compares their service to their three nearest competitors, and in almost every case they were at least cheaper and generally better in the majority of categories. About the only type of hosting that they weren’t a clear winner was dedicated servers, but their offerings were so all over the board that there was no clear “winner.”

Prices start as low as $3.45 a month for a shared server. This doesn’t even come with a dedicated IP unless you pay $2 a month, at which point it’s probably better just to spring for the Enterprise pack at $8.45 a month that includes a free domain, 100 domains you can host there, unlimited storage space and bandwidth as well as an SSL certificate.

Moving up to a Cloud VPS gives you eight possible plans capping out at $120 a month for 4gigs of RAM, 110 gigs of storage, and 1800 gigs of bandwidth, so not very bad at all. That will easily serve most small and medium sized businesses and is already out of reach for most individuals.

Finally, dedicated servers start at $175 a month for an amazing 4 gigs RAM, 500 gigs storage, and 5 TB bandwidth. The top plan, to be honest, isn’t that much different at $295, though you end up with more RAM than many hosting plans: 32 gigs.

The Good

The customer focus of the company shows in everything it does

Transparent comparisons with other companies provided

The Bad

There’s no online documentation to help troubleshoot problems

The Ugly

The dedicated server plans are way too big for most people’s needs