Founded in 1996, 1Host is a U.S. based website hosting provider. They don’t advertise how many customers they have, however, they are worldwide. They advertise that many of their customers have stayed with them for over eight years and this longevity is due to their three core values: great customer service, excellent technology, and affordable pricing. Their website and support are available in English.
Features and Ease of Use
1Host offers shared website hosting, reseller hosting, dedicated servers, SSL certificates, and domain registration. They also offer services such as website design, maintenance, and search engine optimization.
Their shared hosting plans include:
- 99% uptime guarantee
- Instant daily and weekly backups
- Domain registration available at an additional cost
- Five add-on domains in the base package, unlimited add-on domains in all other packages
- Free shared and private SSL certificates
- 6GB to 25GB disk space dependent on package
For beginners, there are some great features. For example, for all plans except the basic plan they offer free of charge a website builder complete with pre-built templates, e-commerce ready integrations including checkout and cart functionality, and one-click installers for popular programs. They also offer an easy cPanel demo for beginners to try before paying.
In addition, 1Host provides top-notch hardware and infrastructure that experts will appreciate. They house their servers in a data center situated in Atlanta. Their infrastructure is fully redundant, ensuring an uptime of 99.9%. They also have 24/7 on-site engineers available. They use top-of-the-line servers, Dual Quad Core Xeon, with 12 GB Ram and RAID 10, meaning your websites will be served up to 30% faster than HDD.
Pricing and Support
Unfortunately, their prices are quite high when compared to local American competition, and large international competitors. That said, the inclusions are quite extensive in all of the 1Host plans e.g., all plans include multiple domains and free SSL certificates.
They do also offer quite good discounts when you purchase a longer term upfront. You can choose to buy in one month, three month, twelve, or twenty-four month terms. The discount increases up to 30% depending on the length of term. All plans include a 30-day money-back guarantee, however, there are no free trials or free plans.
Sadly, their customer service is very limited and quite slow to respond. In fact, there is only a toll-free number and several email addresses. There is no live chat on the website. This is a shame and ideally, I’d like to be able to contact them and receive an instant answer. Furthermore, I found it pretty frustrating that they have a link to a knowledge base but it does not have any documents.
