4host is a web hosting company that was founded 15 years ago. Located in Switzerland, it offers shared hosting, email hosting, reseller hosting, domain registration, and digital marketing services. Over the years, it has served over 800 customers with 5,000+ registered domains and 4,000+ hosted websites.
The company’s servers are located in Germany (Falkenstein) and Switzerland (Lugano). Its website is available in Italian and English, though several pages are only available in Italian. All prices are displayed in Swiss francs.
Features and Ease of Use
4host offers four categories of shared hosting – Budget Hosting, Entry Level Europe, Entry Level Switzerland, and Speed Hosting Switzerland. Each category comes with three plans: Light, Professional, and Business, offering varying resources. These plans are suitable for individuals and small to medium-size businesses.
Some key shared hosting features include:
- 99.98% uptime
- From 10 GB to 100 GB storage
- Up to unlimited bandwidth
- cPanel control panel
- cPanel builder
- Automatic backups on a few plans
- One-click WordPress installer
- Free SSL
It’s nice to see that 4host provides DDoS (distributed denial of service) protection of up to 10 GB per second. DDoS attacks happens for many reasons, like a disgruntled employee, seriously annoyed customer, or even just the desire to hack.
Also, all of the dedicated hosting plans are on a cloud infrastructure, which does a lot to mitigate attacks.
4host has also recently implemented DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) on its infrastructure for all its customers. DNSSEC is a security system that gives DNS (Domain Name System) servers the ability to authenticate the information they receive. You can activate this option from your cPanel, or you can contact 4host’s customer support for assistance.
The company is also coupled with four nameservers to boost your website’s speed and improve its accessibility by reducing waiting times. You can get nameserver management for free for one year.
In addition, 4host provides RAID protection to ensure that customers don’t lose their data in the case of hardware failure. Speed web hosting and dedicated hosting customers also get SSD, which improves performance over traditional disk drives.
If you plan on using a CMS (content management system), you won’t have to deal with manual installation – the company offers a one-click installer for easy installation of CMS like WordPress and Joomla from your control panel.
The company also sells a website builder with a drag-and-drop tool and free modern templates that you can use to design your website.
Pricing and Support
4host’s paid plans are pretty cheap considering its robust infrastructure and included features. However, you can only subscribe on an annual basis.
On the plus side, 4host offers a free domain name for the first year with its Light plans, and you get the domain name free for the life of the plan on the Professional plan. You can chose from .ch, .li, .com, .it, .fr, .de, .eu, .org, .biz, .info, .net, .co.uk , .be, and .es domains.
You can transfer your website to 4host for free, and it offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.
4host accepts bank transfers, PayPal, or credit/debit cards.
4host is one company that does well for customer support. I sent an email and got a response quickly. Also, it has a knowledge base that contains information on technical issues and other hosting matters. You can contact the agents through live chat, phone, ticket, and email.
