To compare the best web hosts, we hosted the same WordPress website on each one and tested performance, customer service, and value for money. Check out the results here.
Area IT’s website suggests that it has been working in the Latvian internet services market since 2009, and it claims that its services are some of the most competitive in Latvia. Area IT has paid a lot of attention to process automation and making improvements in the area for technical support.
The high-performance hosting plans — which are optimized for Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, OpenCart, PrestaShop, Magento, and more — should meet the needs of business portals and personal websites alike. This provider also offers domain registration, SSL certificates (free for 90 days), and web development services.
Area IT’s website can be switched between the Latvian, Russian, and English languages.
Features and Ease of Use
Area IT offers four shared hosting plans (Micro, Mini, Basic, and Business) plus three high-performance shared hosting plans (Business Plus, Business Advanced, and Business Pro). Note that the high-performance plans are not listed on the English translation of the vendor’s website.
The four shared hosting plans, which are optimized for popular CMS and e-commerce systems, provide you with:
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- cPanel control panel
- 1 GB to 200 GB SSD storage
- Two to unlimited domains
- Unlimited email and FTP accounts
- Support for PHP 5.2 to 7.3
- Cron to schedule your tasks
- Antivirus protection and SpamAssassin
- Daily R1Soft backups
If you’re not confident in creating a website from scratch, you can utilize the free website builder, which offers over 1,000 templates. Alternatively, you can use the Softaculous installer to easily set up CMS or other software for managing your website’s content.
The AWStats, Logaholic, and Webalizer tools will provide you with useful insights into how your website is performing, and the performance should be improved thanks to the use of super-fast SSD storage rather than traditional HDD storage. As if this wasn’t enough, the Cloudflare CDN improves your website security and improves page loading speeds by caching content close to your website visitors.
Pricing and Support
Area IT’s standard shared hosting plans are priced very low. Understandably, the high-performance plans cost more, although (as already stated) you won’t find these on the vendor’s English language website. You can pay for plans in euros using PayPal, a credit card, or Swedbank, on billing cycles from semi-annual to triennial. You pay less on longer billing cycles, and you get 14 days to change your mind (which is a little less than with some other hosts).
Area IT has a 24/7 technical support team, whereas the sales and administration department works during 9-to-5 office hours. Customer support can be summoned by support ticket or email, and I’m pleased to say that I received a rapid response (within 15 minutes) to my initial pre-sales queries.
For self-support, you can refer to Area IT’s well-stocked knowledge base and blog.
