ATW first began their operations in 2003 as a free web host. While they still offer free web hosting as a service, over the years, they’ve evolved to offer premium shared hosting along with VPS and rental servers. Their shared hosting plans offer unlimited bandwidth and nice extras such as separate email and database storage.
Features and Ease of Use
ATW offers solid shared web hosting plans with unlimited bandwidth and 99.9% availability. Their paid plans offer the following features:
- SSD storage
- Separate email and database storage
- Unlimited subdomains
- Unlimited databases
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited email addresses
These plans don’t offer a ton of advanced features, but there are a few bright spots:
- Daily backups of websites and databases
- Supports cron jobs
- Redundant server architecture
- phpMyAdmin support
- Customizable plans available
ATW’s plans and feature set are about average for the market, though the 99.9% availability guarantee means better uptime than most hosts (which tend to only offer 99.9% uptime guarantee, if that). Plus, with redundant server architecture, the odds that you’ll experience a server outage are significantly reduced compared to a standard shared server.
The bad news is that beginners will face a learning curve with ATW. They don’t provide an auto-installer or website builder, so you’ll need to learn how to build a website the old-fashioned way. Alternatively, you can learn how to manually install WordPress.
Pricing and Support
ATW offers four shared web hosting plans, including one free plan and three paid plans. Below is a breakdown of each plan.
| Free Web | Minimal Web | Optimal Web | Maximal Web | |
| Free Domain? | No | Yes, 2 years .hu | Yes, 2 years .hu | Yes, 2 years .hu |
| Domains | 0 | 1 | 5 | 10 |
| Storage | 500MB HDD | 2GB SSD | 4GB SSD | 10GB SSD |
| Database Storage | 50MB | 500MB | 1GB | 2GB |
| Email Storage | 100MB | 2.5GB | 5GB | 10GB |
| Databases | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Subdomains | 0 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| FTP Accounts | 0 | 25 | 50 | 100 |
The free plan is really only usable for small personal websites like blogs and resume websites, but that’s to be expected. I like how you get separate database and email storage for these plans. Most hosts combine your email and database storage into your primary storage, which means if you get a ton of emails and tend not to delete them, it’ll eat into your file space for your website. However, overall database storage is lacking so those needing large databases will need to look elsewhere — or upgrade to one of their VPS or dedicated server rentals.
These plans are dirt cheap with the Maximal plan costing the same as entry-level plans from many other hosts. As such, I’d go with Maximal from the start to max out your resources.
Note that your free domain is a .HU domain, so if you want a .com, you’ll have to pay for it. On the plus side, you get this .hu domain registration for two years free rather than the more typical one year from other hosts. Also, SSL certificates are not free, but they come at a reasonable annual fee.
If you don’t like the above pre-made packages, you can use their “Custom Web Host Configurator” (yes, it’s actually called that) to customize your plan. You can select the number of domains, your storage, database storage, email storage, and the number of FTP accounts needed.
ATW support is somewhat lacking. Your only options for support are phone support and email support. Support is not 24/7, only operating from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Hungary time. They also don’t offer a knowledge base, so you’ll have to rely entirely on their limited support during regular business hours for any assistance.
