Web hosting provider Canaca was established in Toronto, Canada in April 1998. With over 20 years of hosting experience, their commitment to providing reliable hosting services is reflected by the 3,600+ domains hosted on their servers. This relatively small provider’s shared web hosting, VPS, and dedicated server solutions are best suited to small and medium-sized businesses.
Features and Ease of Use
Canaca’s hosting services include the following standard features:
- SSL certificate
- cPanel & WHM control panels
- Dedicated IP with one free static IP
- Linux and Windows OS support
- Free RAID
- Free domain name
- SSD drives
- Full root SSH access
- Apache, PHP, Perl and MySQL pre-installed
Canaca owns and maintains its own servers and other hosting infrastructure. The company does not lease any of its hosting facilities to others, thus assuring its customers of high-quality services and unmatched availability. Well, that’s the theory, but while this vendor makes big claims about high availability and excellent website loading speeds, the reality is that sometimes some of its hosted websites load very slowly due to overloaded servers and low bandwidth. And these problems can sometimes last up to 24 hours.
Backups are performed every 3 to 5 days for websites of less than 1GB. Therefore, businesses needing daily backups of databases bigger than 1GB might not be best served by this vendor’s solutions. Canaca also insists that users must maintain their own website backups because the Canaca backups are really only for disaster recovery rather than rollback purposes.
In terms of operating systems, Canaca’s clients can use the Centos 7, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and Fedora 27 Linux distributions for free with their hosting solutions.
Pricing and Support
Canaca’s hosting solutions are quite expensive. And unlike most other vendors who offer cPanel for free, this vendor charges their customers an exorbitant cPanel license fee on top of its hosting charges. Factoring in the fact that their servers sometimes experience prolonged periods of downtime (despite claiming to offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee), the high prices are probably not justified. On the plus side, Canaca’s plans do come with a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can sign up relatively risk-free.
You can contact Canaca’s 24/7 technical support team via email, telephone, or ticket, but not live chat. Although their support is advertised as 24/7, all of their listed phone numbers appear to go straight to voicemail, and my submitted ticket was closed before my concerns had been adequately addressed, and the team took two weeks to respond to an email I had sent them. This could be very frustrating for customers experiencing a hosting emergency, especially since there is no knowledge base to turn to for self-support.
If it weren’t for the fact that my IP address seems to be banned from accessing the Canaca community (which includes an FAQ section), I would be tempted to seek additional help and advice from there. I’m left wondering, “Wow! What could I have possibly done?”
