Latvian host FirstHost brings 14 years of experience to the hosting market. To date, it has accumulated over 7,000 clients, whom it serves from its data center in Riga. FirstHost’s website supports the Estonian, English, Russian, and Latvian languages.
Features and Ease of Use
FirstHost offers five shared hosting plans, five SSD VPS plans, seven colocation plans, and 43 dedicated servers. Its five shared hosting plans provide you with:
- 2 to 30 hosted domains
- cPanel control panel
- Latvian data center
- 5 GB to 200 GB disk space
- Unlimited traffic
- 2 to unlimited FTP users
- Unlimited MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite databases
- Daily backups
The cPanel control panel’s Softaculous installer makes it easy for you to install popular applications such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. Alternatively, you can create your website and its content using the website builder that includes plenty of templates and an easy-to-use interface.
SSD storage provides improved performance and reliability compared with HDD storage, and the Cloudflare CDN improves page loading performance even more, while also helping protect you against some kinds of cyberattacks. You get a 99.9% uptime SLA, which is around the industry average.
If shared hosting doesn’t meet your needs, you can opt for a VPS or dedicated server, granting you full root access for complete control of your server.
Pricing and Support
FirstHost’s shared hosting plans are competitively priced, but you do have to pay extra for a domain. You can pay for plans in Russian rubles, U.S. dollars, or euros via various methods (PayPal, cash, bank transfer, WebMoney, Yandex.Money, or Bitcoin) on billing terms from monthly to triennial. Committing to a year could save you an additional 20%, and also afford you a free domain.
Shared hosting plans provide a 30-day money-back guarantee (which should get you out early if anything goes wrong) and a 14-day free test account (so you can try before you buy).
For self-support, FirstHost offers an acceptable (but not exceptional) knowledge base. If this doesn’t answer all your questions — and it probably won’t — then you can call on the 24/7 customer support team via telephone, email, or live chat. I was pleased to receive quick answers to my questions via the live chat channel:
