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Generous packages and superb support mean that Hostripples isn’t a bad choice for WordPress hosting in India. Signing up for a long-term plan brings the price down to a very competitive point – providing you can dodge those upsells at checkout – and the money-back guarantee means you have nothing to lose. The only potential problem is the server performance, which was disappointing.
Hostripples instantly gives a great impression with a smart, professional website and a wide range of hosting plans. It’s clearly an ambitious host that aims to attract global customers who want to host their website in India, the US, the UK, or Poland.
You can even pay for your hosting with Bitcoin, which is always nice, especially if you prefer to remain anonymous.
Sounds good, right? Well, I set up a test website and hosted it with Hostripples for three months to see what it can actually offer. I discovered that Hostripples has a couple of flaws you need to know about. There’s nothing wrong with its features or resources, as such, but I had an issue with loading speeds in India that put a dent in its score.
Despite the inherent problems of an Indian web host loading slowly in India – Alanis Morissette would call that ironic, and this time she’d be right – Hostripple could be a decent option if you’re looking for a web host in India. Read on to find out more.
4.7
Features
Generous Plans… But Where Are My Backups?
Hostripples has three so-called “managed” WordPress plans. Well, they are “100% WordPress compatible” plans. There are no specific WordPress features, so there isn’t much to distinguish them from normal shared hosting, although the blurb says that the hosting is “optimised” for WordPress.
Let’s not be too critical. These plans are pretty generous even if the marketing is a little ambitious.
We’ve got the standard menu of three plans: Smart, Business, and Enterprise. All have unlimited bandwidth. Disk space and RAM steps up incrementally from 20GB/ 2GB on Starter to 50GB/ 3GB on business and 80GB/ 5GB on Enterprise.
The cheapest plan limits you to one website. The Business plan lets you host 10, and Enterprise has no limits on the number of sites you can create. Email accounts are unlimited across all plans, and all of them get spam protection.
All plans come with free SSL certificates, which will help to boost both your users’ privacy and your Google ranking. Specifically, having SSL means that any data sent to or from your website will be encrypted. Any host worth their salt will include free SSL so it’s always the first feature I look for.
If you’re moving from another host, Hostripples will move your website from your old host to your new Hostripples accountfor free. Always a nice touch, that.
One-Click Installers Make Life Easy (Well… Easier)
You can use Softaculous to install WordPress and dozens of other scripts too: shopping carts, forums, classic business CMSs, and more. Heck, want an old-fashioned early ‘00s forum? You can do that.
Installing the software you need is as simple as clicking the button on the app’s page, and filling out a little basic information.
In cPanel, you’ll find the usual backup menu, along with a wizard that streamlines the process. But backing up your site will be a dreary, manual process because there are no automatic backups at Hostripples.
Hostripples has sailed through this section without any issues so far, but the lack of backups is always a red flag. It’s unwise to run a WordPress site without backups. A backup service is available as a paid add-on, but I always suggest comparing the cost with third party services before choosing paying the host to do something they should be doing anyway.
The Weebly Site Builder Comes Standard
All plans come with the Weebly website builder, but only the basic Weebly plan is free. You can upgrade it to a different plan at checkout if you need to. If you’re interested in exactly what this site builder can do, check out our Weebly review.
4.7
Ease of use
Smooth and Simple – Just Dodge the Upselling
Hostripples has a nice website that combines good content and clear navigation. Signing up for a plan is also super-simple. However, beware of upselling in the checkout.
Otherwise, your hosting and management experience should be smooth sailing. If you’ve used cPanel before, you’ll be all right. If you haven’t, you’ll get used to it. You’ll almost have to, as almost every major host uses some version of cPanel.
Installing WordPress
You can install WordPress in a few minutes using Softaculous, which is located within the cPanel interface. Search for WordPress and click the blue Install Now button. You’ll just need to set up a few basics, like your site name and your login details.
4.0
Performance
Very Disappointing Loading Speeds in India
I set up a real website with Hostripples to see how it would perform on speed and uptime. I collected data using three tools: GTMetrix, the Sucuri Load Time Tester, and UptimeRobot.
Here’s the scoop: Loading speeds were weirdly slow in India, with very little data compression, and an average loading time of over 3 seconds (which is kind of terrible). Weirdly enough, despite the data centre being in India, European test servers loaded the test site quickly and smoothly. My uptime tests reached 99.98%, which is good enough for most use cases.
And now we’re going into more specific details. If that’s your thing, read on. If not, you can skip down to the Support section.
My site was at https://autonomous-shoes-india-m.in. After testing, the account was closed down. I always do this when I test web hosts, to ensure that the host can’t artificially manipulate the performance after the review is published.
My GTmetrix tests showed that Hostripples’ loading times were slow. This test measures the time taken for a website to fully load from a particular data centre (Mumbai, in this case). The fastest result was 2.6s, and the slowest was 4.9s. The average fully loaded time was 3.4 seconds.
This one is pretty close to the average:
My GTmetrix tests revealed poor results
When testing a website from a server in the same country as the data centre, there’s a simple rule: anything below 2 seconds is too slow. Visitors expect to see a page appear within two seconds, and a loading time longer than this could push them back to the search results.
My site had a size of approximately 1.4MB. Some compression was applied to reduce it to 1.22MB. However, other hosts were able to compress the page to less than 1MB, so it’s not the most impressive result.
Sucuri Load Time Tester
Sucuri reported very fast speeds. But there is a caveat. (Isn’t there always?)
Sucuri measures page loading times from different data centres around the world. I ran this test nine times and more than half of the tests failed to report any data.
Among the ones that did, the average response time was 2.9s.
This test below is one of the ones that actually returned results. As you can see, some of the speeds here were incredibly fast. My site was hosted in India, yet three data centres in Europe loaded it in around half a second:
Sucuri reported very fast speeds in Europe and North America
Those failed tests could have changed things. Maybe it was the host’s fault, maybe it wasn’t, we can’t really judge either way.
UptimeRobot
Hostripples achieved 99.98% uptime across a full month of UptimeRobot testing. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good. I’d go with that.
I noticed a mix of uptime guarantees promised on the website – mostly 99.9%, sometimes 99.99%. Whenever a host is unclear on an important figure like this, I go read the Terms of Service so you don’t have to. And there is no uptime guarantee in the terms at all. If your site performs like mine, then you might not need to worry. But if it doesn’t? Hmmmm.
To be clear, that’s a bad “Hmmmm.”
4.9
Support
Amazingly Fast and Detailed Live Chat Support
Hostripples provides support 24/7, 365 days a year. Phone, ticket, and live chat support are all available, and responses were speedy and detailed every time I contacted someone for help.
Here’s a tech support query about installing WordPress. Mark answered quickly and you can see from the timestamps that the conversation flowed quickly too.
I also gave Hostripples the chance to step in with some optimisation tips before I started to test my website. I’ve asked dozens of hosts this question. Many of them just say they can’t help. But Hostripples went to great lengths to give me lots of actionable and useful tips.
Just three minutes for seven different tips. On live chat. Wow!
Finally, a tricky technical question. I ran into a problem uploading a WordPress theme. This is a pretty common issue, but it can be difficult for a hosting novice to resolve without some help. Again, this is a great answer.
Another live chat support query – fast and accurate
Paul, you’re killing it. Nice job.
4.9
Pricing
Competitive Pricing on Long-Term Contracts
If you pay monthly, Hostripples is at the more expensive end of the pricing scale compared to some other hosts in India.
But longer contracts yield generous price reductions of up to 50%, so it’s worth thinking about stretching your plan over a longer term. You can choose to pay monthly, quarterly, annually, 6-monthly, 12-monthly, 24-monthly, and 36-monthly. The longer you commit, the more you save.
Some plans also include a free domain name, but mine was one of the few that didn’t.
You can pay for your hosting using more than 13 different payment methods, including credit card, bank transfer, PayPal, Paysafecard, MolPay, AliPay, and Bitcoin.
There’s no free trial at Hostripples, but there is a 30-day money-back guarantee. I dove into the terms again to check this out, and it really is a genuine guarantee with no catch. If you’re unhappy, you can get your money back without question; all you have to do is tell Hostripples why.
Generous packages and superb support mean that Hostripples is a good choice for WordPress hosting in India. Signing up for longer brings the price down to a very competitive point – providing you can dodge those upsells at checkout – and the money-back guarantee means you have nothing to lose.The performance tests were really the only issue here. Page loading times in India should have been better, particularly since my plan was supposed to be “optimised” for WordPress. If you really need hosting that’s fast in India, HostingRaja easily beats Hostripples in this area, although its tech support is not even in the same league.If you’re trying to target a global audience, I recommend you check out Hostinger’s latest deals1. This host provides excellent performance for an excellent price.
A free domain name is included with some hosting plans from Hostinger
. But Hostinger isn’t just cheap – it also scored incredibly well on our global performance tests, meaning you get excellent value for your money.It’s always a good idea to visit our web hosting coupon page to make sure you’re getting the best deal possible.
Which type of hosting is best?
There is a wide range of hosting services available, from budget-friendly shared hosting to fancy dedicated servers. The best hosting for your website will depend on your specific needs. If shared hosting isn’t enough for you, there are several cheap and reliable VPS hosting services available.
How do I choose a hosting plan?
Try to estimate the size of your website, and how many visitors you think you’ll be getting each month. Since most web hosting providers will let you easily scale up your plan, it’s always the most cost-effective to start small and upgrade later.If you’re not sure what you need, you might want to go with InterServer, which has only one shared hosting plan1 that conveniently comes with unlimited resources.
Based in Melbourne, Jack is a long-time web developer and WordPress enthusiast, always interested not only in how things work, but how he can make them work better. You’ll typically find him glued to his computer screen at all hours of the day and night, but he does go outside every once in a while – mainly to play squash or do some surfing (or at least pretend to).
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We used Hostripples hosting their services is good not bad, even there hosting packages are cheapest compare to their competitors, We used their services for 2 years and never face any issue with server related issue one think i don't like that there sending lot of emails for account renewal.
Trust on me dont go for them such a fake company. Irritate you while you going to ask for refund. I buy the hosting that not need my expectations so I ask for the refund so they start irritating me after that. Such a bogus and fake company. Please don't go for them.
Starting at $1.96/mo, you can host a website without any issues, what Else do you expect?
I wanted a cheap but reliable hosting option for my not so popular website and I found Hostripples. The site is up for almost 2 years now without any downtime. What else do you expect when you pay $2 / month. it can't get any cheaper than that and reliable too...
Hostripples my sites were offline 2 to 7 times a day, short periods of 20 minutes downtime. They always respond by apologizing, saying it won't happen again. Spends 2 days repeating everything. Poor service! They didn't want to return the money, so I started using it. I did several bad reviews, then they started to block my IPs so as not to access the Control Panels. They are very irresponsible people.
I have hosted my e-commerce site with host Ripples and so far I am pretty much impressed with their support team and service. If anyone of you is looking for good hosting at an affordable price I would personally recommend you to go for Host Ripples.
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