Website Planet
Host1 is a Norwegian website hosting company that was founded in 2009. They provide shared website hosting, cloud hosting, and virtual private servers to customers who put a premium on privacy. This company describes itself as one of the biggest hosts in Norway, with a large number of clients at home and abroad including WikiLeaks and Sensorlink. In addition to Oslo, they have offices (but no infrastructure) in Mexico City and Cebu (Philippines). Their website can be switched between the Norwegian and English languages.
Features and Ease of Use
Host1 offers a good selection of hosting services. As standard, their shared hosting plans include the following core features:
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- Backups to an off-site server every night
- Free domain registration with every plan
- Unlimited add-on domains
- SSL certificates available at additional cost
- From 1000 MB to 10,000 MB disk space
Host1 has IPv6-ready servers with full redundancy colocated in two Norwegian data centers. Since they don’t own their own data center, this could mean slower response times to technical issues and slower website load speeds. They advertise a 99.9% uptime guarantee, but this doesn’t seem to be backed by a service level agreement.
Beginners might be attracted by Host1’s Softaculous one-click installer, although the company doesn’t say how many apps you can install with it. In terms of value-adds for experts, Host1 supports the slower PHP 5 rather than the faster PHP 7.2 that is supported by many other website hosts. There is no support for other advanced coding languages like Ruby, Rails, or Python.
It’s interesting that Host1 counts WikiLeaks among its customers, and its primary selling point may well be its assertion to being “regulated by strong privacy-conscious Norwegian laws.”
Pricing and Support
Whilst I was expecting expensive Scandinavian pricing, I was pleasantly surprised by Host1’s prices that seem to be in line with other local and international competitors. So for someone looking for servers located in Norway, these are fairly priced plans. Domain registration is included whereas SSL certificates cost extra.
You can purchase plans for three, six, twelve, and twenty-four-month terms, but there is no discount for opting for a longer-term plan. Unfortunately, they don’t offer a free trial, but they do provide a “14-day no-questions-asked cool-off period” where you can effectively test their services without any obligations.
Host1 has a support email address, and when you click their website’s ‘Support’ button you are invited to log in, which suggests that some kind of ticket system lies behind. Their support is advertised as being 24/7/365, and they have responded quickly and helpfully whenever I have contacted them.
