HostMonster has been offering its services since 1996. It aims to provide small businesses and individuals with the best possible hosting experience at affordable price levels. It achieves this with the help of high-quality hardware, effective administration tools, reliable backups and good business practices.
Features and Ease of Use
HostMonster’s features include:
- ‘Maximum Guaranteed’ uptime
- Courtesy site backups
- Domain registration service
- Unlimited add-on domains
- Let’s Encrypt and PositiveSSL SSL certificates
- Unlimited storage and bandwidth
Since HostMonster targets small businesses and individuals, it is very important for it to cater for customers that are not technically savvy. It does that perfectly by offering a free website builder. Using this tool, all you need to do is drag-and-drop your desired widgets and components in place and you have a website of your own. Similarly, there is a one-click WordPress installer to help you install the most popular blogging software, without any programming knowledge.
In addition to WordPress, there are other useful scripts that you can use to manage your website. These include different project management scripts as well as scripts to create a help center or a ticket support system on your website. Other popular scripts include Moodle, Joomla, Drupal, TikiWiki, and poll and survey software.
HostMonster isn’t just affordable but also feature rich. This is perfectly showcased by its E-commerce features. It supports OpenPGP/GPG Encryption as well as SSL secure server. You can choose from a wide range of shopping carts for your online store, including OSCommerce and Zen Cart among others.
Pricing and Support
The three available packages at HostMonster are Basic, Plus, and Choice Plus. The prices are quite attractive, though you should keep in mind that after the first year, you have to pay the regular price and not the reduced one. You can host one, ten, and unlimited websites in the three packages respectively.
While all packages offer unlimited bandwidth, only the Choice Plus package has unlimited web storage. All packages include free SSL certificates and domain, which is one of HostMonster’s advantages over GoDaddy. The Plus and Choice Plus packages also offer attractive marketing packages to get you started with your website’s promotion.
There is a 30-day money-back guarantee, however, you can also use a demo version of the service to check out the quality. The money-back guarantee does not apply to add-ons and domain names, so if you receive a free domain and then utilize the money-back guarantee, the standard price for the domain will be deducted and you retain the ownership of the domain.
HostMonster offers 24/7 technical support, though for other departments, the support is restricted to working hours throughout the week. You can contact them by telephone, live chat, tickets, or mail. The knowledge base, unfortunately, isn’t very attractive and only contains a handful of articles, but the live chat makes up for it.
I tried the live chat and got connected to an agent right away. The agent asked me if I could give my email id. It always annoys me when support agents do that, but I understand they only do it to collect contact information for their marketing department. Anyway, the support agent was really helpful and answered all my queries right away.
