LankanHost has been offering affordable Sri Lankan hosting since 2006. With more than 3000 domains hosted (according to third-party websites), it is one of the leading hosts in Sri Lanka. The LankanHost website is available in English.
Features and Ease of Use
This is a comprehensive hosting provider selling a full range of hosting services. The shared hosting plans, in particular, come with these core features:
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- Daily local backups and weekly remote backups
- Domain registration available
- Up to 24 add-on domains
- 100 MB to 10 GB disk space
- 5 GB to 100 GB bandwidth
LankanHost co-locates its servers in a U.S.-based Liquid Web data center. Whilst I always prefer a hosting provider that owns its own data center, this top-notch data center has triple redundant direct fiber connectivity to three Tier 1 backbone providers.
The infrastructure is well thought out with enterprise-level features that allow LankanHost to proclaim itself to be “one of the fastest web hosting services in Sri Lanka.” Servers use SATA hard disks and SSD RAID 10 drives with 1 Gbps network connections. The CloudLinux operating system with the CageFS file system helps to isolate shared hosting customers from one another.
It seems a little strange that this company’s 99.9% uptime guarantee is actually higher than its expected uptime of 99.5%, but I couldn’t confirm this with customer services.
Hosting features for experts include PHP versions 4.4, 5, and 7, phpMyAdmin, MySQL, FTP accounts, and Cron jobs. As for beginners, they can take advantage of an HTML5 website builder with hundreds of templates and a Softaculous installer that offers over 250 programs.
Pricing and Support
The prices for shared hosting plans are reasonable. I’d suggest you dismiss the Starter plan since its 100 MB disk space is insufficient for even the smallest website owners. But the other plans have big enough allowances.
You can sign up on one or two-year terms, with a slight price reduction for the two-year term. And you can confidently make the longer commitment because there is a generous 30-day money-back guarantee on all plans.
If you like to research your own solutions to technical issues, you’re in luck because there’s both a knowledge base and a comprehensive set of video tutorials for Softaculous, cPanel, RVsitebuilder… and more.
If you don’t want to support yourself, you can take advantage of the 24/7 support provided by email, telephone, and ticketing system. I’d like to see the addition of live chat support, but that’s not my only complaint. Having sent this company several emails as a presales prospect, and received no replies after several days, I can’t be confident about the kind of support you’ll get as a committed customer.
