Provisov.net Review 2024 – Is It Worth It?

Definitely Not a Market Leader

Provisov.net is a Russia-based hosting provider that has been in business since 2004. While it doesn’t state how many customers it has, it does have customers around the world, with an English and a Russian version of the website.

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Provisov.net has servers in various well-known data centers around the world (but we’ll dig into that below), and it sells all the usual services, including shared hosting, virtual private servers (VPS), and dedicated server rentals, as well as domain name registration.

While it’s a relatively small company, those are the ones that often need to offer more to be able to compete. Sometimes, they are more attentive to their customers or provide a higher level of features for the price point, but is that the case with Provisov.net?

I spent a week testing Provisov.net—contacting customer service, building a small test WordPress website, running speed tests, and so on. Give me ten minutes of your time, and by the end of this review, you’ll know everything you need to know about Provisov.net and, more importantly, whether it’s right for you.

Get a comfy chair, a strong coffee, and let’s get going.

Not Premium, but Enough for Most Customers

Provisov.net offers most of the features we’ve come to expect from a hosting company—SSL certificates, backups stored on a separate server, a free Cloudflare content delivery network (CDN), and cPanel access. The team even offers free transfer of your files from a previous host.

While the website doesn’t do a great job of selling its features (it’s outdated and lacklustre), once you dig into the details, it’s pleasantly surprising to find out how much is included as standard.

Those are the basics. Now, let’s take a look at some of the most interesting features Provisov.net has to offer.

Worldwide Data Centers

Provisov.net uses servers in 12 shared data centers around the world (the U.S., France, Canada, Italy, Finland, Britain, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Germany, Ukraine, and Russia). This comes with pros and cons. On the plus side, you can position your servers in a location closest to your customer base, which will speed up their load speed. However, shared centers can mean slower response times to technical issues and slower load speeds.

Performance-Enhancing Features

Provisov.net offers a range of features to improve the performance of your website. First, the shared hosting plans benefit from CloudLinux hosting, which means your data is completely isolated from your neighbors’ (kind of like a VPS). Second, you’ll get SSD storage, which can be ten times faster than traditional HDD.

Support for Advanced Coding Languages

All of the usual developer features are included (e.g., phpMyAdmin and MySQL databases), as well as support for other scripting languages. There’s support for PHP (up to version 7.1), Perl, Python, and Ruby. Not bad for an affordable host.

Beginner-Friendly Features

Don’t worry—beginners aren’t left out. Provisov.net offers plenty of options for those just starting out, too. For instance, you’ll get a one-click installer for more than 200 programs. Some premium hosts offer around 400, but 200 is still probably more than you need if you’re new to the hosting game.

However, the advertised website-building tool with a “large number of templates” isn’t actually available. Customer service says that statement is just referring to the fact you can install various content management system (CMS) programs with the one-click installer.

It’s Possible to Scale

As well as selling affordable shared hosting, Provisov.net also offers VPS plans and dedicated server rentals, so if you need to scale your online business, it’ll be quick and easy. Just remember that Provisov.net uses other people’s data centers, so they will be acting as the middleman during the upgrade.

Provisov.net isn’t the easiest website to navigate, but you can blame that on the poor translation from Russian to English. I hit a couple of errors along the way, but the customer service team was responsive. Here’s what happened when I set up a small WordPress website on Provisov.net.

Create an Account

Creating an account with Provisov.net wasn’t exactly simple. The pages kept flipping from Russian to English, and lots of the fields couldn’t be translated to English. It was so confusing I ended up purchasing a VPS plan, instead of a shared hosting package, by mistake.

Of course, this isn’t an issue for those who can read Russian. But if Provisov.net wants to keep marketing itself to worldwide customers, it might need to work on its translation problems.

Unfortunately, even after I successfully paid, I received an email telling me there had been an error with my account setup and, “In the near future we [Provisov.net] will check this situation”. That worried me a bit, so I contacted support via email (live chat is only available in Russian) for assistance.

Fortunately, the support agent responded within about ten minutes, letting me know that as I’d ordered a VPS, it would take a while to configure. Even with this issue, it took less than 20 minutes to complete the account creation process.

Connect a Domain and Install WordPress

After a tricky account creation process, I was nervous about this step. But it took less than ten minutes to set up a new WordPress website, and the welcome email provided more than enough information to help me get started.

cPanel Hosting

If you’ve had any experience with website hosting or development, you’ve likely come across cPanel. It’s a widely used and trusted control panel that comes pre-installed with lots of easy-to-use tools and features. You can install WordPress with one click and easily connect your CDN to your website.

Install Any Software

If you’re purchasing a dedicated server from Provisov.net, it’s good to know that once you’ve paid for it, you’re free to install any software you need. There’s no restrictions or limitations—it’s as though you own the server yourself.

Good Results Around the World

As I’ve already mentioned, Provisov.net is a smaller company, so it’s hard to find a huge number of customer reviews online. The ones I did find are generally positive, but I only found about ten.

In terms of uptime, I couldn’t find a guarantee on the website. I did find a page mentioning that the company aims for 100% uptime and that almost ten years ago (yes, it was that outdated), it reported only 40 minutes of downtime in one year.

Clearly, I needed to get more information from support, so I sent an email and received a reply within ten minutes. I was advised that the uptime guarantee is a meager 99%, with compensation applied if there is excessive downtime. Put another way, that’s more than 14 minutes a day of downtime that’s considered acceptable. Not great, especially if you’re focused on e-commerce.

To test Provisov.net’s performance, I ran my WordPress website through a Sucuri speed checker. The performance was great in every location around the world.

Better for Russian-Speaking Customers

In terms of customer service channels, there are a variety of ways to get in touch. But the level of service you receive will depend on what language you speak. If you’re a Russian speaker, you can get live chat, phone, Skype, and email support. If you’re an English speaker, sorry, but you’ll only get email assistance. There isn’t even a knowledge base to refer to.

Here’s what happened when I tested the various customer service channels:

Live Chat

I always like it when a company has live chat. Instant answers, instant gratification. While the agent picked up immediately, they advised me that they could not speak English and that I would need to contact the support email address for an English-speaking agent.

Support Email

Then it was time to ask some questions via email. What’s your uptime? Do you offer a Cloudflare CDN? And I got a response within about ten minutes.

However, I had less luck when I was trying to set up my account. I emailed the team to ask why my account had not been created, and I received an abrupt response within ten minutes stating I’d have to wait since I’d ordered VPS hosting.

I hadn’t meant to order a VPS package—I thought I’d ordered shared hosting, which promised a five-minute setup. Apparently, somewhere along the way, and due to the translation issues, I’d managed to select the wrong product. The agent was very helpful and quickly switched me to a shared hosting plan, activated the account, and credited my account with the extra money. And then I was ready to go within about 20 minutes.

You have the option to pay using various methods such as WebMoney, Yandex.Money, RBK Money, Intercash, PayPal, 2Checkout, credit card, and Express Payment Card.

Cancellations & Refunds

There is a cancellation policy listed on the website. It states that you can get a refund for the unspent money on your billing account. I wasn’t totally sure how this would work with my contract. Would I get a prorated amount back? Or if, because I’d used it for a couple of days, would I have to pay for the full month?

To find out, I followed the documented procedure to cancel the account—you can either email support or create a ticket from inside your dashboard (I did the latter). I received a reply within minutes asking me to confirm the cancellation.

I received an email after about ten minutes confirming that my refund had been processed in full and my account was canceled. No questions asked and no hassle.