Indian web host Royal Clouds was founded in 2014. They offer a wide selection of hosting services from servers located in Los Angeles, U.S.A. Their main website is in English, with a plugin on the knowledge base pages to translate to almost thirty languages.
Features and Ease of Use
Despite being an India-based hosting company, Royal Clouds locates its servers in a Los Angeles data center. They provide SSD shared hosting, virtual private servers, managed WordPress hosting, dedicated servers, and domain registration. As standard, the shared hosting plans come with the following features:
- 99.99% uptime SLA
- Daily, weekly and monthly snapshots to a remote server
- From one to twenty add-on domains
- Free SSL certificate
- From 10 GB to 100 GB SSD storage
Unlike many hosting companies, the excellent 99.9% uptime guarantee is backed by a service level agreement.
Royal Cloud’s servers use enterprise-level RAID 10 SSD storage for faster disk read speeds. They also use the high-performance, secure, and easy-to-use LiteSpeed WebServer (to handle thousands of concurrent connections with a small memory footprint) and LiteSpeed Cache (to cache static content and improve performance for websites with high traffic).
In terms of value-adds, the hosting packages come with the popular cPanel control panel plus the premium Softaculous one-click installer for more than 150 programs. They also support PHP (versions 4.4 through 7.2), and a free CDN to sweeten the deal. Given the support for cPanel/Softaculous and PHP, I’m somewhat surprised that they don’t provide a website builder.
They offer five shared hosting packages named Starter, Economy, Deluxe, Ultimate, and Expert. These packages provide a range of inclusions, starting from 10 GB disk space and 100 GB bandwidth, and going up to 100 GB disk space and unlimited bandwidth.
Pricing and Support
Royal Cloud’s shared hosting prices are okay; not too expensive, and not too cheap. Since the resource caps are quite high, most website owners will be fine with the lower priced packages. While SSL certificates are included with all plans, domain registration costs extra.
They offer a good selection of contract lengths, from one month to thirty-six months, and the prices reduce quite steeply when you pay for a longer term up-front. Although it’s not obvious on their website, this company’s terms and conditions include clauses for a 30-day money-back guarantee for shared hosting and a 7-day money-back guarantee for VPS plans.
24/7 technical support can be obtained by telephone, ticket, email, and live chat. My one small gripe is that I have been left waiting for longer than the advertised one minute response time when using live chat, but otherwise I have found their support to be excellent. Their website includes a large knowledge base and a small video tutorial section.
