SastaHost is an India-based web hosting company offering shared hosting, managed and unmanaged VPS, cloud hosting, and dedicated server solutions. Their shared hosting plans are cheaper than those of many other providers, even packing in a decent array of features. Their shared servers are located in India and the U.S. at present. The company was founded in 2009 and is based in New Delhi, India.
Features and Ease of Use
SastaHost offers shared hosting services with scalable plans and a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Here’s what you get with their shared hosting:
- Unlimited email accounts, databases, subdomains, and add-on domains with most plans
- Unlimited storage and bandwidth with certain plans
- Softaculous auto-installer with 50+ apps
- Your choice of Windows or Linux OS
- Hosting on India or U.S.-based servers
- WordPress hosting available
- Antivirus and antispam protection
One obvious downside here is that you only get a little over 50 applications with their limited version of Softaculous, whereas other providers would offer at least a couple hundred. Furthermore, while they do provide the Weebly and Impress.ly website builders for free, the free versions offered are limited in either the number of webpages you can create or in functionality — notably, the free Impress.ly builder doesn’t allow you to publish your website, tantalizing you with a beautifully-designed responsive website but forcing you to upgrade in order to make it live.
That said, while SastaHost may be rather unkind to beginners, their standard shared plans are good enough for most intermediate users. With support for a multitude of scripting languages such as PHP 5.2 to 7.1.x, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails, CGI, and mcrypt along with above-average performance provided by SSD RAID 1 storage configurations, this Indian web host seems to have invested quite a bit into refining their feature set.
They’ve also got Windows shared hosting available for those interested in Microsoft-specific features, in addition to Linux KVM VPS, reseller hosting, and dedicated servers.
Pricing and Support
SastaHost’s target market seems to focus on Indian entrepreneurs and companies wishing to reach an American market, and their prices reflect that. Below is a breakdown of their U.S.-based Linux plans:
| LSHUSA-1 | LSHUSA-2 | LSHUSA-3 | LSHUSA-4 | LSHUSA-5 | |
| Storage | 1GB | 2GB | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Bandwidth | 5GB | 10GB | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Email Accounts | 5 | 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Subdomains | 5 | 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Databases | 2 | 2 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Websites | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | Unlimited |
Each of these plans offers excellent value for money as they’ve been priced for their local market. Given that they’re all extremely affordable, the primary factor to consider here is how many websites you intend to host. From there, you can determine how much storage and bandwidth you’re likely to need, which will make the decision much clearer.
Note, however, that they don’t offer free domain names or SSL certificates. Also, if you need to transfer your domain to them, they charge a fee for that as well.
SastaHost also offers shared hosting plans based on India servers and WordPress hosting. You can find more details on the website. For those wanting to use WordPress, I’d recommend installing it with Softaculous over using their pre-configured WordPress plans as these are much more expensive than their standard hosting. All plans come with a short ten-day money back guarantee, which is far shorter than the industry average but better than nothing considering the extreme affordability of this vendor.
SastaHost claims to offer 24/7 live support, but this was difficult to verify. When I tried to reach out to them, they didn’t respond. They claim to offer support through telephone, email, Google Hangouts, Yahoo! chat, and a contact form on their website. They also maintain a knowledge base with a decent number of helpful articles.
