Simple Hosting was founded in 2002 and offers shared hosting, email hosting, reseller hosting, cloud server, and domain registration. It is located in Switzerland and its servers are located in Otelfingen, Switzerland. Its website is available in German and English.
Features and Ease of Use
Simple Hosting offers Windows and Linux hosting as its shared web hosting. In total, there are four shared hosting plans with two reseller plans. I’ll focus on the web hosting plans; they are suitable for small business websites and provide the following features:
- Automatic backups every night
- Let’s Encrypt SSL
- Up to five domains
- Either 10GB or 20GB storage
Simple Hosting uses premium hardware from HP, Cisco, NetApp, and Fortinet. Its server hardware is from HP, networking and routing equipment from Cisco, and firewall cluster from Fortinet. These are all reputable companies with top-notch products.
The automatic backups are stored in an offsite location that’s stored more than 160 km away from the main data center to ensure that your data is available, regardless of what happens to the main data center. Email backups are kept for six months while others are kept for much shorter durations.
Simple Hosting provides a couple of security features, including a firewall cluster and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) to protect your data and website, and anti-virus and anti-spam protection for your emails.
Living up to its name, Simple Hosting features the Plesk hosting control panel. It’s one of the simplest and easiest to use panels out there. It’s beginner-friendly and through it, you can manage all hosting settings, including databases, PHP configurations, and email accounts.
Simple Hosting takes it further by ensuring that customers can easily install software through an auto-installer. It supports WordPress, Umbraco, Joomla!, and many other CMSes.
Pricing and Support
Simple Hosting does not offer a free trial or free version. It offers mid-range prices for its features. It isn’t the cheapest in the market, but its features such as Solid State Disks (SSDs) and multiple firewalls might make it worthwhile for you.
You can pay with your PayPal balance or credit card. They only offer a subscription period of one year at a time, which might be too long to commit without being able to try the service with no money-back guarantee.
Also, there’s no free domain registration/renewal. One good part, though, is that it provides Let’s Encrypt, which is sufficient for many websites and you won’t need to deal with constant renewal since it handles that.
On a positive note, I like its self-support provisions. It provides a knowledge base with loads of tutorials. If you’d rather be in touch with a support agent, you can send an email or open a ticket.