SmartHost, LLC, is a private company based in Henderson, Nevada, established in 1998. It started as a shared hosting business but expanded to offer VPS, cloud hosting, reseller hosting, and dedicated servers to a global customer base.
It has multiple data centers in the U.S., along with one each in the U.K. and the Netherlands. As well as hosting, this company provides domain registration and transfer, SSL certificates, and software control panel licenses. SmartHost’s website supports English.
Features and Ease of Use
SmartHost offers four VPS plans for KVM NVMe SSD Linux, Windows, OpenVZ SSD/SAS, and KVM Linux storage. It also has five reseller hosting plans that are available both in the U.S. and the U.K., three cloud hosting plans, two colocation hosting plans, and eight dedicated servers.
With the company’s KVM NVMe SSD VPS plans, you get:
- Low-1 Thread to Extreme 8 Threads CPU (at additional charges)
- 10 GB to 20 GB NVMe SSD RAID disk space
- 1 GB guaranteed RAM
- 1000 GB bandwidth/1 Gbps port
- SolusVM control panel
All these plans come with configurable resources, including server location, OS, bandwidth, CPU, control panel, etc. At an additional cost, you can get backups, DDoS protection, and server management. And you can enjoy the optimal use of your server’s software functionality with root access.
The company promises a 99.9% uptime guarantee (SLA) with all its services. For its VPS and cloud servers, SmartHost uses RAID 10 to deliver enhanced speed and data protection. With shell access (SSH) and full root access for its dedicated servers, the company gives you added protection for your sensitive data and complete control over your hosting environment.
Pricing and Support
SmartHost’s KVM NVMe SSD VPS hosting plans are cheap. To pay for these plans in USD, GBP, or EUR, you can use PayPal, credit card, cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum), Alipay, BitPay, ACH transfer, UnionPay, and WeChat/TenPay. You can even pay via mail if that interests you. The available billing periods are monthly and annually, with the annual term offering a price discount of almost 17%.
On its “Terms of Service” page, it says that SmartHost won’t offer a money-back guarantee or a 30-day refund policy unless it’s explicitly stated otherwise for a particular service.
SmartHost provides round-the-clock customer support through various channels, including phone, email, live chat, fax, support tickets, and a contact form. While attempting to use their live chat, which unfortunately wasn’t available at the time, I decided to inquire about my pre-sales questions using their support tickets. I received a response within approximately 3.5 hours.
With an empty knowledge base and an announcement section with just two posts, SmartHost’s self-help tools are almost non-existent.