To compare the best web hosts, we hosted the same WordPress website on each one and tested performance, customer service, and value for money. Check out the results here.
Belgium-based hosting provider XsOnline offers a decent range of hosting services including shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS, dedicated servers, and domain registration. When this company was founded isn’t clear from its website, but it joined Twitter in 2009, so it’s at least ten years old. Speaking of the vendor website; it’s simple and modern but with a few missing icons. It can be switched into many different languages, presumably via automated translations.
Features and Ease of Use
Unlike most hosting providers, XsOnline has both fixed and customizable plans. With the customizable plans, the storage ranges from 5 GB up to 2 TB, and the bandwidth ranges from 10 GB up to 5 TB. On the other hand, there are four preset shared hosting plans: Standard Hosting, Business Hosting, Advanced Hosting, and Huge Hosting. These plans also vary in both storage and bandwidth.
Other than the bandwidth and storage, the remaining features are the same across all plans:
- Spam filter
- Virus scanner
- Cron jobs
- Custom control panel
- Application installer
- Website builder
Although XsOnline doesn’t support the popular cPanel control panel, its own control panel is equally capable and easy to use. The control panel lets you manage your website files, FTP accounts, domains, email accounts, and more. It also comes with a the SimpleScripts one-click installer which does the same job as the more popular Softaculous installer in terms of allowing you to install CMS and other applications such as WordPress, Joomla, PrestaShop, Magento, Drupal, TYPO3, and phpBB.
Instead of creating a CMS-backed website, you can go for the free website builder that offers hundreds of preinstalled layout templates and a simple drag-and-drop interface. This way, you don’t need web design or development skills to establish your web presence.
Pricing and Support
XsOnline’s prices are average for the European and international markets. You can pay in euros on an annual basis using PayPal, credit/debit cards, or bank transfer. There is no refund or money-back guarantee as far as I can see.
For self-support, XsOnline’s website provides pages for frequently asked questions and tutorials, but they’re not particularly well laid out:
Since the self-support resources didn’t answer all my questions, I decided to contact the company. However, the live chat channel was broken, and my ticket submission received no response.
