Hawk Host Review

Who Is Hawk Host?

Since 2004, Hawk Host has been providing hosting and prides itself in an extensive knowledge of web hosting as well as software development. They work to ensure their services can recover from commonplace challenges while other hosting providers require people to fix those problems. Hawk Host seems to be of the mind that they should work smarter vs. working harder. Let’s see how this is working for them as we go through this Hawk Host review.

Services Offered by Hawk Host

Since they’ve been in the hosting industry for over ten years, you would expect them to have a wide array of products available for its user base. You would be correct. Hawk Host offers the following services:

• Shared web hosting
• Cloud web hosting
• Cloud servers
• Reseller Hosting
• Semi-dedicated Hosting
• Virtual Private Servers
• Domains
• SSL Certificates

Hawk Host is the true one-stop shop all around. Let’s go deeper into this Hawk Host review and see if this is a good hosting provider for your needs. We will be focusing on shared hosting.

Hawk Host Pricing & Plans

Let’s have a quick look at each of the hosting plans:

• Primary - $2.99 per month, 10,000MB SSD disk space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited databases, unlimited domains, free unlimited SSL certificates, free migrations, free memcached server
• Professional - $7.99 per month, unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited databases, unlimited domains, free unlimited SSL certificates, free migrations, free memcached server.

As you can see, for only $8 per month, you can get unlimited everything instead of having to worry about maxing out SSD disk space. $7.99 per month and you’re good to go. Or are you? We went through the checkout to get started with hosting and found that if you want to buy the hosting month to month, you’ll have to pay $9.99 for hosting each month. The $7.99 price is only if you pay upfront for 24 months of hosting which keeps you locked in for a long time.

Pricing Break-Down

Let's take a look at the real pricing if you want to get a $7.99/mont deal:

Sheesh! Nice trick, but not if you don’t want to put out $191.76 upfront and get locked into their hosting for 24 months.

Plans In More Detail

In this part of the Hawk Host review, we are going to look at the plans in more detail. The below comparison allows you to see exactly how this hosting option stacks up against its competition, but also allows you to compare the differences between the two. 

Performance

Hawk Host guarantees 99.9% uptime which is what most of the hosting providers offer and compensates if server uptime goes below 99.9%. Clients can claim compensation by opening an SLA ticket (they have no Live chat option, so dealing with problems can take a while).

And now let's put their performance to the test:

Host Hawk performed similarly to other hosting providers. Although the data is quite decent for Host Hawk users,  you can still check other hosting providers for lower price and with better response times. And now let’s look through the pros and cons in this Hawk Host review so we can see if Host Hawk is worth the money.

Hawk Host Pros

• Customer Support - The customer support is 365/24/7 with the help forum and the help desk. The support responds quickly, and the customer support professionals can answer your questions promptly. You can also email support, but they focus on sending you to the forum for help or to the help desk.
• SSD Servers - They are way faster than HDD and not every provider offers these services.
• Fast Service - Hawk Host’s performance is decent and gives its users a good experience. Its speed as fast as most other websites, but it might not be enough to make you want to pull out your wallet and pay for the top package.
• Easy to Navigate Website - The Hawk Host website is easy to navigate, and you can use the cPanel easily to get your website set up. There are different options for software like Joomla and WordPress which are easy to get to and understand.
• 99.9% Uptime – Host Hawk works to keep the websites hosted on their servers up 100% of the time, but they guarantee a 99.9% uptime and have processes in places to fix some of the minor and common issues while other hosts often have to have humans fix those issues, which means the other hosts are going to have more downtime than Hawk Host.

Hawk Host Cons

• Pricing - The pricing is a little on the high end if you want to pay by the month. Other great hosts allow you to pay much lower rates and do not require you to pay large sums up front to get a good price on your hosting package.
• No Live Chat – While their customer support is responsive and helpful, there is no live chat which is usually one of the easiest ways to get a hold of customer support without having to wait on an answer.
• They Sell Your Information Quickly – According to many Host Hawk customers, they sell your information, and you start to receive many unsolicited phone calls.

Hawk Host Review – Is Hawk Host Right For You?

I have to say that you should not use Hawk Host. But, why not? It looks like they have great hosting and fair prices. While that is true, when the hosting company sells your information to the third parties that harass you, it doesn’t matter what kind of service they offer. Many other hosting providers are glad to give you great hosting options and services without selling your information to every telemarketer looking to give you a call.

Besides for that, the lack of live chat is one of the deal breaks since you have to wait and go back and forth with the support forum and help desk. If you want to take the chance on them, that’s up to you, but we are going to pass.