Hostway Review

Hostway is aiming to provide world-class managed cloud hosting infrastructure to the top companies. But it surely is not limited only to the high-scale projects. Hostway also provides shared hosting services suitable for beginner users and small business.

Claiming to put customers and innovation first, Hostway promises fast, secure, and user-friendly hosting.

Can it make it true? Let's find out in our Hostway review.

What is Hostway?

Hostway is hosting company providing mainly managed dedicated and cloud hosting solutions. For beginners and smaller companies, Hostway also has shared, cloud, and VPS hosting packages. 

The provider also has solutions for email hosting, domain names, and eCommerce.

Recently, the list of services expanded even more. Hostway merged with Hosting.com and became one of the largest managed cloud services. The company now is able to provide different services to match specific industry, such as healthcare, needs.

And it seems to be doing pretty great.

Hostway hosts for over 600,000 customers and the brands include such giants like Samsung, Wix, and FoxNews. 

So let's put Hostway up to the test and see, whether its shared hosting can be the right fit for you.

Hostway Pricing 

For Shared Hosting, Hostway provides only one, Website Starter, plan which costs $6.95/month. It includes an easy to use control panel, website editor, 50GB storage space, and unlimited traffic.

The plan is only available for Linux. While other options for cloud hosting or VPS include both Windows and VPS servers, that's not the case with Website Starter.

On the other hand, you get what is advertised with the Website Starter plan.

Hostway does not play any pricing tricks, and monthly pricing is $6.95/month. Even after the renewal.

But, choosing the longer billing period, you get a little discount. 1-month of either 12, 24, or 36-month plan will cost a bit over $5.70.

Just keep in mind that the domain name is not provided and you'll have to pay separately for it. A simple .com domain with Hostway costs $9.95/year.

Apart from that, there are no upselling attempts.

But that's the catch - you won't get an SSL, domain privacy, anti-DDoS or anti-malware protection

Hostway only takes care of server maintenance.

We put all of the features Website Starter offers in one table, so you can check, whether it's the right fit for you:

Hostway Pros

Hostway claims to put its clients first. And they do manage to provide stable uptime and industry-specific features.

Here are the details.

99.97% uptime:

Hostway claims to provide 99.99% uptime and even exceed it. After several months of testing, I finally found that it can provide a stable 99.97% uptime. This is obviously a great output - leaving only around 3 minutes weekly for maintenance or unexpected downtime.

Industry-specific hosting and compliances

Hostway is a leading PCI- and HIPAA-compliant service provider and it happen to have 20 years of experience for that. Moreover, it is fully equipped with the certifications and needed expertise in this sector. Hostway will also help you develop and run your solutions according to your compliance strategy.

Some of their Enterprise level solutions include:

Healthcare Solutions

These solutions are designed for healthcare providers or healthcare related industries that collect and preserve the information of patients. For this, they provide HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliant solutions that will provide the highest level of security to preserve this information.

Additionally, Hostway is HITRUST certified, so it is fully capable of handling this information.

PCI Compliance

Sometimes meeting with strict Payment Card Industry’s necessities might cause security loopholes without any trusted source. But not with Hostway. It provides PCI-compliant solutions to help you deal with credit/debit card information.

Moreover, these solutions are geared toward organizations that deal with these types of sensitive information and needs more security.

Mission-Critical SaaS Apps

Want additional support in the development of SaaS Apps? Well, Hostway might have a powerful solution for you. Other than providing PCI and HIPPA compliance, they also provide solutions just for the development of SaaS Apps.

So when your project grows, you'll have strong backing and tech architecture to host your own SaaS App.

Hostway Cons

Not everything Hostway promises is true. The server performance is average at best, customer support acts as if they own the company, and plans are way to pricey.

Check out the details.

Average response time

For this Hostway review, we've tested the provider performance. And it did not impress us.

Hostway an average response time ranging from 200ms-500ms and scoring a solid C+. The result itself is not bad, the US times average at 55ms. However, other locations exceed 200ms. That means, that Google might rank your mobile pages down, as it uses 200ms as a benchmark for mobile page loading speeds.

Horrible customer support

We've tried to contact the live chat support to ask a bunch of questions about the plans. After all, it is not specified if you get SSL, basic security features, etc.

But reaching support is not as easy as clicking the chat button on the homepage. You'll have to wait till someone actually answers. And, that will probably take awhile.

And it gets better once someone replies.

Our support agent seemed way too arrogant even address our questions. He kept dumping all expensive suggestions managed cloud hosting, practically forcing me to buy one. Even though I specified I only need the answers about SSL and other security features.

Overpriced plans

Even though $6.95/month do look affordable and there's no price increase, you are missing out on a lot of features.

The shared hosting plan is practically barebones. You will not get even the minimum and completely essential features like SSL certificates or anti-DDoS protection. Not even if you're willing to pay. So $6.95 is not at all affordable - for the price you basically don't get anything.

Also, when you look at other plans, the pricing is ridiculous. Basic VPS hosting will cost you at least $19.95/month.

All in all, Hostway does not provide much for its above the industry average pricing.

Hostway Review – the Verdict

Hostway has a lot of hosting solutions to offer. But what we found out from our Hostway review, the quality of these services is definitely not top-notch.

While the uptime is great, the response time could be better. Pricing is also on the very steep side.

And in case you need help, well, unfortunately, the support is no good either.

So we won't recommend using Hostway - there's definitely a bunch of better hosting providers out there.