Overview

Hostwinds Makes Some Bold Claims…

Hostwinds advertises fast servers, affordable prices, 99.9999% uptime, and a unique “friendliness guarantee.” But does it actually deliver on these promises?

Hostwinds is a moderately priced hosting provider that offers a range of services including shared hosting, reseller and white-labeled hosting, VPS, and dedicated servers. With data centers in Seattle, Dallas, and Amsterdam, it primarily caters to customers in North America and Europe.

The key questions are: Is Hostwinds the right hosting provider for your needs, and does it offer the services you require at a price you’re comfortable with?

Additionally, what sets Hostwinds apart from other hosting providers? Does it offer something unique or perform better than its competitors? To find out, as part of Website Planet’s global web host comparison project, I set up a test site on one of Hostwinds’ shared hosting plans and monitored its performance over several months to determine its strengths and weaknesses.

Features

Fairly Standard Hosting with Useful Features

Hostwinds offers three shared hosting plans: Basic, Advanced, and Ultimate. The only difference between them is the number of domains you can connect: one, four, or unlimited. However, you can still create unlimited subdomains with any plan, so even the Basic option allows for multiple sub-websites if needed.

All plans share the same features, such as hosting on SSD-powered servers and management through cPanel. You also get unlimited email accounts and databases. Softaculous is included to easily install WordPress and other platforms with just a few clicks. For those who prefer building from scratch, Weebly’s site builder is also provided.

If you’re migrating from another host, Hostwinds offers free website transfers, which makes the transition seamless. Additionally, all hosting packages come with a free domain for the first year (with annual plans) and free SSL certificates, which are essential for securing your website and improving your Google rankings.

There’s also simple integration with Cloudflare’s CDN, which speeds up your website by distributing it across servers worldwide, ensuring faster load times for global audiences.

Hostwinds offers a few optional add-ons, such as 24/7 site monitoring. However, this service might not be necessary as free tools like UptimeRobot offer similar functionality.

Unlimited Disk Space and Bandwidth

All Hostwinds plans come with unlimited disk space and bandwidth, but there are limitations. If you attempt to use your hosting as personal storage (like for a large music library), you may face issues. As long as you’re using the hosting for legitimate websites, you’ll have plenty of space. The only potential bottleneck could be server processing power, which is a common limitation with shared hosting plans.

Business Hosting with LiteSpeed Technology

For those looking to avoid shared server limitations, Hostwinds offers Business hosting plans with LiteSpeed technology. LiteSpeed is a newer and faster server option, particularly optimized for speed-boosting features like caching. This makes it a better option for business websites, though it comes at a higher price.

Nightly Cloud Backup Service

Hostwinds offers a nightly cloud backup service as an optional add-on. Although backups aren’t free, this service ensures your site is backed up every day, providing peace of mind. Plus, as a cloud backup service, it includes built-in redundancies, ensuring your backups are reliable and secure.

Hostwinds has chosen not to overcomplicate things, opting for reliable, familiar tools. Hosting is managed through cPanel, a long-standing favorite, while account management is handled by the widely-used WHMCS platform.

By using these proven systems, Hostwinds ensures a straightforward and user-friendly experience. However, as with most services, there are a few drawbacks alongside the positives..

Minor Issues with the Signup Process

Hostwinds has a fairly strict fraud prevention system, which caused a hiccup during my signup. My account was canceled right after registering, and I had to reach out to support, request verification, and submit personal documents and ID. It took two days to get verified and have the account reactivated. While this process was a bit inconvenient, it wasn’t too bad, especially when compared to the two-week ordeal I had with Liquid Web.

Once inside, managing the account is straightforward, and connecting your domain via the nameservers is easy. From that point on, everything runs smoothly.

One-click Installations Are Effortless
Softaculous, the app installer, makes setting up applications on your hosting account a breeze. It offers dozens (if not hundreds) of apps, and setting up something like WordPress is incredibly quick — you can have a blog live in just a few minutes.

The Good, the Bad, and the Highly Inconsistent

In order to test Hostwinds properly, I ran several performance tests over a few months. I used GTmetrix to test complete page loading speeds, Sucuri to test international loading speeds, and UptimeRobot to test… you guessed it, website uptime.

I used a site that’s designed to mimic a proper, functioning site with HD images, JavaScript, the whole thing.

Now I’m going to get a bit more specific about the tests I ran. If you, like me, get nice and excited about performance statistics, then please enjoy. Otherwise, you might want to head on down to the Support section of this article.

GTmetrix

So again, complete page loading times were 0.9 seconds at their fastest, and 2.9s at their slowest. That’s an average of 1.82s. Generally speaking, you want to keep your site’s loading time under 2 seconds, because people start to leave after that point. The kids are yelling in the background, they have those animal party hats to buy, and no time to waste.

The fastest speed is amazing, but the slowest is pretty bad. There was no consistency here, which leads me to believe that Hostwinds’ shared servers are packed with users, and resources are available only if you’re lucky.

The performance of your website does have a direct impact on how people view your company and your brand, so that’s something to keep in mind. If you’re running a-business oriented site, you’ll either want to go with one of the Business plans, or choose a host with consistently better performance – such as Hostinger, which achieved the best score for a shared hosting service in our performance tests.

Sucuri

International loading times varied even more, with 0.697 seconds average at the fastest, 4.364s average at the slowest, and a 3.338s average average. (Man, saying “average average” makes me think of Jimmy Kimmel.)

It’s good stuff very close to the data center, and incredibly horrible everywhere else. There are only three data centers to choose from – Seattle, Dallas, and Amsterdam, so any location not in those areas is bound to have a bad time.

Here’s a look at one of those average average tests:

UptimeRobot

So… about that 99.9999% uptime guarantee… there are so very many things wrong with that. Those things could best be described with words that I’m not going to use here, because, well, think of the children.

Suffice it to say that keeping this particular promise is literally impossible. About the only thing a host can actually guarantee is electricity to the servers. Actual site availability is another thing. Over three months, UptimeRobot recorded 99.982% uptime, which isn’t too terrible, but definitely not what was promised by the marketing department.

Support

Oh, This Could Have Gone a lot Better

True to all other aspects of the service, Hostwinds’ support is also extremely hit or miss. It’s not outsourced, and generally seems to be manned by good people, but they’re not always very capable.

On paper, you get 24/7 support through live chat, email, tickets, and phone. That actually seems to be the case, with responses on live chat never taking more than a few minutes. I’d say Hostwinds actually meets the “friendliness guarantee.”

Live Chat was Mostly Okay

The presales chat was very, very good. The salesperson was honest to a fault, never making a single promise or exaggeration. This is in stark contrast to many hosts who feel very free to lie, blabber, and exaggerate just to lure you in. Kudos to Hostwinds for not going that way.

I had a great first chat interaction when I signed up. Evan assisted me in connecting my domain and provided clear instructions on how to install WordPress. He was incredibly helpful, and even someone who is completely new to this would have been fine.

The second support interaction was with a super nice person, but he really didn’t know his stuff.

We chatted for a very long time, and even though I tried pointing him in the right direction, he managed to crash my website and could barely solve some basic requests, like redirecting my sites to HTTPS, or adding “www” to the URL. He did keep trying, which is really nice, but succeeding is a pretty important part, too.

The Ticket System Was Helpful, Eventually

Here at Website Planet, we like to ask hosts for help with website optimization, to let them make the best impression they can when we run our performance tests.

To do just that, I opened a ticket to ask for help with optimization. At first, the agent sent a response saying “Please optimize the images of the website. Optimizing images for the web can reduce your total page load size by up to 80%.” – basically telling me to go fish.

But then, she immediately sent other messages saying that she did implement some optimizations, such as browser caching. It was nothing major, although the help was appreciated. Competitors like Greengeeks, for comparison, did way, way… way more.

Pricing

Hostwinds’ pricing is decidedly average for consumer-end hosts, and you’ll have to pay even more if you want add-ons like monitoring (which is, in my opinion, a useless cash grab) or backups (come on, people!). The long-term prices are an improvement; they’re on par with those of much better hosts like InterServer.

There’s a lot of flexibility in terms of payment terms – you can choose to pay for 1, 3, 6, 12, 24, or 36 months at a time. Another cool thing is that in addition to all major credit cards and PayPal, Hostwinds also accepts bitcoin and a lot of other cryptocurrencies. Hostinger is the only other host in our top 10 web hosting services that accepts crypto.

When I checked out, the backups add-on option was preselected, which counts as a hidden upsell in my book and as a very unfair sales tactic. There’s also no money-back guarantee of any kind, making Hostwinds the only service in our top 10 that traps you without any means of escaping doesn’t offer some sort of refund.

But hey, that free domain is available with yearly plans and longer, which is cool, I guess.