WebHostingHub is on a mission to provide simple, affordable web hosting, particularly to new businesses, start-ups, and entrepreneurs. Unusually, the company only offers Shared hosting but has won multiple awards, primarily for the low cost of its budget hosting plans. It offers some of the cheapest hosting plans available on the internet. Read our Web Hosting Hub review below.
OverviewBased in Virginia, WebHostingHub is an all-American company (although nobody is certain who owns it) offering entrepreneurs standard features powerful enough to get their businesses up and running on the internet, but simple to use.
Shared web hosting lets you share a web server with several other people or websites. It’s the cheapest kind of web hosting, but it can be the most problematic because your website could be put on an overloaded server with thousands of other sites.
So, choosing a suitable host for Shared hosting means checking out how reliable they are in the industry, how easy it is to get started building a website, and whether the features the host offers makes up for the downsides of a shared platform.
On the face of it, many features are pretty similar to other hosts. What makes WebHostingHub unique is that it only offers Shared hosting. If that’s enough for you, it’s a positive feature; if not, it could be a drawback. After all, other budget sites like HostGator and BlueHost can offer VPS and Dedicated hosting. But, we’ll get to some workarounds to these types of issues a bit later.
While WebHostingHub may be described as ‘vanilla’ due to its limited hosting offerings, it makes up for it regarding affordability and simplicity. It was a car; WebHostingHub would be a Volkswagen or “people’s car”.
While many hosting companies claim to be eco-friendly, WebHostingHub has the very first green hosting center in Los Angeles, CA. By utilizing advanced Outside Air Cooling technology, they say they’re cutting cooling costs by nearly 70% and reducing carbon output by more than 2,000 tons per year. When legislation is passed limited carbon output, WebHostingHub won’t be one of those axed.
WebHostingHub is an offshoot of (circa 2010) and managed by, big sister InMotion Hosting, which is a premium hosting company since 2001, specializing in business hosting. Their close relationship means that WebHostingHub can offer extra support and experience available to it via InMotion Hosting, and if you need more than ‘vanilla’ hosting, you can easily transfer to InMotion, who offers VPS and Dedicated hosting if your business takes off.
WebHostingHub has advanced backup and technical support at its fingertips if needs are.
Best for personal, DIY hosting, the typical user profile is someone who wants to get his or her business online quickly and be able to manage it without having to spend too much time working out how.
It’s ideal if you don’t know much about building websites and have little interest in learning; WebHostingHub has all the necessary tools.
The top hosting plan offered is an acceptable option for small businesses that plan on growing their online presence in the future as their customer base expands but the cheapest plan only allows for two websites so is not an ideal E-commerce solution.
Offering only Shared hosting means the company can focus on what it’s good at rather than being a Jack of all Trades. It does mean scalability can be an issue, but unless you’re expecting thousands of visitors at your new online front door every month, it is not an important issue.
Another thing to watch out for is that WebHostingHub price plans are based on a sliding scale, so you need to ensure you’re ready to make a long-term commitment if you want to get the best value for money.
Also, sites are not backed up automatically by default; you need to pay $1 extra per month for that particular feature (backups being pretty standard on most sites). WebHostingHub is not, at the time of writing, Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant, again, a problem if your focus is on E-commerce.
Another premium feature is a discounted web design service for its NITRO and DYNAMO plans. As one customer wrote: ”You’ve got so little to lose by trying them out.”
Key FeaturesThe experts give Web Hosting Hub (WHH) a respectable, but somewhat reserved, nod of approval and above average ratings. But what have the experts noticed that you may not have?
Cons
Pros
In summary: It’s a pity WHH blots its copybook with dubious marketing and upselling practices. And considering the extra charges and billing options, WHH’s cost-effectiveness is questionable. But, experts agree, WHH is a “low-risk” option worth giving a whirl.
Researching four user review sites for Web Hosting Hub (WHH), the company was rated 5/5, 4.5/5, 9/10 and 4.8/5. The number one positive feature satisfied customers agreed on was good customer service.
In summary, the four most positive features that came up repeatedly in consumer reviews:
Web Hosting Hub (WHH) has a loyal customer base but shyster-type behavior has irked some of its customers and seems to be at the bottom of the majority of negative user reviews.
Shyster-type behavior in customer reviews:
Being shut down on shared servers because their sites use too many resources
Being shut down without warning because of “fraudulent” activity or security breaches
Inadequate backups
Erratic auto-renewal system
Misleading money-back guarantee
Reliability & UptimeWebHostinHub has an Acceptable Usage Policy which it is a good idea for you to read, particularly regarding anything “unlimited”. For instance, an expressly state is that customers may not “post messages or software programs that consume excessive CPU time, or storage space, or network bandwidth”.
Some hardware optimization for WordPress has been done. PHP caching is standard, reducing I/O requests to the servers’ hard drives and helping decrease load times.
WebHostingHub has APC Cache, and Memcache enabled as a standard for dynamic caching. Essentially, this allows you to store your database and PHP cache into RAM making it much faster. The downside is that APC Cache is limited to PHP 5.4, which is much slower than PHP 7 which will become a 2017 standard.
WebHostingHub guarantees no downtime site transfers. Users who are switching from another web host will get a temporary “platform” to set up and test their sites before making the actual move.
WebHostingHub has a guarantee of 99% server uptime. A test done by us showed server uptime for January 2016 for a WordPress site of 99.97%. They also measured an average response time of 271ms.
Features & Tools A little bit about some of the top touted features.
You know the old saying, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” So, a word about unlimited bandwidth, storage, etc., from Jerry Low webhostingsecretrevealed.com: “If unlimited hosting is a real option then there is no reason NASA or Google or Facebook or Yahoo! need to invest millions (if not billions) of dollars into its server infrastructure. Imagine this “Hey look, WebHostingHub is giving out unlimited hosting, let’s move Google.com over to the Hub!”
WebHostingHub offers dynamic caching into RAM, which is a premium feature worthy of more expensive hosting plans. Unfortunately their base technology for this, PHP5.4, is probably going to become outdated in 2017 but one assumes, having the resources to do it, they will upgrade by then.
The parked domain feature allows you to have multiple domain names point to the same account – often used to send mydomain.com, mydomain.net, and mydomain.org to the same site. A sub domain name looks like sub.domain.com. The standard ones are www.domain.com and domain.com.
Depending on your shared hosting package, other names like info.domain.com or support.domain.com can be used – you choose the “sub” when you sign up. SSH access allows a user to access their server using a command line. It allows for an easier workflow than a graphical user interface can provide.
Solid State Drives (SSD) are up to 20x faster than traditional hard drives because they have faster read/write speeds and improved uptime.
| Feature | Overview |
| Control Panel | WebHostingHub uses the popular cPanel Control Panel. They call it the Account Management Panel (AMP). From AMP you can pay bills, download and install software, purchase extras like a dedicated IP address for your site, backup and restore data, read your email (and install SpamAssassin or the McAfee email protection service), check your usage, monitor visits, etc |
| Bandwidth and Disk Space | These resources are offered in unlimited (within reason) supply. However, the terms and conditions expressly say that you may only host images that are used in connection with a website hosted on your account which is something to bear in mind. They also restrict the right to use WebHostingHub solely for media streaming |
| Database Support | All MySQL databases are backed up on a daily basis. There is a tool in the Control Panel to back up your entire account manually as required. There is also an option to restore your database (usually up to five days of backups are stored). The company also offers support for PostgreSQL |
| Free Domain | When registered, you get a free domain for as long as you use WebHostingHub. You also get free domain locking and auto-renewal. Free domain locking is a security enhancement to prevent unauthorized transfers of your domain to another registrar or web host by “locking” your domain name servers |
| WordPress Websites | WordPress powers about 27% of the websites. WebHostingHub fully supports BoldGrid, which is an HTML5 drag-and-drop web builder created on top of WordPress and specifically designed for the DIY webmaster. When you sign up, you can even choose to pre-install WordPress during checkout |
| Multiple Domains | There is no limit to how many domains/ sub-domains you may add to your account for the Nitro and Dynamo plans |
| Data Backups | WebHostingHub will take backups for a fee and encourage you to do your own manually, which is good practice anyway. It uses Mozy, an online backup service, for all the shared web hosting plans |
| SSDs (Solid State Drives) | Your website will load up to 20 times faster than with traditional HDDs (Hard Disk Drives) due to the faster data access capabilities of SDDs |
| Web Applications | With Softaculous, a one-click install application, you can easily install hundreds of different scripts including WordPress; 310 at last count |
| Email Accounts | As with storage and bandwidth, WebHostingHub offers unlimited email accounts for Nitro and Dynamo plans. While you can create unlimited emails remember that each time your client checks for email it used a process and shared hosting usually restricts the number of entry processes to between 10 and 20. Secure POP3/IMAP email is available anywhere on any device |
| Security Features |
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| Website Builder | BoldGrid, a free website builder for WordPress, is included in your hosting plan. The drag-and-drop builder is easy to use and requires no coding skills. With free themes and custom content, WebHostingHub claims you can build “beautiful” mobile-optimized website in an hour. Other website builders include Joomla and Website Baker. Unfortunately, WebHostingHub doesn’t offer any free trials so you can try before you buy |
| Malware and Spam Protector | Malware and spam protection prevents viruses from entering your hosting account and spam from entering your emails |
| eCommerce Solution | The one-click installer includes various shopping carts necessary to handle E-commerce solutions. Prestashop is pre-installed, but you can select others, e.g. Magento. If you need to store credit card details, you will need to use their big sister, InMotion Hosting, as their servers are not PCI-compliant. But many E-commerce shops use third party payment processors to the extent that it could almost be called a trend. So if you want to use credit cards and stick with WebHostingHub, there’s your workaround |
| Programming Languages Support | Python, Perl, PHP and Ruby on Rails are supported |
| Additional Features and Tools |
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Plans & Pricing Hosting plans are billed annually, not monthly.
WebHostingHub offers three plans: cheap, cheaper and a giveaway. In ascending order:
Available extras you can pay for:
Customer Support WebHostingHub offers 24 x 7 US-based technical support via phone, email and online chat (from their website). You can also submit a support ticket via AMP. Big sister InMotion (which uses the same support team) claims that all their support staff undergo an internal training program and are required to have at least 160 hours of internal training before being allowed to interact with customers.
WebHostingHub also has a useful “Ask the Community” channel where users can make queries and answer queries from others. Even better, there are designated support staffs to monitor the channel and oversee that every query is responded to within a 60-minute time frame.
They have active Facebook and Twitter pages, but these don’t seem to be a favorite haunt for customers. News and announcements, e.g. new releases, are provided on the Help Center web page.
The online Help Center includes tutorials (not only how-guides but also generic tips on building websites), FAQs and a Learning Center. The Learning Center has articles on what are things like meta tags and advice on basic website design. There are also links to guides and whitepapers.
http://status.webhostinghub.com/ lets customers know if the network is down, etc. but doesn’t provide detailed figures.
Twitter: @WebHostingHub
Telephone: +1.8775954482 (intl)/ 877-595-4HUB(4482)
Web: http://www.webhostinghub.com/help/ (includes live chat)
Email: support@webhostinghub.com
Status support: http://status.webhostinghub.com/
Ease of Use WebHostingHub was designed with ease-of-use in mind, not just in the way customers interact with tools they use to create and manage their sites but the whole package, from choosing a plan to getting support. When you sign up, they phone you up and help you get started if you need help.
Conclusion WebHostingHub is not for you if you want a high-volume E-commerce site dealing with hundreds of customer queries daily and requiring secure credit card facilities.
However, it is probably one of the most cost-effective hosting services out there; it allows you to create a website and manage it with a little computer or website knowledge or skill, and the support is out of proportion to its three very basic plans. Bear in mind, though, while the SPARK plan is competitive, the others aren’t particularly.
Some reasons to choose WebHostingHub:
Alternatives
Expert Reviews
User Reviews
