Hosting24 Review

Hosting24 was bootstrapped in 2008 and is a part of the Hostinger web hosting. They provide services for 29 million users in 178 countries.

Similar to many other web hosts, their website is chock-full of hyperbolic language, including 99.9% uptime guarantees and ‘automatic backups’ (which we’ll debunk in a minute).

We set up a WordPress website with their cheapest shared hosting plan and been closely monitoring uptime and speed, in addition to testing their customer support and performing background checks to compile our results in an unbiased, honest review.

Did Hosting24 perform well enough to get our recommendation?

Read on to find out.

General Info & Hosting Overview

Pros of Using Hosting24

Hosting24 throws quite many nice-to-have things.

Take a look:

1. Enhanced Security With Automated Backups

Hosting24 follows up its seemingly customer-centric approach by paying special attention to your site’s security.

Many of their hosting plans come standard with Cloudflare DDOS Protection and the ClamAV antivirus scanner to proactively protect your site.

They’ll also perform weekly backups. In an ideal world, you would have daily backups. Since they’re throwing it in for free, while many other sites force you to pay extra, it’s not a bad deal. We’ll review these backups in more detail soon.

In addition, they also offer SpamAssassin Protection for emails.

2. U.S. and European Server Locations

When signing up for a new shared or VPS hosting account, you’re given the option to choose between hosting your site on their North America (Asheville, North Carolina) or European (United Kingdom) locations (depending on your target group).

3. Numerous Promotional Sales

If you time it right, you might get an incredible deal.

At the time of writing this review (5/18/16 – Update 11/01/18 they appear to be still doing them!), they were running a 50% lifetime discount flash sale.

A quick look at their Facebook Page reveals numerous different sales, usually associated with some holiday.

4. Free Website Transfer(s)

Hosting24 will help you transfer or migrate an existing website — free of charge — if it’s hosted elsewhere. (It’s worth noting that almost every other host we’ve reviewed also offers this perk.)

5. Good Speed 695 ms

Hosting24 performed rather well with their load times. They clocked in at 695 ms over the past 12 months.

Not the best we’ve seen, but not the worst also.

Consider this:

74% of people will leave your site forever if it fails to load within just 5 seconds.

That means speed isn’t just an experience issue. In fact, it has a direct impact on your conversion rates, too, causing site visitors to leave in droves.

One of the most important factors for site speed comes down to the speed of your hosting. There are only so many things you can do if the foundation is faulty.

Cons of Using Hosting24

There are some downsides to consider before committing to Hosting24.

Let’s have a closer look.

1. Poor Uptime (Only 99.79%)

One of the first things you’ll notice when visiting the Hosting24 website is a 99.9%+ uptime boast, so we had high expectations.

Unfortunately, Hosting24 did not keep up with their promise and delivered an average of 99.79% uptime with almost 18 hours of downtime during the last 12 months.

However, if you look at the uptime history, their uptime in most months fluctuated between 99.98-100%, only September, October and December were poor months and took down the whole average result.

Last 12-month average uptime:

• January 2021: 99.99%
• December 2020: 99.91%
• November 2020: 99.99%
• October 2020: 99.90%
• September 2020: 97.96% (not good)
• August 2020: 100%
• July 2020: 99.98%
• June 2020: 100%
• May 2020: 99.99%
• April 2020: 100%
• March 2020: 99.99%
• February 2020: 100%

2. Limited and Slow Customer Support

Hosting24 primarily offers support via email, ticketing, knowledge base, and live chat. However, the latter is only available if you’re a registered user and have an account with them.

We logged in to our client area and tested out the live chat. The first thing that we saw when we opened the chat window was that the approximate response time is under an hour – that’s way too long for a live chat. So instead of a customer rep, we were connected with a chatbot.

The good thing is that we got a fast, knowledgeable reply to our question and it was backed up with a link. However, if you want to talk to a real person, you have to consider waiting for quite a long time.

3. Limited, Marginally Beneficial Backups (Despite Claims to the Contrary)

Hosting24 advertises their backup feature as a badge of honor on their website. Unfortunately, in our experience, it doesn’t live up to the hype.

Here’s why:

Reason #1: They only do weekly backups.

Ideally, these should be done daily to make sure you always have a copy ready to restore, in case anything happens.

Reason #2. During the weekly backup, they will delete your previous ones.

That’s not ideal, because to be on the safe side, it’s always better to have multiple versions. Relying on a single backup could be a problem if there are any random problems or issues that happen.

Reason #3. To top it all off, they won’t backup accounts larger than 2GB.

2BG ain’t that big. Especially if your site is highly visual (eCommerce comes to mind). If you don’t properly scale, crop, and compress high-resolution images before uploading them, you could have a single photo take up over 20 MB easily. Multiply that by 10 (or 100) and you’re quickly maxing out.

All-in-all, don’t believe the hype!

You’re probably better off backing up the site yourself.

Hosting24 Pricing, Hosting Plans & Quick Facts

Here’s a quick overview of their hosting plans.

Quick Facts

• Free domain? Yes, starting from the Premium Plan.
• Ease of Signup: Easy sign-up process.
• Money-Back: 30-day money-back guarantee.
• Payment Methods: Credit Card, PayPal.
• Hidden Fees and Clauses: Accounts with a single file above 1GB, or with more than 250,000 files, can be terminated without notice to the account owner.
• Upsells: SSL certificate.
• Account Activation: Instant Activation.
• Control Panel and Dashboard Experience: cPanel.
• Installation of Apps and CMSs (WordPress, Joomla, etc.): One-click installation of popular apps and CMSs through Softaculous.

Do We Recommend Hosting24?

Yes and no – they’re just a bit too average.

When you sign up for web hosting, you’re paying for the performance.

Namely, (1) uptime and (2) page loading times.

Hosting24’s uptime was, well, below-average. The best website that’s consistently falling offline, won’t benefit you.

Their page loading times are about that same- just slightly too average. That might become a problem when it comes to generating revenue from your site (as discussed earlier).

There are better hosts out there with more stable uptime, blazing-fast loading times, and fantastic customer support – all at a decent price point.

Do you have any experience with Hosting24? Please leave a review below – good or bad – as long as it’s honest and transparent.