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 useful features, including a 99.9% uptime guarantee and a website builder.

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

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Pros of Using Hosting24

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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. Numerous Promotional Sales

If you time it right, you might get an incredible deal. For example, at the time of this writing, there was an 80% deal off from web hosting plans.

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

3. Free Website Transfer(s) and Domain Name

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).

Moreover, you’ll get a free domain name for the 1st year. This, however, applies only for the higher tier plans, starting from the Premium Web Hosting plan (only if you sign up annually).

Still, it’s better than nothing.

4. Good Speed 706 ms

Hosting24 performed rather well with their load times. They clocked in at 706 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.

Needless to say, 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.

5. Custom Control Panel (With a cPanel Option)

Hosting24’s backend is easy to browse and very beginner-friendly. From there you can manage your hosting details, domains, servers and check your account details.

Similar to Hostinger, Hosting24 also uses a custom-made control panel called hPanel. However, if you’re not a fan of it, you can also change it to cPanel, which is the most popular control panel in the hosting industry.

6. 99.9% Uptime Guarantee

An uptime guarantee is something that we always like to see hosts offer. Not only it gives you more confidence using their services, but also the host proves itself to be reliable (in most cases).

Hosting24 includes a 99.9% uptime guarantee in all of their shared hosting plans.

What does it mean to you?

If your uptime falls below 99.9% you’re eligible for a refund of 5% of your monthly hosting fee for that month.

7. 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee

You can try out Hosting24’s services for a full month. In case you’re not happy and no longer want to continue with them, you’ll get a refund (this applies to all of their hosting plans).

However, there are some exceptions and some products are not available for refund, for example:

• Domain name renewals
• Redemption fees
• SEO Toolkit
• Privacy protection
• Google Workspace Email

Moreover, new domain registrations and transfers are refundable only if canceled within the first four days of registration (96 hours).

Cons of Using Hosting24

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There are some downsides to consider before committing to Hosting24.

Let’s have a closer look.

1. Poor Uptime (Only 98.74%)

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 its promise and delivered an average of 98.74% uptime with more than four days of downtime during the past year.

However, if you look at the uptime history, their uptime in most months fluctuated between 99.98-100%, only September, October, December 2020, and March 2021 were poor months and took down the whole average result.

Last 12-month average uptime:

• March 2021: 87.51% (not good)
• February 2021: 99.99%
• 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%

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 (especially considering that Hosting24 promises on their website that the average response time is 50 seconds). 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:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

4. Cheap Pricing Only Available with Long-Term Plans

Hosting24’s cheapest plan costs only $0.80/month. However, this price only applies when you sign up with them for 48 months.

Want a shorter term?

Then be ready to pay more.

The good news is, that the shorter-term prices are still pretty competitive compared to many other hosts we’ve reviewed.

Hosting24 Pricing, Hosting Plans & Quick Facts

Here’s a quick overview of their hosting plans.

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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: Custom control panel with cPanel option.
• 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.

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