Hosting24 Review

Hosting24 is a daughter company to Hostinger, and as you can read in our Hostinger review, it’s one of the best web hosting providers. It’s inexpensive, easy to use and fast, which strikes a balance that’s hard to find in the web hosting market.

In this Hosting24 review, we’re going to talk about our experience after spending time with it. We launched a WordPress website with its most inexpensive plan to test speed, security, user-friendliness and more, all so we can give you our verdict.

Hosting24 just makes it too easy to recommend it. Though we found a couple of areas where it lacks, the pros are too many to deny. That said, if you’re looking for powerful dedicated hosting or managed WordPress, it might be better to look elsewhere.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Alternatives for Hosting24

Features

Hosting24 has a lot of features, though that may not be immediately apparent. Though a quick glance at the product page shows that it includes everything it should, the stuff that sets it apart is going on behind the scenes.

Before getting to that, though, we need to talk about how Hosting24 segments its plans. We’ll get into the specifics in the “hosting types” section, but the short of it is that there are plans that use cPanel and others that use Hosting24’s control panel. They’re also sold with different features at different price points.

Normal shared plans have a decent range of features, including a free website builder. Though it isn’t as good as our best website builder, Wix, it’s still a solid offering (read our Wix review).

That said, to get everything out of the shared plan, you’ll need to jump to the Business tier. There, you get the website builder, as well as a free SSL/TLS certificate, automated daily backups and a free domain.

Hoting24 cPanel Plans

cPanel plans, on the other hand, don’t segment features between tiers. Across both tiers of cPanel hosting, you get the SSL/TLS certificate, website builder and automated backups. You also have easy integration with Cloudflare (read our what is Cloudflare guide) and full SSH access.

What’s strange is that the cPanel plans can be cheaper than the shared plans depending on what tier you choose. Though we’re fans of Hosting24’s control panel, we like cPanel a lot, too, so it might make sense to jump for a cPanel plan to get more features for less money.

That said, those features are nothing compared to the server software Hosting24 is using. Most web hosts use Apache, which is an open-source server software that offers excellent flexibility. There’s an alternative, though, called LiteSpeed that offers similar flexibility while decreasing overhead.

What results is much faster speed for the user. As we’ll get into in the “speed” section, Hosting24 performs exceptionally, and that’s largely thanks to the LiteSpeed servers. It’s not flashy like the ad credits you get at HostMonster (read our HostMonster review), but the LiteSpeed servers will do much more for your website in the long run.

Hosting24 Features Overview

Pricing

Shared Price for longest term Details	$ 0.80/ month
Shared - cPanel Price for longest term Details	$ 1.95/ month
Reseller Price for longest term Details	$ 17.45/ month
Cloud Price for longest term Details	$ 7.45/ month
VPS Price for longest term Details	$ 3.95/ month

Hosting24 isn’t the most inexpensive host — read our Namecheap review for that — but the prices aren’t bad. Unlike LunarPages, which, as you can see in our LunarPages review, nickel and dimes you for almost everything, Hosting24 offers a comprehensive list of features at a reasonable price.

That said, it excels with multi-year rates. Like most web hosts, Hosting24 advertises the price for the longest term of hosting, which, in this case, is four years. Even so, unlike Bluehost, which uses the multi-year discount as a way to misrepresent its rates, Hosting24 is clear about what you’ll be paying (read our Bluehost review).

Plus, Hosting24 doesn’t force you into a multi-year contract. You can purchase one month, three months, one year, two years or four years of hosting. The price per month increases as the duration gets shorter. Still, unlike with Arvixe, the renewal price remains the same throughout (read our Arvixe review).

We prefer the straightforward pricing of DreamHost (read our DreamHost review), but Hosting24 isn’t doing anything misleading with its pricing scheme. In fact, without the hidden fees and add-ons of a host such as Bluehost, Hosting24 ends up being cheap on the multi-year end.

Hosting24 Shared Plans

The most inexpensive shared plan, for example, is under $40 for four years, which is unheard of in the web hosting industry. Considering the monthly rate is around $8, that’s around five times more expensive for nearly 50 times the duration. Plus, going for a longer term may actually be cheaper.

That same shared plan is $8 per month if you go monthly, but only $2.15 per month if you purchase three months, meaning you can get three months of hosting for $2 less than a single month.

The rates aren’t the lowest we’ve seen, but Hosting24’s excellent introductory rate makes the price tag worth it. Plus, you get 30 days to change your mind. Though InMotion Hosting has a longer refund period — as you can see in our InMotion Hosting review, you’re allotted a full three months — Hosting24’s is still decent.

Though it’s normally not a factor, we want to mention the payment options. Hosting24 — and Hostinger, for that matter — is unusual in that it not only allows you to pay with a credit card or PayPal, but also with a variety of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin.

Ease of Use

Checking out with Hosting24 is simple thanks to the modern website design and straightforward checkout screen. It’s much cleaner than FatCow (read our FatCow review), but the strange distribution of shared plans makes it slightly less user-friendly than, say, Kinsta. Even so, that’s a small gripe in an overall excellent checkout experience.

The checkout screen shows all the durations possible for the plan you selected and the price per month for those durations. That takes most of the screen, too, leaving little room for nagging about add-ons or hidden fees.

After you choose your plan and duration, you’ll be asked to log in or sign up, which you can do by entering your account information or by connecting Facebook or Google. There are privacy concerns when connecting external accounts, but doing so makes the checkout process easier.

That said, once checkout is done, Hosting24 handles things differently from other web hosts. Your payment will clear and Hosting24 will start walking you through a setup process where you’ll purchase or add a domain and choose your server location.

One brilliant aspect of this setup is that you’ll be able to find your nameserver easily (if you’re unclear about those, read our what are DNS records guide). If, like us, you’re pointing a domain registered elsewhere, you’ll need to update your nameserver. Usually, that consists of finding a welcome email or looking in the knowledgebase, but Hosting24 gives you the details right away.

Finally, you’ll be sent to a page asking how you want to build your website, which includes links to install WordPress, start the website builder, access the file manager, invite collaborators and access the auto installer. You can skip that process, but the fact that Hosting24 seamlessly walks you through checkout into installing a new application is huge.

It doesn’t dumb down the process, either. Hosting24 is digestible for beginners while still providing the options that advanced users need. Instead of taking your money and dumping you into a complex, confusing control panel, Hosting24 ensures that your website is up and running before getting into the details.

We installed WordPress from that point, which, much to our surprise, was simple to do. It’s easier than the Softaculous app installer and still installs swiftly, unlike the process at JustHost (read our JustHost review).

The Hosting24 Control Panel

At this point, your experience with Hosting24 may differ depending on the plan you choose. As we’ll get into in the section below, there are shared plans that use Hosting24’s control panel and others that use cPanel. We’ve covered cPanel time and again — read our SiteGround review for one example of a web host that uses it — so we’ll cover Hosting24’s control panel instead.

Surprisingly, it can go toe-to-toe with cPanel. Instead of being a dumbed down version or a rip-off of the beloved web management tool, Hosting24’s control panel combines power and usability in a different way.

You get a similar, icon-based navigation for your website management, which makes it easy to find what you need, as well as other aspects of web hosting, including billing, domains and additional servers.

The thing about cPanel is that it’s only concerned with website management, so the web hosting aspects of your account are usually relegated to a separate dashboard. With Hosting24, everything is under the same roof, meaning you can quickly jump from managing your website to, say, your billing information without opening another screen.

Also in the control panel is a store where you can purchase Hosting24 products. You can register a new domain, get enterprise email and upgrade your hosting, but there are unusual options, too. For example, you can buy a subscription to NordVPN there, which, as you can see in our NordVPN review, is one of the best VPN services on the market.

Hosting Types

Like Hostinger, Hosting24 is focused on shared hosting. Even so, power has been added at the top end to cater to those who need it. There’s a strange distribution of the shared plans, though, so we’re going to clear the air before moving to the more complex types of hosting.

Shared hosting is when multiple websites are hosted on the same server. By allowing those users to share the resources as they need them, the web host is able to save money on the number of servers it needs to operate and pass those savings onto you. Because of the pooling of resources, though, shared servers occasionally struggle with speed and uptime.

Hosting24 offers two types of shared hosting, with only a slight difference between them. The first type, called “web hosting” on the website, is a standard shared plan that uses Hosting24’s proprietary control panel. There are three tiers of standard shared hosting, but we recommend the top tier.

That’s because it comes with faster overall speed, a free SSL/TLS certificate and daily backups. Though not as inexpensive as, say, 1&1 IONOS, the most expensive shared plan is still a great value (read our 1&1 IONOS review).

Hosting24 cPanel Plans

There are also cPanel plans, which use cPanel instead of Hosting24’s control panel. As you can see in our best web hosting with cPanel guide, cPanel is great for a lot of reasons, but these plans are more impressive outside of that. Rather than limit things like an SSL/TLS certificate and automatic backups to certain tiers, both tiers of cPanel hosting come packed with features.

As mentioned, they’re cheaper, too. Though the normal shared plans are solid, they look mediocre compared to the cPanel options. Unless you don’t like using cPanel, there’s little reason not to save a few dollars while getting more features.

If you want to whitelabel and sell web hosting, Hosting24 has reseller plans. Essentially, they’re just bundles of cPanel hosting at a discounted rate, allowing you to purchase 50-150 cPanel accounts for much less than buying them individually. Though there are limits on the number of cPanel accounts you can have, you can oversell them as long as you have resources available.

For more power, there are VPS plans, which still use a shared architecture, but give you a virtual environment dedicated to you. The low-end VPS plans aren’t impressive — the single-core setup couldn’t pass Geekbench’s Surface Book Pro benchmark — but the more expensive plans pack a solid punch.

Hosting24 Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is what sets Hosting24 apart. As you can see in our Kinsta review and MDDHosting review, web hosts that specialize in cloud hosting generally have the best balance of value, speed, security and reliability because the hosting style lends itself to higher resilience.

Like traditional forms of web hosting, your website is stored on a single server, but that server has the ability to use additional resources from a network of other servers. That means under a distributed denial-of-service attack, traffic spike or anything else, your resources will always be available.

Cloud hosting is a natural home for WordPress, which is why you’ll find that most of our best web hosting for WordPress picks offer it. Some hosts that specialize in WordPress offer cloud hosting exclusively, in fact (read our Pagely review for an example).

Hosting24 is closer to Pagely and Kinsta than it is to, say, HostGator when it comes to cloud plans (read our HostGator review). Plans are packed with power, starting at 3GB of RAM and two CPU cores and going up to 12GB of RAM and six CPU cores. They come with excellent features, too, including a cache booster and free SSL/TLS certificate.

Speed & Uptime

We use Pingdom Speed Test and Load Impact to test website speed. Our process is simple: we launch a website with the most inexpensive shared plan, install WordPress without additional content or add-ons and run the website through our testing platforms. That way, we can eliminate as many variables as possible.

Because of that, we focus less on the response time of our tests and more on things like HTTP errors, wait times and recommendations from Pingdom Speed Test. Our goal with speed testing is to get a point of comparison, not the exact speed you’ll get with a particular web host. If you’re trying to make your website faster, read our how to improve website loading times guide.

That’s an important note here because Hosting24 took around two and half seconds to load, which isn’t good compared to most web hosts. Even so, it still received a 96 out of 100 from Pingdom Speed Test, which is as good as our frontrunner in speed, A2 Hosting (read our A2 Hosting review). Both made it onto our fastest web hosting shortlist, in fact. 

Initially, we assumed that was because there was some amount of caching going on, but that’s not the case. You can turn on the cache in your control panel, but our testing was done as the hosting was handed to us, which is how we always do it. Instead, the excellent speed results are likely thanks to the LiteSpeed software Hosting24 uses.

We ran the test again just to see what the cache would do and, unsurprisingly, it cut the wait time to one-sixth of the original time. Our performance grade was still 96 out of 100 — there was little optimization we could do — but in the eyes of search engines, a lower wait time is always better.

Hosting 24 Impact Test

Load Impact tests a different angle. Instead of gauging speed for a single user, it tests how the website performs when put under a load. Our test consisted of sending 50 virtual users to the website over five minutes, which we’ve found to be around the breaking point for most inexpensive shared packages.

Unlike GreenGeeks, Hosting24 held up. As you can read in our GreenGeeks review, it broke early in the test with an elevated number of HTTP errors, which suggests the server is at its performance limit. Out of the 7,250 requests sent in our Hosting24 test, only one had an error, which is well within the margin of error.

The performance is excellent. Hosting24 shows the power of a reasonable number of people on LiteSpeed servers, which is accentuated by the caching that’s included in your control panel. Plus, there’s a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee to ensure your website will always be online.

Security

Hosting24 has the three essential security features we look for: an SSL/TLS certificate, automated backups and malware protection. Even so, those features are distributed strangely. If you skipped ahead, you can read more about that in the “features” section.

Starting with the SSL/TLS certificate, you get one for free on the Business shared tier or on the cPanel plans if you purchase a year or more. One is also included with cloud plans, which shouldn’t come as a surprise considering they’re much more expensive.

The certificate tells browsers visiting your website that you can be trusted, which opens an encrypted connection between your website and the user. An SSL/TLS certificate is the first step in website security because it protects users entering personal information on your website from man-in-the-middle attacks and cybercrime.

Likewise, backups come with the Business tier of shared hosting and all tiers of cPanel hosting. What’s important is that the backups are automated, so you can revert to a previous version of your website if something goes wrong. That said, you should still download your backups and store them using an online backup service, such as Backblaze (read our Backblaze review).

Hosting24 Malware Removal

Malware protection is sticky. The LiteSpeed servers are protected with ModSecurity, which is a web application firewall that’s highly customizable. You’re also protected by BitNinja, which should deter DDoS attacks, malware and more.

That said, there isn’t malware scanning or removal for your website. Though Hosting24 takes generous steps to prevent malware, there isn’t a tool that allows you to know if your website is infected. Instead, Hosting24 ensures that its servers are kept safe, so protecting your website is still in your hands.

Though it’d be nice to see malware scanning included, server protection suffices. Plus, it’s easy to overlook that when the free SSL/TLS certificate and automated backups are brought into the equation.

Privacy

Privacy isn’t as big a concern for Hosting24 as it is for, say, DreamHost, but it’s still a far cry from the egregious misuse of data we see from Endurance International Group brands — read our iPage review for an example. Hosting24 respects your privacy, but some of the steps other web hosts have taken to protect your data haven’t been implemented to full effect here.

In particular, Hosting24 doesn’t include domain privacy when you register a new domain. Registering a domain requires you put personal information, such as your name, address and phone number, in a WHOIS record. That record can be publically searched online, too, making it a prime target for spam lists and data harvesting.

When you register privately, your information is replaced with the registrar’s. Only a few web hosts offer that for free — read our WestHost review for an example — and Hosting24 isn’t among them. Still, domain privacy only costs $5 per year, and considering Hosting24 offers domains for a few bucks less than GoDaddy (read our GoDaddy review), it’s hard to complain.

Hosting24 Privacy Policy

The privacy policy is solid, too. Before getting into how your data is shared (or not), Hosting24 says it’ll only collect with lawfulness, fairness and transparency and limit the purpose of the data to what’s outlined in the privacy policy.

What’s outlined is enclosed. Hosting24, like most web hosts, says it collects data to better serve its audience, contact users and maintain the service. It doesn’t make mention of selling or sharing your data to third parties outside of a small clause near the end of the policy, though.

Section 11 of the policy says: “While collecting and processing your Personal Data, we may perform data transfers to various third parties.” It’d be nice if there was a list of the third parties Hosting24 is sharing your information with like EIG provides, but, unfortunately, that isn’t the case.

What we can conclude is that your privacy is treated with a decent amount of respect, but Hosting24 isn’t taking the strides we’ve seen from, say, Midphase (read our Midphase review). A clearer privacy policy would go a long way, as would free domain privacy, so we hope to see Hosting24 take those steps soon.

Support

Hostinger had some of the best support we’ve seen, so it’s no surprise that Hosting24 has excellent support, too. The support team is knowledgeable, friendly and responsive, which is difficult to find in the often complex world of web hosting.

The live chat stands out most. Following you around the control panel is a small bubble that’ll occasionally show a pop-up asking if you need help. It isn’t a dedicated rep pestering you, of course, but there are multiple support agents at the ready to take questions you may have.

Plus, you don’t need to enter information to contact support through live chat. Because Hosting24 knows you’re logged in, you don’t have to go through the annoying process of entering your email, domain and question before being connected with a rep. Simply enter your question and you’re on your way.

If you’d rather handle issues yourself, there’s a knowledgebase that’s thoughtfully laid out into three simple categories. There are a lot of pieces published, with everything from basic setup tutorials to advanced configuration walkthroughs at the ready. That said, most of the pieces lack depth.

Depending on how you like support, that could be a good or bad thing. Questions are usually answered with no more than a couple of sentences, and if instructions are given, they’re just put into a list. Because of that, many of the entries feel like they’re from a Q&A and not a knowledgebase.

Even so, it’s a helpful resource as long as you’re willing to reach out to support if you need clarifications. For us, that’s the star of the show, anyway. Hosting24 has excellent support, even if the knowledgebase isn’t detailed. The fact that we’re willing to overlook some of the downsides in the self-help resources is a testament to how great the live chat is.

The Verdict

Unsurprisingly, Hosting24 hits it out of the park. Like its parent, its big on features and low on price, making for a value that’s seldom seen in the web hosting world. Though we could nitpick and find small cons to the service, the overall picture works too well in Hosting24’s favor. It’s fast, flexible and easy to use, making it one of the best web hosting providers around.

What do you think of Hosting24? Do you plan to try it? Let us know about your experience in the comments below and, as always, thanks for reading.