HostMonster Review

Unlike major competitors that are mostly known for flashy television commercials that air during the halftime of the Super Bowl each year, HostMonster prefer to market its services through more discreet internet channels.

In essence, this is a budget hosting provider that focuses on offering complete solutions at the personal and business levels. The company often underscores factors such as bandwidth, speed, uptime, and reliable servers as their main advantages.

While HostMonster cannot claim to be the most affordable hosting provider in 2019, it has every right to boast about the overall value offered to clients, particularly with regard to bandwidth.

Since this is a strong factor guiding the decisions of individuals shopping around for hosting providers, it makes sense to get it out of the way first: As of mid-October 2019, the uptime reported by Solarwinds, also known as Pingdom, was 100% during a seven-day period.

Once you start getting into the historical performance for this provider, the lowest uptime was recorded in July 2019 at 99.93%, which puts HostMonster firmly above the industry average for this metric.

It is not unusual to see consecutive months when the uptime was between 99.99% and 100%, which means that seeing a "HostMonster down" is not common at all. If uptime is important for your website goals, and it should be if you are running an e-commerce operation or pages that are constantly updated with fresh content, you cannot go wrong with HostMonster.

Great uptime is not always synonymous with fast page loading times; however, with the average page speed with HostMonster underscores that their servers are indeed capable of quickly delivering pages.

Once again, a Pingdom check over the last few months returns an average page loading time of 940 milliseconds. When compared to other major hosting providers, this average page speed is about 6% slower, but when you consider the solid uptime and other factors we will discuss later, this will work out for most situations.

Something to note about page speed these days is something that website administrators should strive to optimize. If your loading times on HostMonster are too slow for your business goals, you should run them by Google PageSpeed Insights and see how they can be improved.

With the advent of modern programming frameworks that call up library routines and elements loaded with JavaScript, it is easy to fall into the page bloat trap. Think of each page as being a download; you do not want visitors to suffer through 3 MB page where the meaningful content content is just a few paragraphs with a couple of images.

As with many other EIG web hosting brands, the main HostMonster data center serving North America is located in Utah; however, the company also keeps servers in other major overseas markets such as China and India, not to mention numerous content delivery network (CDN) arrangements with partners around the world.

In order to provide and manage hosting plans that include cloud, dedicated, and virtual private servers, HostMonster maintains state-of-the-art server technology with dual quad-core machines, automated network monitoring for mitigation, diesel-powered generators as backup power solutions, and enterprise Linux configuration for best performance.

As previously mentioned, you or your visitors will rarely come across "HostMonster down" error messages thanks to the company's commitment to providing excellent uptime, but let's talk about another situation whereby visitors sometimes end up seeing an error on their screens instead of the intended page, such as when you exceed your bandwidth capacity.

All of HostMonster's plans, even the most affordable one, will grant you unmetered bandwidth as well as generous storage.

Online chat is the most common method to get HostMonster customer service, and the company goes to great lengths to ensure that this channel is always available.

Like many other hosting providers today, HostMonster has their own set of features. Many of these features often costs a good sum, so pay attention to the details and look out for what you'll need.

Customer accounts and websites can be managed directly from the HostMonster cPanel (Read more: Guide to cPanel) dashboard, which is an enhanced version of this popular interface. The HostMonster login procedure can be accomplished directly from cPanel or through the hosted websites.

Once logged into the HostMonster cPanel, customers can also access and manage their HostMonster webmail. Although the HostMonster webmail login can be done separately and directly from the RoundCube or Horde clients, it is recommended to do so from the HostMonster cPanel.

The HostMonster webmail feature is not limited to RoundCube and Horde; you can use various applications to access email, including Microsoft Office 365 an Gmail. Customers can adjust their IMAP or POP HostMonster email settings so that they can get their messages on smartphones or desktop clients such as Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird.

Even though the Horde and RoundCube clients are not as fancy as other apps, you can easily configure your HostMonster webmail to act as a forwarder or auto-responder. Your HostMonster webmail login credentials are different from the HostMonster login account. Customers who wish to use SSL and TLS to protect their accounts can configure their HostMonster email settings on two dedicated ports.

Weebly is the website builder solution provided by HostMonster, a leading drag-and-drop online builder that is intuitive and easy to use. With Weebly, creating a stylish and functional website is simple even if you do not have knowledge of HTML or CSS; plus, getting started is as easy as choosing from hundreds of templates that include e-commerce stores.

Many of the Weebly templates are provided for free and can be extensively customized; premium templates can be purchased if you feel that they are a better fit for your websites. Unlike other point-and-click website builders, Weebly gives you full access to the code in case you need to edit elements or layouts, and the responsive design properties in all templates will adequately render websites on mobile devies. The excellent reputation that Weebly enjoys is a major selling point for HostMonster.

If you intend to use HostMonster as an e-commerce platform, you can design your online stores on Weebly, but you will find Magento to be a more sophisticated and comprehensive solution. Other e-commerce tools you will find include: secure server environment for PCI compliance, various shopping carts such Agora and Zen, PGP encryption, HTML directories that can be protected with passwords, and merchant processing services through Square.

Aside from Weebly, HostMonster offers other scripting software platforms to build websites. The Drupal and Joomla open-source content management platforms are supported, and the same goes for WordPress, but there is no dedicated hosting for the latter. Specialized web publishing platforms include Moodle for online courses, Coppermine for media galleries, TikiWiki for encyclopedic websites, mailing lists, online project management, help ticket platforms, and more. As for database support, you have access to standards such as MySQL CGI-BIN, Python, Ruby, and Perl. JavaScript and Shockwave are also supported along with DHTML.

This is the most popular HostMonster offering, and it consists of three plans: Basic, Plus, and Choice Plus.

Let's go over the highlights.

Even though shared hosting is HostMonster's bread and butter, the company also offers virtual private servers and dedicated website hosting.

The new pricing points rolled out by HostMonster puts the company on a competitive level that is on par with budget hosting providers, but you get more than just a low monthly price. The Choice Plus hosting plan, for example, provides incredible value to individuals and business owners who plan to operate and manage multiple websites. The uptime and uncapped bandwidth offered by this provider make it one of the most attractive options for prospective hosting customers looking for real value. No other web hosting company offers a plan that can truly compete against Choice Plus.

In the end, HostMonster is a highly recommended hosting provider for just about anyone. There are a few things that the company surprisingly does not offer; for example, dedicated servers do not run on Windows, there are no optimized plans for WordPress, and there is no cloud hosting options available to customers. What is strange about the lack of these offerings is that HostMonster is certainly in a position to provide them. Nice touches such as the Weebly website builder, the free SSL certificates, the unmetered bandwidth, and the unlimited storage of the Choice Plus plan puts HostMonster ahead of many other website hosting providers. Something else to consider about HostMonster is how long it has managed to stay in business and the considerable client base it has built without resorting to purchasing television commercials to air during the Super Bowl.