Features
HostMonster provides a web hosting plan that has all the features to have a fully functional website. They provide unlimited disk space, domain hosting, POP3 and IMAP email, bandwidth, add-on domains, parked domains, and sub-domains. The plan also comes with cPanel control panel, FTP access, web file manager, Secure Shell access, hotlink protection, log files, site statistics, customizable error pages, custom cron jobs, and spam assassin protection.
Its web hosting plan is ideal for beginners to intermediate level. Its limitations can be problematic for advanced users, such as the database restriction that allows only up to 100 MySQL databases of 1,000 tables each. A database can’t be over 2 GB and the total over 3 GB.
Reliability
HostMonster doesn’t advertise a 99.9 percent uptime like any other affordable web hosting provider but nevertheless, they strive to have the best server and network uptime. And just like any other shared hosting companies, they do experience downtimes from time to time. These are caused by various issues, such as traffic to other sites, activity of the customers, hard drive failure, and file corruption. The web hosting provider tries its best to resolve any issue within 15 minutes or less. HostMonster allows customers to cancel their account anytime and will provide a pro-rated refund if the reason is due to downtime. Uptime is a huge factor when considering a hosting provider because it affects the efficiency and accessibility of the business.
Price / Value
Affordability is one factor that makes HostMonster appealing to people looking for a hosting provider. At present, the hosting plan costs $4.95 a month. The promotional price is applicable for the first term and renews at the regular rate of $7.99 a month. Each plan comes with $100 worth of Google Adwords, $50 worth of Facebook ad credits, $50 worth of Twitter ad credits, and $50 worth of Bing and Yahoo! add credits. They also provide free domain name and website builders to allow users to create the perfect WordPress blog just after signing up with the hosting provider. And in the event that you are not satisfied with the service, customers can get a full refund within thirty days.
Performance
The data center of HostMonster is located in Utah. The servers are monitored 24/7 by in-house technicians. In order to prevent downtimes, they utilize a synchronized, balanced power system that allows the servers to run at optimum level of performance all the time. They also have a UPS backup power as well as live system monitoring to avoid outages and keep them to a minimum. All its Quad Opteron servers have an OC-48 backbone connection and mirrored storage backups. These factors guarantee that websites hosted on HostMonster load fast even during peak traffic.
One thing that customers don’t like about HostMonster is CPU throttling. They reduce the resources of the website if they find out that a customer is using too much resources of the shared server. CPU throttling will affect the page loading time as well as downtime. There are times when the web hosting provider punishes the wrong website on a server.
Customer Support
Customer service representatives can be reached through phone, email, live chat, and ticket-based support system. HostMonster.com also provides a knowledgebase, user forum and video tutorials on their website. The web hosting provider keeps its customer support staff in the United States. They ensure that holding times will be less than 30 seconds and are well-trained to help customers with their issues.