Hostwinds is a web hosting company that provides shared, VPS, dedicated, and cloud hosting services, as well as domain registration and website design services. The company was founded in 2010 and is based in Seattle, Washington. Hostwinds offers a variety of hosting plans to suit different needs and budgets, and customers can choose from Linux or Windows hosting options. The company is known for its affordable prices, reliable uptime, and excellent customer support. Hostwinds also offers a 60-day money-back guarantee, so customers can try their services with confidence.
- Great uptime
- Best speed scores in our tests
- Decent customer service
- Excellent hosting plans
- Reasonably affordable
- Average 5-minute tickets for resolving support requests
- Free unlimited email accounts
- Unlimited bandwidth on shared plans
- Unlimited storage
- Only 72-hour money-back window
- Not 100% beginner-friendly
- Support can be too technical at times
Snapshot
✅ Hosting Type Offered: Shared, VPS, Dedicated Server, Cloud, Reseller Hosting
✅ Load time: 5/5
✅ Uptime: 99,97%
✅ Support Score: 4/5
Features
⭐️ Shared hosting services
⭐️ Business hosting
⭐️ Managed VPS hosting
⭐️ Dedicated hosting
⭐️ Reseller hosting
Hostwinds Web Hosting Plans
Despite offering reasonably affordable shared hosting, Hostwinds is better known for its VPS and Linux plans along with their business hosting solutions.
It’s important to note that you’re not comparing apples to apples when you compare Hostwinds to a company like GoDaddy or Hostgator, for instance. Hostwinds has a customized technical infrastructure and a solid team behind it for all their hosting solutions.
However, when it comes to price, Hostwinds pricing is rather average in the market and also relies on hidden upsells to unlock essential functionality, like backups and server monitoring.
If price is your biggest concern, there are cheaper solutions out there. In any case, here is the low-down on each of Hostwinds’ hosting types.
Hostwinds offers reasonable Linux-based shared hosting servers that are affordably priced. Although their website is light on the details of what these plans include, you can bank on receiving:
✅ Unlimited storage
✅ Unlimited domains on the “Ultimate” plan
✅ Free website migrations
✅ SSD storage
✅ Unlimited email accounts
✅ Free dedicated IP address
2. Business Web Hosting Service
As far as standard features go, Hostwinds’ Business plans are like the shared hosting plans but with better functionality. These plans are:
✅ 500% faster
✅ Have fewer websites per server
✅ Suited to higher traffic volume websites
✅ Offer more resources
The business hosting plans are still on shared hosting servers, but the servers are more powerful, and they use LiteSpeed technology to boost their performance.
LiteSpeed is a newer server technology that has been built from the ground up. It is used specifically to be faster than other servers out there and uses several speed-boosting features like caching.
Hostwinds can offer a competitive advantage with their shared servers for business owners due to having full control over their server infrastructure from Day 1.
The small yet growing company can also implement the latest server technology faster than web hosting mega-giants that sell very cheap business hosting plans.
3. VPS Hosting
If having a private server with loads of storage is what you’re after, hands down, Hostwinds’ virtual private server plans are among the best options.
Unlike shared hosting, VPS hosting imitates a dedicated server using virtual partitions. These partitions allow you to access private resources even if your server is shared with others.
Hostwinds takes their VPS hosting services not one but two steps further. Firstly, you can choose between Linux or Windows VPS servers.
Secondly, you also can configure your own unmanaged server (a preference among techies) or opt for a fully-managed server (recommended for non-techies).
Either way, Hostwinds offers so much flexibility and customizability with their VPS servers!
Given that this type of hosting is best suited to people who want to customize their servers, Hostwinds does a great job of providing any option you can dream of.
Although the above prices are reasonable and fairly low, each of the above plans has multiple tiers with incrementally increased CPU, RAM, storage, and bandwidth.
✅ CPU Options: All plans offer a choice of 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, or 16 CPUs.
✅ RAM Options: All plans offer a choice of 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, 32, 64, or 96 GB.
✅ Storage Options: All plans offer a choice of 30, 50, 75, 100, 150, 200, 300, 400, 500, or 750 GB.
✅ Bandwidth Options: All plans offer a choice of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, or 9 TB.
The mix of all these options is why Hostwinds has won multiple awards for VPS hosting services and is one of our favorite hosting providers.
4. Dedicated Server
Dedicated hosting is very powerful. Instead of sharing a server and its resources, you would have the entire server to yourself with no limitations to how you use its resources.
Hostwinds offers fully managed Linux and Windows dedicated servers. You can choose a pre-configured server or customize your setup to your requirements.
These dedicated options start at about $100/month but can easily cost much more depending on what customizations you add. Your options for drivers to add to your server can reach up to 3TB of HDD or 1TB of SSD storage per bay (with a maximum of 4 storage bays).
You can also configure the RAM, RAID, IP addresses, and operating system to your heart’s content!
If you max out everything, you could easily be spending around $1500 per month so be mindful of the costs involved for fancy features you likely don’t need.
5. Cloud Hosting
Besides their stellar VPS plans and fully customizable dedicated servers, Hostwinds also offer cloud hosting with additional extras like:
✅ Load balancers
✅ Block storage
✅ Object storage
Cloud storage spreads CPU, RAM, and other resources across multiple servers which operate in the cloud. It’s different from regular hosting where your website draws power and resources from the same server.
If something happened to that server, your website would usually go down with the server. But that doesn’t happen if using cloud hosting. Since your website’s uptime isn’t tied to a single server’s performance.
Hostwinds’ cloud plans are priced by the hour and the smallest plan equates to around $4.99 per month for bare minimum resources (1 CPU, 1GB RAM, and 1TB bandwidth). On the other side of the spectrum, the largest plan is around $328.99 per month.
The great thing about Hostwind’s cloud storage is that it is modular and can scale according to your needs. You don’t have to go all in and commit to a tonne of resources like you would with dedicated hosting.
Should You Use Hostwinds in 2023?
Hostwinds remains one of the better hosting options in our book despite a smaller refund window and the technical nature of most of their services. Overall, their customer support has a track record of closing tickets in 5 minutes (on average) which is ridiculously fast!
Not to mention the number of customizations you can make on VPS, dedicated, and cloud servers.
If you’re after reliable, decent hosting at reasonably affordable rates, check out Hostwinds today.
