As a hosting expert and website owner, I’ve come across Hostwinds in the past. The general verdict is that Hostwinds was built for medium/large-scale businesses. To confirm this, I decided to test this hosting provider and come up with a thorough, unbiased review.

Hostwinds, a company founded in 2010 by Peter Holden, directly owns all of its hardware and continuously updates its hosting software. A wide range of hosting services, including shared, business, reseller, VPS, cloud, WordPress, and dedicated hosting, are provided by the company. Their wide variety of packages guarantees that both established businesses and tiny startups can find the ideal hosting solution for their requirements. The firm prides itself on delivering top-level service to customers at a fair price.

The reputation of Hostwinds is solidified by its impressive customer ratings across multiple platforms. On HostAdvice, they have received a rating of 4.7 based on 1165 reviews. Additionally, they boast a rating of 4 on Trustpilot from 673 reviews. Although not BBB accredited, the overall consensus among users appears to be highly favorable.

In my professional view, Hostwinds is a standout hosting company, offering a comprehensive range of services that are intended to meet a variety of customer demands while upholding a high standard of customer service.

Hostwinds

Looking for reliability and performance without breaking the bank? Hostwinds delivers high-quality web hosting solutions that fit your needs. From shared to dedicated hosting, their diverse range of plans has got you covered.

Visit Hostwinds

Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

Rating Breakdown

At HostAdvice, our experts have developed an S.I hosting rating guide that measures and gives scores on how hosting providers perform so you can choose the right one for your business.

Hostwinds Prices & Plans – 2024

Hostwinds offers shared, VPS, reseller, WordPress, dedicated, and cloud hosting. They have different categories of VPS plans and they also offer white-label reseller hosting, web application hosting, and business hosting.

Hostwinds hosting plans come with a 72-hour refund policy. The countdown starts when your initial payment is confirmed. You can pay through Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and crypto.

Shared Hosting

Hostwinds doesn’t recommend any shared hosting plan specifically. The only major difference between the plans is the number of domains allocated. They all come with the latest cPanel, Weebly site builder, unlimited FTP accounts, free dedicated IP, solid state drives, and SSL certificates.

VPS

Hostwinds has a wide range of options in its Managed Linux plans. You can select the plan with the right storage and bandwidth for your business. All plans come with enterprise firewalls, custom ISO’s, snapshots, nightly backups, server monitoring, and much more.

Dedicated Server

Hostwinds offers dedicated hosting web hosting plans. They are highly customizable and you can have more storage, RAM, and bandwidth for an extra fee.

Resellers

The features on the reseller hosting plan are quite similar to the shared hosting plan features. You get unlimited databases, email accounts, FTP accounts, and subdomains. Your customers also get to enjoy the latest cPanel and 24/7 support.

Cloud Hosting

Hostwinds does not recommend any specific plan under its cloud server category. The only difference is you get more CPUs, RAM, storage, and bandwidth for higher plans.

Hostwinds Features

• Shared; VPS; Dedicated; Cloud; Reseller; WordPress hosting
• Softaculous Auto installer
• Free SSL certificate
• Latest cPanel
• Unlimited databases
• Solid State Drives

Hostwinds offers a few unique features on its VPS, and cloud server hosting plans. They include snapshots, firewall, volumes, and load balancers.

Snapshots help you take a complete real-time backup of your Linux VPS and also deploy a fleet of pre-configured Linux servers just a few clicks away. The enterprise firewall gives you an additional layer of security while the volumes give you extra storage space. Load balancers help to assign your traffic to multiple servers to help increase efficiency and uptime.

Hostwinds

Looking for reliability and performance without breaking the bank? Hostwinds delivers high-quality web hosting solutions that fit your needs. From shared to dedicated hosting, their diverse range of plans has got you covered.

Visit Hostwinds

Performance

When hunting for a web hosting provider, there are three important performance metrics you must consider. They are server speed, uptime, and loading time.

• Server speed reflects how quickly a user on your website receives data from the host’s server.
• Uptime shows how consistently your host’s servers stay online.
• Loading time measures how quickly your web pages load when customers use your website.

Higher server speed and quicker loading time will allow for a seamless customer experience which will lead to less bounce rate from your website.

Hostwinds promised a 99.99% uptime guarantee to all their customers. To measure the accuracy of this claim, I tested the host’s speed and load times using GTMetrix. The test was carried out on modernclassics.com – a website hosted on Hostwinds.

These were the results:

Modernclassics.com had a superfast response time (time to first byte) of 51ms and a fully loaded time of 2.4s.

The website had an excellent overall performance of 98%. This is far above average.

Level Of Support

Live chat

Hostwinds recommends live chat support channels for both existing and prospective customers. I checked for the support section on the homepage and tried to access the support channel from there.

After clicking on the ‘Live Chat With Us’ button, the chatbox opened immediately and the agent was on hand to answer my questions.

The agent was super helpful and I was impressed. Hostwinds has its live chat customer support channel on lock.

Support ticket

The support ticket channel is only available to paid customers. After you log in, you will be able to file your complaint and get ASAP unique solutions for your problem.

Tutorials

If you learn faster on your own, you will find the Hostwinds Tutorial support section very helpful. There are a whole lot of resources for you right here.

Mailing address

You can also send direct mail to the Hostwinds office. Here’s their mailing address:

Hostwinds

Looking for reliability and performance without breaking the bank? Hostwinds delivers high-quality web hosting solutions that fit your needs. From shared to dedicated hosting, their diverse range of plans has got you covered.

Visit Hostwinds

User-Friendliness – Ease of use

Registration

Hostwinds designed a simple UI that makes registering and signing up hassle-free. You can click the ‘Get Started’ button on the homepage to proceed.

You will be directed to the shared web hosting plan package. There, you can pick a plan to start the registration process.

Input your client information and pick a domain name.

Select your preferred payment method after confirming your preferred plans and add-ons.

After you are done with payment, you will be able to access the account management dashboard.

The UI of Hostwinds is quite pleasing and it makes it easy to navigate. From here, you can easily log in to your webmail and cPanel.

Hostwinds Control Panel

Hostwinds prides itself on staying up to date with the latest cPanel. This makes it easier for you to manage your files, site builder, databases, emails, and so on.

Installing WordPress on Hostwinds

You can install WordPress on Hostwinds using the Softaculous App Installer. The first thing you do is log into your cPanel and locate the installer.

After you open the installer, click on the top script and then on WordPress.

Click on ‘Install Now’ and make your required configurations.

After you make the necessary adjustments and click ‘Install’, you will be directed here.

Follow the link to access your WordPress dashboard.

Add an email account with Hostwinds

It is easy to add an email account on your Hostwinds cPanel. Go to the Emails section and click on ‘Email accounts

Go to ‘Add Email Account’, fill out the necessary details, and click on  ‘Create Account’.

You should have your email immediately.

Conclusion: Do We Recommend Hostwinds?

Hostwinds was built to solve the problems of bigger web hosts and provide only the best hosting service to its customers. I’d say they lived up to that standard and I will recommend them. For starters, they have superfast server speed and their customer support is excellent.

They also utilize the latest cPanel and a simple aesthetic UI to make website management easier. Hostwinds offers a broad range of hosting plans and you can easily find one that suits your business regardless of your current audience.

Hostwinds is perfect for medium-sized organizations and growing businesses with long-term vision. Scalability is easy on this platform, and you can adapt to traffic easily. They have data centers in the US and Amsterdam which means you can target a global audience.

Hostwinds

Looking for reliability and performance without breaking the bank? Hostwinds delivers high-quality web hosting solutions that fit your needs. From shared to dedicated hosting, their diverse range of plans has got you covered.

Visit Hostwinds