MochaHost Expert Review
MochaHost was launched in 2002 with affordable yet flexible hosting plans as its guiding star. Since then, the company has gone on to become a top choice for users that want budget-friendly prices but are unwilling to compromise on hosting features.
Our MochaHost review revealed that the company’s comprehensive plans give you a lot of value for the cost of subscription. It’s not only developers that have a lot to gain from MochaHost’s featureful plans. Beginners are also given a lot of tools to help settle into web hosting with ease. With a rare 100% uptime guarantee and super-fast load times, MochaHost is a web hosting solution to watch.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Enjoy a lifetime discount that lets you renew your plan at the initial price you paid – or for less.
- Keep your website running consistently thanks to MochaHost’s Never Reboot Protection.
- Hit the (web hosting) ground running with a free website builder and free website transfer help.
- Get the help you need quickly from MochaHost’s tech experts via 24/7 live chat, ticketing and phone callbacks.
- Protect your website with 24/7 network monitoring, RAID 10, firewall and malware protection.
- Take MochaHost out for a test drive with a 180-day risk free guarantee – if you’re not happy with your plan, you get the remaining months’ payments refunded.
- Use ultra-fast load speeds to move up the Google SEO ranks and expand conversions.
Cons:
- The wide selection of MochaHost plans can be confusing for newcomers.
- While the company’s core prices are very low, for customers that require add-ons the costs can accumulate.
- MochaHost’s basic plans are really meant for light traffic. If your traffic starts to pick up – you’ll have to scale to a costlier plan.
Pricing and Payment Methods
Among the world’s many affordable web hosting providers, MochaHost stands out as being exceptionally cost-effective. Part of this is due to the company’s LifeTime Discount, which covers most MochaHost products and means that your renewal prices will be the same or less as the initial price you paid. Moreover, if you use a MochaHost coupon, you can likely reduce your total payments quite a bit.
MochaHost offers cloud, reseller, VPS, and dedicated hosting, with most cloud hosting plans optimized for CMS, Java, and e-commerce platforms. The company’s most basic cloud hosting plan, Soho, starts at $1.95 a month and covers hosting for one website, unlimited bandwidth and storage space, unlimited email accounts and SSL certificates.
However, if you want access to slightly more advanced features – the company’s website builder or 1-click app installation – you’ll have to upgrade to MochaHost’s business cloud package. Reseller plans start at $9.47 and include the WHM control panel, free SEO tools, the website builder and a choice between Linux or Windows servers.
Users that require or prefer more privatized servers can choose from MochaHost’s feature-rich VPS or dedicated packages. The starter VPS package with a Linux server, Ristretto4, is from $7.98 monthly and gives you 40 GB disk space, smartphone support, and even a newsletter or email marketing app.
MochaHost’s dedicated Linux cloud servers start with Altura-3 at $19.00 monthly and offer 50 GB SSD storage space as well as letting you choose between managed and unmanaged servers. We were definitely impressed with MochaHost’s very low prices, though we would advise users to read the fine print – some features listed are actually add-ons and can bump your signup prices.
Ease of Use
There are a lot of things going for MochaHost. Beginners can do well for themselves with the company’s website builder and unlimited email accounts. Clear explanations of each plan’s features on the MochaHost website are complemented by the company’s expansive knowledge base, which provides easy-to-follow instructions for both billing and technical issues.
We would be remiss if we didn’t mention MochaHost’s developer pack, which addresses the majority of the advanced tools we look for in a hosting provider. An intuitive PHP selector tool gives you a choice of 6 PHP versions to configure, manage and adapt your PHP extensions and applications. The 50 MySQL accounts that come with even the most basic cloud hosting plan gives you a lot of flexibility for managing your web content.
Load Times and Reliability
MochaHost has really put a lot of effort to provide the best of the best when it comes to uptimes and load times, and it shows. The company’s Never Reboot Protection updates servers without having to power them down, and this in part accounts for MochaHost’s 100% uptime guarantee – a rarity in today’s web hosting landscape. Our months of tests were able to confirm upwards of 99.99% uptimes, placing MochaHost at the pinnacle of hosting reliability.
As far as load speed goes, MochaHost has several different factors, including SSD drives with caching boosts, geo optimization and state of the art servers contributing to its incredibly fast load times. The result? Over our months of testing under different traffic conditions, MochaHost’s load times averaged between 850-1000ms, half or less than Google’s recommended hard limit of 2s.
Features
On the whole, MochaHost provides the features we like to see. Beginners are empowered to dive into the thick of things with the company’s intuitive website builder, a 1-click installer for over 450 apps directly from the MochaHost cPanel, and free website transfers. You can also easily build your online business up with unlimited email accounts and free SSL accounts.
Developers also have it good with MochaHost. We liked how the company let us customize our back-end with different programming languages, and how easy it was to choose a PHP version with MochaHost’s advanced PHP selector. Both beginners and advanced users can benefit from a range of security features, such as malware and spam monitoring, and weekly automatic backups.
A word of caution: some standout MochaHost features are only available after an upgrade – if you stick with MochaHost’s most basic plans, you may not have access to all of the dazzling features the company has to offer.
Learn more about MochaHost:
Customer Support
One of the things that we really enjoyed about MochaHost was the detailed information they provide about the different features that come with each plan. Instead of leaving hosting newbies to frantically Google these unfamiliar concepts, MochaHost takes pains to explain what your getting – and why it’s important.
Live agents are available 24/7 via live chat, but you can open a ticket through the website or call MochaHost’s toll-free number to receive a callback. The company’s large step-by-step video tutorial library walks beginners through different setup procedures, and its knowledge base also includes written guidance for more advanced users.
User Reviews
Our expert reviews don’t take web hosts’ marketing for granted – we test each host over a period of months to see if they actually live up to their hype. After reading our analysis, explore our user reviews to discover whether MochaHost makes the grade.
Conclusion
On the whole, we were impressed with how well MochaHost balanced its affordability with featureful packages. Beginners have access to the types of tools and support that make the initial plunge into web hosting less daunting. Developers are also home safe with features like support for various programming languages and MySQL extensions.
The name of the MochaHost game is choice, and the fact that you can have three tiers to choose from within each plan, as well as choices between Linux and Windows servers and a variety of servers optimized for different popular platforms, really sealed the deal for us. With MochaHost you do get what you pay for, and it’s important to scroll through your plan to ensure you’re signed up for the features you really wanted.
That said, MochaHost is constantly innovating to deliver better consistency, speed, support, and safety for your website, which is something that strongly resonated with us.
