Uptime & Reliability

99.9% uptime guarantee

Abaco offers your stander hosting guarantees such as a 30-day money back agreement (written in the contract), with no questions asked. In addition, they have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, meaning any downtime experienced will be well compensated for. Most reviews online focus on the extremely low price being worth it either way. Also there’s no phone number listed for them, which I always consider a red flag.

Features

Mostly average hosting features

With regards to their hosting plans, they offer both Linux and Windows shared plans, which is always a bonus. On the Linux side, all of their plans are very affordable and vary quite a bit, with the low-end plan featuring only 1GB of disk space, yet the deluxe plan is unlimited. On the down side, all of these plans, including the Deluxe, only allows you to host 1 domain. Windows Plans are similarly affordable, with both low-end and high-end options, but they have the same catch-22. People want unlimited disk/bandwidth to host more websites, and the 1 max is a problem in my opinion. Abaco also offers reseller hosting accounts, which allow unlimited cPanel accounts/domains but comes with very limited disk space (40GB – 200GB). That is way too low for SATA disk drives (There are no mentions of SSDs on their shared account pages).

To go along with that, they have affordable and pretty high quality virtual and dedicated servers. Disk space remains low on the VPS, with only 100GB for the top plan (with 2.5GB RAM and 2TB bandwidth), but I really like some of the other plans, especially for the price (covered below). They let you select whether you want Plesk or cPanel, and additional dedicated IP addresses are available for purchase. Meanwhile, even better, their dedicated servers are equally as affordable and all include at least 4GB of RAM and 1TB of disk space. All the processors are Intel E3’s, either Dual or Quad core, but they’re also very well priced if you’re looking for a good dedicated server.

Abaco even has a Site Builder they created, allowing for professional website design in minutes. Plans don’t include many pages (1 – 50), but they’re pretty cheap so its not a bad deal if you just need a simple website.

Support

Some concerns about their support

Doing some basic tests, I was surprised and very satisfied with the response times on their ticket. Regrettably, the same can’t be said for their live chat system, which was offline every time I attempted to contact them through it. I guess it is a bonus that they have it, but it’s not of much use if it doesn’t work. Their knowledge base is also completely empty, never a good sign in itself.

Pricing

Low pricing on most services

They are known for their prices and it’s for good reason. Beginner shared hosting plans only cost $1.85/month, while even the Deluxe plan only costs $4.33 (Unlimited everything…besides domains, which is restricted to only 1 on all plans). If you just have one place you need to store a lot of data or run a lot of traffic through, it is a steal of a plan. Windows plans are also pretty affordable, with the cheapest being $2.47 and the Deluxe also $4.33, with similar restrictions. If you need to host more than 1 domain, they have multi domain plans (3 with unlimited everything, or unlimited domains with unlimited everything) for $6.20 or $8.03 respectively, not bad at all. Reseller plans are a little more expensive, running from $23.59 to $52.77 a month yet containing no more than 200GB of disk space even on the fifty dollar plan

Their dedicated servers start at only $111 per month, and it includes 4GB of RAM and 1TB of disk space. It’s difficult to find anything near as similar in specs for such a low price. The higher end plan costs $223 per month and has 16GB of RAM and a quad-core processor, also a good price for a high end dedicated server. VPS’ start at around $19 and run up to $80. I’m not a fan of the allowed disk space or the CPU speeds, with the $45 plan only running a 1.96GHz CPU with 60GB disk space, too pricey. The cheap plan features less than 1GHz CPU, but its also so low for a VPS you can’t complain.

They also offer email packages starting at just 50 cents per month for the basic package, or up to $2 per month for the top e-mail plan, also not bad. Domains are a standard $11/year of basic TLD’s.

Summary

While not perfect – they are inexpensive

If you’re looking for a cheap hosting package, they are actually one of the best around. While some of their more expensive packages are not bad, you can do better. They’ve been awards from Free Hosting pages because of their low prices, so that’s really their main audience and what their staff gears to. It has its pluses and its minuses, and I can see very well why someone would use them, or why would may pass.

Pros:

• Very low prices
• Nice unlimited plans
• Windows and Linux options

Cons:

• Questionable support
• Knowledge-base is basically empty
• Bad CPUs on their VPS
• Low disk space limitations