Uptime & Reliability

Few complaints about reliability

While there are not too many people complaining about the reliability of the hosting here, they also don’t seem to offer any uptime guarantees or SLAs.  The few people on their social media sites and other locations that do say they experienced problems typically associate them with slowness rather than complete outages.  This may be an indication that they are overselling their servers.

Features

Nice features at most levels

Other than the lowest level hosting plan, you’ll get some very nice features with your package.  You can choose from a wide range of options when it comes to disk space and bandwidth, and there are even options for unlimited plans.  As you move up in price, you’ll continue to get access to more and more options as well.

There are a lot of different hosting plans to choose from as well.  This is nice in some ways, but for many people it will just end up confusing.  You have to go through each package to ensure it is sufficient to meet your needs, and that it includes all the features that you require.

Support

Good support but no phone option

The support teams at Host Department seem to do a very good job.  You are able to contact them via email, forums and live chat and they are normally quite responsive.  They do not offer a technical support phone number, which many will find disappointing.  They also offer a nice blog that has a lot of good self-help information.

Pricing

Inexpensive hosting at all levels

Keeping the price down is clearly a priority for this company, and they do a good job with it.  Whether you are looking at their entry level options, or something more advanced, the price is always significantly lower than you would find it at most other companies.  The best part is that in most cases, it is not obvious where they are cutting costs in order to reduce their prices.  You’re still getting a very good service for the cost.

Summary

Overall good hosting services at a great price

Most people will find that this is a great hosting company to work with.  While they don’t have some of the highest end options available, they do a good job with what they are targeting.  If you have a small to medium sized site, you can likely get very good service here.

Pros:

• Very low prices
• Lots of features to choose from, mostly included in packages
• Easy to upgrade to higher hosting package if needed

Cons:

• Lowest packages are very basic
• Potentially overwhelming number of options
• Some complaints of slow loading speeds
• No phone support