HostPapa Reviews and Expert Opinion

Our HostPapa expert review comes after months of thorough testing. Take a look at our findings and look through our users’ reviews to see if HostPapa is right for your SMB.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Enjoy generous basic plans that include 100 GB of storage and unlimited bandwidth.
• Give your website a reputation for reliability with 99.99% uptimes.
• Take advantage of HostPapa's huge database of customer support documentation and video tutorials to resolve issues on your own.
• Go green with a hosting service that is really committed to using renewable energy sources.
• Get the help you need from a friendly, multilingual support team available 24/7 by phone, live chat, or ticketing.
• Take advantage of a wide range of integrations such as 1-click shopping carts and Softaculous to fully customize your site.
• Keep your customers happy with speedy load times thanks to Cloudflare free CDN and enhanced SSD drives.

Cons:

• Customer support resolution times were sometimes slower than anticipated.
• Some of the company’s additional features are locked behind paywalls.
• The feature-rich offering can be somewhat overwhelming for webhosting newcomers.

Pricing and Payment Methods

We found that HostPapa’s hosting plans are budget-friendly and valuable for budget-minded SMBs. Shared and WordPress basic plans start at $3.95 monthly and include 100GB of disk space, unlimited bandwidth, and free website transfer. Business accounts starting from $5.95 will get you bonus features like unlimited MySQL databases and disk space.

Finally, if your website has higher requirements than shared hosting can provide, there’s WP Business Pro, which starts at $12.95. The top WordPress plan offers fewer websites per server, which speeds up your load times, marketing tools that include SEO optimization, and strong JetPack security.

Whatever plan suits your SMB, we found that each plan is well worth the money you pay.

Ease of Use

HostPapa is most useful for small business owners who need a fast and intuitive hosting solution. If you’re just starting out, you can take advantage of the platform’s free website builder. However, if you have a website that you like, you can migrate it over to HostPapa for free. The company also gives you excellent business integrations such as 1-click shopping cart installations, PayPal merchant compatibility and unlimited email accounts.

It’s equally important to us that a hosting service’s advanced features are easy to use and access, and we were happy to see that HostPapa’s more complex utilities worked well.

You can choose your preferred PHP version, and install over 400 free scripts that expand your website and back-end. HostPapa also lets you run unlimited MySQL databases and quickly integrate Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress. Most importantly, you can access all these tools directly from your cPanel dashboard.

Load Times and Reliability

After testing HostPapa’s uptimes and load times over several months, we are happy to report the company scored well in both categories. On average, HostPapa scored a near-perfect 99.99% uptime, matching its promise and slightly surpassing the industry average. The platform’s loading times, which are increasingly important to get ranked highly on Google, were also well within the industry average, scoring under 1s for most months.

Features

One of HostPapa’s major advantages is the number of features you get with even the more basic of packages. If you’re just starting your business, you can use the service’s SohoLaunch drag-and-drop website builder to set up your site, and quickly build your back-end with cPanel’s intuitive interface. The cPanel gives you several intriguing add-ons and options, though from our experience this abundance of features can be somewhat overwhelming if you’re not familiar with them.

Even so, if you’re looking to get more customization and flexibility from your hosting, you can still take advantage of HostPapa. The service lets you choose between 3 different options for web analytics, includes unlimited FTP accounts, and provides over 400 apps such as WordPress and Joomla that can be installed in one click. The business accounts in particular offer a high standard of security, including Premium Wildcard SSL and automated website backup. We were happy to see that the robust security also covers the basic accounts, which include network monitoring, DDoS prevention, and automated patches and updates. Finally, one nice touch which may not affect your day-to-day experience, but is still a pleasant surprise, is HostPapa’s commitment to renewable energy.

Customer Support

Our experience of HostPapa’s customer support team was positive overall. You can reach the company by live chat, phone, or ticketing, or use the company’s existing knowledge base to find your answers. On the whole, we found their team to be patient, friendly, and eager to resolve the issues we brought to them. Moreover, it was refreshing to see that their support was multilingual, offering services in English, French, Spanish and German.

We were also extremely impressed with the educational resources HostPapa provides. Their blog is updated every couple of days with valuable technical and marketing tips, while their library of video tutorials and huge body of documentation help you solve most issues on your own. The one area where the company could upgrade their service is in resolution time, which is slightly longer than average. On the whole, however, we found that HostPapa’s team was able to answer most of our questions effectively.

Conclusion

Overall, our HostPapa review found that the company provides excellent value for money for small and medium businesses. Features like HostPapa’s drop-and-drag web builder and 1-click OS Commerce Cart and ZenCart Shopping Cart integrations let you quickly build an e-commerce site or business portal.

At the same time, were very happy with the level of customization advanced users could achieve. Different versions of PHP, hundreds of complementary scripts and advanced analytics integrations help you personalize your website and install the tools you need. Thanks to a great variety of features and SMB-friendly hosting plans, HostPapa stands out as a top competitor when it comes to web hosting.