Expert Overview
Argentinian Hosting Company
Hoztear is an Argentinian hosting company offering several different services with plans to allow anyone from the personal site owner/blogger to the small to medium size business. They may be a reseller since they don’t share a lot of information on their site about things like data center location. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something that you should be aware of and look into more before choosing a company.
Uptime & Reliability
Typical 99.9% uptime guarantee
As is common with many hosting sites, Hoztear offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee; this should be more than adequate for all personal sites as well as small business. Another distinct value-add proposition missing from many firms is Hoztear’s daily backup service.
Features
Mostly normal list of features
Hoztear offers the software or compatibility on all packages with some applications usually found on higher-end sites: Python & Perl, these robust programming applications allow greatly advanced capability over “cookie-cutter” tools offered by many hosting concerns.
Real audio/video capability is offered, so site owners as well as their customers should be able to have no buffering issues when watching video. Another claim that Hoztear makes missing from many hosting companies is the ability to have customer sites appear on Google within 15 minutes; I thought this was a great point for the firm whether it is unique or not. Hoztear also offers Google’s “Adwords” advertising service.
All plans offer “unlimited” subdomains and include extensions for Microsoft’s FrontPage application as well as directory and anti-virus/spam protection. All web hosting plans include such popular applications/compatibility with Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, Magento, and BBphp.
Hoztear also offers maintenance/update plans for customer websites, with monthly, quarterly or yearly plans; customers simply have to contact the company for details and pricings.
I was unable to find any location regarding datacenter operations; in my experience this usually means that the company is operating as a reseller. As with any vendor operations, business owners should inquire further; it simply isn’t an issue with an individual site builder or blogger.
Support
Their support seems to be good
Hoztear lists 24/7 support year round, so as with most hosting issues, the time zone of the physical location is irrelevant. There is a FAQ page which conveniently links common issues in the related group (hosting, billing, service requests, etc) and an online ticketing system as well as a live chat, which was active on a Saturday morning when this review was written.
Pricing
Pricing seems a bit high
Hosting plans range from $120-300 AR ($13.64-34.10 USD) on a quarterly payment plan; no annual contracts are required. Disk space ranges from 200 MB to 2 TB, data transfer from 2-15 GB, and the number of domains from 5 to 50, depending on the plan selected.
Domain registration, transfer and renewal are each priced at $250 AR ($28.41 USD) which is about the same price as most other registration services. Transfer of website contents is based on the hosting package selected, with prices ranging from $360-900 AR ($40.92-102.29 USD)
All products and services are subject to Argentina’s 21% Value Added Tax.
Summary
Not a bad option to consider
One thing that may be common, but I have only seen on Hoztear’s site is the partnership with Google to provide mail service as well as promoting Google Docs. Hoztear emphasizes the advantages of not being tied to an office location for a self-hosted email or web server so employee’s location isn’t a factor in accessing office resources. The company also notes the savings of going with Google’s various platforms as a means of freeing company funds from licensing fees.
I was left with a few concerns when I attempted to learn about virtual and dedicated server options and found the links to be inactive, as was the link that was listed “UK servers”.
Pros:
- Many different plans at all budget levels
- Lots of templates to choose from
Cons:
- No data center info listed
- Links to VPS and Dedicated hosting pages are down
- “latest news” page is over a year out of date