HubHost is based in Cape Town, South Africa and started operation in 2010.The company promotes themselves as a business with the desire to help and accommodate everyone from the home user to medium-sized international businesses while keeping prices within range of the general public in South Africa.
Uptime & Reliability
99.9% uptime for all hosting
HubHost offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee for both local and internationally based sites. As with many sites, there is no indicator of actual uptime over the last month, year-to-date, etc; I believe that this would be a powerful selling point for any hosting organization.
One feature that I found compelling was that online backup was included; while everyone should maintain their own backup, many companies do not offer backup of any sort or if the service is available it is seldom included in the monthly costs.
Features
Lots of interesting features
HubHost has a lot to offer any of their customers regardless of whether they’re an individual or a business. The firm presents over 300 free applications with every hosting package to allow site owners to customize their online presence to a degree apparently limited only by their imagination.
All of the selections from HubHost seem to come with generous allotments of drive space, data transfer and come with the cPanel management interface. In fact, email addresses, domains, subdomains and MySQL databases are unlimited for all hosting services.
Business hosting services generally have lower allowances for storage and bandwidth, but offer e-commerce tools such as online checkout, customizable error pages, URL redirects and secure folders that non-commercial sites simply don’t need. The trade-off between these allowances and access to the e-commerce features certainly seems to be more than fair. Another feature of the business services is that more powerful tools such as Python and Perl are included, as are the ability to build portals, password protected directories.
Reseller bundles offer the same unlimited allowances as the business and personal counterparts, but the standard disk space and bandwidth amounts are much less than the regular hosting packages. The allotments are not “per account under reseller’s domain”, so more investigation would be required, as it would before becoming a reseller on any host.
Support
Good technical support options
HubHost offers an online ticketing system which requires customer login to authenticate traffic. Another means of customer support is the FAQ page, which offers answers based on categories such as mail, domain, managing preferences etc.
Another support feature that isn’t seen very often is an “announcements” section that advises customers of current provider issues, including scheduled maintenance. This simple page allows customers to be aware of any problems that may impact their business, or be able to plan for downtime.
Pricing
Very reasonable prices
Local hosting packages start at 12.95 Zar ($1.08 USD) per month for 200 MB of disk space and 1 TB of data transfer; the premium locally hosted package lists for 39.95 Zar ($3.32 USD). A 10% discount is offered for the first month’s service, no annual agreement is required. Oddly, internationally-hosted packages are priced identically to the locally hosted ones and are comprised of the same features.
Business hosting, as mentioned earlier, offers more powerful tools and is offered from 74.95 Zar to 199.95 ($6.65-16.64 USD) per month.
Reseller hosting is priced at 149.95 to 349.95 Zar ($12.48-29.13 USD), again with a 10% discount offered on the first month’s service.
HubHost accepts PayPal, Bitcoin, wire transfer and EFT payments. South Africa’s 14% value-added tax is imposed on all services.
Summary
Very reasonable option for most sites
Overall, HubHost appears to be a sound choice for any individual or small-to-medium business; the wide variety of options lets the customer decide on the amount of monthly expense.
Pros:
- Green Energy Power
- Lots of different features to chooes from
Cons:
- No phone support
- Some sections (SSL) are inactive right now