What is Host Monster?
Like Blue Host, Host Monster is also owned by Endurance International. Both the sites having same operators have a lot of similarities in terms of their functioning. The company is American-run with absolutely no outsourcing. They have shared Linux hosting in three plans with VPS and committed.
Based in Salt Lake City in Utah, Host Monster is a rapidly growing company with more than 475,000 domains worldwide.With the backing of a well-established and renowned parent company, one can be sure Host Monster has the necessary skills and expertise to provide complete customer satisfaction servers. WP Designer brings you a review of Host Monster in detail now!
Control Panel
HostMonster offers a control panel for account administration. Customers can log in to the control panel on the company’s website. The control panel is industry standard so migrating users should feel comfortable using it. This control panel is stocked with numerous management features and applications to help users
Control panel is the interface used by Host Monster, ensuring easy management of all your account features. Navigation is simple and functions include domain management, web stat applications, script implementation, database administration, and fully configurable email accounts.
The Pricing Plan
Host Monster offers three pricing plans:
- Basic: $3.95
- Plus: $5.95
- Pro: $13.95
The users are asked to sign either one or two or three-year contracts.
The Basic Plan
On the basic plan, Host Monster is known to heavily cap domains, databases, disk spaces and email addresses. Even for a basic plan, the price is expensive compared to HostGator, Blue Host, and Web Hosting Hub
Plus and Pro Plan
These plans offer fewer caps. But then again, they are still more expensive than the same level plans offered by HostGator, InMotion Hosting, and Siteground.
The Plus and Pro plans have tried to compensate the price with the BONUS features they offer.
But are those bonus features worth it?
Most features are either of questionable value (2 SpamExperts and $150 in marketing offers), more complex than they sell (GlobalCDN and free SSL), or devalue the Basic and Plus plans.
In a nutshell, if the users need a single website without an email, HostMonster pricing is ok and is not what we would genuinely recommend.
VPS Hosting Plans
- Standard: $14.99 first month, then $29.99/month with 2 GB RAM
- Enhanced: $29.99 first month, then $59.99/month with 4 GB RAM
- Premium: $44.99 first month, then $89.99/month with 6 GB RAM
- Ultimate: $59.99 first month, then $119.99/month with 8 GB RAM
Dedicated Hosting Plans
- Standard: $99 first month, then $149.99/month with 4 GB RAM
- Enhanced: $99.99 first month, then $199.99/month with 6 GB RAM
- Premium: $124.99 first month, then $249.99/month with 8 GB RAM
Short-term Pricing
For the users who want to save money in the first year, HostMonster offers a discount on the basic plan reducing the price to $3.95. Not only that, but their Plus plan costs $5.95/mo (discount included)
For the starters owning a small website for a year, these discounted prices offer a good deal
Features Offered Free of Charges
- Domain ( with all the plans)
- Dedicated IP (offered only in Pro)
- SSL Certificate (offered only in Pro)
Renewal Rates
Although HostMonster’s introductory rates are fairly cheap, the subscription will renew at regular rates that are quite hefty. All in all, HostMonster’s renewal rates are expensive.
Distinctive Features
HostMonster offers many additional features. These include PHP, MySQL, RubyonRails, JavaScript, DHTML, Flash/Shockwave, free submission to search engines and several shopping carts. Moreover, each account with HostMonster is also given $50 worth of Google credits and $25 worth of Yahoo Search Marketing credits, ensuring instant traffic. As if this wasn’t enough, Host Monster also provides customers with a free domain name, a free site builder with templates, free setup, and multiple domains on each account – a great feature for webmasters running many sites.
Website Builder
HostMonster includes a version of Weebly free of cost. However, if the users want more than six pages on their site, payment is required. Site builders can be easily installed with a single click.
Multiple domains
HostMonster allows its users unlimited domains with all HostMonster accounts.
Statistics
HostMonster has made it easier for its users to track their traffic using Webalizer and Awstats.
User-Friendly
Registration is simple but the company opted to do that sneaky thing of automatically checking some add-ons, so if users don’t pay attention and uncheck them, they will be paying for stuff they didn’t necessarily want. For example, SiteSecure is automatically selected.
Fortunately, HostMonster utilizes control panel, which is a relief to those used to its interface. One nice feature about HostMonster is that users can access the control panel before purchasing, so users can get familiar with it and be sure that they like that layout before forking over the cash.
On the flipside, HostMonster lets control panel get a little overburdened with promotions, so it seems a bit cluttered. On the upside, applications like WordPress can be installed with a single click.
Is HostMonster reliable?
Host Monster guarantee 99.9% network uptime and with OC-48 backbone connections, 24/7 monitoring, top-notch Quad Opteron servers and UPS backup, their data center is one of the best. Backups of websites are held on mirror servers to ensure that the data is held securely, with no loss in the event of equipment failure. HostMonster doesn’t throw out a promise of a number, but our testing shows basically perfect uptime. This is probably due to its back-end protections, like SSH access, spam blocker IP deny, and leech protect. These technologies are a step above the usual cheap host offerings, and it means more stability at a lower price.
Host Monster considers reliability one of their main priorities and they’re doing a great job so far.
The Three Ds
Core hosting features are the “3 D’s” – domains, databases and disk space. They all relate to the core purpose of a hosting server, which is to serve website files when someone types in the user’s domain name.
Domains
It includes the number of domain names users can point to their hosting account. If they want multiple websites, they’ll want to have multiple domains allowed. The users also need to look at email addresses per domain but sometimes those are capped as well.
Databases
Databases tell as to how many pieces of website software the user can run on their hosting server. A WordPress install requires one database. If users have any apps, Listservs, etc they’ll need more.
Disk space
It shows the number of files you can put on a server – images, text, PDFs, etc.
Customer Support
Host Monster want to ensure all customers are completely satisfied with all aspects of their web hosting and to this end, they provide 24/7 toll-free telephone support and free online chat, neither of which are outsourced. But the problem is that they are not responsive enough. The customer service is inefficient in term of responsiveness.
A help center is also provided with useful information, including an FAQ section, knowledgebase articles and an interactive support line with a ticketing system. But if you’re a self-learner, you might find the company lacking. Moreover, the Help Center doesn’t have a great selection of video tutorials, and the User Forum is unimpressive.
Stability Complaints
We’ve seen this with quite a few other shared hosting providers, and to be honest, we aren’t exactly surprised to find it here with HostMonster. As with so many other reviews, it appears that the 99.99% uptime guarantee is not quite correct. We’ve even got reports of user’s sites being down for as much as two days: A truly horrendous lapse if the user’s business uses the Internet for the majority of its revenue. All in all, we’d simply caution the users to be wary of relying on such up-time claims, as in nine cases out of ten; they turn out to be not quite true.
BlueHost vs. HostMonster
BlueHost and HostMonster are two great options for web hosting service. Excelling in their industry, they compete with one another for your business with reliable servers, useful features, valuable e-commerce tools, and professional support services. Both BlueHost and HostMonster wrap everything they have to offer into one all-inclusive package. However, the packages offered by each company are very similar. Choosing between them can be difficult, without the right information.
Let’s compare them!
BlueHost has:
- Unlimited data transfer
- Unlimited data storage
- Multiple host domains
- 30 days money back guarantee
- Unlimited emails
- NO server uptime guarantee
- Dedicated hosting available
HostMonster has:
- Unlimited data transfer
- Unlimited data storage
- Multiple host domains
- 30-day money back guarantee
- Unlimited emails
- 09% server uptime guarantee
- NO dedicated hosting available
Ratings
Cost 3/5
Features 4/5
Storage Allowance 5/5
Bandwidth 4/5
Reliability 3/5
Customer Service 3/5
Technical Support 3/5
Response Times 2/5
Overall Usability 2.5/5
[proscons]
[verdict]
