About HostPapa
Founded by Jamie Opalchuck in 2006, HostGator is a Canadian-based independent hosting company that now hosts over 200,000 websites. Today they provide shared, VPS, reseller, and WordPress hosting.
Though not popular as BlueHost or HostGator, they are one of the rising web host providers. The reason for their rise could be the various customer service options that they provide. Especially they offer various language options for communications through their phone support like English, French, Spanish, and German to both local and international clients.
A lot of features are offered by HostPapa like great uptime. Their customer service is also impressive with lots of options to choose from. Let’s see in brief the pros.
Table of Contents
The pros of HostPapa:
Good Uptime-
The amount of time your website stays up is known as uptime.
A good web hosting provider will always make an effort to provide uptime of at least 99% for their users because 100% is anyway impossible due to internet problems and maintenance.
HostPapa’s average uptime guarantee is 99.96% which is very reliable if you are planning to blog or run e-commerce to sell things.
Ample customer support options-
HostPapa holds various ways to provide ample support options to help customers.
24/7 support is offered through phone, mail, email, ticketing, online chat, and fax too. Apart from English phone support is provided in various languages French, Spanish, and German. The response from both phone and online chat is quick too.
Another interesting customer support feature of HostPapa is Papa Squad Experts which is a one-to-one session that basically is a guided walkthrough using telephone or video conference.
If you want to independently help yourself then there are lots of tutorial videos.
Security-
Various security features are offered with HostPapa’s shared hosting plans. Server firewall, monitoring, and intrusion detection, DDoS attack prevention and responses, RAID-10 redundancy, Let’s Encrypt SSL, network monitoring, and brute force detection are some of the few.
All these features are also available with their cheapest plan.
More additional features come if you switch to their Business Pro plans like domain privacy protection, a premium Wildcard SSL certificate, a dedicated IP address, and automated website backups.
They also have spam protection to avoid any spam.
Money-back guarantee–
There is no web hosting provider that does not provide this feature. Most web hosts follow the industry-standard practice of 30 days money-back guarantee. This is also the same for HostPapa. They also offer 30 days money refund if you did not like their services.
Free site migration-
HostPapa’s team will help you to transfer your existing site from another host to theirs with no additional charge
Free domain registration-
On signing up for an account with them, you will also receive a free domain for one year.
Eco friendly-
If keeping the environment clean is your concern then you might want to look at eco-friendly hosting and HostPapa is one of them.
They claim to be one of the 1st companies to make a public commitment to going green as per their website. To power their laptops, servers, office computers, and office space they have taken the upper hand to use green renewable energy. On this day they are going green 100%.
Easy to use cPanel–
Domains, profiles, websites, profiles, services, billing settings and any other things related to hosting can be managed from HostPapa’s control panel which is very easy to use.
They use the traditional cPanel which the most popular in the web host industry because of it is very convenient to use and suitable for both starters and advanced users.
Business Plan offers good value with regard to price–
Even by purchasing the Business plan which is priced the same as the Starter plan; they offer lots of ‘essential features’ like unlimited websites, unlimited SSD web space, unlimited email address, unmetered bandwidth, website builder (Starter), free one-to-one training sessions and ‘advanced features’ like unlimited add-on domains, unlimited MySQL databases, and 2 times more CPU and MySQL resources.
Therefore, so many features offered for $3.95 is a great deal and makes it worthy of its price.
Multiple data centers –
Their servers are located in Toronto (Canada), Los Angeles (USA) and Amsterdam (Nederland). Therefore multiple data centers mean faster load speed.
Although with their fast page loading speed and their polite and knowledgeable customer support HostPapa still have some drawback. Let’s have a look at these.
The cons of HostPapa:
Renewal prices high-
The offer price of HostPapa’s cheapest plan is $3.95 per month. To avail of this offer, you have to sign up for three years.
They charge double the renewal price once the discount price ends.
Starter Plan’s renewal rate is $9.99 per month
Business Plan’s renewal rate is $14.99 per month
Business Pro Plan’s renewal rate at $23.99 per month
Automated website backup not available-
They offer free automated website backup only for their Business Pro Plan. For Starter Plan and Business Plan, you have to pay an additional price $29.95 per year if you really want it badly. Else you have to manually back up files which are quite absurd as their other competitors in the market are offering it for free.
Tricky checkout process with high priced Add-ons–
when you choose their cheapest plan, Starter while checking out you will be shown a few add-ons which are very pricey like Protection Power Website Security will cost $19.95/year, and Automated Website Backup for $29.95/year as mentioned above, Paid SSL Certificate for $24.95/year, PapaCare approximately will cost $49.95/year.
Although these are optional, if you are not paying attention these add on will get added to your final bill automatically if you manually do not untick it.
This seems like a sly trick of HostPapa to upsell their products to inattentive people.
Overall Review
Especially for the cheaper plans, HostPapa provides good value according to its price. The disadvantage is that just like other hosting companies you have committed for three years to get the best value. It neither has the most extensive package.
Since the price of the Starter plan is the same as Business Plan, the Business Plan offers more features therefore the latter is recommended. Compared to HostPapa, other web host providers like HostGator and BlueHost offer more features and choices.
Do we recommend HostPapa?
Yes, we do recommend HostPapa for small business owners that are looking for good value with lots of features. Their service has improved over the last six months. With almost perfect uptime, fast page loading speed, and lots of various support options, HostPapa is definitely not bad. Another positive side is they are eco-friendly hosts.
Their renewal prices are high which we didn’t like. HostPapa could be could for you is high price does not matter to you.
Where are the servers of HostPapa located?
Their servers are located in the United States, Canada, and Europe.
Is the security of HostPapa good?
Yes it is. Many security tools like server firewall and monitoring, ModSecurity package, and DDoS attack prevention are offered by HostPapa.
Is HostPapa good?
Yes. Different hosting options with a good range, and numerous security tools are offered by HostPapa. The initial prices are affordable and you will have a pleasant and smooth experience when you will interact with their customer support that is always ready to help you.
