All you looking for a cost efficient all-in-one hosting service? Then HostMedia is the one you are finding! In this post we are going to review HostMedia.co.uk company. Lets explore the features of this hosting brand.
HostMedia is web hosting provider which started in 2002 as a solution provider and then turned to providing web hosting services in 2008 and is based in United Kingdom. They provide solutions all across the hosting spectrum and continuous upgradations in the services that they offer. With primary office based in UK and servers all over the world, and is regarded as one of the best web hosting services in the current market.
HostMedia.co.uk is one of the best web-hosting service providers I have had the pleasure to be connected with. HostMedia offers one of the best services at the cut-throat prices, and their customer service is really up to the highest of standards. It is the third hosting service that I have tried and to be honest I don't really see there being a fourth one until and unless there is a massive slip-up on their part.
Though I have been using it for the purpose of running an e-commerce site, it does provide services for practically anyone and everyone with packages starting from just £1 per month. It almost seems like a prank that Adobe ColdFusion (also is available as a free trial) is up for grabs at that monthly rate. In fact. if you have only a few sites (using reseller accounts) you can get the full cPanel package for as less as £3.99 per month.
Further let's talk about the pros and cons which I found while using this product.
These are some points I liked about it, Pros:
- One of the best features that I like about HostMedia is that they have excellent customer support round the clock and usually respond within a very good timeframe (usually within 2 or 3 hours).
- Almost any company can achieve that by outsourcing their tech support, but this is where they come in handy, with experience in this domain for approximately 15 years they really seem to know what they are talking about, as their answers are precise and really useful.
- I haven't really encountered a problem which wasn't resolved by the support team and they don't really see any problem as a 'small problem' so, the experience is quite user friendly, especially for the newcomers who don't know the ropes around site management.
- Speaking of newcomers, it is usually a very daunting task for new users to operate and manage sites without any prior experience of cPanel and for this HostMedia provides quite an extensive documentation which helps each and every user, and if not that, their customer support service is always an e-mail away.
- They also do WordPress for users who don't need the full hoopla but just the basics and an easy to customize interface for their own personal use. In caring for customers, they do cover almost the full spectrum and it is easy to see as to why they are one of the leading web-service providers.
Cons:
- If you actually have a question you'll have to generate a 'support ticket' which acts like a thread and you'll be helped by whoever is available at the point of time (mind you, all of the ones I have had the chance to speak were trained and knew what they were on about), and this does seem to be a bit of a hassle to me but the service is still quite stupendous.
- Although there are some problems that might not be resolved as easily and even the documentation seems to be of no help, but such cases are really rare and technical team is always on stand-by on such cases.
- Although, the documentation provided is already quite extensive, it could be made even better by covering every aspect of the service that they provide, because configuring the features of the website sometimes does seem like a titanic task considering how many aspects are to be configured.
- There were very occasional IP errors, but since they are really infrequent and rare, it is not something to be really bothered about.
Technical Points
- Coming down to the technicalities of the service itself I'd say it leaves its competitors behind by quite some distance. There are other sites like HostGator and GoDaddy which might come close, but I'd say they don't come close enough.
- HostMedia provides very consistent uptime (with the company guarantying 99.9% of uptime), I think in my tenure with them the servers were down once, and to give them some credit for it, it was resolved really quickly and without much of a hassle.
- The response time is excellent because they have dedicated servers and the pages if optimized correctly don't take a long time to load and this response time coupled with unlimited bandwidth does prove to become quite the metaphorical weapon and helps in handling loads of visitors at once.
- With HostMedia earlier providing solutions for clients based in United Kingdom, the service wasn't really accessible for everyone but recently they have expanded their business into USA and Asia as well.
- Flexibility does also come to mind when thinking of this particular service-provider as they do tend to provide easy package upgradation or degradation for that matter according to the needs of the consumer.
- They provide security features such as SSL for free which is quite an addition because stand-alone SSL certificates cost a lot.
- The fact that they provide free data backups is also a good and unique selling point of their service and I have personally lost data from servers and trust me it is not a good experience, sitting down on your computer for days trying to get data as well as your source code back.
HostMedia Pricing Plans
As mentioned before, the pricing point of HostMedia is quite cheap and might be considered another one of the USPs of the site and there are essentially three types of services that HostMedia provides:
1) Cloud Hosting:
All the servers are hosted on the cloud and are based on state of the art hardware that the company uses, with 5 different locations available. There are three packages available under cloud hosting and it starts from £1/month (Lite package) and goes till £8/month (Advanced Package) considering the amount of space that you might be availing.
2 ) Cloud VM Hosting:
With instant setup and 24/7 customer support, it is one of the best services on offer. Even in case of hardware failure, the data is loaded from another node. The best part about this service is absolute flexibility as you can choose what service (such as CPU cores, memory, Data Sent, Extra IPs) you want in what quantity. The monthly cost for this service is as low as £8.
3) Managed Dedicated Servers:
This is a high-end service, with servers completely dedicated to your needs. The whole server is dedicated to hosting your website and is usually used in cases where the traffic to the website is very high. The pricing plan starts at £78.30/month and goes up to £315/month with variations considering how much you customise your package.
Also read:Over To You:Should You Try HostMedia.Co.Uk
All in all, HostMedia seems to be one of the best service providers towards hosting services with really well trained-staff. The pros outweigh the limited number of cons there are without a doubt and with the cheap pricing point they are working at. I think it is a must try if you are done and dusted with your previous service provider, who literally can't care any less about their customers.
