HostPapa review

Finding the right web hosting provider for your business can be a daunting task. With so many providers to choose from, it can be hard to distinguish which one has the features and services that align with your business goals. Currently, with up to 90% off plans for Black Friday cost is less of a factor. Check out the deals on our Black Friday web hosting deals page

HostPapa has been around for more than a decade and has been providing web hosting services to small to medium-sized businesses. This blog post will take a closer look into HostPapa and its services, and help you decide if it’s the right hosting provider for you.

• You can sign up for HostPapa here

What is HostPapa?

HostPapa is a popular web hosting provider that was established in 2006. Since then, it has grown to become a global leader in hosting solutions, serving over 500,000+ customers in more than 100 countries. 

HostPapa offers a variety of hosting plans such as shared, VPS (Virtual Private Server), reseller, and WordPress hosting. Also, it provides domain registration, website builder tools, email hosting, ecommerce solutions, and more. 

What sort of hosting plans does Hostinger offer? 

HostPapa offers a variety of hosting plans to cater to the different needs of its customers. Here are some of the hosting plans by HostPapa.

Web Hosting 

HostPapa's web hosting plan is ideal for small to medium-sized businesses that are looking for an affordable and reliable web hosting solution. With HostPapa's web hosting plan, you'll get a free domain name, unlimited disk space, and bandwidth as well as personalized email addresses to help you create a branded email experience. The web hosting plan also comes with a user-friendly control panel, enabling you to easily manage your website from anywhere.

Optimized WordPress Hosting 

HostPapa's optimized WordPress hosting plan is an excellent option if you want to build a website on WordPress. This plan includes a pre-installed WordPress environment, automatic WordPress updates, as well as enhanced performance through optimized settings. Additionally, you will benefit from having your website hosted on servers that are specifically designed for WordPress, ensuring your website performs at optimal speed and reliability. 

Managed WordPress Hosting 

HostPapa's managed WordPress hosting plan goes a step further by providing dedicated customer support for WordPress issues, ensuring you have a hassle-free experience. With this plan, HostPapa takes care of WordPress updates, security patches, and daily backups. This allows you to focus on growing your business while HostPapa handles the technical aspects of your website. 

VPS Hosting 

HostPapa's VPS hosting plan is perfect for businesses that require more resources and flexibility than what's offered with shared hosting. With a VPS hosting plan, you will have dedicated resources, including CPU, RAM, and storage, allowing for faster website performance, better security, and the ability to scale your website as your business grows. HostPapa also provides full root access and the ability to choose your own operating system, giving you more control over your website. 

Reseller Hosting 

HostPapa's reseller hosting plan is designed for businesses that want to provide web hosting services to their own clients. With this plan, you'll be able to host multiple websites under one account, allowing you to offer hosting services to your customers, while HostPapa takes care of the technical aspects. Also, HostPapa's reseller hosting plan comes with a white-label solution, enabling you to customize the hosting experience for your customers under your own brand name. 

Does HostPapa have a website builder?  

HostPapa offers what is called a "Do-It-Yourself (DIY) online Website Builder" which allows you to create, publish, and optimize a beautiful website. The HostPapa website builder is user-friendly and doesn't require any technical skills. With HostPapa website builder, you can build a web store. This is perfect for anyone who wants to sell products online. The website builder is ecommerce enabled, allowing you to set up an online store with ease. It has 45+ payment gateways, so customers can pay through any preferred channel. 

HostPapa's website builder features free domain registration. This means that you won't have to pay extra for a domain name, which can be a significant cost when starting a website. Plus, the website builder allows for up to 1000 pages, so you won't feel limited in what you can create. The mobile-friendly, responsive design templates ensure that your website looks great and functions well on any device, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Advanced HTML & CSS editing feature of the website builder is available for users who have more technical skills or specific customization needs. The website builder also provides header/footer code injection for those who want even more design control. 

HostPapa's performance 

HostPapa's hosting is exceptionally reliable, with an uptime guarantee of 99.9%. This means that your website will always be up and running, providing your customers with an uninterrupted browsing experience. HostPapa's servers are secure and equipped with the latest technologies, ensuring that your website's performance is always at its optimal level.

How fast is HostPapa? 

HostPapa uses SSD (solid-state drives) on its servers. SSDs are much faster than traditional hard drives as they rely on flash memory rather than spinning disks to store data. 

HostPapa also uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that caches website content on servers located all over the world thereby increasing website speed. This reduces website load times for visitors from different locations. 

Another thing I noticed during my testing was HostPapa’s use of the LiteSpeed web server. This is a high-performance, HTTP web server that is designed to work with popular CMS platforms like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. LiteSpeed has proven to be faster than other web servers like Apache and Nginx, especially when running PHP-based websites like WordPress. 

An uptime test via UptimeRobot that ran on HostPapa’s main website for over a month didn’t show a single trace of downtime and showed only a few major oscillations in response time. Considering that HostPapa guarantees that their uptime will never drop below 99.9%, we can only confirm that. 

How easy is HostPapa to use? 

The first impression of a hosting provider is crucial. With HostPapa, getting started was a breeze. I was able to sign up for an account, choose a domain name, and set up my email within minutes. The dashboard layout is straightforward, and the icons and menus are self-explanatory. I appreciate that HostPapa provides video tutorials and a knowledge base to guide users. 

HostPapa uses cPanel as its control panel, which is a popular choice among hosting providers. I was glad to see that HostPapa had customized its cPanel interface to match its branding and added some useful features like softaculous, a tool that automates software installations. The control panel is organized, and the icons are labeled clearly, making it easy to manage my website files, databases, emails, and backups.

If you’ve selected one of the shared hosting plans, the first thing you’ll notice will probably be the absence of an option for monthly billing. Instead, you’ll be able to select between billings for 12, 24 or 36 months only, which seems unnecessarily inflexible. 

On a more positive side, all plans offer a decent value for money and the customers can choose from a few (not too specified) server locations: the US, Canada and Europe. Additionally, at a rather high price you can throw in a couple of add-ons labeled as “website essentials”. A few of these may come already check marked, but you can unselect each of them easily enough.

After this, you are able to choose a new domain name or transfer an existing one, free of charge. To continue, you’ll have to provide HostPapa with a number of rather regular personal information, pick a payment method and finalize the purchase. All in all, it’s a pretty straightforward process.

All details about your order will be displayed on the far right side of the screen in a transparent manner, with both individual and total expenses shown, which is always good to see. 

Plans and pricing

HostPapa claims its goal is to provide every customer with a fully-featured hosting package at the lowest possible cost without compromising the quality. All of the above should come together with the help of top-notch customer service and powered by renewable green energy. With this in mind, we were expecting budget-friendly prices and that's more or less what we got.

The shared hosting Start plan begins at $2.95 per month (if you sign up to a 3-year subscription), supports hosting up to two websites and includes a free domain, starter website builder (two pages limit), 100GB of SSD storage and unmetered bandwidth. This sounds like a pretty good value for money.

Although all customers are entitled to cancel HostPapa’s services at any moment, there is a 30‑day risk-free money‑back guarantee. However, it applies to shared and reseller web hosting plans only, which seems a bit reductive. 

As for the payment method, HostPapa accepts credit/debit cards and PayPal.

Given that HostPapa doesn’t support Windows hosting, you’ll be using Linux-based cPanel, which is intuitive and easy-to-use, even for average users. From there you’ll be able to install WordPress in no time via Softaculous app installer, and the same goes for hundreds of popular apps, such as Joomla or PrestaShop.

At a minimum, HostPapa offers a basic version of its great drag-and-drop website builder with all its plans, but there is a catch. This product is only offered to users whose domains have been registered with HostPapa. Therefore, if you already have a registered domain elsewhere, you need to transfer to HostPapa before using a website builder or sign up for a new hosting plan. Unfortunately, if you have multiple domain names on your account and want a website builder with each of them, you’ll need to pay for each instance of website builder individually. 

How good is HostPapa's support? 

HostPapa offers several ways to access its customer support team. One of the most convenient options is the Knowledge Base, which is a comprehensive library of articles and video tutorials that cover everything from setting up your account to troubleshooting technical issues. 

The video tutorials are especially helpful for visual learners and provide step-by-step instructions for many common tasks. In addition to the Knowledge Base, HostPapa also offers live chat support. This is an excellent way to get quick assistance if you have a question or need help with something. 

The live chat support team is available 24/7, so you can get help whenever you need it. If you prefer to speak to someone over the phone, HostPapa's customer care center is available to you. You can call at any time, and the HostPapa team of technical experts will be happy to help you with any issue you may have. 

HostPapa also offers email and fax support, which is useful for users who prefer to communicate in writing. In general, HostPapa's customer support team is responsive, helpful, and professional.

The competition

HostNoc is a fellow Canadian web host provider which, much like HostPapa, offers a wide range of well-rounded and adaptive hosting solutions to global customers and at budget-friendly prices. While HostNoc throws in free daily backups and a constant security monitoring, HostPapa adds free domain registration to all of its plans. Since both competitors seem to be affordable, trustworthy and reliable, the choice may be a matter of personal preference.

If competent customer support is an important factor for you, both HostPapa and Hostgator will meet the criteria. However, when it comes to hosting plans, Hostgator will provide every user with a free SSL certificate, while you’ll need to pay an extra for it with HostPapa. 

Bluehost is another strong rival to HostPapa and one of the most popular global hosting options. However, Bluehost doesn’t offer reseller hosting as an option, while HostPapa does, so if that’s what you’re looking for, the choice is clear. 

Doteasy is another Canada-based provider which aims to provide quality yet affordable hosting solutions to the international clientele. In contrast to HostPapa, Doteasy provides monthly billing for shared hosting plans. Unfortunately, they are quite expensive and exclude a money-back guarantee.

Final verdict: Is HostPapa right for you? 

One thing that stands out to me about HostPapa is its customer service. I have had my fair share of frustrating experiences with other service providers who would take days to get back to me on support inquiries, but HostPapa was different during testing. Its support team was incredibly responsive and helpful. HostPapa offered efficient live chat support, and whenever I had an issue with my website, I was always able to reach someone within minutes.

Another factor that made HostPapa stand out was its user-friendly dashboard. I found it incredibly easy to navigate and customize my website without needing any technical expertise. This was especially useful since I didn't have a lot of experience with website building before using HostPapa. The website builder was drag-and-drop, and I could easily add and remove pages, install eCommerce features, and integrate various plugins.

HostPapa's uptime was impressive, and my website never experienced any downtime. I didn't need to worry about losing traffic due to site unavailability. Additionally, HostPapa's pricing was affordable compared to other service providers. I found great value in the Starter plan, and as my site grew, I could quickly upgrade to a more powerful plan if I want.

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