eHost Review

Company History

eHost has been providing web hosting solutions since 1996, which makes it one of the older players in the industry. It was acquired by Endurance International Group (EIG) in April, 2010 and has become more known market-wise only after that. The company has been majorly revamped and re-launched in 2015, with a new website design, new logo and a new control panel. Until recently, eHost offered vDeck control panel to its customers but has now moved to cPanel offering after the revamp.

eHost is a provider of cloud based solutions, including but not limited to web hosting, domain name registration and web design. The company focuses on entry-level low cost solutions in shared web hosting space. The plans on offer are therefore aligned to this goal. Company platform now boasts of hosting over 1 million websites.

eHost Hosting Plans & Services

eHost offers only one shared hosting plan, that serves as a one stop shop for all your hosting needs. Their everything in one plan is priced pretty low at $2.75 a month, but includes plenty of features and free add-ons. This plan offers unmetered bandwidth, unmetered storage space, unlimited email addresses and unlimited domains & MySQL database installations. Also you can register a domain name completely free for the life of the hosting account.

Apart from these standard features (which by the way are hard to get at the price point available with eHost), you get access to drag and drop site builder with thousands of professional looking templates and ability to customize them for your website. eHost Blog setup wizard makes it super easy for people with no technical knowledge to set up their blogs and online businesses in no time.

Other features include cPanel, one-click install applications like, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla etc., basic ecommerce tools like, shopping carts, integration with paypal, online store etc. and over $200 in ad credits for running marketing campaigns on Google, Bing & Yahoo. Two very unique benefits that come with eHost hosting plan are a free US toll-free phone number and 1GB cloud storage on just cloud.

eHost provides a great deal of transparency in the concept of unlimited bandwidth and storage. So they do not use the term “unlimited”, instead they call the provision of bandwidth and storage space as “unmetered”, which means there exist no set limits. But the customers are expected to fall within the normal usage range, which they determine through regular statistical analysis. Around 96% customers have more than enough bandwidth and storage capacity needed to run their websites. eHost might put constraints on accounts that use more than the normal resources for operation. Unless your website expands and outgrows the capabilities of shared hosting altogether, you would be good to host it with eHost.

Affordable Pricing

One thing about eHost that makes them so popular is the affordable pricing. At competitive price of $2.75 a month, they are the most cost-effective web host in the market. One can get eHost hosting for less than what it costs to buy a cup of coffee. The basic goal of eHost management team is to bring maximum users on their platform; their enticing price point coupled with up-to-date technology and good customer experience are right steps to meet that end. eHost offers a monthly payment option, but you can get more discounts if you opt for longer term plan.

Website Design & Ease of Use

When you sign up with eHost, you have the option to choose between cPanel Hosting and Website Builder. If this is your first time creating a website or you want to set up your site really quick, you should go with website builder option. If you have some experience and want finer control over your site (like, using WordPress or other software), you should choose cPanel hosting.

cPanel Hosting is the regular web hosting with customized cPanel interface. It is very well organized with a plenty of features to easily design, build and maintain your website. It allows you to install WordPress or other CMS with a single click, provides FTP access and other controls.

The Website Builder offered by eHost is one of the finest ones available. It’s drag and drop functionality makes it very simple for inexperienced users to create beautiful sites. The beauty of this website builder lies in the fact that what you see on screen while creating the sites is what you get when you view it, so it takes any guess work out of the picture. You get access to thousands of free templates, can even customize them, style the layout as you wish, add image & video galleries, insert slideshows & contact forms and everything else you may need for a functional and good-looking website.

Security, Uptime & Performance

eHost guarantees 99.9% server uptime (scheduled maintenance not included). This is a tall claim and most web hosts shy away from making such guarantees. But eHost is committed to providing fast load speeds and best performance to the customers. If eHost fails to deliver on 99.9% uptime guarantee, you will be given a one month hosting credit. So they use the best-in-class hardware and technology coupled with 24-hour monitoring to deliver high uptime and performance as promised. eHost uses load balancing technology on Linux servers, dual-file location system and triple-redundant OC3 internet connections to ensure a stable and reliable network.

eHost hosting package comes with an enhanced security suite worth $100 value. Client personal information is stored on secure servers. The company also provides courtesy automated weekly backups of client websites.

Customer Support

eHost technical support team can be reached 24/7 via phone, email or live chat. They generally answer all phone calls within 2 minutes. We found the support staff to be warm & friendly and knowledgeable to tackle customer queries and issues. eHost provides an extensive online Support Center on their website that includes step-by-step tutorials and guides. Customers can easily search the knowledgebase to find solutions to common issues related to website setup, blog tools, web design, SEO, ecommerce etc.

Money Back Guarantee

eHost cancellation policy is pretty straight forward. They offer 45-day no questions asked money back guarantee. This is far better than the 30-day hosting industry standard. So, if you are not satisfied with eHost, you can claim a full refund within the first 45 days of signing up with them. If you choose to leave them at a later time, you will still receive a partial refund, calculated on a pro-rata basis.

In the event of hosting account cancellation, customer has to pay a non-refundable domain fee of $15, if a free domain name was registered with the purchase of hosting plan and customer wishes to keep the domain name.