Hostpapa Review

Company Information

Hostpapa is a Canadian web hosting company that was founded in the year 2006 with the goal of providing high-value, low-cost web hosting services to individuals and small-to-medium sized businesses. The company focuses on environment friendly hosting solutions and is the first webhost to go green with all operations powered by 100% renewable green energy. It is privately owned and operates the business from Oakville, Canada and Niagara Falls, United States.

When Hostpapa started operations, they offered only shared web hosting. In August, 2011 the company launched first set of Reseller hosting plans. It ventured into VPS Hosting space much later in June, 2014. Host Papa has seen exponential growth in the last few years. It is the most selling web host of Canada and among the fastest growing hosting companies of United States. The company currently has more than 500,000 websites hosted on it’s platform.

Host Papa Hosting Products & Services

Hostpapa offers solutions in Shared hosting, VPS hosting and Reseller hosting space. Additionally they offer Hostpapa Website Builder that is available with webhosting plans or can be purchased separately.

Shared Hosting

Hostpapa’s shared hosting plans are perfectly suited for personal websites or small businesses. They are designed to be scalable, so there are no bandwidth and storage limits (of course based on acceptable and appropriate usage). 3 shared hosting plans are:

1. Starter – ideal for a basic website
2. Business – allows to host unlimited number of websites
3. Business Pro – ideal for an online business with accelerated speed and high performance

The pricing for all these plans is tiered to the number of years for which web hosting is purchased and will vary for 1, 2 or 3 year packages. If you are willing to commit to 3 years plan, you can avail cheapest price offerings. There are no monthly hosting plans.

VPS Hosting

Hostpapa’s VPS Hosting plans are not only very affordable but also fast, scalable and customizable. They are best suited for running high-performance websites and other applications, like email server, VOIP, mobile apps, social networking apps, video games server etc. The plans are designed to be flexible, so you can allocate more resources as the requirement for these grows. The key features of Hostpapa VPS hosting solutions are:

• Choice of Linux and Windows operating system
• Choice of Server location between North America & Europe
• Fully managed VPS server environment – hardware, security updates etc.
• Control Panel access for Linux based VPS plans
• Full command line root access
• SSD drives

Hostpapa offers 3 VPS hosting packages VPS-Plus, VPS-Pro and VPS-Premium. The company does not offer dedicated hosting yet.

Reseller Hosting

Hostpapa offers Reseller Hosting starting as low as $19.95 a month. There are 5 different plans available to choose from based on the diskspace and bandwidth you want to purchase – Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Titanium. The key features of Hostpapa Reseller hosting packages are:

• Access to Web Host Manager (WHM) to manage user accounts
• cPanel control panel for all your customers
• No set limitations on the number of cPanel accounts you can create
• Domain reseller account to handle domain name registrations for your clients
• Automated billing software
• Managed server environment

Host Papa Website Builder

Hostpapa offers a powerful and flexible drag-and-drop website builder that makes it very easy to create remarkable websites for both beginners and advanced customers. There are 4 different website builder plans, which you can purchase to fit your design needs. These are based on the number of design templates included, ability to edit the template code, ecommerce capabilities and feature that makes it possible to publish to mobile and facebook with a single click. This website builder allows customers to add and edit images, add videos, maps, contact forms, RSS feeds, social widgets like twitter and facebook like links, ecommerce options like checkout widgets etc.

Customers who purchase hostpapa web hosting get a free access to website builder, though the features available vary depending on the hosting plan you purchased. For example, Starter shared hosting comes with a starter edition of website builder, while the Business & Business Pro plans have unlimited edition of website builder included.

It is important to note that you need to purchase a new website builder plan for each domain that you want to build with website builder. You can add a website builder plan to your domain by visiting the “Add Services” tab within Hostpapa dashboard.

Features & Control Panel

Hostpapa management have a combined experience of more than 70 years in web hosting niche that they have used to put together feature-rich, powerful hosting solution. cPanel comes as a standard feature with all web hosting plans, making the site administration and maintenance tasks super easy even for a beginner. Apart from the near standard features of unlimited diskspace, bandwidth, email, databases etc., other key features of Hostpapa web hosting include:

• Free domain registration for first year of service
• Rocket fast premium servers for better performance
• Free website migration to Hostpapa
• Over 300 1-click install applications
• Both FTP and SFTP access
• Marketing credits for Facebook, Google, Bing & Yahoo Ads
• Access to Google Apps & Microsoft Office 365 and easy integration options
• Ability to fast build a mobile site with goMobi
• Best site building and design tools
• Ready Ecommerce capabilities
• Panda cloud antispam protection

Hostpapa Green Initiative

Hostpapa’s commitment to environment and green policy is commendable. They are the cheapest 100% green web hosting provider in the industry. Though the company does not own any wind turbine or solar energy panels to power their operations, they purchase green energy tags or certificates from certified clean energy suppliers who calculate Hostpapa’s total energy consumption (from data centers to office admin works) and pump equivalent green energy into the power grid. This nullifies the company’s carbon footprints. Hostpapa offers customers to include green hosting certificate on their websites.

Uptime & Performance

Hostpapa guarantees that their server uptime will never drop below 99.9%. This signifies their focus to providing a reliable service to the customers. Although there is no mention of any refunds or credits offered, in event this guarantee is not fulfilled.

Hostpapa employs all possible security features to protect their data centers. The equipment is powered by Intel Server products and a fully featured Cisco-powered network. Additionally controls are in place for 24/7 applications monitoring so that any service issues can be identified and fixed with minimum outage.

Customer Support

Hostpapa company’s motto reads – “Let Papa take care of you!”. This is a reflection of their commitment to providing best experience to the customers. The offer help to their clients at each step of, right from website set up to maintenance. The customer support team can be reached all round the clock through telephone, live chat or email.

Hostpapa is amongst the first web hosts to offer multi language support. They provide support in English, French, Spanish and German, so they are a perfect choice for customers who require multi-lingual assistance.

Hostpapa provide free phone numbers for 18 countries across the globe and mail addresses for 5 different country locations.

Their Business and Business Pro web hosting plans include a 30 minute one-on-one dedicated session with a customer care team member. So if you are a beginner, you can hit the ground running with this basic training from hostpapa. The expert advice can go a long way in choosing the right tools and features to build a professional website.

Their Customer Care Center gives you access to hundreds of searchable knowledgebase manuals, guides and articles that you can even download and use.

Money Back Guarantee

Hostpapa offers a 30-day risk free money back guarantee for shared hosting and reseller hosting plans. If you cancel your hosting account within the first 30 days, Host papa will issue you a full refund less any domain registration charge, set up fee or migration fee. Also any charges for domain privacy or mobile websites will be reduced from the refund amount.