hosting.com review
We read its page and found no price on it, and checked its features, its guarantee and its map. Here is what we found.
- BySalwa Al-Otaibi · edited by Nora Al-Mutairi
- Read on
- Score6.4 / 10
Built from what hosting.com publishes about itself on its hosting page, read without an account and without buying. Its price and term come from an earlier round, because its page shows neither. Read on .
hosting.com sells a plan and does not print its price. We read its page three times and found the words starting from three times, and not one figure completing them.
This is the fact: hosting.com’s hosting page writes the words starting from three times and completes none of them with a figure. We counted what the rendered page contains and found not one currency symbol and no price in any form. Every other company on our table prints a price on the page that sells the plan
And what the page writes about itself, in the same place: The same page writes: backed by proof, not promises — a 99.9 per cent uptime SLA and a 30-day money-back guarantee, we stand behind the service, we don’t just sell it. That sentence is printed on a page that states no price
How this review was built
We bought nothing from hosting.com. We read its hosting page, created no account and typed no personal detail.
A limit on this page, said at the top of it rather than in a footnote: we could not verify this plan’s price or its term today, because the page does not show them. The figures our score carries were read on the sixteenth of September, they are internally consistent, and they are not read from today’s page.
Speed and uptime sit outside the score, here and at every company on this list, because measuring them needs a bought plan.
Buying and price
3.5
Basis: the company’s own pages · weight 33%
Three times it says starting from, and three times it does not say from what.
This company’s price score is among the lower ones on our table, and the reason is written on the page itself: hosting.com’s hosting page writes the words starting from three times and completes none of them with a figure. We counted what the rendered page contains and found not one currency symbol and no price in any form. Every other company on our table prints a price on the page that sells the plan
Our record carries a forty-eight-month term at one dollar ninety-nine a month renewing at nine ninety-nine, with a first payment of ninety-five dollars fifty-two. Those are the figures of an earlier round, consistent with each other, and we could not see them on the company’s page today. We say so rather than printing them as though we had.
The term alone is worth stopping on: four years is a term no other company here asks for, and it is the term the advertised price holds on, if what we recorded still holds.
| Value | Points |
|---|---|
| Renewal jumps to 5.0× the opening price | 0.00 |
| The advertised price demands 48 months up front | 2.17 |
| The renewal price is on the pricing page | 10.00 |
| $95.52 today | 5.22 |
Support availability
7.0
Basis: the company’s own pages · weight 27%
Three channels around the clock.
The company advertises support at all hours by chat, phone and ticket, and three channels is what puts the support score where it is. The score looks at published availability and how many routes there are, not at the quality of the answer.
We found no statement about support languages in either direction, and that comes in the Arabic chapter below.
| Value | Points |
|---|---|
| support around the clock | 10.00 |
| Contact by chat, tickets, phone | 10.00 |
| Publishes no Arabic support | 0.00 |
Published features
7.0
Basis: the company’s own pages · weight 20%
Five items of seven, all written where the price should be.
We read the card item by item: The plan carries 5 of the seven items we count, all of them written on the page: free domain name registration, free managed migration, a free SSL certificate, daily backups and email included. There is no content delivery network and no staging on it
The irony deserves one sentence and no more: the features are on the page and the price is not.
| Value | Points |
|---|---|
| 5/7 published features | 7.00 |
Refund and billing
10.0
Basis: the company’s own pages · weight 20%
Thirty days written down, with an uptime agreement beside them.
The score looks at three things: is the window written down, are the exclusions published, and does the billing show the renewal price. This company takes full marks on the criterion, one of three on our table that reach it.
And the window itself is written into the sentence the company uses to describe itself: The same page writes: backed by proof, not promises — a 99.9 per cent uptime SLA and a 30-day money-back guarantee, we stand behind the service, we don’t just sell it. That sentence is printed on a page that states no price
| Value | Points |
|---|---|
| a refund window of 30 days | 10.00 |
| The refund exclusions are written down | 10.00 |
| Billing states the renewal and its price | 10.00 |
Speed and uptime: we did not measure them
Speed and uptime sit outside this score because measuring them needs a bought plan.
And what we did not measure here is the price itself, which is not true of anyone else on this table. The score rests on figures we read six days ago and could not confirm today, and a reader deserves to know that before reading the number.
Arabic: where it reaches and where it does not
No Arabic, and a list against which the absence reads differently.
We found no occurrence of the word Arabic and no Arabic text on its page, nor any statement about support languages in either direction. The full map is in the chapter before this one, because it is too heavy to compress into a line.
The map: Rwanda yes, Riyadh no
Twelve countries, including Rwanda, Bangladesh, Kenya and Nigeria, and not one Arab country.
We read what it publishes: hosting.com publishes thirteen entries in its alternate-language set, in two languages — English and Spanish — covering 12 countries: Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, the United States, Colombia, Spain and Mexico. Not one Arab country is among them
We have made this observation seven times on this table, and it is sharper here than anywhere before it, because the list is not a list of wealthy markets. The company builds a dedicated edition for Rwanda, and for Bangladesh, Kenya and Nigeria. It builds none for Saudi Arabia, Egypt or the United Arab Emirates.
We do not say there is intent in that, because we do not know. We say these are peer markets in size and growth, that the choice fell on some and not others, and that a reader in Riyadh deserves to see the list as it is.
The full calculation
| Sub-score | Value | Weight | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | 3.5 | 33% | 1.155 |
| Support | 7.0 | 27% | 1.890 |
| Features | 7.0 | 20% | 1.400 |
| Refund | 10.0 | 20% | 2.000 |
| Total | 6.445 → 6.4 |
If not this one, then what
Both picks are computed from the scores rather than written by hand: the first is the one directly above it in the ranking, the second the one that beats it by the widest margin on the criterion it loses on.
Namecheap
6.7The service directly above it in the ranking.
$1.83/mo on a 12-month prepayment: $21.96 today, then $5.88/mo
Read the reviewVerpex
7.6What this page offers instead on the criterion it loses on — Buying and price.
$3.00/mo on a 12-month prepayment: $36.00 today, then $6.00/mo
Read the review
Bottom line
Buy from hosting.com if you know its price from somewhere else and accept it, accept a four-year term, and read English. Stay away if you want to see what you will pay before you begin, because its page does not say.
Questions
Did you buy this plan?
No. We read the hosting page, created no account and bought nothing. That is why speed and uptime are outside the score.
What does this plan cost?
The company’s page does not say. We read it and found the words starting from three times with no figure, and not one currency symbol. Our record carries one dollar ninety-nine a month on a four-year term, figures from an earlier round that we could not confirm today.
What do you get on the plan?
A free domain, free managed migration, an SSL certificate, daily backups and email included. Five of the seven items we count, all of them written on the page.
Do I get my money back?
Thirty days, written on the page beside a ninety-nine point nine per cent uptime agreement. We did not read the full terms of service, so we do not know what conditions attach.
Does the company address Arabic?
No. It publishes thirteen entries in two languages covering twelve countries, among them Rwanda, Bangladesh, Kenya and Nigeria, and not one Arab country and no Arabic edition.
What we know, and where from
Every figure on this page, where it came from and when we read it.
| What we say | How we know | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| hosting.com’s hosting page writes the words starting from three times and completes none of them with a figure. We counted what the rendered page contains and found not one currency symbol and no price in any form. Every other company on our table prints a price on the page that sells the plan | we measured it | hosting.com — hosting plans page | |
| The same page writes: backed by proof, not promises — a 99.9 per cent uptime SLA and a 30-day money-back guarantee, we stand behind the service, we don’t just sell it. That sentence is printed on a page that states no price | the company states it | hosting.com — uptime and guarantee copy | |
| The plan carries 5 of the seven items we count, all of them written on the page: free domain name registration, free managed migration, a free SSL certificate, daily backups and email included. There is no content delivery network and no staging on it | the company states it | hosting.com — included features | |
| hosting.com publishes thirteen entries in its alternate-language set, in two languages — English and Spanish — covering 12 countries: Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, the United States, Colombia, Spain and Mexico. Not one Arab country is among them | the company states it | hosting.com hreflang set |