eHost is a large shared hosting provider that has been growing aggressively in the recent years by offering cheap yet easy-to-use hosting services. Due to the fast growth in these years, the company is now hosting more than one million domains with its low-cost shared hosting plan.
Based in the US, eHost is claimed to be established in 1996, which means it has been in business for 20 years. Since the establishment, it has been offering a single plan without any upgrade option like VPS or dedicated server.
In this eHost review, we will present the pros and cons of the company’s shared hosting plan to you. But firstly, please read the ratings below for a general impression about the most important aspects that you should care about.
Pros of eHost Web Hosting Service
eHost is fairly good when it comes to the cost-effectiveness, reliability and support resources, thus it can meet the basic hosting needs completely.
All-in-one plan at affordable prices
eHost offers only one plan which is named Premium. This shows the company’s concentration on shared hosting, while at the same time, it also means the scalability is strictly limited.
Premium is priced from $5.5/mo for the initial term, but nowadays eHost has taken a 50% discount into effect, so that the price decreases to $2.75/mo for first-time users. This low price is available for the 36-month billing cycle, and if you select another billing cycle among 24/12/1 month(s), the payments will be $3.49/mo, $4.99/mo and $6.99/mo.
In terms of the price, you should also pay attention to the renewal prices which double the initial payments. The renewal costs for the mentioned billing cycles are $5.98/mo, $7.98/mo, $9.98/mo and $13.98/mo, which are a little bit high for a standard shared hosting plan.
Easy-to-use features
eHost provides nearly all the commonly used features in its hosting plan in order to make the plan a solution to everyone who needs entry-level web hosting. All of the following things are available.
- A free .net, .org, .com or .biz domain name for the life of your account.
- $100 credits for Bing/Yahoo paid ads.
- Unlimited resources including disk space, bandwidth, MySQL databases and POP3 accounts.
- Unlimited domains hosted on one account.
- A free website builder with over 1000 templates.
- cPanel control panel in which you can set up domains, websites, emails, etc. in an easy way.
- QuickInstall auto installer which supports the one-click installation of over 70 scripts.
- PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, CGI, SSI, jailed SSH, and Cron Jobs.
45-day refund
To get rid of the worries of trying its hosting plan, eHost promises to refund all the hosting fees minus the domain registration fee to the first-time customers who decide to leave within the first 45 days.
This guarantee is great, while the following facts are still worth attention.
- 45 days are long enough for trials in most cases, but some leading providers like InMotion have already made the 90-day refund guarantee available.
- eHost doesn’t provide refunds after 45 days.
- Refunds are only available for payments via PayPal and credit cards. If you pay your bills via other methods like checks, credits, instead of refunds, will be issued.
Good uptime
eHost houses all servers in a data center which is located in Houston, Texas and owned by CyrusOne. The servers, networks and data center are claimed to be reliable, so the company guarantees 99.9% uptime for all customers.
Fortunately, due to the utilization of a UPS power system, multi-homed networks and 24×7 network monitoring, eHost is able to get the guarantee fulfilled, which is shown in the monitoring results blow. You can hardly find a complaint about the company’s service uptime on the Internet.
Rich support resources
Like the majority of shared hosting providers, eHost offers varied resources for technical support. When you are stuck with a server issue, a downtime or the confusion about a feature, you can seek a solution in any of the following ways.
- Search the question in the knowledgebase.
- Describe your problem in an email and send it to eHost technical support team.
- Talk to a support agent on the phone.
- Chat with a support agent online.
Cons of eHost Web Hosting Service
eHost needs to make great improvements in the hosting speed, security and support quality before it can be ranked among the top shared web hosts.
Very low speed
You cannot get any information about the shared hosting speed of eHost on the official site except that the company’s servers are load balanced in order to deliver high performance. The server configurations and the bandwidth providers are not detailed. Besides, the company doesn’t provide speed tests.
Considering this situation, we have monitored the response time of eHost servers by ourselves with our monitoring system. The results surprise us much because the servers need at least 1000ms to respond to requests. The time even doubles during peak times, which means over 2000ms for server responses.
This speed is much too slow because you may wait over 10 seconds for a webpage to load in full. The slowness will eventually lead to a bad user experience, little traffic, and low conversions.
Complaints about the technical support
As discussed above, eHost provides rich resources for technical support. However, the support quality should also be considered when judging the company’s competitiveness. And in this aspect, there are some complaints found.
- It is generally accepted that eHost support agents reply chats, phone calls and emails in a timely manner. But different voices still exist telling that the support team doesn’t show professionalism or patience when faced with severe server problems, for example, files cannot be uploaded.
- The company doesn’t provide technical assistance on the installation, configuration and troubleshooting of third-party scripts.
- Occasionally the company has issues with the installation of SSL certificates. If you meet such an issue, you might not enjoy prompt support. Some customers even got hang up.
Imperfect security
eHost does back up the hosted websites automatically on a regular basis. However, the frequency for backups is once per week, which is much less secure than the leading web hosts’ daily or nightly backups.
Besides, eHost only stores one backup copy on their servers, so you cannot get any earlier copies from the host if your recent changes have caused errors.
Therefore, no matter which size your website has, you must not rely on eHost to guarantee the security of your website files and databases, or you might suffer a huge loss. You have to make manual backups regularly and store the backup copies locally or on a cloud service.
Even though, it would be better if eHost can keep daily backups of customers’ websites like many of its competitors do.
Conclusion – Good for Personal Blogs But Not the Best
Concluding from our monitoring results, trials and the customer reviews, we would say that the web hosting plan offered by eHost is acceptable if you just need a basic solution to set up a personal blog. The price is competitive, and the uptime is good.
However, if you want to improve your online presence with a business-class hosting plan, eHost is far away from being a good choice due to the unbearably slow speed. The absence of VPS and dedicated servers is also a reason not to host your business or eCommerce site with this web host because you will want enough room for growth.
If you like choices or want a faster hosting environment, you can turn to any of the following web hosts which have maintained a reputation for their great performance and quality technical support.
