WebHostingBuzz is a world-class web hosting provider that has more than 13 years of experiences in the hosting industry. Since its inception in 2002, it now has more than 30,000 customers from over 140 countries around the world.
Growing based on customer feedbacks, this web host claims to deliver the top-level hosting service for Drupal running, being as competitive as all the official Drupal sponsors.
To figure out whether this web host is a good Drupal hosting provider as it promises, we have made a WebHostingBuzz review in the following, mainly focusing on its cost-effectiveness, technical support, hosting reliability and page loading speed.
WebHostingBuzz Pros
As for the Drupal hosting solution, WebHostingBuzz has done great in terms of Drupal compatibility, Drupal hosting charges, upgrade options and basic hosting features.
100% Drupal Compatibility
After checking the wiki area and forum of WebHostingBuzz, we have found that this web host now utilizes the PHP version 5.3.x, MySQL version 5.x and Apache version 2.x. All of these have fully met the technical requirements for proper installation and running of Drupal.
Besides, this web host runs suPHP as PHP for the increased level of hosting security, and allows you to increase the PHP memory limit from 32 MB to 128 MB using the php.ini file.
Affordable Hosting Charges
WebHostingBuzz has three Drupal packages named as Light, Power and Premier. You can purchase them at the price of $4.95/mo, $6.95/mo and $9.95/mo effectively. As compared with many other Drupal hosting providers, this level of hosting charges are just moderate, which can be afforded by the majority of Drupal users.
Multiple Upgrade Options
Different Drupal hosting packages of WebHostingBuzz comes with different allocations of disk space and monthly bandwidth. Therefore, if your package is the basic one and your Drupal site continues growing, you have enough room to upgrade your plan for more server resources.
Even, if the shared web hosting cannot meet your needs, you can also upgrade to the VPS hosting and the dedicated server hosting without any hassle
Rich Basic Hosting Features
Just like all the other Drupal web hosts, this company also offers all the basic hosting features to meet your needs, including cPanel control panel, 1-click Drupal installer, free domain name, free website migration service, daily backup service, shared SSL, SSH and many more.
WebHostingBuzz Cons
Poor Money Back Guarantee
WebHostingBuzz claims to offer the 45 days money back guarantee, with which you can receive a refund if you cancel your account within the initial 45 calendar days. However, this policy is only valid for the web hosting and reseller hosting. If you go with the VPS hosting, you can only get a 30 days money back guarantee.
Besides, the refunds do not apply to SSL certificates, dedicated servers, WHMCS, dedicated IP addresses, Blesta, cPanel and domain registration related fees.
Less Responsive Technical Support
WebHostingBuzz claims to offer the 24/7 technical support via multiple support channels, including live chat, email and the ticket system. However, unlike many other web hosts those directly showcase their live chat button at every webpage of their official site so that customers can start the online conversation easily, WebHostingBuzz simply hides this button at its support page.
Besides, this web host claims to offer the phone support. However, after entering its support page to go for the hotline number, we have found a statement that the phone support is currently unavailable. This kind of contradiction is really frustrating.
As for the support efficiency, we do not think this web host has achieved a responsive technical support after checking this aspect personally. The email and ticket responses take about 2 hours and the live chat response takes around half an hour.
Fake Unlimited Hosting
This web host claims to offer unlimited Drupal hosting with no restrictions on the disk space, monthly data transfer and email delivery. However, this is just a promotional trick. After checking its Acceptable Use Policy, we have found that it actually places some limitations.
- The data under your account can not take up over 250,000 inodes on disk.
- Drupal or other software cannot use more than 35% of the whole server resources for over 60 seconds.
- The number of sending emails for each domain cannot be more than 500 each hour.
If you break these rules, you can either upgrade your hosting plan or face the penalty of account frozen.
Poor Hosting Performance and Uptime Record
In order to test the uptime and server responding time of WebHostingBuzz, we have got a newly-created Drupal site hosted with it, and started an online testing using Pingdom.
According to the result, this web host has achieved a 98.56% uptime for the last 30 days, along with 5 downtimes that last for around 13 hours. As for the server response speed, our sample Drupal site requires around 500 ms on average.
To be frank, the resting results for WebHostingBuzz uptime and speed are not excellent as compared with many other Drupal hosting providers. As researched online, some quality Drupal hosts can guarantee at least 99.99% uptime and a short server response time that is less than 270 ms on average.
Summary – Is WebHostingBuzz Good for Drupal
It is true that this web host achieves a 100% Drupal compatibility and offers multiple cost-effective Drupal hosting packages. However, when it comes to the support, hosting speed and uptime, it fails to do a good job. In this case, if you are looking for Drupal hosting, we do not recommend WebHostingBuzz, but one of the following listed three hosting providers who provide top-level Drupal hosting solutions.
