How Good is Hostwinds Hosting?

Our Official Hostwinds Hosting Review

Hostwinds is a US-based hosting company that appears to be a tad notch higher than the rest. Aside from a few bad apples posting a few poor complaints about Hostwinds hosting, they have a lot of good things going for them, which makes them a strong player in the industry.

Best Features of Hostwinds Hosting

First things first, let’s talk about the best features of Hostwinds. These were the best things that I found enjoyable about Hostwinds.

Excellent Prices

Hostwinds has excellent prices. As of 2016, their cheapest hosting plan starts at $3.50 per month. It goes up from there, offering business hosting and reselling hosting. They have a couple of unique hosting plans. They have a budget VPS for $7.50 per month and they have a dedicated Minecraft – as in the video game – hosting option so that players can get with their friends and play games.

Hostwinds Shared Web Hosting Pricing Table

Plan	Basic	Advanced	Ultimate
Price	$5.24/mo	$6.74/mo	$8.24/mo
Bandwidth	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Disk Space	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
No. of Domains	1	4	Unlimited
Feature 1	Solid State Drives	Solid State Drives	Solid State Drives
Feature 2	Free SSL Certificates	Free SSL Certificates	Free SSL Certificates
Feature 3	24/7 Support	24/7 Support	24/7 Support

Hostwinds Managed VPS Hosting Pricing Table

Plan/Price	$12.74/mo	$20.99/mo	$34.49/mo	$42.74/mo	$68.99/mo	$83.99/mo	$123.74/mo	$186.74/mo	$301.49/mo	$431.24/mo
Bandwidth	1 TB	2 TB	2 TB	2 TB	3 TB	4 TB	5 TB	6 TB	8 TB	9 TB
Storage	30 GB	50 GB	75 GB	100 GB	150 GB	200 GB	300 GB	400 GB	500 GB	750 GB
RAM	1 GB	2 GB	4 GB	6 GB	8 GB	12 GB	16 GB	32 GB	64 GB	96 GB
CPU	1 CPU	1 CPU	2 CPU	2 CPU	4 CPU	4 CPU	6 CPU	8 CPU	12 CPU	16 CPU

Hostwinds Cloud Server Hosting Pricing Table

Plan/price	$0.006931/hr	$0.013875/hr	$0.026375/hr	$0.040264/hr	$0.054153/hr	$0.069431/hr	$0.106931/hr	$0.173597/hr	$0.298597/hr	$0.456931/hr
Bandwidth	1 TB	2 TB	2 TB	2 TB	3 TB	4 TB	5 TB	6 TB	8 TB	9 TB
Storage	30 GB	50 GB	75 GB	100 GB	150 GB	200 GB	300 GB	400 GB	500 GB	750 GB
RAM	1 GB	2 GB	4 GB	6 GB	8 GB	12 GB	16 GB	32 GB	64 GB	96 GB
CPU	1 CPU	1 CPU	2 CPU	2 CPU	4 CPU	4 CPU	6 CPU	8 CPU	12 CPU	16 CPU

Many Great Features

The hardware specifications aren’t nearly as high-end as you might expect them to be, but they make up for that with a lower price. Among their features, you can expect to find:

• instant setup options
• free migration
• unlimited FTP accounts
• unlimited email accounts
• unlimited subdomains
• unlimited MySQL accounts
• unlimited bandwidth and disk space

Pair all this with the option to have your hardware upgraded quickly and easily, and you have a solid player in the field of Web hosting providers.

Hosting Options at All Levels

On the surface, it appears that Hostwinds has a wide variety of hosting options – and they do, but not as many as we would like to see. They have shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated server options, and even a cloud server option. Most of these have different levels – they even have a budget VPS option. The one thing that’s really unique is their Minecraft server.

60-Day Money Back Guarantee

While most hosting providers are busy offering a 30-day money-back guarantee, Hostwinds is busy offering a 60-day money-back guarantee. That is double what the industry standard offers a provides. It is unsure if they prorate the money-back guarantee or not their terms of service one as clear as I would’ve liked them to have been. What this means is that you’ll get a good chance to really experience their service for yourself or a full two months to decide if this is a good fit for you.

US-based Hosting

While many companies – even outside the hosting industry – are busy outsourcing their business operations overseas, Hostwinds is still entirely US-based. They’re not just hosting their servers on US soil, their support is US-based. That’s good news for anyone in the U.S. looking for US-based hosting.

US-based Support

All of the support for Hostwinds is based right here in the United States. They have quick and efficient 24/7, year-round service. Although you could get them on the phone, you can also submit a support ticket. According to their terms of service, they will answer all email support tickets within one hour. Our experience says that they will answer email tickets within 15 minutes.

Downsides of Hostwinds Hosting

Not everything that glitters is gold, and that includes us in the hosting industry. Here are the downsides of Hostwinds hosting.

Lack of Managed WordPress Hosting

You would think that with everything that Hostwinds offers that they would offer managed WordPress hosting. There are varying statistics around the Internet about how much of the Internet uses WordPress, but it is a significant chunk. It would serve Hostwinds well if they were to offer this.

Limited Number of Dedicated Server Plans

Hostwinds does offer several different types of hosting plans – shared, VPS, dedicated, and Minecraft. Some of these even have discount options. However, they don’t offer very many options when it comes to some of these plans. Their dedicated server plan only has one option. Their VPS plan has two – a regular one and it discounts one. If they’re going to offer one type of plan, then they can afford to provide different levels of the plan – something Hostwinds does not do.

Terms of Service Were Not Very Clear

I looked at the terms of service and I did not like what I saw. There are many hidden fees that they are enacting on some people that are not clearly spelled out, such as server reboots and OS reloads. There are many instances of them using open-ended language, which leaves things up in the air for interpretation. This can legally enable them to do what they want, no matter what the Terms of Service say.

Bottom Line

Hostwinds has a lot going for them. They appear to be scalable, they have unlimited disk space and bandwidth, unlimited email, and FTP accounts, and more. There aren’t a whole lot of complaints floating around the Internet about how they conduct business. There are some, but they appear to be few and far in between. They don’t seem to have poor customer service, which was the same experience we had with them. All in all, Hostwinds appeared to be a solid player as a hosting provider.