If you’re looking for fast, fully managed dedicated hosting, Hostwinds is your best bet. While it’s not the cheapest option on the market, it does score highest among the cheap providers for reliability. Customer support is also excellent, even though it’s not always accessible by phone.
Features
Hostwinds’ dedicated servers are fully managed, which means you don’t necessarily need a ton of tech experience to set them up. You do have the ability to access your website’s cPanel, manually add firewalls to your site, manage your domains and install OpenLitespeed for no additional cost to optimize your server speed. Hostwinds accounts come with an uptime guarantee. If at any point your server is down, you can contact the company for an account credit for the entire day—even if it’s only down for five minutes.
You do have the option to pay for unmetered outbound bandwidth, which puts no cap on how many visitors your site can handle per month, but this level of bandwidth will cost you an additional $750 per month. If your site isn’t getting hit with a ton of traffic, you may prefer to estimate your monthly usage to lower your monthly bill.
Pricing
Your Hostwinds dedicated server will vary in cost depending on the specifications. The cheapest package is $82 per month, but it can get as high as $1,436 per month depending on how much storage you purchase, the amount of RAM and outbound bandwidth, the number of IP addresses and whether you want to use Windows as your operating system (OS).
In addition to the base price for your dedicated server, you’ll want to consider add-ons. Hostwinds charges for some services that competitors may include for free, such as daily cloud backups ($1 per month), WHOIS privacy protection ($5 per domain per year), distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection ($50 per month) and SSL certificates ($75 or $150 per year per certificate).
Customer Service
Hostwinds has customer service agents available 24/7 through live chat and ticket support. While there’s technically a phone number, it’s meant for sales rather than ongoing technical support. If you want phone support, you don’t have to compromise. Plenty of other providers, such as GoDaddy and Mochahost, provide technical support by phone 24/7 on top of the options provided by Hostwinds.
Reputation
Hostwinds has an excellent reputation across the board. While not every last customer will have an identical experience, the overwhelming majority of people who work with Hostwinds praise its customer service as being not just speedy, but adept and competent in fixing any problems that may arise—even if they’re solving those issues in a live chat session most of the time. Speeds and upload times also receive high ratings from small business owners.
Learn more: Read our full Hostwinds review.