HostPapa Review

HostPapa is a budget website hosting provider that strongly focuses on customer service and green energy. The entire company’s infrastructure is run using renewable energy resources, which helps make a significant impact on carbon reduction, given the large volume of power necessary to run a data center. Though based in Canada, HostPapa is a leading budget hosting service provider in the United States and Europe.

Green

Throughout this HostPapa review I will share many features, but this one is the closest to my heart. HostPapa’s use of exclusively green, renewable energy makes it a fairly unique web hosts. They were among the first web hosts to make a commitment to utilizing green energy. This is done by promoting the development of wind and solar energy resources, and by purchase of green energy certificates to offset the amount of power that is used in datacenters and offices. This puts equivalent clean energy back into the electrical grid, which reduces the company’s carbon footprint.

Features

Web Hosting with HostPapa entails a great number of features, and is sold at a flat rate. At the time of writing, they offer plans for as low as $3.95 a month, and none of its plans run above $7.95 per month. Just like other hosts, they offer a free domain for life (as long as you keep hosting with them), which is a perk seldom offered by many webhosting companies. They allow you to host an unlimited number of domains, offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, promise 99.9% uptime, provide the industry standard cPanel control panel software, FTP access, and of course – power your server with 100% green energy.

In terms of technical specifications, they offer all of the features that one could expect from a web-hosting provider geared towards individuals and small businesses. An account comes with unlimited disk space and bandwidth, which means that there are no worries about exceeding bandwidth caps or disk space limits imposed by some budget hosts (given you are a regular user). E-mail services come with each plan, and every plan is entitled to create an unlimited number of e-mail addresses. E-mail can be accessed by POP3 or IMAP, and they let you use SMTP for sending messages, virus scanning, catch-all email accounts, Spam Assassin spam filtering, and custom MX records. HostPapa has all the standard features that one could expect in terms of domains, plus one very lucrative addition: free transfers from other registrars. This is a lucrative feature that is uncommon among most budget hosting providers. Customers also benefit from allowances to an unlimited number of MySQL  5.1 databases and phpMyAdmin access, PHP5 support, Fantastico (which allows one-click install of over 50 web applications), Perl, SSI, Frontpage 2000 and 2002 extensions, custom cron jobs, custom error pages, and SSL support. In addition, users can password protect certain directories on their hosting plan, and tweak their own .htaccess files. Customers benefit from a wide range of log analyzers that help crunch the numbers on visitor metrics. They provide Web Statistics, Analog, Webalizer, access to raw logs, AWStats, and error logging.

Ease of Use

In addition, HostPapa makes it incredibly easy to set up and manage a website without much prior experience. They use cPanel and Fantastico to provide a number of instantly-installable web applications and a suite of website building software. Users can build websites easily with software like SohoLaunch – which provides the user a what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface for the creation of professional-quality web pages. You can choose from hundreds of design templates to get started with, and they make it easy to install and configure popular web apps such as: WordPress, Joomla, Guestbook, and many, many more.  They support a wide variety of digital media technologies such as: Flash, Downloadable video and audio, Real Audio and Vidoe Support as well as Macromedia Shockwave and MIDI files.

Plus, they are very friendly to use for businesses looking to establish a storefront online. They equip you with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) hosting on request, allowing the business to securely handle financial transactions online without risk of exposing sensitive customer information. Dedicated IP addresses – which further enhance the security and trustworthiness of an online retailer – are available for a small yearly fee. Hosting plans are also PayPal Merchant compatible, which opens many doors with regard to customer access and payment alternatives. Automatic installation of leading software packages used to manage digital storefronts, such as OS Commerce and ZenCart Shopping Cart are simple to install, a matter of few clicks really.

High Performance

HostPapa uses a powerful hosting infrastructure to host your website. They use high performance, Linux-based servers behind triple-redundant firewall systems in order to keep your site served fast and securely. All servers are monitored 24/7, and a proactive network support team is always ready to step in if something appears to be going wrong with the hardware in the data center. Servers are serviced by multihomed OC48 and Gigabit fiber optic network connections, which assures the fastest possible transfer of data to your website’s users. Each server is connected to a UPS power backup system, which will keep the site online even in the event of a power failure at the data center. Of course, every server uses RAID technology to constantly back up all files stored on the web server, providing redundancy and peace of mind.

Support

In terms of support, they are quite serious. HostPapa offers around the clock telephone, e-mail, and live chat support. Even better, they provide multilingual support services, which increases the accessibility of support services to a wide range of customers. In addition to all of this, they have taken great care in cultivating a huge variety of knowledge base articles that explain how to create and manage a website, and explain the various features and functions that are found in one’s hosting plan. Furthermore, they are constantly adding to an array of instructional video tutorials that explain concepts or procedures that might appear confusing at first glance, ensuring that you can easily complete tasks that you otherwise might depend on customer support for.

Overview

HostPapa is one of the easiest to use and best web hosting providers that you can find, and is dedicated to making your websites the most profitable and highest preforming websites of its kind. With low rates, impeccable features, and one of the best support teams behind you, HostPapa is definitely worth considering and the current users and the many positive HostPapa reviews may be proof of the quality of their services.