FreeHostia Review – Users Speak About Hosting With Them

Name: FreeHostia
Plans: Free, Cloud, VPS, and Dedicated.
Website: www.freehostia.com
Summary: FreeHostia isn’t bad, but I don’t recommend them. They have some issues they need to sort out. This FreeHostia review shows what their customers are saying.

FreeHostia is a host that was started in 2005. They aim to provide hosting at a low cost. FreeHostia is built entirely on the cluster-based web hosting.  They do offer a free hosting plan like AwardSpace and Ultra Web Hosting, but they do have paid plans.

In this FreeHostia review I am going to discuss:

• Features.
• Uptime.
• Performance.
• Customer Support.
• At the end of this FreeHostia review, I write a summary either recommending them or pointing you elsewhere. So, let’s get started and see what all FreeHostia has to offer.

FreeHostia Features

Free Plan

Many hosts are offering free hosting with no ads. This is a good business model because it doesn’t cost you anything and you can always upgrade to a paid plan at a later date. FreeHostia has a free plan called “Chocolate”. It comes with these features:

• 5 Hosted Domains.
• 200 MB disk space.
• 6 GB monthly traffic.
• 3 email accounts.
• 1 MySQL database.
• 10 MG MySQL storage.

Cloud Plans

FreeHostia offers 4 cloud plans. Here are the details:

• Watercircle. $2.95/month. 10 domains. 2 GB disk space. 50 GB monthly transfer.
• Lovebeat. $4.95/month. 20 domains. 2 TB disk space. 1 TB monthly transfer.
• Wildhoney. $7.95/month. Unlimited domains. Unlimited disk space & unlimited monthly transfer.
• Supernatural. $9.95/month. Unlimited domains. Unlimited disk space & unlimited monthly transfer.

FreeHostia does use the whole unlimited sales pitch though on their Wildhoney and Supernatural plan.  This could be problematic once you start getting an influx of traffic to your site.

VPS Plans

KVM Servers

• Fiber. $14.00/month. 1 CPU core. 1024 MB RAM. 20 GB disk space. 300 GB monthly traffic. 1 dedicated IP.
• Cyber. $26.00/month. 2 CPU core. 2048 MB RAM. 40 GB disk space. 800 GB monthly traffic. 1 dedicated IP.
• Hyper. $46.00/month. 3 CPU core. 4096 MB RAM. 80 GB disk space. 1.2 TB monthly traffic. 1 dedicated IP.
• Sniper. $86.00/month. 4 CPU core. 8192 MB RAM. 160 GB disk space. 1.8 TB monthly traffic. 1 dedicated IP.

OpenVZ VPS

• OVZ01. $14.00/month. 1 CPU core. 1024 MB RAM. 30 GB disk space. 1 TB monthly traffic. 1 dedicated IP.
• OVZ02. $26.00/month. 1 CPU core. 2048 MB RAM. 50 GB disk space. 2 TB monthly traffic. 1 dedicated IP.
• OVZ03. $36.00/month. 2 CPU core. 3072 MB RAM. 70 GB disk space. 3 TB monthly traffic. 1 dedicated IP.
• OVZ04. $46.00/month. 2 CPU core. 4096 MB RAM. 90 GB disk space. 4 TB monthly traffic. 1 dedicated IP.

Semi-dedicated

• Boabab. $29.95/month. 20% max CPU usage. 160 MB PostgreSQL databases storage. 5 cron jobs. Unlimited domains, disk space, bandwidth, email accounts, 1 dedicated IP.
• Sequoia. $49.95/month. 40% max CPU usage. 300 MB PostgreSQL databases storage. 10 cron jobs. Unlimited
• domains, disk space, bandwidth, email accounts, 1 dedicated IP.

Dedicated

• Arctic 1. $69.95/month. 2x 1.8 GHz. 2x 250 GB. 10 TB monthly bandwidth. 4 GB DDR3.
• Arctic 2. $84.95/month. 4x 2.40 GHz. 1x 256 GB (SSD). 10 TB monthly bandwidth. 8 GB DDR3.
• Arctic 3. $109.95/month. 8x 2.40 GHz. 1x 512 GB (SSD). 10 TB monthly bandwidth. 8 GB DDR3.
• Atlantic 1. $109.95/month. 6x 2.1 GHz. 2x 500 GB. 11 TB monthly bandwidth. 8 GB DDR3.
• Atlantic 2. $129.95/month. 12x 2.1 GHz. 4x 500 GB. 12 TB monthly bandwidth. 16 GB DDR3.
• Pacific 1. $149.95/month. 4x 2.1 GHz. 2x 512 GB (SSD). 10 TB monthly bandwidth. 16 GB DDR4.
• Pacific 2. $149.95/month. 4x 2 GHz. 2x 512 GB (SSD). 10 TB monthly bandwidth. 16 GB DDR3.
• Pacific 3. $229.95/month. 8x 2 GHz. 2x 512 GB (SSD). 12 TB monthly bandwidth. 16 GB DDR3.
• Pacific 4. $269.95/month. 10x 1.80 GHz. 2x 1 TB (SSD). 20 TB monthly bandwidth. 16 GB DDR4.
• Pacific 5. $339.95/month. 16x 2.60 GHz. 2x 512 GB (SSD). 15 TB monthly bandwidth. 32 GB DDR3.
• Pacific 6. $399.95/month. 20x 2.60 GHz. 2x 1 TB GB (SSD). 20 TB monthly bandwidth. 64 GB DDR4.

I do like how FreeHostia does offer a plethora of dedicated plans like LiquidWeb and Turnkey Internet.  Their prices are reasonable, too.

Domain Names

FreeHostia does offer free domain names with their Wildhoney and Supernatural plans. Optionally, you can buy .com, .net .org, .info, etc. for $9.95 to $10.95 a year. These are on the cheaper end. The prices for their domain names do not go up like GoDaddy. However, I do prefer to buy all my domain names with Namecheap because they are very cheap and easy to work with.

FreeHostia Uptime & Performance

Uptime

So, how good is FreeHostia’s uptime?

FreeHostia does have an uptime policy which is stated in their TOS.  It does state that their servers will be up 99.9% of the time.  They state they will notify you 24 hours prior to any scheduled maintenance.  You could have downtime when they are performing maintenance.  However, there isn’t anything on what happens if their uptime falls below 99.9%.

Research shows there have been problems with uptime.  This has been stated by several customers at WebHostingReviews.com.

Performance

How good is FreeHostia’s performance?

On some of FreeHostia’s plans, they do use SSD hard drives. They do use cloud hosting on their plans which does help their performance. I ran some test which shows how fast their servers reply from various locations:

After 9 lookups, the average response time of your name server dns1.freehostia.com is 83.53 milliseconds

Also, I ran some test which shows metric on how quickly their site responds:

Research does show that performance shouldn’t be an issue with FreeHostia. Couldn’t find much information about people complaining about their lacking performance with FreeHostia.

FreeHostia Customer Support

How good is FreeHostia’s customer support?

It’s a gray area for me. Here is why.

I contacted FreeHostia because I had questions on their support. Wanted to know all the ways I could get ahold of them. I filled out their form and waited four days and never got a response. They didn’t even bother to tell me if they have a live chat, support ticket, phone support.

I don’t believe FreeHostia has live chat support.  I know they do have a ticketing system.  FreeHostia states that they do respond to them in 1 hour or less.
FreeHostia does have a forum http://forum.freehostia.com/ It looks like they are pretty active on answering their customers’ questions.

Research does show they have some complaints on hostjury.com and WebHostingReviews.com. There isn’t a lot of feedback on their customer support, though. Only a handful of complaints, though.

FreeHostia Review Summary

Do I recommend FreeHostia? No. Does this mean they are a horrible host? No. First, I do like how they offer cloud hosting with all their plans. This is a nice feature. Their prices are on par with other hosts. But, customer support didn’t even bother replying to my message. Also, other sites have stated that customer support is nonexistent. Therefore, I am waiting for more feedback on FreeHostia and can not recommend them at this time.

Shared Plan Recommendation

I recommend WebHostingHub over Freehostia for shared hosting.  I’ve done business with them for almost a decade now.

VPS & Dedicated Recommendations

I recommend InMotionHosting and RoseHosting for VPS and dedicated plans.  They might be a little bit more expensive but have a better quality service.