HostRocket Reviews – Good Reviews & Trustworthy Host

HostRocket was founded in 1999; they’re a web hosting service. They currently host over 50,000 websites on their servers.  One of their focal points is to provide their clients with the best customer support possible.  They have a team of network engineers, quality assurance agents, and business analysts to keep up with the fast paced web hosting industry.

When I review any web hosting company I like to look at a number of different aspects of their business.  I like to look at their features and plans that they offer.  Then I like to see how they compare to other companies.  Then, I like to research them and see how good their performance and uptime is.  I also heavily research their customer support and then finally either recommend them or point you elsewhere.

Let this full HostRocket review show you everything they have to offer.  Lets start off by looking at their features.

HostRocket Features

HostRocket provides the latest impressive professional website designs, domain registration, tools and hosting for personal and enterprise portfolios. Individuals can arrange for all these services in a single understandable billing account. They certainly do offer a number of different plans. Their prices are on the higher end for shared hosting plans (see SiteGround, Hostgator, and HostNine), but for VPS and dedicated plans they are actually on par with other hosting companies.

Now, lets take a look at the different plans that HostRocket offers to their clients.

Shared Plans

I do like how with HostRocket you can pay your bill monthly, semi-annually, annually, and bi-annually. Unlike companies like WebHost4Life and PowWeb you’re not forced into paying for your service 1 year in advance.  This is great if you just want to try out their service, but not commit to them for a year or longer.

This shared plan is broken down to fit all sorts of clients including a monthly plan billed at $11.98 a month, a semi-annual plan at $8.99 a month, an annual plan at $7.99 a month and a biennial plan for just $5.99 a month. The common features enjoyed in all plans include unlimited disk space, bandwidth, and number of websites, E-mail accounts and a round the clock technical support. Unique to the annual and biennial plans comes with free setups, and three months and six months of free hosting.  These plans are not SSD, though. Their prices for a shared plans without SSD are actually on the higher end, which I will go over next.

I should note that HostRocket does use the whole unlimited bandwidth offer for disk space, bandwidth, websites supported, email accounts, etc.

SSD Shared Plans

HostRocket does allow you to purchase a SSD shared hosting plan with their company. At this time they do offer 3 different SSD hosting plans. I will go into further details about what is offered with each of these plans. Unlike their shared plans these don’t use the whole unlimited bandwidth sales pitch, which I do like.  The price tag for these plans is on the higher end like RoseHosting and DreamHost.

SSD Premium

This plan is broken down to SSD Premium for 5GB SSD RAID Storage, 200 GB Bandwidth, and 1 free domain name. If you pay for the plan monthly it’s $14.98. The semi annual plan will run you $12.98/month. The annual plan will cost you $11.98/month. The bi-annual plan will cost $9.98/month.

SSD Professional

The SSD Professional comes with 20GB SSD RAID Storage, 300 GB Bandwidth, and 1 free domain name. If you pay for the plan monthly it’s $19.98. The semi annual plan will run you $16.98/month. The annual plan will cost you $15.98/month. The bi-annual plan will cost $13.98/month.

SSD Executive

The SSD Executive comes with 40GB SSD RAID Storage, 400 GB Bandwidth, and 1 free domain name. If you pay for the plan monthly it’s $24.98. The semi-annuall plan will run you $22.98/month. The annual plan will cost you $20.98/month. The bi-annual plan will cost $18.98/month.

VPS/Reseller Plans

This plan provided by HostRocket enables an webmasters to host other websites for his/her own clients, as a reseller for an affordable costs (at a glance). This has been facilitated by the availability and flexibility of HostRocket’s cloud platform. One can be able to provide hosting services to clients of their own by acquiring a cPanel license, currently charged at $14.95 a month.

With this license, a subscriber’s account is able to gain additional features such as:

• The cPanel Control Panel which is an interface intended to simplify tasks for website owners such as managing uploaded web pages and the installation of applications.
• WebHost Manager which is the interface that assists in setting up and modifying accounts for clients and relaying alerts.
• Rebranding which enables the subscriber to come up with new customized nameservers and a company logo.
• Customer account management that enables the administrator who is reselling HostRocket services to easily create and modify accounts, packages, access levels and profiles.

Depending on the 12 different plans you can purchase with HostRocket it’s either going to be $9.95month up to $239.95/month. There is a slider where you can specify how many processor cores you want (1-24), RAM (1 GB – 24 GB), SSD storage (20 GB to 250 GB), and bandwidth of 500 GB to unmetered.

I should note that there is a licensing fee for $14.95/month which does up the cheapest plan to $24.90/month.  This is actually higher than MyHosting and FatCow’s cheapest VPS plans. The prices are right on par with other web hosting companies though. But, once you get to higher VPS plans they are considerably higher like LiquidWeb.

Dedicated Plans

This solution is ideal for webmasters who are not comfortable with being in a shared hosting environment and require resources in terms of server hardware, storage and bandwidth dedicated to their services solely. They have the opportunity to have this on HostRocket for $119 a month for 12 cores and 100TB bandwidth to $169 a month for 24 cores.

However, the kicker is you now have to pay $29.95/month for cPanel. This is double what they charge for their VPS plans. Why? This makes the price higher than other companies by about $30-$50 per month.

Other Services

Other services that customers can add to their existing HostRocket accounts include dedicated IP Addresses at only $2 a month, 256bit SSL Certificates for $99 for two years and occasional 50% sale offers at certain times of the year, Domain registration at $20 per annual (kind of expensive).  I do recommend NameCheap for purchasing domain names, though. Domain transfers are available at $20 per transfer and Remote back-ups can be done at an affordable rate of $5 per full or incremental back-up.

Overall, HostRocket does offer a lot of different plans. Their shared and SSD plans are actually quite high. At a glance their VPS plans look cheaper, but if you want to add cPanel this makes them more expensive than other hosting companies. Lastly, their dedicated plans are more expensive than other hosting companies. But, if paying a little extra is worth it to you; it might be worth it if they have good uptime, performance, and customer support.

HostRocket Uptime & Performance

Uptime

HostRocket does have a very good uptime policy. They claim that your website will be up 99.5% of the time. This is stated right on their knowledgebase page. If you ever have issues with your website being down for a extended amount of time HostRocket ask that you contact them and they will credit your account accordingly.  Also, HostRocket does have a feature on their website that shows you the status of all their servers.  This is a nice added touch that a lot of webmasters have grown to appreciate over the years.

A lot of other web hosting companies like GreenGeeks, InMotion, and BlueHost actually beat HostRocket’s uptime policy though. Those three companies all have a SLA agreement page that states your website will be up 99.9% of the time.

From the research I have done on HostRocket it doesn’t seem like there are all that many complaints about downtime. There are a very small percentage of webmasters that have complained about their uptime. I don’t have any issues with their uptime and most webmasters don’t either.

Performance

Whenever you sign up with a web hosting company you want to make sure they have all the features needed to handle your website. In terms of features HostRocket does have everything you should need to handle your website. However, one thing a lot of host lack is the right hardware to handle your websites. This is no problem at all with HostRocket.

Since you are paying a little extra with HostRocket my hopes for their performance is very high. For the most part they do deliver great performance. Since they are using SSD hosting you can expect that your websites are going to run smoothly. They have passed my test and their performance is quite good.

I have done about 2 hours and research on HostRocket and haven’t found to many webmasters that complain about performance issues. So it’s safe to say that you shouldn’t experience any real performance issues with HostRocket.

HostRocket Customer Service

You’re probably wanting to know how good is HostRocket’s customer support. Customer support is one thing that I have learned to rely on over the years. Having a lack of customer support can really break a web hosting company. I have personally learned this over the years.  Just look at my 1and1 and MochaHost review if you don’t believe me. Since we are in the technology era it’s important to be able to contact someone at HostRocket 24/7.

I am not going to argue the fact that they don’t have 24/7 customer support, because they do have it. However, there is no live chat support which is my preferred way to contact my host if I need to. They do have a ticketing system which you can contact them at too. For the most part they do answer your tickets pretty quickly (usually in 2-4 hours).

From the research I have done it looks like their customers are very happy with their customer support though.  In fact, I have read various reviews where webmasters are praising them for their customer support.  I would like to see HostRocket add in a live chat feature in the upcoming years though.  Overall, the support is great.

HostRocket Summary

So here is the question you have all been wanting to know. Do I recommend that you sign up with HostRocket. Yes, HostRocket is a dependable web hosting company.  They are more expensive than other companies, but not by much. This has worked for MDDHosting which is a company I have reviewed in the past and do recommend. The performance and uptime are amazing with HostRocket.  You’re most likely never going to have issues there.  Customer support is great, but does not have a live chat feature.  It’s all phone and ticket system support based.  All and all, they are a great hosting company, though.

However, if you’re looking for a dependable hosting company for your shared, VPS, and dedicated needs I would highly recommend that you read my InMotion hosting review. I have personally done business with this company for 6+ years now. They are cheaper and have live chat support. Thanks for taking the time to read my HostRocket review.

I started this special section for HostRocket because I wanted to show you the research I have done on them. I really believe this helps add creditability behind my HostRocket review. I really spend several hours reading all kinds of content on each web hosting company I review. This helps me get a better understanding of what other webmasters are saying about their experience with them.

Based on the content I read I then file it in my positive, negative, or neutral section. I like to write a short summary of the piece of content I have found so you can view it all here at tbwhs.com. I always try to update my research whenever I find new content on HostRocket. Please take a couple minutes to look over the research I have done on their company.

Interviews are a great way to get some feedback on any hosting company. Since I have always been a fan of interviews I like to contact webmasters to find out what it’s like to host with HostRocket. I email their clients and ask them if they wouldn’t mind doing am email interview on their experience with HostRocket. If they agree to it I then publish the interview in this section.

If you have experience with HostRocket I am looking for you. Please feel free to contact me through my contact page or you can always send me a tweet @tbwhs.