Imhosted provides website hosting and reseller services to their customers from all over the world. They have been in business since 2000. Being in the business for more than a decade, they offer their customers with cheap hosting solutions in maintaining their online presence. The main goal of the company is to provide top-notch website solutions to small and medium sized businesses. They focus on setting a new standards in customer care and website hosting. They are a U.S. based company who has datacenters in Dallas and Atlanta.
They present their customers with scalable and reliable online solutions to their dedicated customer support and technical team. Imhosted is boasting its quality data centers and feature packed products and services. Through the years, the hosting company is said to have been grown as one of the premiers when it comes to website hosting services. Although the company seems to present itself as a reliable solution, let’s take a look whether it’s good to do business or not with it.
In this Imhosted review I will go over all of the features they have to offer. Then I will take a look at their performance and uptime. I will then review their customer support. At the end of this review I will then write a summary of them.
Imhosted Features
While reviewing Imhosted it was kind of tough to find all the products and services they offer. There is no easy to navigate page which shows all their plans that they offer. Really, I get the impression that they are a newbie hosting company, because stuff is very hard to use on their site. But I have been monitoring their site for 4 months and nothing is fixed! I thought I might have caught them at the wrong time, but I guess not? Possibly, they are going through maintenance or something, I don’t know! Instead you click on “services” and then get a page that shows you a smorgasbord of their services. See the image down below to see what I am talking about.
You see how there are no images or anything to click on? Just text and I guess it’s up to you to click “Shared Hosting”, “Economy Hosting”, “Unlimited Domain Hosting”, or “Advanced Hosting”.
Shared Hosting
They offer two different plans under their “Shared Hosting Plans” link. The two plans there are are “Simple Plan” and “Power Plan”. The details are down below:
Simple Plan
The simple plan appears to just be a simple plan as the name suggest. With this plan you can use 10 GB of disk space, 100 GB of monthly bandwidth, and only 1 domain name for this server. It’s price tag is 4.95/month. It might be a good option for first time site owners, but the fact is you can get more disk space, monthly transfer, and host 25 domain names with WebHostingHub.
Power Plan
This plan is a step up from the simple plan. With this plan it comes with unlimited disk space and data transfer. As you’ll soon find out in my reviews I am not a huge fan of unlimited. I like to know the actual number of resources I can use. Also, as mentioned in my customer service part of this review I was going to jump on live chat and find out what the actual numbers are, but their live chat button isn’t there, so I guess I have no way to ask them how many resources I can use?
Unlimited Hosting Plan
Next, they offer “unlimited hosting plans”. At first I thought these were shared plans with unlimited disk space or something, but it turns out they are reseller plans. For instance, Gold Plan 1, Gold Plan 2, and Gold Plan 3 are the plans they offer. The details are down below for these plans:
Gold 1
The Gold Plan 1 is $30 a month. It comes with 25 GB of storage, 4 TB of monthly bandwidth, unlimited domain name support, and reseller management interface.
Gold 2
The Gold Plan 1 is $40 a month. It comes with 30 GB of storage, 5 TB of monthly bandwidth, unlimited domain support, and reseller management interface.
Gold 3
The Gold Plan 1 is $70 a month. It comes with 40 GB of storage, 6 TB of monthly bandwidth, unlimited domain support, and reseller management interface.
I should note that each plan comes with 128 bit SSL shared server support, pre-installed scripts, anti-spam systems, and Quad-Core XEON (8 CPU processors).
Java/ JSP Web Hosting
The Java/ JSP web hosting plan is for users that want to run their hosting on JSP Tomcat servers. On their site they actually state that if you’re not ready for a dedicated server you might want to check out this plan. I was expecting to see something in the range of $150-$300 per month. I was sadly wrong its only $14/month?
With this plan you get 100 GB of disk space, 250 GB of data transfer, and unlimited domain support. Really, I have no clue how they came up with the word dedicated server, because this isn’t anything close to that. In fact, most VPS are 10 times more resource rich?
Control Panel
According to Imhosted they use their own control panel. It’s stated as being an “award winning web-base control panel”. While they do have live demo links on their website if you click any of them it goes to a broken page? See the screenshot down below:
One thing is for certain, things are not properly organized or even functional on their website? Can you really trust a company like this? So, already my hopes with Imhosted are slowly starting to fade.
On September 8th of 2015 I did check their demo control panel again. This time it loaded up and to my surprise they are using cPanel? It says right on their website that they use their own inhouse control panel.
Imhosted Uptime & Performance
Uptime
Imhosted has a guarantee that your website will be up 100% of the time. It is proudly displayed on their homepage. It’s been said that if you see the words 100% you should run because this isn’t really a realistic number, that even the most reliable web hosting companies can back up. I have seen other companies like MochaHost use this tactic too. So why does Imhosted make these outrageous claims? Marketing. Unfortunately, many webmasters are reporting that they are experiencing lots of downtime. So this makes these claims of 100% uptime completely false. But, if you dig down a little deeper they make claims of 99.998% uptime on their “uptime” page? Here is a look at what some webmasters are saying about their uptime:
Performance
Yes, performance matters and with Imhosted you’re just not going to get it. In fact, their servers run very slow compared to a lot of other web hosting companies. So, if your interested in them to run your simple WordPress site, chances are your going to be sadly let down. Possibly, Imhosted overloads their shared servers with thousands and thousands of websites (much like GoDaddy). Forget any claims about load balancing, because that isn’t going to do anything when you have 1,000 websites hosted on the same server. You’re simply trusting 1,000 people and that none of them are going to do anything that requires more resources. One bad apple can screw it up for everyone.
Imhosted Customer Service
Customer support is a comedy show.
Customer service with Imhosted is below average. They outsource their customer support to India. But, what is actually quite funny is Imhosted states that they have 24/7 customer support. I was going to chat with them and see how much bandwidth you could expect on a shared server, since they claim it’s unlimited. Thus, I went to their contact page and found the text “Opening Hours: 24 hours, 7 days per week.” Then there was some text below it that stated to click the button down below. Funny thing is there is no button down below!
I searched their site for awhile and found that they don’t have a telephone number to call. So I guess calling them is out of the question. They do have a support ticket. So, I guess since the first two options are not going to work you can always send them a ticket to get your questions answered. But, webmasters are reporting that it takes 2-4 days to get a response (sometimes sooner), but when you do get a response it’s really not all that helpful. I simply can’t trust my websites with a support team in India to get back with me about any questions or concerns I have with my website. Then, if you throw in the added stress of a client baring down on you to get a site back up in running, chances are your in for some sleepless nights. It just seems like too much work to me!
Imhosted Summary
Avoid Imhosted at all cost if you want to reduce migraines and lots of stress. There are so many things that are not even functional on their own site! Can you really trust a company that can’t update their own site? Don’t go for them when you’re looking for a reseller services or a hosting solution. They claim to have 100% uptime which is a huge red flag with me. Other webmasters are reporting that this is not really the case either. Performance wise I don’t see anything with Imhosted that really stands out to me. Also, the customer support is lacking with them. Really, I can’t think of to many positive things to say about them other than they have reasonably cheap prices.
Avoid them altogether! Stay away from this company, but deal with a reliable hosting and reseller solution from other companies such as GreenGeeks or InMotion. Please leave your comments up above. Thanks for reading.
I started this special section for Imhosted in October of 2015. The goal with this section is to show the research I have done on their company. I like to spend 3-4 hours researching any company that I review on tbwhs.com. What I do is Google their name to see what I can find on them.
I like to write a short summary of the content I have found so you can view the content all in one place. Depending on if the content is praising them or pointing out areas which they could be improved upon I will file it in the following categories; positive, negative, or neutral. Please take a couple minutes to view the research I have done on Imhosted.
This section was started for Imhosted so I could conduct email interviews on the company. I like to reach out to other webmasters that have used Imhosted over the years. I then email them a series of questions. I then cut and paste the interview and publish them on tbwhs.com for everyone to read.
If you have experience working with Imhosted I am looking to talk with you. Please feel free to reach out to me through my contact page. Also, you can always send me a tweet on Twitter @tbwhs.