Justhost Web Hosting Review – Not Bad, But I Wouldn’t Use Them

JustHost is based out of Glendale, California and has been around for ten years.  They are owned by Endurance International Group, Inc. (EIG) and if your new to my reviews you’ll know that I don’t typically support companies owned by EIG.  Here are a few more EIG owned companies ApolloHosting, Startlogic, Dotster, and HostNine. They have served more than a thousand websites, but are their customers happy with them?  There are a number of mixed reviews about JustHost.  Webmasters are either stating they love them or hate them.  There doesn’t seem to be any medium about them. 

When I review a web hosting company I like to look at a number of different aspects of their business.  For instance, what features do they offer?  What does their uptime look like?  How well do their servers perform?  What can you expect with their customer support?  And last but not least, what is their price tag.  A lot of other web hosting review sites recommend JustHost, but I do not recommend them.  In this full review of their company I am going to show you why I prefer other web hosting companies over them.

JustHost Features

Pretty much any kind of web hosting plan your site requires JustHost should be able to support it.  Unlike a lot of web hosting companies they don’t just offer shared plans; they offer VPS, Reseller, and Dedicated.

Shared Hosting Plans

JustHost offers shared hosting with unlimited hosting in several areas, including, Gbs hosting space, email accounts, domain name registration, site builder, data transfer, domain hosting, instant setup, disk storage, secure POP3 e-mail support, secure IMAP e-mail support, forwarding of e-mail accounts, GB of site transfer, add-on domains, parked domains, and subdomains.

You also get technical support 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, and CGI, Ruby (RoR), Perl, domain hosting, SSL, FTP, PHP, MySQL, and web stats. These, and other features, are available at an introductory price of $2.95 each month.  However, if you don’t pay 2 years in advance the cost is $6.99/month.

Other features that you receive, with variable prices and time periods, are free drag and drop site builder, support for international domain names, 3 different webmail solutions, cPanel account control panel, FTP access, web file manager, SSH access, server side includes, hotlink protection, override .htaccess support, log files, site statistics, customizable error pages, custom cronjobs, and spam assassin protection.

In addition to the features mentioned above, you also receive lots of features with the CGI/Databases, site promotion, free website scripts, e-commerce features, multimedia features, as well as their version of top-of-the-line technology.

VPS Plans

JustHost has four different hosting plans. Each offers a significant discount for the first month of service. The Standard Package is $29.99 per month, with the first month at $14.99. The Enhanced Package is $29.99 for the first month, and $59.99 per month afterward. The Premium Package is $44.99 for the first month, and $89.99 per month after that. Finally, the Ultimate Package is $59.99 for the first month, and $119.99 per month after that. These prices are quite comparable to those of other hosting services, and quite a bit cheaper than some.

Reseller Plans

As a reseller, you have three different packages available through JustHost. The Silver Package is $19.95 per month, and allows you 100GB of disk space and 15 Mbps of transfer speed. The Gold Package is $49.95 per month, and ups the ante to 250 GB of disk space and 25 MBPS of transfer speed. The Platinum Package is $89.95 per month, with 500 GB of disk space and 35 Mbps of transfer speed. This service provides free cPanel for all of your clients. You also get a free billing system and free client manager.

Dedicated Plans

Dedicated plans with JustHost are also in three levels, as with the reseller plans. For dedicated hosting, you can sign up for the Standard Package at $149.99 per month, with a first month fee of $74.99. The Enhanced Package is $199.99 per month, with the first month costing $99.99. The Premium Package is $249.99 per month, with the first month offered at $124.99. These plans feature mirrored storage and root access, along with enhanced caching, dedicated support, and enhanced cPanel.

If you need extra storage JustHost allows you to purchase extra space.  For 500 GB it’s $45.00/month, 1 TB is $65.00/month, and 2 TB are $95.00/month.

Really there web hosting plans are right on par with BlueHost and Hostpapa, so I don’t have any issues yet with them in terms of their price-tag.

cPanel

cPanel is the most widely used control panel on the internet, and is the leading Linux control panel.  I typically prefer web hosting services that use cPanel, and JustHost does offer it.  They do allow you to try out their control panel before using their service. Managing your backend settings is pretty easy with JustHost.  They even offer MOJO Marketplace which has over 100 open-source applications for installing your favorite scripts.  Managing your account settings such as billing, sub-domains, FTP, email, etc. are very easy with JustHost.

Now, that we know all the features and plans that JustHost offers lets take them on a test drive to see how well they perform.

JustHost Performance

Uptime

There are just to many questions with JustHost’s uptime.

JustHost does have a 99.9% uptime guarantee.  However, there were many reports that their reliability and uptime is a flat out lie.  From my personal experience there are some issues I’ve had with them.  At times they seem great and other times they seem to be anything but great.  Furthermore, from my research I have done on them in terms of performance I have found a mixed bag.  People are either praising them 100% or they are telling you to avoid their service altogether.  To show you both sides of the story I will show you some comments that webmasters have left for JustHost:

On the other side of the coin, webmasters are stating that they have nothing but good words to say about their experience with them:

Performance

Another grey area for JustHost is their servers response times.  Typically, when I test a server I want it to respond in under 20 milliseconds.  50 milliseconds is the average, but nothing to get excited about, but with JustHost it’s far from that.  In fact it is double: 121.8 ms.  This is way to long!  My speculation is JustHost adds way to many people on their servers or isn’t using server redundancy.  It’s a problem that Hostgator (another EIG company) has been doing for years.  When you host with them you can bet that your websites will not load very quickly.  See screenshot down below:

JustHost Customer Service

I have mixed feelings about JustHost’s customer support.

Justhost customer service is so-so.  They have a toll free number you can call anytime.  Live chat is also an option, along with email support and a ticket system.  They’re saying that they focus on customer satisfaction,but the feedback from their clients seems to point the other way.  Unfortunately, it’s all about publicity.  Just like performance and uptime I have questions about their technical support.   They’re claiming to be dedicated to making customers satisfied, but many of them are not. Even if they provide live chat, phone, or email support, you might need to wait awhile to get an answer from them.  From my experience I have had to wait 30 to 45 minutes just to get a simple issue resolved.

When you contact them for help there is one common message you’ll receive. Don’t be surprised if they’ll just tell you that “your website will be back soon”.  There will be no explanation for the problems! Many have heard of this promise before and they just had a lot of frustration.  I like techs to tell me the exact problem on why stuff is having issues.  Not just a generic response.  I know from personal experiences that it can be frustrating when you have a client that is all pumped about their website, but you sadly have to explain to them that their site is down do to server issues.

JustHost Summary

JustHost isn’t a company I would recommend to fellow webmasters.  Am I stating that they are a horrible web hosting company?  No.  There are much better options out there though. I believe they have subpar customer and technical support and a number of other issues.  I will add yet another company that you should avoid to my list.  I would like to hear from webmasters that have used JustHost in the past.  Good or bad; I will post everything.  If you found this review helpful would you mind sharing it on any social media sites you use?

The reviews on the web seem to be widely mixed so I would stick with someone I know and trust like InMotion or GreenGeeks.  You can see what I think about both of those companies by reading my reviews on them.  Thanks for reading.

In February of 2015 I decided to start up a new section for JustHost.  I spend a lot of time carefully crafting my reviews and put a lot of time into researching them and writing my honest feedback on them.  In this section you will find a summary of what other sites are saying about them.  I point out some of the key points and then file them under positive, negative, or neutral.

Clearly, this is where you can see why I say whatever I have to say about JustHost.  JustHost does receive a lot of publicity and people do publish articles on their websites, blogs, etc.  I will be updating this section whenever I find out more information on them.  Please take the time to look over some of the articles I have found.

Another section that is interactive at tbwhs.com is the interview section.  Why?  Because this section is a series of interviews I have done with webmasters that use JustHost services.  Whenever, someone leaves a comment on JustHost I tend to send them an email and see if they wouldn’t mind doing an email interview about their experience.  I then post the interview on tbwhs.com.

If you have experience working with JustHost please feel free to contact me.  You can always reach me on Twitter @tbwhs.