Justhost Web Hosting Review - Will They Work For You?

Name: JustHost
Plans: Shared, VPS, Reseller, and Dedicated.
Website: www.justhost.com
Summary: JustHost is another company I don’t recommend you do business with. They are EIG owned and have a lot of issues that need to be sorted out. This JustHost web hosting review will show what other webmasters are saying about them.

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JustHost Logo 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:

JustHost Performance — This comment was left by Ivka Bobic – croatranslations.com.

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

Justhost isn’t up to keeping their promises and in the end you could suffer from lots of frustration when you find out your website is offline. The downtime you’d meet with this company is too long.

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 Response

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.

JustHost Customer Support Comment — This comment was left by Elliot Wicks – wicksie.co.uk.

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.

You can expect long waiting times with JustHost.

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?

If JustHost could address the problems I have mentioned in this review I would be more than happy to reevaluate them. Again, I’m not stating they are horrible, but there are better host in the industry.

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.

“Positive”

WebHostingGeeks.com

WebHostingGeeks.com is one of the top hosting review sites on the net. They have 1,200+ reviews on their site. The overall feedback is 3.55 stars out of 5 which is decent. However, I do want to highlight a review that was left there:

“This web hosting company has some of the worst feedback from their customers”. Joe Schmo (probably not the real name…lol), a webmaster, posted a review of JustHost on webhostinggeeks.com, dated December 18, 2014. In the review, Joe Schmo pointed out the following problems he faced when using JustHost services.

The company is unreliable in services they claim to offer. They changed the subscription of clients to a lower package mid way before the subscription ended.

The company used deceitful methods to advertise. The marketing team sent spam messages to thousands of clients claiming that they were among fifty lucky winners of discounts on upgrades. They did not offer the discounts.

They have a shoddy response system which does not respond to queries posted. The writer stated that the email system responds to queries with unrelated articles, some of which are promotional material.

The company is unfaithful with a customer`s funds. The company charged the writer a renewal fee for the hosting -which they barely provided- even after he wrote to them and tried to cancel his subscription. Moreover, the writer states that even a long time following up the money, none was recovered.

Evidently, this is not a commendable site for web hosting. Their upsell tactics coupled with incompetence and misrepresentation of their services can leave anybody hopeless. However, Joe suggested that 1&1 was a reliable site for web hosting.

The feedback from WebHostingGeeks.com does seem to be both good and bad. Mostly, it’s good since they get 3.55 out of 5 stars. As of lately, they have been getting a lot of horrible feedback. I see a trend that shows people are not happy with JustHost.

TopTenReviews.com

Kent Dunn published a review of JustHost on March 2014. In his review he rated them 10/10 for features, 9.4/10 for ease of use, 10/10 for help and support, and overall 9.7/10. They are one of the highest rated hosting companies on toptenreviews.com.

I can’t help but appreciate the honesty that is given here, in a form of a review, for the web host named ‘JustHost’ by the famous TopTenReviews.com. Despite the overly positive attitude that sometimes overwhelms me, and not to mention the suspicion that might crawl in, TopTenReviews.com have done their task in examining the works of ‘JustHost’ step by step. Their methodology of using the principle of deduction to outline the negative and positive aspects, in my opinion, is to be admired. Aside from research based on the websites customer reviews and background operating system, they also provide full information on their content, use of tools, functionality, outbound communication and features.

I particularly like the points in the article where JustHost’s easy access was rated by testing them through their phone, e-mail, and live chat. They did this in JustHost’s ‘peak time’, which tells us that the reviewers gave no ‘breathing space’ when assessing a web host. They do have a number features that beginners will love. However, if you are advanced they have a lot of other appealing features, as well.

The only con that was mentioned was that JustHost doesn’t offer Windows web hosting. Instead you can only use Linux. Not a problem for most users. Their prices are very competitive and they are highly recommended here.

“Negative”

“Neutral”

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.

“Patrick_Valmont”

I recently did an email interview with Patrick Valmont. Patrick has been a web designer for 4 years; since 2011. He has given me some more incite on JustHost and what it is like hosting with them. Below is a copy of the interview:

How long have you been using JustHost?

I’ve been with JH for 4 years now.

Can you tell me in details about the down time you have been having with email?

The uptime on web hosting is Grade A. I have not seen any downtime until recently 2014. This is ok. As far as email is concerned; I have received various complaints from my clients on this. When I check or ping the smtp server, there’s no response. This could go from a few minutes to hours and that’s bad for business

Communication is bad with JustHost? Can you explain what it’s like?

Support does not pay attention to your ticket. It’s almost always an automated reply and not specific to the subject. I would raise tickets in regards to a certain problem (say email) and they would come back saying no such problem exists. I recently raised a ticket to transfer a domain away and they gave me the opposite of that, how to transfer a domain into JH panel. I believe this could be improved. On some occasion they are rude if you try to persist and show them where the root problem is, but unfortunately, it’s best to just leave it at that.

What are your final thoughts on JustHost?

Justhost is ok for smaller scale sites. People on startups, blogs etc. I will not recommend it if you have 10+ sites which was the case with me. cPanel area is actually friendly. More friendly than other hosts I’ve used in the past. With the implementation of Mojo marketplace, it’s a breeze to install applications and stuff. Other than that, all other services are ok.

This follow up email was sent to me:

I Just cancelled everything recently with them and requested deletion of everything (and by everything they should know it means domains, ftp, emails etc). I got an email that said all has been cancelled but still, I was able to log into ftp and log in their cpanel. Which brings me back to what I said in my previous email, they don’t pay attention to what’s happening or what was requested.

All content on tbwhs.com are opinions and not facts. I have thoroughly reviewed each company and then provide my personal opinions on them. It's up to you as the consumer to do your due diligence and do more research if you feel something might be inaccurate.

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