WebHost4Life Review – Lots of Features, But Fall Short

WebHost4Life has been providing web hosting services to businesses of all sizes since 1999.  But, what is the feedback from webmasters that have used their service over the years? WebHost4Life thrives on offering the most stable web hosting service to compliment the effectiveness of the IT services of your business. At present, Webhost4Life is providing web hosting services to over 50,000 clients across the globe.

WebHost4Life is a host that is owned by EIG who owns a lot of hosting companies like ApolloHosting, Dotster, HostNine, PowWeb, Startlogic, and JustHost.

With their name, you would think customers would stay for life (pun intended).  I like to rate each web hosting company on 5 areas; overall, uptime, performance, cost, and customer support.  I have developed a rating system at the top of this review to show how I rate them.  In this review, you will see why I don’t recommend WebHost4Life.   Hopefully, this review should help you when deciding if you want to choose this web host or not.

WebHost4Life Features

WebHost4Life offers a number of webs hosting plans to those webmasters that are looking for shared plans.  Each plan comes with either the Linux or Windows operating system.  They mostly focus on using the Windows OS.  They do offer a dedicated server for those that are expecting more traffic and will require a server that can support more bandwidth.  Their prices are a tad bit higher, but if the value is there then I wouldn’t have any issues hosting with WebHost4Life.  Now, let’s take a look at the features that they offer.

MS Hosting

For Windows MS Hosting you have the option to pick from 3 web hosting plans.

Basic Plan

The “Basic” plan comes with 10 GB of storage, unlimited transfer, and bandwidth, unlimited domain names, 20 MySQL databases, Windows 2008, 10 FTP/e-mail accounts.  The price tag for this web hosting plan is $4.95/month.

Advanced Plan

The “Advanced” plan comes with unlimited storage, transfer and bandwidth, unlimited domain names, 50 MySQL databases, 5 MSSQL databases, Windows 2008, 300 FTP accounts, and 2,500 email accounts. The price tag for this plan is $9.95/month.

Premium Plan

The “Premium” plan is their highest shared Windows hosting plan.  This plan comes with unlimited storage, unlimited transfer, and bandwidth, unlimited domain names, unlimited MySQL databases, 5 MSSQL databases, Windows 2008, unlimited FTP accounts, unlimited email accounts.  The price tag for the “Premium” plan is $19.95/month.

WebHost4Life does use the whole unlimited bandwidth offer that a lot of other web hosting companies use.  I am a not a fan of this because I like to know the actual numbers.  One company that doesn’t use this marketing tactic is WireNine.  I should mention that with the “Premium” you will receive a free domain name.  Otherwise, if you purchase the “Basic” or “Advanced” plan you will have to pay 15.99/year.

Unix Plan

The “Unix” plan comes with unlimited disk space, bandwidth/transfer, unlimited domain names, 50 MySQL databases, ShopSite shopping cart (15 products), a site builder, and unlimited email accounts.  The price tag for this plan is $6.95/month.

There are a number of optional upgrades you can purchase with this plan.  SubmitNet (Search Engine Submission) $79.95/month, RatePoint for $19.95, and enhanced security for $100.

MS Power Server

The MS Power Server plan states that it’s a “high performance” dedicated server.  The price tag for this plan is $59.99/month.  This plan allows 8 sites, 1,000 email accounts, 8 MSSQL databases, 1 MySQL database, 10 GB of disk space, and 200 GB of transfer and bandwidth.

I feel really shortchanged with being limited to 8 databases on this server.  I currently, have 2 VPS servers with InMotion and I can support hundreds of databases.  It just doesn’t make any sense to me!

Security

In the technology world that we live in security is a big threat.  Many companies are implementing paid services to help us strengthen the security of servers.  WebHost4Life does offer a paid service call SiteLock to help protect our website against hackers.  This service will prevent hackers from being able to attack your website and can even restore your site to an earlier state if it does get hacked.  This service does cost $14.99/month extra.

So, now that we know all the features and plans that WebHost4Life offers let’s take a look at uptime, performance, and the customer support.

WebHost4Life Performance & Uptime

Uptime

Webhost4life guarantees an uptime of 99.9%.  But do they really deliver on these bold claims?  The answer is no.  Downtime is one of the most frustrating things to deal with when you running or creating a website.   In fact, out of all the web hosting companies out there, WebHost4Life has very poor uptime.  The feedback from a lot of webmasters is very bad.  In fact, I have trouble finding someone that has something nice to say about their experience with them.   Don’t believe me on this check out these comments left by angry WebHost4Life customers:

So, am I stating that if you decide to host with WebHost4Life that you are going to have a ton of downtime?  Might you?  This will be one hosting company I will be signing up with and monitoring in 2015, though.  I will then be able to show you my uptime stats.

Performance

Well, if you’re still reading this WebHost4Life.com review I’m going to show you how their performance stacks up to another host.  To do this I check their response times on isitdownrightnow.com.  What this does is gives me an accurate readout of their response times.  The response time is measured in milliseconds (ms).  In order for a hosting company to have excellent performance, they should have response times under 20 ms.  Average would be 21-49 ms.  Over 50 ms is considered to be slow.  It was no surprise that WebHost4Life had a response time of 72.19 ms.  This is far too slow!  Here is a screenshot of my findings:

WebHost4Life doesn’t use SSD hosting which could be one of the reasons why their performance numbers are not on par with other companies.  Other EIG brands like Dot5Hosting and Easy CGI use SSD drives.  Why can’t WebHost4Life?

WebHost4Life Customer Service

Their customer support is all in India; I think.

WebHost4Life has very lacking support! Customer service is the main reason clients opt to continue or stop a web hosting service.  If you can’t get your issues resolved you’re just going to get frustrated and migrate to a new web hosting provider (which is what many people are doing).  When you call them you’re just going to get someone in India to talk to.  It would be nice to speak to someone locally.  Since websites work 24 hours a day, web hosting companies’ customer service should work 24 hours a day, too.  They do work 24 hours a day, but I don’t believe they actually know anything about running a web hosting company.  At times you’ll feel like your on a hidden game show where someone is going to pop in and say “Surprise this is really a joke, but thanks for playing.”

WebHost4Life Review Summary

WebHost4Life is such a bad web hosting company words really can’t even describe how bad they actually are. Everything changed when towards the end of 2009 they sold their company to EIG. In late 2009, WebHost4Life was acquired by new owners and boy oh boy did they destroy it. A lot of clients lost valuable data during the transitional period. The new WebHost4Life circa 2010 has become slower and less reliable. Service quality has deteriorated and prices have increased.  I would really like to hear from an employee of WebHost4Life and let us know what your doing to better your company.

If you are looking for a good web hosting service go with InMotion or GreenGeeks. Please leave your comments down below and please provide your experience working with Webhost4life.  Please review and rate them up above in the user reviews section.  If you have found this WebHost4Life review helpful please use the share buttons to share it on any social media sites you participate on. Thanks so much for reading my review on their company.

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