Founded in 2010, Hostwinds is an Oklahoma-based web hosting company offering shared hosting, business class hosting, reseller hosting, virtual private servers, dedicated servers and cloud hosting.
Review
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Sales
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Hostwinds takes sales questions by telephone, live chat and an online ticket system. I first attempted to reach Hostwinds by phone, but the call went straight to voicemail. Next I tried live chat and found success. I ended up chatting with the Hostwinds CEO (Peter Holden) at length. Mr. Holden was able to give me some background information on the company and answer my many questions, though there was often a lengthy (4-5 minute) wait between answers. I’m guessing he was juggling multiple customers at once and, of course, actual clients take priority over new sales. At least I hope that was the case. Overall, good experience though could have been speedier.
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Setup
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New sign-ups take place directly from Hostwinds’ website. The entire process takes just a few moments, and is easy enough for new webmasters to complete with ease. My account was ready-to-use less than five seconds after making payment. Perfect!
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Billing
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Hostwinds takes all major credit cards, PayPal, PayZa and Google Checkout. I was never billed inappropriately and was able to cancel my account with ease.
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Pricing
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Hostwinds’ unlimited shared web hosting starts at $3.50/month, business hosting runs $5/month and up, and reseller hosting starts at $10/month. All of Hostwinds’ other services are similarly priced cheaply. Hostwinds is one of the least expensive hosts around today.
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Reliability
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I only had my VPS down for 6.5 hours once. Other than that, I had no hardware issues of any kind while staying with Hostwinds over a one year period.
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Help & Support
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Hostwinds offers support by live chat, telephone and a trouble ticket system. During an average day, one in which there are no emergencies like downed servers, Hostwinds answers tickets, call and chats with relative speed. When there are problems, however, it seems Hostwinds sends all calls to voicemail and disappears completely from live chat. This is both good and bad. It’s good, if only because it means Hostwinds is putting all their efforts into fixing the problem, but bad, because it makes it seem as if Hostwinds is desperately understaffed and unable to cope in a crisis. Overall, I was happy with support, though they could up their communication and availability during troubled times.
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Uptime
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My uptime monitor showed that Hostwinds kept to their uptime guarantee with a 99.95% uptime rating.
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Guarantee
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60 day money back guarantee.
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99.9% uptime guarantee.
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100% satisfaction guarantee.
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Terms of Service
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Using a shared hosting account as a backup service not allowed.
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IRC scripts/Bots not permitted.
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Gambling sites forbidden.
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Zero tolerance spam policy.
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Clients responsible for performing backups.
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Bottom Line
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Advantages
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Cheap!
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Friendly support.
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cPanel control panel.
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60 day money back guarantee.
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Easy to upgrade/downgrade.
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Solid network.
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Disadvantages
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Support tends to disappear during a crisis.
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Live chat support sometimes slow. Understaffed?
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