In this article, I am going to share the most honest review on my hosting experience with HostPapa as a 3-Year REAL customer. You may navigate to any parts that you are interested with below table of contents:
HostPapa Review Summary
Below is the invoice proving that I purchased a 3-year hosting plan (Optimized WordPress Hosting Business Plan) with HostPapa in 2019.
As you can see, my HostPapa hosting plan only costed USD$36 for 3 years (USD$12/year). This is crazily cheap – only costed me USD$1/month! Since I purchased the plan on Cyber Monday (biggest discount in the year), I enjoyed a very good deal against normal price (USD$3.95/month).
HostPapa WordPress Hosting Plans
HostPapa is a website hosting provider based in Canada. They have various hosting services offered. The most comment one is WordPress Hosting. Personally, even if you have very low traffic usage, I would still recommend you to go for Business plan as it has the BEST value!
Starter
US$3.95/mwas US$9.99/m (60% OFF)
Entry level – for blogger or personal website
Business
US$3.95/mwas US$14.99/m (74% OFF)
Medium level – for advanced blogger with regular traffic
Business Pro
US$12.95/mwas US$23.99/m (46% OFF)
Advanced level – for small business owners with regular traffic
Pros & Cons of HostPapa
In the following section, I am going to talk about the Pros and Cons of HostPapa‘s WordPress hosting servicess based on my real experience.
Pros 1. Very Cheap Trial Price During Peak Promo Season
As mentioned above, I enjoyed the crazily cheap hosting price of USD$1/month by purchasing a 3-Year plan on Cyber Monday back in 2019. Their Cyber Monday offer is the cheapest among all hosting providers I have seen so far. I have kept an eye on HostPapa‘s Cyber Monday promotion since 2019, their offer remained at USD$1~2/month promotion in the past 3 years. If you are not rush to set up your website, I highly recommend you to wait for the promotion in Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
You may question if the hosting quality is bad with such cheap price – I can say the overall hosting experience is quite positive and I truly think that it worths the investment as a website beginner!
Pros 2. All Plans Come with FREE Domain
Not every hosting provider will bundle FREE domain in their hosting plan. HostPapa is a rare one of them! You can enjoy both FREE domain and quality hosting service at one price!
Yet, I would suggest you to also purchase the Domain Privacy add-on to protect your personal information if you are running your personal site. It costs USD$9.99 for the 1st year, renews at USD$14.99/year. I think it’s optional for businesses with physical address.
Pros 3. Brilliant Customer Services
One of the best thing I like the most of HostPapa is they are having a team of professional customer support which is available 7/24 with very short waiting time (<30s most of the time). Whenever I encounter any technical issues, they are always responsive via live chat. Most of the time, the support team can reply my enquiries within 1-2 minutes. I do not have to wait so long for their response. Even there are times that the support team cannot immediately solve my questions via live chat, the technical support team can still follow up my questions via email within few hours.
As a website beginner, it is very common that we are not familiar with those server side or cPanel settings, the customer support team can always patiently assist to fix some server issues and provide guidance for set up. So I think it is quite a beginner friendly hosting provider.
Pros 4. Well-documented Support FAQs
If you are a more advanced user, you may want to adjust the settings of cPanel. HostPapa has a very well-documented Support FAQs (HostPapa Knowledge Base) that covers many common server setting FAQs with clear instructions and explanation. You can easily follow the steps to complete the settings. If you cannot find the setting tutorial you want, you can always reach out to the support team to see if they can get the right one for you.
Cons 1. Expensive Renewal Price
HostPapa‘s Renewal Price: https://www.hostpapa.com/renewal-pricing/
Although the trial price for HostPapa can be very cheap, when comparing to other hosting providers, the renewal price (based on Optimized WordPress Hosting Business Plan) for HostPapa is quite high:
- 36-month term: USD$14.99 per month (billed USD$539.64 for 36 months)
- 24-month term: USD$15.99 per month (billed USD$383.76 for 24 months)
- 12-month term: USD$16.99 per month (billed USD$203.88 for 12 months)
Some other renowned hosting providers offer renewal price starting from USD$5.99/month. Given with the limited resources usage (see next point), I think the renewal price of HostPapa is not very attractive.
Cons 2. Limited Resources Usage
I have double checked with sales team that even my plan was purchased at discounted price, my plan is eligible to consume same resources as regular users who buy the same Optimized WordPress Hosting Business Plan at normal price.
However, due to my website growth recently, there are more traffic coming in my website which has triggered high physical memory faults. This can be an issue if you are planning to grow your website in the future – not only the visitor traffic can affect your resources usage, but search engine crawling bots can also be sources that consume high hosting resources.
You may wonder what will happen if your website exceeds the resources limit – from my experience, if your website is consuming extremely high resources in a short period of time, an account manager will send you an email to alert you on that. If you have no response to that, they will automatically suspend your hosting services for awhile. But one good thing is, if you contact the support team, they can help to temporarily release back the services to you. But still you need to follow up with the account manager via email. They will not sharp cut your hosting services and they can provide some suggestions to help improving the situation.
So, if you are running a website for business or ecommerce, you may need to consider about this.
Cons 3. Relatively High Server Downtime
This is one of the most struggling part of my hosting experience with HostPapa. I had quite a number of server downtime issues when I was trying to update my website. Each time it takes around 15-30 minutes to wait until the server to be fixed. But I feel like the situation has been improved as I update more frequently in 2022 – so far I just got 1-2 times of server downtime issues and it got fixed a lot quicker than in the past.
Who is Suitable for Using HostPapa Hosting?
- Personal/Indivisual Site
- Low Traffic Needs
- Testing/Practise Site for Website Design/WordPress/SEO
HostPapa Hosting is best for personal/individual user who wants to build a website with low traffic needs. If you want to host a website for ecommerce or business use, HostPapa may not be the best option for you as you may need more website resources for supporting your website traffic. But, if you just want to try building your own site for testing or practising about website design/WordPress or SEO, it is still a cost-efficient choice.
That’s the end of my sharing. Here to recap the review summary again. Hope you find this helpful 🙂