Host Excellence Introduction

Host Excellence is a US based web hosting company with a focus on shared hosting, although it does also offer a step-up to VPS hosting. The company emerged out of the dot com bubble in the 1990s and has been in the web hosting business for at least 10 years.

Host Excellence is privately owned and run, with corporate locations in four countries around the world (including the USA and Ukraine).

Host Excellence Hosting Plans

There are three competitively-priced shared hosting plans offered by Host Excellence. Each offers unlimited space, bandwidth domains and subdomains.

● The basic plan is a low cost shared hosting option. This provides one free domain name and one dedicated IP. This plan restricts your email resources and the number of databases you can have, and it only allows for Linux based web hosting.
● The business plan includes two free domain names and three dedicated IP addresses. Databases are restricted again, but this plan also allows for more email space and Windows hosting, albeit with an extra monthly charge.
● The ultimate business plan is similar to the business plan but provides three free domain registrations and 15 dedicated IP addresses. This plan allows for even more email resources and only SQL databases are restricted.

VPS hosting plans allow customers to choose between Linux or Windows web hosting and are based on three different VPS options. Each option comes with two dedicated IP addresses, burstable RAM and allows for unlimited domains and subdomains.

● H2 gives customers 10 GB storage space, 384 MB RAM and 500 GB bandwidth. This provides one Intel Xeon core processor, but it doesn’t come with a free control panel.
● H4 allows customers to purchase 50 GB space, 768 MB RAM and 1.5 TB bandwidth with 4 Intel Xeon cores and a choice of control panels.
● The H8 plan ups the customers storage space to 100 GB, RAM to 2048 MB and bandwidth to 2 TB. This plan provides 8 Intel Xeon cores.

There is also an affiliate programme, allowing customers to earn extra money through site referrals. Customers can also purchase an eCommerce SSL certificate, professional web design and a merchant account for transaction processing.

Host Excellence Uptime/Downtime

Host Excellence boasts 100% of satisfied customers and 99.9% uptime. Importantly, this claim is backed by a guarantee. Customers can claim credits for should the uptime fall below 99.9% in any given year (except where downtime is caused by ‘acts of God’ or where Host Excellence do not have any direct influence on events).

Host Excellence does not rent its server space - its owns its own facility. Its data center is based in Ohio and is managed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The company’s server farm is continually optimized and upgraded, and features redundant cooling systems and a back up power supply to ensure it stays up and running.

Another feature of the Host Excellence hosting packages is the ability to purchase CloudFlare to help protect your site from outside attack.

Host Excellence Support

24/7 customer support is provided through live chat, phone lines (notably, the host provides both US and international numbers) and an online ticket centre. Host Excellence also provides a support centre with FAQs, video tutorials and a web hosting manual for customers to find the answers they need. There is also a blog and a status page where the company keeps customers informed of any problems that have arisen.

The Host Excellence Facebook page is not particularly active, and neither is the Twitter account, although the team do respond to customer queries when they arise.

Host Excellence in the News

Despite being a relatively long running business, Host Excellence have attracted little attention in the media, either good or bad.

Host Excellence Control Panel

Host Excellence provides its own custom control panel for customers to use with their shared hosting plan. The control panel seems fairly simple to use and is quick enough to get your head around, but it’s not as slick as something like cPanel.

For VPS hosting customers, Host Excellence offer a choice of cPanel or Plesk to administer their websites.

Host Excellence Extras

All of Host Excellence’s shared hosting packages come with a free site builder, free web templates, a free SSL certificate and a range of free scripts to install, such as Wordpress, Joomla, PHP, Perl and Ruby on Rail.

Free domain names come with each web hosting account and Host Excellence support a range of eCommerce tools such as CubeCart, ZenCart and SugarCRM.

Host Excellence Money Back Guarantee / Cancellation Policy

Host Excellence provides two 100% money-back guarantees for its customers.

● There is a standard 30-day money-back guarantee available to new customers, allowing them to cancel their service and receive a full refund, less any domain name costs. This does include setup fees, but any over-usage costs are not included.

● The Anytime money-back guarantee allows customers to cancel their account and claim back their current month’s fees and all future fees on their plan. To claim a refund, Host Excellence asks the customer to explain the reasons for the cancellation and provide suggestions on how it can improve its services.

Host Excellence Summary

Host Excellence does not offer a vast range of web hosting services, and their plans do not really stick out as offering anything particularly unique. The bespoke control panel may also put some shared hosting customers off. Having said that, 100% customer satisfaction is a bold claim, so the company must be doing something right.

The biggest selling point for Host Excellence is its guarantees which go further than many other hosting companies. The 30 day guarantee is fairly standard, but the Anytime guarantee goes beyond that, offering genuine peace of mind. Together with the 99.9% uptime SLA, Host Excellence customers have comprehensive set of guarantees to fall back on if anything does go wrong.