Hostwinds Review 2023 – Is This The Web Hosting for You?

If you're looking to change hosting providers or are thinking about setting up a new site, then you might have come across Hostwinds in one of your searches.

Hostwinds is a popular web hosting best known for its reliability and great features. 

But is it the web hosting for you?

In this Hostwinds review, we’ll look at its pros, cons, and features. This way, you’ll have a comprehensive look at what they offer and you’ll be able to determine if it’s the best web host for you. 

So let’s begin. 

Get to Know Hostwinds 

Hostwinds is a relatively new web hosting, it was established only in 2010. Of course, that doesn’t mean you’ll face inexperience here.

Over the years, this US-based hosting provider has gone from strength to strength, being rated as one of the best hosting providers by numerous review agencies.

They’ve grown to provide an array of hosting services to meet the needs of any site, no matter how large or small those needs may be.

Hostwinds Review

To give you a complete review, we’ll look at:

• The pros and cons

• Performance and uptime

• Products and features

• Security

• Pricing and packages

• Customer service

Now, let’s get into the details. 

Hostwinds Pros

With Hostwinds, you can expect:

• Great uptime

• Unlimited storage

• Free site migration

• Responsive customer service

• Free unlimited email accounts

• Easy to navigate dashboard and control panel

Great Uptime

Coming in with near-perfect uptime of [cvg hostwindsup], Hostwinds ranks highly when it comes to reliability. They have excellent back-end servers that ensure your site stays online.

Higher uptime is especially important if you’re looking to set up an online business site. This is because even just a few extra hours of downtime could result in dissatisfied customers, opening up possibilities for them to switch over to your competitors. 

Higher uptime also ensures that your site won’t be ranked lower by the Google algorithm, so your site will have the best chance of ranking #1 on Google.

With Hostwinds, you can be sure that you always have high uptime. 

Unlimited Storage

All Hostwinds’ shared hosting packages come with unlimited storage space. That’s awesome, especially if you’re looking to upload large files such as videos and pictures.

It is here that Hostwinds beats a lot of competitors since they only offer a few GBs for their shared hosting packages. 

Free Site Migration

With every package, you are eligible to transfer one site for free within 60 days. And with a professional technical team that ensures your site transfer runs smoothly on their service, 

the whole process of changing your hosting provider will definitely be a lot cheaper and easier. 

Responsive customer service

HostWinds boasts a responsive 24/7 customer support service, and we’re happy to tell you that they don’t fall short of this promise. In fact, their live chat support team is accessible around the clock to answer any of your concerns and issues. 

This is important for any web host to have, as delayed support can affect a client’s website ratings and functionality. 

Free unlimited email accounts

Nowadays, your email is a direct representation of your brand and personality. Having a personalized and professional email for your website will make you look and feel more reliable to your audiences. 

Furthermore, hosted emails also give you double the protection that most public email services can’t offer. 

Easy to navigate dashboard and control panel

Dashboards and control panels are two elements of website hosting that may get confusing for beginners. Luckily, Hostwinds gets rid of this hurdle by giving its users an intuitive and modern-looking dashboard where they can access everything from their billing, domains, and other services. 

Additionally, since HostWinds uses cPanel — the industry-standard control panel — users won’t have such a hard time learning how to use it. 

Check out this video on how to install WordPress with cPanel:

Hostwinds Cons

Now for the downsides. Here’s what you can expect:

• Short refund policy
• Not the best loading speeds
• Lack of server locations

Short Refund Policy

Unlike other hosting providers that normally provide at least 30-days to file for a return, Hostwinds only gives its users a 72-hour return policy.

What’s worse is that you won’t be refunded for features such as SSL, domains, and more, plus you won’t be eligible for a refund if you pay with cryptocurrency.

This makes it difficult to evaluate their service without some risk. (Which makes this review even more important!)

Not the Best Loading Speeds

When it comes to loading speeds, Hostwinds does fall a bit behind when compared to other providers out there, with speeds of [cvg hostwindsspeed].

This slower loading speed means you may encounter a few customer complaints. And, customers may click away in frustration, which can be a concern especially if you’re setting up a business site.

The slower speed will also definitely have an impact on your SEO, which means you may not rank as highly as you otherwise would if you had faster loading speeds.

That said, you should know that its speeds are not terrible. It’s just not the best. 

Lack of Server Locations

Unfortunately, Hostwinds isn’t the best when it comes to offering its services to international clients, with server locations only in the US and Amsterdam.

While that may be great if your clients are located in the US or Europe, you may have to face slower loading speeds if you’re based in continents such as Asia and Africa. If you don’t already know, this will negatively affect your site experience.

Hostwinds Performance and Uptime

As mentioned previously, while Hostwinds’ uptime is great, their loading speeds aren’t the fastest. So while you may be online for longer, you’ll possibly have slower site loading speeds when compared to your competitors/other sites.

Whether that is a dealbreaker may depend on the amount of traffic you're receiving. If your site doesn’t get too much traffic, then these slower loading speeds won’t affect the experience so much. 

One great thing about Hostwinds’ packages is that they use SSD storage. This means that your content will load faster - a lot faster than if they used HDD storage space. 

So overall, Hostwinds does have a good performance. 

Hostwinds Products and Features

When it comes to features, Hostwinds has lots of it with unlimited bandwidth, storage space, and emails on every shared hosting package.

Hate the annoying restrictions that hosting providers impose?

These unlimited features to Hostwinds give you a lot of flexibility. 

What’s more, traditional cPanel support is offered, which is great if you already have experience with the layout.

And, with its softaculous auto-install, downloading software and integrating products into your website is a cinch with 1 click installs and an easy-to-understand process.

With their VPS and dedicated server offerings, you’ll get to choose between Linux or Windows. You have the choice to select whichever platform you prefer according to your needs and experience.

Hostwinds Security 

Every Hostwinds package comes with free SSL certificates to keep your site secure, while also improving your SEO in line with the latest Google algorithm changes.

Sadly, nightly backups aren’t provided as a feature in the basic shared packages (it is included in the business shared packages though). Instead, it is marketed as a separate add-on that you’ll have to buy to get. 

Hostwinds also provides DDoS protection, another important security feature. They have firewalls that prevent any malicious attackers from overloading your site with bots that can take you offline.

Even better, all Hostwinds servers are monitored 24/7. This means that their servers aren’t compromised.  Plus, they have backup power so that your site remains online even during an outage. 

So you can be sure that you get high security with Hostwinds. 

Hostwinds Pricing and Packages

Hostwinds’s basic shared packages can be a bit more pricey than the other options available. But considering that they offer many unlimited features, it does make the price a bit more reasonable.

Business Shared Hosting plans promise to be up to 500% faster than its shared hosting counterpart. This allows your site to sustain more traffic through increased resources allocated to support your site.

The VPS packages are pretty similar to the other offerings on the market and are economically priced considering their management.

Dedicated hosting solution pricing varies as Hostwinds allows you to configure packages to your needs, which is great in avoiding paying for unnecessary resources.

Hostwinds Customer Service

24/7 customer support is an integral part of Hostwinds's packages. They take pride in their proactive website monitoring feature that automatically sets up a support ticket if their system detects any issues with your site.

With numerous contact methods, including email and live chat, they’ve made accessing experienced customer reps convenient.

Their knowledge hub also has a wide range of articles from web design to troubleshooting. This makes solving issues easier and faster without having to contact customer support.

Wrap Up

So Hostwinds provides some impressive features that make them stand out. 

If you can overlook the average loading speeds and poor return policy, you can get a reliable and secure web hosting provider with Hostwinds.

And with their different plans, scalability is not a problem. You can avail of a plan that fits your site’s needs, whether a big eCommerce business or small blog. 

However, small sites and/or international sites may find Hostwinds a bit difficult to enjoy because of their higher-priced basic package (compared to other competitors) and lack of server location outside Europe and the US.

Have we missed anything?

Comment your thoughts down below.