Hostnet Review: The Most Overrated Hosting Provider Ever
According to multiple online review platforms, Hostnet has many satisfied users. Why that is remains a mystery to me. The service is slow, lacks crucial features, has unhelpful customer support, and suffers from countless outages.
Hostnet review overview
Speed
Time to First Byte (TTFB) exceeds 600ms.
Uptime
Constant disruptions caused by DDoS attacks.
Support
Reachable in many ways but completely useless.
Simplicity
Simple and attractive self-designed dashboard.
Features
Missing crucial features such as daily backups.
Costs
Far too expensive with confusing plan options.
Our score:
2 / 5
Hostnet pros
Hostnet cons
Hostnet is a popular Amsterdam-based hosting provider with over 280,000 customers. They have been in business for decades and focus primarily on entrepreneurs (including startups) and business clients.
Let's start with some positive notes. In line with their target audience, Hostnet offers customer service that's accessible 7 days a week. You can reach their customer support via live chat, phone, WhatsApp, and email with minimal wait times. This level of service is quite uncommon within the Dutch hosting industry, and few competing providers can match it.
Now for the bad news. This customer service isn't particularly friendly, helpful, or competent. It appears that Hostnet uses outdated server infrastructure (which isn't carbon-neutral either, unlike many hosting companies), causing your site to load rather slowly. Additionally, several crucial features are missing, including automatic backups.
While browsing around the world wide web, I was surprised to find very few critical remarks about Hostnet. Spoiler alert: this review goes completely against that positive sentiment.
TIP: Our Cloud86 review shows that this provider is faster and more stable than Hostnet. Additionally, their customer service team consists of WordPress experts.
Hostnet at a glance
Hostnet speed, uptime, and customer service
Speed, uptime, and customer service are the most important factors when evaluating a hosting provider.
How does Hostnet score in these areas?
Speed
The speed of your website has a direct impact on your site's conversion rate and is also one of the factors that Google considers in their rankings.
To gauge Hostnet's speed, I purchased their WordPress Pro (100 GB) plan. After renewal, this costs €9 per month.
I installed the following test website on this:
- WordPress theme: Kadence
- Plugins: Block Navigation, Kadence Blocks, Post Duplicator
- SSL certificate (Let's Encrypt)
- No speed or caching optimizations
This site includes images, text, and graphic elements, making it representative of, say, a simple business website or blog. This allows you to realistically assess how fast a hosting plan actually performs. You can view the site I've installed here.
I ran a speed test using GTMetrix, a tool that provides a 360-degree view of a website's speed.
Website speed is a complex matter. You can see a lot of green in the image above, but in this case that says more about the site's coding than the web hosting itself.
Looking at the TTFB (Time to First Byte), we can see it exceeds 600ms. In simple terms, TTFB refers to the server response time. So if you click a link and the TTFB is 1,000ms, it takes a full second before the webpage even begins loading. For your visitors, a site with a high TTFB feels slow as molasses. This is why it's crucial to keep this score as low as possible.
According to Google, you should start to be concerned when your TTFB (Time To First Byte) exceeds 600ms. This is the case with Hostnet, and I haven't even tested their cheapest plans.
To put this in perspective: there are hosting providers that offer a TTFB of under 200ms for the same monthly fee (more on this later).
Additionally, the full page load time is 1.5 seconds. That's significant. A good loading time should be under one second.
Hostnet is far from being the slowest hosting provider out there, but their speed is hardly impressive.
Uptime
Uptime refers to the time your website is operational.
Uptime tests generally aren't worth much because they typically only cover a single server. For this reason, it's more valuable to look at customer complaints about downtime and outages that the hosting provider shares on their status page (if they have one).
While I haven't been able to find many customer complaints about downtime in online reviews, I did come across numerous reports about outages on Allestoringen.nl. These appeared to be caused in part by DDoS attacks.
Although every hosting provider occasionally faces disruptions that lead to downtime, the frequency seems to be significantly higher with Hostnet.
One question remains: how many DDoS attacks can a hosting provider actually experience? There are much larger hosting providers (who would therefore be more obvious targets) that never seem to deal with this issue. Or at the very least, they've implemented measures to protect themselves against such attacks.
Fortunately, Hostnet maintains its own status page. This allowed me to easily confirm that outages at Hostnet are indeed a common problem, rather than having to rely solely on anecdotal evidence.
Take a look at the outage history of Hostnet. There's always something going wrong every week. And many problems seem to recur, which makes me question the technical capabilities of the company.
Customer service
Hostnet's greatest strength is the accessibility of their customer service. You can contact them 7 days a week via live chat, WhatsApp, email, or phone. The live chat waiting time is only a few minutes. Additionally, Hostnet maintains a comprehensive knowledge base.
When I asked Hostnet what sets them apart from their competitors, they highlighted their customer service. So my expectations were high when I presented them with several issues via live chat.
The biggest problem: to install my test website, I had to increase the upload size limit on the server. With most hosting providers, you can do this yourself through the dashboard in just a few clicks, or else customer support will do it for you.
With Hostnet, however, you need to adjust the upload size limit by uploading a text file to an obscure folder within the file manager. This is a rather awkward and unusual method.
When I pointed this out to them, I received this response:
Alright, I guess I'll work with the manual they sent me. Unfortunately, it didn't lead to success. As it turned out, the manual was missing a critical step which prevented me from solving the problem myself. When I pointed this out to the support agent, they finally logged into my system and fixed the issue in a second flat. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Look, I don't expect a hosting provider to hold my hand and walk me through every problem step by step or jump in to fix things themselves. But when your solution to an issue is an incomplete knowledge base article for something that's already user-unfriendly, you're falling short as a company. Especially when you boast about how great your customer service supposedly is.
By the way, the user manual that was sent to me wasn't the only weakness in Hostnet's knowledge base. Most of the articles are extremely brief and lack images, making them difficult to use.
Hostnet further examined
Signing up for a hosting plan with Hostnet
Signing up for web hosting with Hostnet isn't particularly complicated. However, you will be bombarded with a relentless stream of upselling attempts.
This includes offering countless domain extensions that you don't need. Think of a useless .online domain that's supposedly offered for free.
But beware: this “free” domain costs €35 per year after renewal, something that isn't clearly indicated at all.
Additionally, bizarrely enough, you're offered other hosting plans while you've already chosen a hosting plan and are trying to check out.
After all this, you can finally proceed to checkout. However, the only payment methods available are iDeal and Bancontact – you cannot pay with credit card or PayPal.
It then takes approximately one hour for your hosting plan to be ready. With most hosting providers, your hosting plan is immediately ready for use.
Dashboard
Hostnet has a custom-designed dashboard that works intuitively and has a clean, user-friendly layout.
You manage your account, websites, and hosting settings from this dashboard.
The dashboard is fine for beginners, but advanced users will find some features lacking. And as I mentioned above, certain functions like increasing your upload limit work in an extremely cumbersome way.
What I really appreciate about the dashboard is that it gives you direct access to customer service. This is in contrast to some web hosts where this feature is buried several pages deep.
Hosting features and extras
Before I mention which features and extras Hostnet does offer, I want to point out what the service is lacking.
Hostnet does not offer automatic backups. Not with any of their plans. I've tested around 30 hosting providers by now, and this is the first one where this is the case. This is so shocking and absurd that I'm almost at a loss for words.
Automatic backups are the foundation of website security. Yes, you can create backups of your site through an additional plugin, but normally you do this as an extra layer on top of your hosting backups. You can't expect your customers to take 100% responsibility for this themselves.
What makes this especially bizarre is that Hostnet positions itself as a business hosting provider. Business hosting providers should simply offer backups as standard practice.
Additionally, Hostnet doesn't offer a staging/test environment with most of their hosting plans. You use this to safely test new designs, themes, and plugins. This is also a must – especially for business websites.
Finally, Hostnet doesn't offer a free migration service. You can have them move your site for you, but it'll cost you €95 (!) – which is quite unusual in the industry.
For hosting providers that do offer all of these features, scroll down to the conclusion at the bottom of this page.
Here are the features and extras that Hostnet offers:
- Free SSL Certificate
- Email hosting
- 1-click WordPress installation (but not available with their cheapest plans)
Hostnet hosting plans and pricing
Hostnet offers shared hosting, WordPress hosting, managed WordPress hosting and VPS hosting.
Shared hosting is by far the most common form of web hosting. You share a server with other websites, which keeps the costs low. Generally, shared hosting is suitable for sites that receive up to 50,000 visitors per month.
With many hosting providers, their managed WordPress hosting is exactly the same as their shared hosting (and WordPress hosting). But not with Hostnet. With their rather expensive managed WordPress hosting plans, you get a server that's entirely yours but is managed by Hostnet. For most websites, however, this is complete overkill.
Finally, Hostnet also offers VPS hosting where you get your own virtual partition on a server with resources specifically reserved for you.
For my review of Hostnet, I limited myself to testing their shared hosting and WordPress hosting services, so that's what I'll be focusing on in this article.
Shared hosting and WordPress hosting from Hostnet
Hostnet divides their shared hosting into Webhosting and WordPress hosting plans. This is not unusual in the hosting industry. Many hosting providers do this for marketing purposes, but ultimately the specifications and prices of both types are exactly the same.
This is not the case with Hostnet. Their Web Hosting plans offer 1000 GB of monthly data traffic while their WordPress hosting plans have 100 GB of monthly data traffic. A 10x difference! And yet the plans cost almost the same.
Hostnet's WordPress plans include a WordPress manual valued at €19.95 with their 50 GB plan and above. That would be nice, except when I opened it, the manual was already two years old – and WordPress changes constantly. Two years is a long time in the WordPress world. Additionally, the authors felt it necessary to dedicate 140 pages to something that could easily be explained in just 20 pages.
Additionally, the internet is filled with excellent free, concise, up-to-date WordPress tutorials, including our own.
The bottom line here is: don't choose one of Hostnet's WordPress hosting plans, even if you're building your site with WordPress. Their regular hosting plans also include a simple 1-click WordPress installation (from their Pro plan upward at least) but offer you much better value for your money.
Their best plan for most people would be the Pro plan (€7.00 per month upon renewal, when paid annually). This gives you 50 GB of disk space, which is more than enough for most websites. For most new sites, it could take years before they outgrow this plan.
Hostnet reviews: what do users say?
Hostnet receives extremely positive reviews from its users. Online reviews are often a fairly good predictor of a product or service's quality. However, Hostnet is an exception to this rule.
On TrustPilot, Hostnet scores 4.8/5 after more than 1,000 reviews.
And on Google, we've earned a 4.5/5 rating from nearly 1,000 reviews.
These are exceptionally good scores.
I don't want to accuse Hostnet of manipulating their online reviews. While the positive reviews are brief and lack details, they appear legitimate as far as I can tell. Therefore, I cannot directly explain why a service that falls so short has such high average user scores.
Since none of these positive reviews appear to be longer than 2 or 3 lines, and I haven't been able to find any that offer a balanced insight into the company, I'm instead sharing some longer reviews with a more critical approach.
I find these reviews much more relatable, and I think they paint a far more realistic picture of Hostnet than the positive reviews do.
But honestly, that's just my opinion. Make sure to do your own research and come to your own conclusions.
Conclusion & Hostnet alternatives
There are no reasons or specific cases for which I can recommend Hostnet. The service isn't fast, and while customer service is very accessible, it disappoints. They fall short on crucial features like automatic backups. To top it all off, the service constantly experiences outages.
Hostnet isn't expensive, but its pricing isn't particularly attractive either, and you can only install a single site on their cheaper plans.
Now for the good news after reading this Hostnet review. There are hosting providers that cost less, offer more features, deliver faster performance, and provide better customer service than Hostnet.
Here are two examples:
- Cloud86. A Dutch hosting provider located in Friesland. Thanks to their LiteSpeed servers, your site runs incredibly fast with them, and they offer automatic backups with all their plans. Read more about Cloud86 in our review.
- Hostinger. A great option if you're willing to go with an international hosting provider. They're accessible 24/7 via live chat and provide lightning-fast web hosting powered by LiteSpeed. Read more about Hostinger in our review.
