TransIP Review: Are Their Glory Days Behind Them?
With half a million customers, TransIP is one of the biggest hosting companies in the Netherlands. However, big doesn't always equal good. How do TransIP's services measure up when it comes to quality?
TransIP review overview
Speed
Scores exceptionally well in terms of TTFB and loading time.
Uptime
Overall good but there was a major outage in 2019.
Support
Support tickets and having to wait an hour for a response.
Simplicity
Self-designed dashboard that works poorly.
Features
No staging, migration service, or WordPress tools.
Costs
Quite expensive and overall poor value for money.
Our score:
2.5 / 5
Benefits
Disadvantages
If you're looking for web hosting, TransIP is probably on your radar. As a Dutch person, this company is practically unavoidable.
Since 2003, TransIP has grown to become one of the largest domain registration and hosting companies in the Netherlands. They offer shared hosting for new and smaller sites, while providing a wide range of VPS plans for medium to larger websites.
In terms of speed, the hosting provider performs well. However, TransIP's user-friendliness, transparency, and customer service leave much to be desired.
What you're reading is the most comprehensive, thorough TransIP review available on the web. I examine the service from every angle. At the end of this review, I'll also discuss several TransIP alternatives that might better align with your needs.
TIP: Our Cloud86 review shows that this host is faster and more stable than TransIP. Their customer service is also much more personalized.
Additionally, it costs less and you'll receive 60% off your first year.
TransIP at a Glance
TransIP speed, uptime, and customer service
In this section, we'll examine TransIP's performance (speed and uptime) and the quality of their customer service. For most users, these are the most critical factors that a host needs to excel in.
Speed
To test TransIP's speed, I purchased one of their shared hosting plans. For newer and smaller websites (think up to several tens of thousands of visitors per month), shared hosting is ideal because it doesn't require any technical knowledge and you can set it up with just a few clicks.
I tested out TransIP's Pro plan, which is the mid-tier option in their shared hosting lineup. After renewal, this plan costs €12.99.
These are the features of TransIP Pro:
- You can install one site on it
- 100 GB storage
- 100 email addresses
To test this plan, I set up a website using WordPress. I customized the website as follows:
- WordPress theme: Kadence
- Plugins: Block Navigation, Kadence Blocks, Post Duplicator
- SSL certificate
- No speed or caching optimizations
I used a site template that includes images, text, and other elements. You can find it here. This makes the site much more representative than a “bare” WordPress installation and therefore leads to much more interesting and relevant test results.
GTMetrix Results
GTMetrix provides an excellent overview of how a site performs in terms of speed across the board.
The site loads in less than a second (“fully loaded time”), passes the Core Web Vitals assessment, and achieves a TTFB under 200ms, which is quite good for shared hosting that costs just ten bucks a month.
(For reference: according to Google, your TTFB score is considered good when it's below 200ms.)
PageSpeed Insights Results
PageSpeed Insights is a tool developed by Google. It provides a less comprehensive overview of your site's speed compared to GTMetrix, but offers more in-depth analysis.
The PageSpeed Insights score looks good, but this is more attributable to the quality of the test site's coding.
Uptime
Uptime is the second critically important component of website performance. After all, what good is a fast website if your visitors can't access it?
Although TransIP doesn't offer an uptime guarantee for their shared hosting (they only provide this for their VPS plans, where they guarantee 99.99% uptime), their actual uptime performance appears to be quite reliable.
Conducting personal uptime tests has limited value since they only reflect a single server. It's more useful to investigate whether a web host has experienced extended outages in the past, how they handled those situations, and what customers are saying online about the host's reliability.
In 2019, TransIP was hit by a DDoS attack that took their service offline for several hours. Other than that, I haven't been able to find any major outages.
I've sifted through several hundred online user reviews and couldn't find any significant complaints about downtime.
Conclusion: TransIP's uptime is (in all likelihood) excellent.
Customer Service
For such a large company as TransIP, their customer service can only be described as downright sparse. They offer neither live chat nor phone support: you can only reach them through support tickets in your dashboard. You'll have to wait approximately an hour for a response. The replies are relatively detailed and their staff are generally competent.
You can reach their support on weekdays between 8:00 AM and midnight, and on weekends and holidays between 11:00 AM and 7:00 PM. This is quite generous for a Dutch hosting provider.
TransIP also has a fairly comprehensive knowledge base.
I expect more from a hosting provider that has been in business for two decades, employs over 100 staff members, and positions itself in a relatively premium price segment. At the very least, they should offer either wait-free live chat or telephone support.
TransIP under further scrutiny
In this section, we'll examine how easy it is to set up hosting with TransIP, how user-friendly their dashboard is, and what additional features and extras you receive with their hosting plans.
Setting Up Hosting with TransIP
Setting up web hosting with TransIP isn't particularly difficult, but what the service does lack is clarity and transparency. Typically, with hosting providers, you'd see a comprehensive list of specifications, how many sites you can install on your hosting plan, and more.
(Please note: I'm referring to their standard hosting here, not their VPS hosting, which is explained much more clearly.)
With TransIP, it's a bit of guesswork. The only information they show you is how many databases, email addresses, and disk space you get.
How many sites you can install, whether there's a test environment, and approximately how many visitors per month each plan can handle? Who knows!
This makes the provider quite non-transparent. This could easily be much better.
Dashboard Usability
TransIP offers a custom-designed dashboard where you can manage your hosting plans and domain names, handle your SSL certificates, and install WordPress with just a few clicks.
This dashboard appears outdated and doesn't prioritize user-friendliness. For instance, I ended up installing WordPress twice because the dashboard doesn't indicate that anything is happening during the first 10 seconds.
Hosting providers like Kinsta or SiteGround demonstrate that this can be done much better.
You'll figure it out eventually – even as a beginner – but not before you've probably scratched your head in confusion a few times.
Another noteworthy issue: it took me several hours before my SSL certificate was activated. I'm used to this process taking no more than a few minutes with other hosting providers.
Security
On their website, TransIP only mentions that they use Linux containers and a firewall. This is quite a vague description that gives you little insight into what this web host actually does to keep their users' sites secure.
Hosting extras and features
In terms of hosting extras and features, TransIP falls short. While you can count on an SSL certificate, there's no migration service available for new users.
Additionally, none of the TransIP plans offer staging functionality that would allow you to build a test environment to try out new features or test a new website design.
When I asked a TransIP employee about their staging capabilities, they suggested I could work with subdomains as an alternative. I'll keep it brief: that's a terrible idea that your users absolutely won't want to deal with.
TransIP offers daily automatic backups that go back up to 30 days (which is excellent).
Apart from that, TransIP doesn't offer a CDN, a custom-developed caching plugin, WordPress toolkit, or any other attractive extras.
That wouldn't be such a big deal on its own, if it weren't for the fact that TransIP isn't cheap and there are countless web hosts that do offer all these features for less money.
Hosting plans, costs and payment methods
Now let's take a look at what hosting plans TransIP offers, how much they cost, and the available payment methods.
Shared hosting
For the majority of users, shared hosting is the best option for their website. It's the most affordable type of hosting and the easiest to use.
TransIP offers 4 different shared hosting plans:
As mentioned earlier, these plans don't exactly shine when it comes to transparency. You can't find the specifications anywhere, and the feature descriptions are quite spartan as well.
While TransIP doesn't explicitly tell you how many monthly visitors each plan can handle, it's reasonable to assume that the cheapest plan (Basic) is suitable for roughly 10,000 monthly visitors, while the most expensive one (Max) can accommodate around 50,000 monthly visitors.
All the plans offer more than enough storage. To give you an idea, WebsiteGecko, a site with hundreds of pages and thousands of images, takes up no more than 2 GB of space.
Remarkably (and annoyingly), you can only install one website on each plan. I can understand this limitation with their cheapest plan, but with their more expensive plans, you would expect to be able to have at least 10 different installations.
One major advantage: you can pay monthly with TransIP, instead of being locked into a multi-year contract like with many other providers.
Unmanaged VPS
For more experienced webmasters, TransIP offers a wide range of VPS hosting plans.
In this area, TransIP is much better developed than with their shared hosting. Their VPS hosting is unmanaged, which means you'll be responsible for server maintenance and configurations yourself.
The most powerful TransIP VPS hosting option is their PerformanceVPS line:
For this, you'll pay at least €20 per month (promotional rate). The specifications are quite good. You can also customize your own VPS.
Money-back guarantee
TransIP does not offer a satisfaction guarantee, but under Dutch law, you can exercise a 14-day cancellation right using this form. This only applies to the hosting services you purchase – not to any domain names you may register.
Payment methods
You can pay in two ways: via direct debit or through iDeal. You cannot pay directly with MasterCard or Visa, nor can you use PayPal. If you manage your business bank account through an international service like Wise, you won't be able to use it with TransIP.
What do their customers say?
Most user reviews of TransIP offer little insight into the quality of the service. Most positive reviews consist of just a few lines about how they received quick help (which is surprising, given that TransIP has one of the slowest support teams among the web hosts I've tested).
Most negative reviews on TrustPilot complain about missed automatic payments and the consequences that follow.
To be completely honest, it's pretty bizarre that TransIP would send a debt collection agency after you for missing a payment of just a few euros. Normally, an online service would simply suspend your service and leave it at that.
It would be more interesting to gain insights into how people who give TransIP poor reviews actually experience the service itself rather than peripheral matters.
On Google Reviews, we see a similar trend:
Based on the online reviews, TransIP's performance with their customers seems neither particularly bad nor especially impressive.
TransIP is part of a massive conglomerate: here's what that means for the quality of their services and pricing
TransIP acquired several web hosting companies a few years ago and established team.blue in 2019 together with Combell.
Over time, this has grown into a substantial conglomerate consisting of more than 30 hosting brands spread across all of Europe.
When hosting companies engage in these kinds of expansion ambitions, it typically leads to two things:
- Higher prices for consumers
- Less technological innovation, customer service, etc. – all in the name of cost savings
This is what we've already seen, for example, with the massive EIG, an even larger conglomerate that has been buying up good hosting companies for years and stripping them of their R&D and support.
TransIP seems to be following this trend as well. Their services keep getting more expensive while the quality continues to deteriorate.
History shows that once a trend like this takes hold, it typically becomes irreversible.
Alternatives to TransIP
Depending on exactly what you're looking for in web hosting, here are a few providers that offer better value for money than TransIP.
First, there's Cloud86. This is a Dutch-based web hosting service that outperforms TransIP in virtually every aspect, except for their customer service availability (which you can only reach during standard Dutch business hours). In my opinion, this is the best hosting provider for most people.
Read more about them in our Cloud86 review.
If you're willing to work with a foreign hosting provider, consider Hostinger (you'll sacrifice a bit on customer service, but it's incredibly competitively priced, super user-friendly, and fast). This service has servers distributed worldwide and offers 24/7 support via live chat.
Read our Hostinger review here.
Conclusion
TransIP is a subpar web host when it comes to their shared hosting. That said, they do serve more experienced users well with a wide range of unmanaged VPS plans. I didn't test these plans for this review.
TransIP scores poorly to moderately on customer service, user-friendliness, and features. The value for money isn't great either: you pay a bit too much for what you get.
TransIP was one of the pioneers of the Dutch hosting industry and has grown into an enormously successful company since 2003. However, it's no longer positioned at the bleeding edge of web hosting. Newer players have surpassed them, as has happened with many once-innovative companies.
Therefore, choose one of the hosting providers I recommend above.
