Yourhosting Review: Solid Performance, Poor Elsewhere
Since early 2022, Yourhosting has been the biggest hosting provider in the Netherlands. However, being big doesn't necessarily mean being the best. Is Yourhosting the right place to host your website?
Yourhosting review overview
Speed
Average speed, nothing to write home about really.
Uptime
Extremely stable: achieved 100% uptime in 2019.
Support
Reachable through many channels but not very helpful.
Simplicity
Somewhat outdated dashboard, but easy to use.
Features
No staging environment, limited backups.
Costs
Prices have risen by 300% over the last 10 years.
Our score:
2.5 / 5
Yourhosting pros
Yourhosting cons
As of January 1st, Argeweb, Sohosted, Vevida, Alphamega Hosting, and VIP Internet have become part of Yourhosting. This acquisition instantly makes the Zwolle-based hosting provider the largest web hosting company in the Netherlands.
TIP: Our Cloud86 review shows that this provider is faster and more stable than Yourhosting. Additionally, their customer service team consists of WordPress experts.
Yourhosting offers relatively fast hosting, great uptime, poor customer service, and even worse features at high prices. This makes this provider a mixed bag. What particularly annoyed me to no end were their numerous upselling attempts. I might have found this acceptable if their prices were a third of what they are, but given their current rates, it feels like highway robbery.
This Yourhosting review is the most comprehensive one you'll find anywhere on the internet. I thoroughly examine this provider from top to bottom. Spoiler alert: I cannot recommend Yourhosting, but I do offer several good alternatives at the end of this review.
NOTE: Since the publication of this review, Yourhosting has made several improvements, including (finally) adding automatic backups. If we were to review the provider today, the score would likely be somewhat higher.
Yourhosting at a glance
Your hosting speed, uptime and customer service
How does Yourhosting perform in terms of speed, uptime, and customer service, the most important components of any web host?
Speed
When evaluating any web host, speed is the first thing I look at. Speed is an important Google ranking factor and has an enormous impact on conversions. Nobody likes slow-loading websites, which means visitors are more likely to abandon a sluggish site early or click away from a page that's still loading. A slow website can therefore cost you a lot of money.
To get a good idea of Yourhosting's speed, I purchased their Start plan. It costs about ten dollars per month and allows you to install a single website.
I tested this plan by setting up a simple but representative WordPress site on it. Here's how I built this site:
- WordPress theme: Kadence
- Plugins: Block Navigation, Kadence Blocks, Post Duplicator
- SSL certificate
- No speed or caching optimizations
The site contains images, text, and various graphic elements, providing a representative picture of how quickly a “real” website will load.
GTMetrix Results
First, I ran the site through GTMetrix.
The test results look pretty good, which is what you'd expect from a web hosting plan that costs 10 euros per month. The full page load time is under 1 second (which is excellent), the core web vitals (recently introduced as a Google ranking factor) are easily passed, and there's nothing else that stands out as concerning.
The Time to First Byte (TTFB) performance isn't particularly impressive, however. At 400 ms, it's somewhat approaching the danger zone (Google doesn't like when this score exceeds 600 ms). Still, this is just about acceptable for hosting at this price point.
Let me briefly explain what TTFB actually is: it refers to how long a server takes to send the first piece of information (the “first byte”) to the browser after a user clicks on a page. The shorter this time, the better. The page will begin loading faster as a result.
PageSpeed
PageSpeed is Google's own speed tool. Both the mobile and desktop scores show excellent results.
Regarding speed, there's not much to criticize about Yourhosting, but you can find faster hosting for less money. More on that later.
Uptime
What good is a fast website if it's offline? Uptime is one of the most critical aspects of quality web hosting. Poor uptime frustrates your visitors and Google, while also causing you to miss out on revenue.
Yourhosting scores excellently in terms of uptime. In 2019, they even managed to achieve a perfect uptime of 100%.
One of the best ways to gauge a host's uptime is to thoroughly examine every user review you can possibly find.
My conclusion? Yourhosting experiences virtually no downtime.
However, they don't offer an uptime guarantee.
Yourhosting is one of the few Dutch web hosts that maintains a status page where they display outages and announce scheduled maintenance.
Customer Service
Yourhosting's customer service can be reached through an exceptionally wide range of channels: by phone, social media (Twitter and Facebook), live chat (my personal favorite), and email.
Until recently, they were available during quite extensive hours: on weekdays between 9 AM and 9 PM, and you could also reach them on weekends, albeit with somewhat limited availability. Now they're only available Monday through Friday from 9 AM to 5 PM.
My experience with Yourhosting's customer service wasn't great. I clicked through to the support section in my dashboard. The first thing that caught my eye was an upsell attempt for premium support at 8 euros per month.
After ignoring this, I ended up on a separate support portal where I wasn't automatically logged in. When I subsequently tried to log in, I couldn't do so using my Yourhosting account that I had created earlier that same day.
Good hosting providers typically have these systems interconnected. You don't need to log in separately to another system just to contact customer support.
Eventually, I managed to reach a Yourhosting support agent through live chat. While she was friendly enough, she didn't really help me. This resulted in me going around in circles. The advice was along the lines of: “have you tried using a different browser?”
This kind of thing might be acceptable from a budget host, but Yourhosting positions itself in the premium segment. I shouldn't have to spend 30+ minutes just to access a customer service portal where I can create and track my support tickets.
(The solution ultimately turned out to be that I needed to register separately for the support portal.)
Once I finally managed to log in to the support portal, I asked a few detailed questions about their hosting services. The answers I received didn't really inspire confidence. The staff members I spoke with appeared to have limited training and couldn't really provide substantive help with my technical questions.
This is probably different if you pay 8 euros per month (!) for Yourhosting's premium support service.
A closer look at Yourhosting
In this section, we'll explore how to sign up for hosting with Yourhosting (and what to watch out for), how their dashboard works, what security measures they offer, and what additional features and extras Yourhosting provides.
Sign up for hosting with Yourhosting
Signing up for web hosting with Yourhosting is quite straightforward. If you don't already have a domain name, you can register one through them.
Make sure you skip the so-called popular variations of your domain name. These are expensive and completely unnecessary.
The upselling practices continue further. Make sure you don't purchase their paid SSL certificate (more on this later) and skip their premium support option.
Dashboard
Yourhosting features a custom-designed dashboard where you can manage your products, handle payments, and access support.
This dashboard looks quite dated, but everything you're looking for is in a logical place. It's straightforward to use.
For managing your website, Yourhosting uses the well-known Plesk platform, which serves as an alternative to cPanel.
With Plesk, you can install WordPress or another web application, set up an SSL certificate, and access your database. The tool works well and feels fairly intuitive.
Security
Yourhosting monitors their servers 24/7. They use robust firewalls and anti-spam protection. I haven't been able to find any information about data breaches or other large-scale security issues with Yourhosting.
Hosting features and add-ons
Yourhosting offers the following features and extras:
- SSL Certificate
- Automatic backups (go back 5 days)
- Email hosting
There's no free migration service available to you, which is surprising considering how expensive Yourhosting is. Additionally, there's no staging/test environment where you could safely test new WordPress themes and plugins before merging them with the live version of your site.
A frustrating aspect of the automatic backups is that they only go back 5 days, and if you want to restore an older version, you have to do this through a contact form. You can't manage this yourself. As a customer, I would absolutely have no interest in dealing with that.
Overall, Yourhosting scores very poorly in terms of extras and features.
MijnWebsite Website Builder
If you don't want to create a site using WordPress or a web application like Joomla, you can use YourHosting's website builder: MijnWebsite.
This builder is solid but not as well-designed as what a specialized service like Webador offers (learn more about that website builder in our Webador review).
Yourhosting plans and pricing
Yourhosting offers shared hosting and VPS hosting. With shared hosting, you share a server with other users. This is the best solution for most websites. With a VPS, you get your own dedicated partition on a server where you can manage your own resources. This option is more suitable for experienced users.
On the Yourhosting website, they refer to their shared hosting as “Website hosting” and “WordPress hosting.” However, both are exactly the same.
Shared hosting
Yourhosting's shared hosting is divided into 3 plans.
Start
- 25 GB storage (more than enough for most websites – our site takes up about 2 GB and contains hundreds of pages)
- 50 email addresses
- 5 GB mailbox
- Creating Your Own Backups
- Free SSL Certificate
- $10.99 per month
Plus
- 50 GB storage
- 100 email addresses
- 10 GB mailbox
- Creating Your Own Backups
- Free SSL Certificate
- $16.50 per month
Max
- 100 GB storage space
- 250 email addresses
- 15 GB mailbox
- Creating Your Own Backups
- Free SSL Certificate
- $19.99 per month
For any of these plans, you can only install a single website. While I can understand this limitation for their cheapest plan, it feels rather stingy for their more expensive plans.
As a beginner, your best option is to go with the Start plan. When necessary (that is, when your visitor numbers exceed the plan limit), you can always upgrade to a more expensive plan.
The more expensive plans offer greater speed than the cheaper plans, but Yourhosting doesn't explain what causes this difference.
VPS hosting
Yourhosting also offers managed and unmanaged VPS hosting. You don't need to consider this if you're a beginner or have a relatively small site (up to a few tens of thousands of visitors per month).
Money-back guarantee
Yourhosting offers an extremely generous 100-day money-back guarantee. This is significantly longer than the industry standard of 30 days.
Significant price increases in recent years
Yourhosting has become significantly more expensive in recent years. Yourhosting's plan rates have increased by 300% over the past 10 years. Understandably, many Yourhosting customers are not happy about this.
Yourhosting claims this is because they invest more in their hosting infrastructure, etc. Personally, I think it has more to do with the company's enormous growth ambitions (consider the countless hosting providers they've swallowed up in recent years) which need to be financed somehow.
Don't purchase the SSL certificates offered by Yourhosting
One of the most annoying things about Yourhosting is that they're very eager to make you pay for an SSL certificate. An SSL certificate ensures your site operates through a secure connection. These days, practically every website in the world uses this.
Yourhosting offers 3 paid SSL certificates. They list outdated benefits like displaying a green padlock and—with their most expensive SSL certificate—showing your company name in your browser. These benefits haven't existed for years. Every SSL padlock—paid or free—appears gray in all browsers today. Additionally, no browser displays your company name in the address bar anymore.
Don't fall for these sales pitches and simply use the free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate instead.
What are people saying online about Yourhosting?
Yourhosting receives average ratings from online users. On TrustPilot, it has a score of 3.7/5 based on more than 700 reviews.
And on Google, it also has a 3.7/5 rating based on more than 1000 reviews.
Many negative reviews are related to the substantial price increases that Yourhosting has implemented over the past few years. Others complain about the customer service, which isn't always easily accessible or knowledgeable.
On the other hand, there are also plenty of customers who specifically praise Yourhosting for their customer service.
I personally relate most to the negative feedback about their customer service. I found it to be an utterly frustrating experience.
As is surprisingly common with Dutch hosting providers, reviews primarily focus on receiving good customer service. Alternatively, people complain about unexpected billing practices and price increases.
Performance and hosting features are barely mentioned at all.
Alternatives to Yourhosting
Yourhosting is far from impressive. For less money, you can get better web hosting from several other hosting providers.
- Cloud86. This is a Dutch hosting provider based in Friesland. They're a relatively young company (established in 2020). However, the team previously founded Sohosted, which has since been acquired by Yourhosting. Cloud86 offers practically everything you'd look for in a hosting provider. Great speed, excellent uptime, and easily accessible customer service that you can email or call without waiting on hold. Unlike Yourhosting, most of their plans allow you to install multiple websites. The only drawback is that their customer service is only available during Dutch business hours. Otherwise, they offer the best value for money of any Dutch hosting provider. Read more about this provider in our Cloud86 review.
- Hostinger. If you don't mind receiving support in English, consider Hostinger. Thanks to their LiteSpeed servers, Hostinger is one of the fastest web hosts on the market. Additionally, their uptime is excellent and they offer good customer service, albeit not very quick (if you don't pay for their premium support, expect wait times of 30 to 40 minutes). Finally, Hostinger is incredibly well-priced. Read more about this provider in our Hostinger review.
- SiteGround. If you have a slightly higher budget for hosting (more than ten dollars per month after renewal), consider SiteGround. We personally used WebsiteGecko for years before switching to Cloud86. SiteGround is fast, reliable, and stable. Besides great performance, SiteGround offers excellent 24/7 support. Read more about this provider in our SiteGround review.
If you're specifically looking for hosting for a WordPress website, check out our article where we compare WordPress hosting providers.
Conclusion
Yourhosting performs adequately in terms of speed and uptime. However, their customer support is subpar. Their staff seem poorly trained, which makes resolving even simple issues a frustrating experience. The web host also falls short when it comes to features (for example, their automatic backup system is quite poorly designed and they don't offer a testing environment).
In addition, Yourhosting engages in several questionable upselling practices. This feels particularly uncomfortable given that Yourhosting is far from being an inexpensive hosting provider.
YourHosting doesn't particularly excel in any area (there are faster providers that cost less), so there really isn't a good reason to recommend them.
I recommend checking out one of our alternatives to Yourhosting listed above.
