Yourhosting Review: Decent Performance, Poor Elsewhere
Yourhosting has been the largest hosting provider in the Netherlands since early 2022. However, big doesn’t necessarily equal good. Is Yourhosting the right place to host your website?
Yourhosting review summary
Speed
Average speed, nothing to write home about really.
Uptime
Extremely stable: an uptime of 100% in 2019.
Support
Reachable through many channels but not very helpful.
Simplicity
Dated looking dashboard, but easy to use.
Features
No staging, limited backups and no free migration service.
Cost
Rates went up 300% over the past 10 years.
Our score:
2,5 / 5
Advantages
Disadvantages
As of 2023, Argeweb, Sohosted, Vevida, Alphamega Hosting and VIP Internet are part of Yourhosting. That makes the Zwolle-based hosting provider at once the largest web hosting party in the Netherlands.
Yourhosting offers fairly fast hosting, excellent uptime, poor customer service and even worse features, at high prices. That makes this provider a mixed bag. Something that I found to incredibly annoying were the many upsell attempts they made. I would have found that acceptable had they been much cheaper, but given their current rates, it feels like a cash grab.
This Yourhosting review is the most comprehensive you’ll find on the internet. I’m leaving no stone unturned. Spoiler alert: I cannot recommend Yourhosting, but do offer a bunch of good alternatives at the bottom of this review.
TIP: Cloud86, where we host WebsiteGecko, is faster and more stable than Yourhosting. In addition, their customer service consists of WordPress experts.
Yourhosting at a glance
Yourhosting speed, uptime and customer service
How does Yourhosting score in terms of speed, uptime and customer service?
Speed
With any web host, speed is the first thing I look at. Speed is an important Google ranking factor and also has an incredibly large impact on conversions. No one likes slow-loading sites, and so someone is more likely to leave a slow site prematurely or click away from a page which is loading. Therefore, a slow site can be costly for businesses.
To get a good idea of Yourhosting’s speed, I purchased their Start plan. This costs around 10 euros per month and you can install a single website on it.
I tested this package by setting up a simple WordPress site on it. This is how I built this site:
- WordPress theme: Kadence
- Plugins: Block Navigation, Kadence Blocks, Post Duplicator
- SSL certificate
- No speed or caching optimizations
The site has images, text and various graphical elements which gives it a representative picture of how fast a “real” site will load.
GTMetrix results
First, I ran the site through GTMetrix.
The test results look pretty good, which you should expect from a web hosting plan that costs 10 euros a month. The full page load time is under 1 second (which is excellent), the core web vitals are passed fairly easily, and other than that, there is nothing that really stands out in a negative way.
However, the Time to First Byte (TTFB) isn’t that great. At 400 ms, it is somewhat near the danger zone (Google does not like it when this score exceeds 600 ms).
Just a quick explanation of what TTFB exactly is: it refers to how long a server takes to send the first piece of info (the “first byte”) to the browser after a user clicks on a page. The shorter this takes, the better it is. This is because the page will start loading faster.
PageSpeed
PageSpeed is Google’s own speed tool. Both the mobile and desktop scores come out fine.
In terms of speed, Yourhosting isn’t doing terrible, but you can find faster hosting for less money. More on that later.
Uptime
Uptime is one of the most important features of good web hosting. With an unpredictable uptime you’ll frustrate your visitors, Google, and will end up losing revenue.
Yourhosting has excellent uptime scores. 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 dig through every user review you can find.
My conclusion? Yourhosting practically does not suffer from downtime.
However, they do not offer an uptime guarantee.
Yourhosting is one of the few Dutch web hosts that does have a maintenance page where they show outages and announce maintenance.
Customer service
Yourhosting’s customer service can be reached through an exceptional number of channels: phone, social media (Twitter and Facebook), live chat (my favorite) and email.
In addition, they can be reached within a pretty wide time frame: on weekdays between 9am and 9pm and on Saturday you can reach them between 9am and 5pm.
Nevertheless, my experience with Yourhosting’s customer service wasn’t great. I clicked through to the support section in my dashboard. The first thing I saw was an upsell attempt at premium support for 8 euros a month.
Upon ignoring this, I ended up on a separate support portal where I was not automatically logged in. When I then tried to log in, I was unable to do so via my Yourhosting account that I had created the same day.
With hosting providers worth their salt, these types of systems are usually connected. You don’t have to log into another system separately in order to get in touch with support.
Eventually I got a hold of a Yourhosting employee via live chat. She was friendly enough but didn’t really help me. As a result, I ended up spending dozens of minutes talking in circles. The advice was of the “have you tried another browser?” level.
Something like this is acceptable with a budget host, but Yourhosting charges a premium. I don’t expect to spend 30+ plus minutes to access a customer service portal where I can create and track my support tickets.
(The solution eventually turned out to be that I had to register separately for the support portal.)
Once I managed to log into the support portal, I asked a few substantive questions about their hosting. The answers didn’t really inspire confidence in me.
Perhaps this is different when you’ll end up shelling out 8 euros per month (!) for Yourhosting’s premium support.
Other things to know about Yourhosting
In this section we’ll take a look at how hosting with Yourhosting works (and what to look out for), how the dashboard works, how they handle security and what features and perks Yourhosting offers.
Setting up hosting with Yourhosting
Setting up web hosting with Yourhosting is fairly easy. If you don’t have a domain name yet, you can register it through them.
Do make sure you skip the so-called popular variations of your domain name. These are expensive and completely unnecessary.
The upsell practices continue for a while. Make sure you don’t purchase their paid SSL certificate (more on this later) and skip their premium support.
Dashboard
Yourhosting has a self-designed dashboard through you where you can manage your products, arrange payments and reach support.
This dashboard looks pretty dated, but it is easy to use.
To manage your website itself, Yourhosting uses Plesk, an alternative to cPanel.
Through Plesk, you can install WordPress or another Web application, set up an SSL certificate and access your database. The tool works fine and feels fairly intuitive.
Security
Yourhosting monitors their servers 24/7. They use decent firewalls and anti-spam protection. I have been unable to discover any data breaches about other large-scale security issues at Yourhosting.
Hosting features and extras
Yourhosting offers the following features and perks:
- SSL certificate
- Automatic backups (go back 5 days)
- Email hosting
There is no migration service that you can use, which is remarkable considering how pricey Yourhosting is. There is also no staging/testing environment where you can safely test new WordPress themes and plugins, for example, and then merge them with the live version of your site.
What is annoying about the automatic backups is that they only go back 5 days, and if you want to restore an older version you have to do it through a contact form. You can’t take care of this yourself.
Yourhosting plans and rates
Yourhosting offers shared hosting and VPS hosting. With shared hosting, you share a server with other users. For most sites this is the best solution. With a VPS you get your own separate partition on a server with which you can manage your own resources. This 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 thing.
Shared hosting
Yourhosting’s shared hosting is divided into 3 plans.
Start
- 25 GB of storage (more than enough for most websites, our site occupies about 2 GB and consists of hundreds of pages)
- 50 email addresses
- 5 GB mailbox
- Make your own backups
- Free SSL
- 9,99 € per month
Plus
- 50 GB storage
- 100 email addresses
- 10 GB mailbox
- Make your own backups
- Free SSL
- € 14,99 per month
Max
- 100 GB disk space
- 250 email addresses
- 15 GB mailbox
- Make your own backups
- Free SSL
- €19,99 per month
On each of these plans you can only install one website. From their cheapest package I can imagine this, but with their more expensive packages this feels very skimpy.
As a beginner, your best bet is the Start package. When necessary (i.e., your visitor numbers exceed the package limit), you can always upgrade to a more expensive package.
The more expensive packages offer more speed than the cheaper packages, but Yourhosting doesn’t explain what causes this.
VPS hosting
Yourhosting also offers managed and unmanaged VPS hosting. You don’t need to look into these if you are a beginner or have a relatively small site (up to several tens of thousands of visitors per month).
Not-good-money-back guarantee
Yourhosting offers a very generous 100-day no-good-money-back guarantee. This is a lot more than the industry standard of 30 days.
Substantial price increases in recent years
Yourhosting has gotten a lot more expensive over the past few years. The rates of Yourhosting’s packages have gone up 300% over the past 10 years. Many Yourhosting customers are logically unhappy about this.
Yourhosting claims this is so because they are investing more in their hosting infrastructure etc. Personally, I think it has more to do with the huge growth ambitions the company has (think of the countless hosting providers they’ve gobbled up in recent years) which surely have to be funded from somewhere.
Don’t buy the SSL certificates offered by Yourhosting
One of the most annoying things about Yourhosting is that they are very eager to charge you for an SSL certificate. An SSL certificate ensures that your site goes through a secure connection. These days, practically every site in the world uses this.
As I describe in detail in this article, paying for an SSL certificate today is pure nonsense. The free Let’s Encrypt works just as well and by now is used by organizations with millions in revenue (such as Quora and the BBC).
Yourhosting (which earns big bucks from paid certificates) logically has a different take on this.
Yourhosting offers 3 paid SSL certificates. Here they spoon-feed outdated benefits such as showing a green lock and – with their most expensive SSL certificate – showing your company name in your browser. These benefits haven’t existed for years. Every SSL lock – paid or free – looks gray today in every browser. Also, no browser shows your company name in an address bar anymore.
Don’t fall for these sales pitches and just use the free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate.
What do people online say about Yourhosting?
Yourhosting scores average among users online. On TrustPilot, it gets a 3.7/5 after more than 700 reviews.
And on Google likewise a 3.7/5 after more than 1,000 reviews.
Many negative reviews have to do with the hefty price increases Yourhosting has implemented in recent years. Others complain about the customer service that is not always easy to reach and knowledgeable.
On the other hand, there are also plenty of customers who praise Yourhosting for their customer service.
I myself can relate most to the negativity surrounding their customer service. I found it to be a downright frustrating experience.
As is surprisingly often the case with Dutch hosting providers, reviews are mainly limited to being well served by customer service. Or people complain about unexpected billing and price increases.
Things like performance and hosting features are virtually ignored.
Alternatives on Yourhosting
Yourhosting is not a really bad web hosting service, but it is not a high-flyer either. For less money, you can get better web hosting at a number of other hosting parties.
- Cloud86. This is a Dutch hosting provider based in Friesland. It is a relatively young party (they have been around since 2020). But the team previously founded Sohosted, which has now been acquired by Yourhosting. Cloud86 offers practically everything you look for in a hosting provider. Good speed, great uptime, and easy-to-reach customer service that you can email or call with no wait time. Unlike with Yourhosting, you can install multiple websites on most of their packages. The only flaw is that their customer service can only be reached within Dutch business hours. Otherwise, they offer the best value for money of any Dutch hosting provider.
- Hostinger. Thanks to their LiteSpeed servers, Hostinger is one of the fastest web hosts on the market. In addition, their uptime is fine and they offer good, though not very fast customer service (if you don’t pay for their premium support, you’ll have wait times of 30 to 40 minutes). Finally, Hostinger is ridiculously well priced.
- SiteGround. If you have just a little more budget for your hosting (more than a tenner a month after renewal), consider SiteGround. We ourselves used Start24 for years before switching to Cloud86. SiteGround is fast, reliable and stable. In addition to good performance, SiteGround has excellent, 24/7 support.
Conclusion
Yourhosting scores pretty well in terms of speed and uptime. However, their support is underwhelming. Although you can reach their staff at pretty many times and fairly quickly, they don’t seem to be tremendously capable. This quickly makes solving simple problems a frustrating affair. The web host also falls short when it comes to features (for example, their automatic backups sting pretty badly and they don’t offer a test environment).
In addition, Yourhosting engages in some questionable practices around upselling. This feels extra uncomfortable because Yourhosting is far from a cheap hosting provider.
Because of this, Yourhosting is not necessarily a bad web host, but the service doesn’t excel at anything either (for example, there are faster providers that cost less) and therefore there isn’t really a good reason to recommend them.
I therefore recommend you check out one of our alternatives to Yourhosting above.