Web Hosting Hub Review
| Support | Help Desk, Email, Chat, Forum, Phone & Knowledge Base |
|---|---|
| Uptime | Excellent (99.99% past 6 months) |
| Guarantees | 90-Day |
| Free Migration |  |
| Best For | personal blogs and small businesses |
| Strengths | Deep discounts & range of features |
| Weaknesses | Shared hosting only |
| Promotion | Get Up To 51% Off |
What Is Web Hosting Hub?
Web Hosting Hub is a shared web hosting provider founded in 2010 by InMotion Hosting – its older, more well-known parent company.
In addition to hosting services, Web Hosting Hub offers complimentary website products such as domain names, a WordPress-powered website builder, web design, and email services.
Is Web Hosting Hub Legit?
Web Hosting Hub is 100% legit. They position themselves as a stable hosting provider not owned by one of the major web services holding companies (i.e., GoDaddy and Newfold Digital) that also has good performance and good support for businesses that want a no-nonsense website.
The company provides 24-hour customer support and a 90-day money-back guarantee.
What Is Web Hosting Hub Used for?
Web Hosting Hub hosts websites and web applications such as WordPress. They market themselves to bloggers, ecommerce stores, and other small businesses. Unlike many other hosting companies (like their parent, InMotion), they are focused on hosting small to medium-sized websites.
As a result, Web Hosting Hub offers one product – shared Linux hosting – which can run most websites and apps that don’t have large amounts of sustained traffic.
In this Web Hosting Hub review, I’ll cover its plans and pricing, pros and cons, and share a few Web Hosting Hub Alternatives that you may want to consider.
Web Hosting Hub Pricing
Web Hosting Hub has three hosting plans. Here’s a brief overview of each.
Shared Hosting Plans
Shared hosting is the bread and butter of the website hosting world and consists of individual accounts on a Linux server. They can run WordPress or any application on a LAMP Stack. It’s a cost-effective and reliable way to run most websites. Learn more about shared hosting in this guide. Web Hosting Hub has three primary shared hosting plans.
| Plan | Spark | Nitro | Dynamo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Initial Price* | $5.99/mo. | $7.99/mo. | $9.99/mo. |
| Renewal Price | $11.99/mo. | $15.49/mo. | $20.49/mo. |
| Websites | 2 | unlimited | unlimited |
| Storage | unlimited | unlimited | unlimited |
| Bandwidth/month | unmetered | unmetered | unmetered |
| Free Domain Name | 1 year | 1 year | 1 year |
| Free SSL |  |
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| CDN | |
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| Dedicated IP | |
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| Daily Backups | |
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WordPress Hosting Plans
Even though WordPress can run on web hosting, many hosting companies have separate WordPress hosting plans due to customer demand and the hardware demands of WordPress. But while the plans are separate, most WordPress hosting plans are the same as their shared hosting equivalent.
Web Hosting Hub is like this to a degree. Their WordPress plans are just Web hosting plans with WordPress auto-installed. The good news is that they have the same pricing for both plans. As a bonus, they bundle a drag-and-drop WordPress-powered website builder in every WordPress plan.
Web Hosting Hub Alternatives
Pros of Web Hosting Hub
The Web Hosting Hub platform is transparent and user-friendly, which is everything a beginner, start-up, or small website owner would want. Here is my list of Web Hosting Hub Pros.
Pricing
As mentioned, Web Hosting Hub has three plans – Spark, Nitro, and Dynamo – ranging between $11.99 and $20.49 per month.
They offer a generous discount for new customers, up to 51% off the first year’s hosting, so you can get the Spark plan for less than $6 per month (if you commit to a 36-month term.)
The web hosting industry makes it difficult to make an apples-to-apples comparison between hosting providers, so I focus on the three critical features you are paying for – domains, databases, and disk space. Everything else is an upsell or bonus that you can assess separately.
Web Hosting Hub only places caps on its basic Spark plan, limiting you to two websites and ten databases. For many small site owners, that’s perfectly fine.
A single install of WordPress requires one database. Their other two plans are unlimited and are similar to HostGator’s Baby and Business plans or GoDaddy’s Deluxe plan. Since they allow unlimited websites and domains on the Nitro and Dynamo plans, there’s plenty of value.
Overall, Web Hosting Hub’s pricing is very competitive when you account for the unlimited features. It’s better than Bluehost, and with the promos, they are in line with HostGator – even for their cheapest Spark plan.
The only downside to their pricing is the lack of month-to-month pricing. Companies like HostGator allow for contracts as short as a month. With Web Hosting Hub, you must commit for at least a year.
They make up for it with a 90 Day Money Back Guarantee, which is uncommon in the industry, so overall, Web Hosting Hub’s pricing falls into the “pro” column.
Features
Beyond “domains, databases, and disk space,” Web Hosting Hub boasts some useful features that help them stand out against other web hosting companies.
Like their parent company, InMotion Hosting, they offer Solid State Drives (SSDs) on all accounts – instead of the typical “spinning disk drives.” This feature usually helps with server performance and isn’t always found in the value end of the market.
As a resident of the East Coast of the US, I appreciate the ability to choose between data centers (i.e., where your website files are housed). For small shared server websites, the physical location of your files doesn’t usually impact speed. However, since Web Hosting Hub offers it, it is a nice bonus.
Lastly, their standard features are very competitive with other hosting providers. They offer a free domain name for a year, which is nice (though I recommend using a domain registrar for registration long-term since most hosting companies are expensive for renewals.)
Web Hosting Hub has all the standard marketing credits for Bing, Google, and Facebook. They have a solid email interface and a free website transfer service, which can be helpful if you are transferring an existing website and find the migration process daunting. They also provide a free shared SSL certificate, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space, and a free domain with any web hosting plan.
Overall, Web Hosting Hub’s feature set is a strength.
Usability, Apps & Builders
Setting up a website can be daunting, so any good web hosting company needs to simplify things for the user. I like how Web Hosting Hub handles user experience and “onboarding.”
For example, at the end of the checkout process, they ask you questions about your experience level to ensure you receive support material suitable for you – or connect you to an account specialist.
Like InMotion, Web Hosting Hub runs your account through an Account Management Platform (i.e., Control Panel). It’s the single place to log in, manage your hosting account, install apps and access your actual server.
They also run their servers with industry-standard cPanel software, so there are no surprises. You can use website setup guides to install your website.
Or – you can use their install scripts which install the most common web apps (i.e., WordPress, Joomla, etc.) in just a few steps.
All of the screens are uncluttered. I like how they install a clean version of WordPress without the pre-installed plugins you’ll never use.
For customers who want to use a website builder, they’ve developed BoldGrid, an overlay software on top of WordPress – so you’re not locked into a proprietary website builder like HostGator.
Again – solid props to Web Hosting Hub for usability.
Excellent Performance (for a Shared Host)
With shared hosting, many websites share the same server. It’s kind of like living in an apartment. You have your own space, and you own what’s in it. And everything is fine as long as your neighbors don’t invite hordes of people over and the landlord doesn’t try to redesign your apartment.
In other words, even though you aren’t paying for a VPS server (i.e., townhouse) or a dedicated server (i.e., your own plot of land) – you should expect a shared server to perform well.
Many web hosting companies are infamous for slow performance and overloading servers. There are a *lot* of variables that go into judging this. And you should be careful to cast judgment on a company because of an intermittent issue (i.e., YouTube, Amazon, Facebook, and Netflix have all experienced downtime.) There are many things companies can do to manage performance that is outside of the scope of this review.
That said, there are three metrics that I look at to get a general sense of performance.
First is Time To First Byte (TTFB). That is how fast the server returns the first byte of information after it receives a request from a browser. For TTFB, Web Hosting Hub is quite solid:
The second is memory allocation. How much memory does the host allocate to the account by default? WordPress runs better with more memory allocated (more than 128M), and Web Hosting Hub is generous with the amount they install and up-to-date versions of PHP and MySQL.
The third is uptime. Web Hosting Hub’s uptime guarantee is 99.9%, and they have had rare downtime incidents based on their network status page.
As far as I can tell, Web Hosting Hub does very well with performance for a hosting company.
Customer Support / Service
The thing about online customer reviews is that the comments are usually not representative of a typical experience. It’s why 5-star and 1-star reviews on Amazon are generally worthless (tip – look at the 3-star reviews). For this reason, gauging a web hosting company’s customer support levels requires further investigation.
I look for indicators that a web host considers customer service an investment instead of a cost and whether the right culture and processes are in place.
Web Hosting Hub’s US-based support team is an indicator that they value customer service. Their ticketing system across multiple access channels indicates the right processes. They have a live chat and a phone support team.
Their Onboarding emails and Community Q&As indicate that Web Hosting Hub attempts to solve the root problem instead of kicking along the symptom. And they’ve been doing this for years – here’s an example from way back in 2016:
My interactions so far have been positive, which places Web Hosting Hub’s Customer Support in the pro column for me.
Cons of Web Hosting Hub
Web Hosting Hub is not for everyone. You’ll find plenty of Web Hosting Hub complaints around the web. Some are valid, and some are purely anecdotal. Just like they have plenty of pros – enough for me to use them for projects – they also have some cons.
They Only Offer Shared Hosting
Web Hosting Hub’s primary drawback is tied to their main selling point – they only offer shared web hosting.
Although most sites will never need more than a shared hosting server, dealing with a web host that can accommodate you as you grow is nice. If you start with Web Hosting Hub but eventually need a VPS, you’ll have to switch companies (even if it means to their parent company, InMotion.)
You’ll also need to switch if you ever need to scale up hardware or get a VPS for an Extended Validation SSL.
Paid Backups & Domain Renewal
Backups are critical because stuff happens. You need software or a system to keep your website backed up and ready to go if (when) something happens. Many hosting companies offer varying levels of backups as fail-safe.
As an aside, never leave backups to your hosting company. You should set it up and take responsibility for it. However, it’s also good to have a third-party backup.
InMotion offers free backups and doesn’t charge to access them. HostGator also does free backups but charges for access. Web Hosting Hub charges an extra $1/month for backup whether you need it or not.
It might not sound like a low, but it throws a small wrench in the price comparisons if you are trying to save money.
Free domains can be convenient; many users love bundling domains with their hosting provider. But you can get better management and protection by keeping your domain name separate from hosting.
The ones I recommend are on my best domain registrars list.
If you decide to keep your domain with Web Hosting Hub, keep in mind that renewing costs $14.99/year. It’s not too expensive, but it is higher than what you will pay elsewhere.
Paid backups and pricey domain renewal are a con for me, especially compared to hosts that include it with their lower-priced plans (i.e., HostGator).
Web Design & Marketing Services
Web Hosting Hub offers custom web design and marketing solutions in addition to hosting.
Like domain names, web design is a complementary business to web hosting. For Web Hosting Hub, it’s a good way to develop business and makes sense on one level.
Putting graphic design, themes, and layout together for a basic website can be simple if you know how…but will quickly devolve if you don’t.
Web designers who offer “hosting” rarely pull it off well, and the opposite can be said for most hosting companies offering web design services.
FAQs
Is Web Hosting Hub Worth It?
Web Hosting Hub is a solid web hosting service for bloggers, small ecommerce stores, and other small businesses.
If you are looking for a cheap but reliable hosting company, put Web Hosting Hub on your shortlist. Just make sure you do your site backups.
Check out HostGator’s heavily discounted plans if you want something a bit cheaper (or shorter term) with unlimited features.
If you are looking for a hosting solution with room for growth (i.e., VPS and dedicated servers), check out InMotion Hosting.
I’ve also pitted other companies against Web Hosting Hub in my best web hosting article.
Fabulous review! I was kind of curious about the ‘boldgrid’ thing but you have convinced me: I will definitely give this company a try! Just wondering though: how long have they been around?