Hostwinds

Shared plans show one "Starting at" price each: Basic $6.99/mo, Advanced $8.99/mo and Ultimate $10.99/mo. We didn't see a renewal price or a required term on the plan pages, and the order guide says the price changes with the billing cycle you pick, from monthly to three years. The shared page's own description says plans start at $3.29/mo, and a Hostwinds blog post calls $3.29 the standard rate that doesn't rise at renewal. Managed Linux VPS shows two prices per plan, $10.99 and $7.14/mo for the smallest, without saying how long the lower price lasts, and the special offers page shows $9.34 for the same plan. The terms say prices exclude taxes and can change with at least 30 days' notice.

The terms are an agreement with "Hostwinds a HostPapa Inc Company" and are governed by the laws of the State of Washington. The company pages give an office address at 12101 Tukwila International Blvd #320, Seattle, WA 98168, and say Hostwinds was founded in 2010. We didn't see a full legal company name, a registered office address or a company registration number on the pages we read. The privacy policy doesn't name a data controller.

A public status page at status.hostwinds.com showed one notice when we looked, "Client Area Unavailable", with no list of services and no past incidents. The SLA promises 99.9999% network and power uptime. Credits cover the whole day or days affected and must be requested in a support ticket. Scheduled and emergency maintenance are excluded, and only not being able to reach the network counts as downtime.

Live chat and technical support tickets are available 24/7/365, and sales can be reached by phone at (888) 404-1279, by email or by ticket. Billing works through tickets, Monday to Friday from 8 am to 4 pm PST. The SLA says tickets are answered as soon as possible in the order they arrive, and we didn't see a stated response time. Unmanaged VPS plans come without technical support.

Instead of a money-back period, the terms allow a prorated refund if you ask within 72 hours of a payment, including a renewal payment, after cancelling in the Client Area. Software licences, domains, SSL certificates, IP addresses, hourly services and payments in cryptocurrency are excluded, and requests after 72 hours aren't eligible. Services renew automatically, and you cancel in the Client Area before the next billing cycle starts; the help article says cancelling takes effect at once and can't be undone. Refunds go back only to cards, PayPal or Alipay, and other payments become account credit.

Backups are a paid add-on: $3.00/mo plus $0.03 per GB for Shared and Business, and $1.00/mo plus $0.03 per GB for VPS, cloud and dedicated. They run nightly and are kept 60 days by default, and shared customers can set retention from 3 to 364 days. A help article says you can download backups from object storage with an S3 browser, and technicians can do a full restore, but we didn't see whether a restore costs extra. The shared plan page lists nightly backups as a feature, while the terms say Hostwinds doesn't back up customer data.

Shared and WordPress plans include a free domain-validated SSL certificate, installed automatically. The Client Area supports two-factor login, set up under Security Settings, though the help page doesn't say which methods it uses. Shared, Business and Reseller accounts have a Virus Scanner in cPanel that you run yourself; we didn't see automatic malware scanning described. VPS pages list an enterprise firewall.

The data centres page names three locations by city: Seattle, Dallas and Amsterdam. The order guide says you choose a location when you order shared hosting. The privacy policy covers the rights of people in the EEA but doesn't mention GDPR by name, and we didn't see a data processing agreement on the pages we read. It doesn't say where Hostwinds keeps its own customer data.

VPS and cloud plans list vCPU, RAM, storage and bandwidth: the smallest unmanaged Linux VPS has 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 30 GB storage and 1 TB bandwidth for $4.99/mo. Shared and Business plans list unlimited disk space and bandwidth, with only the number of domains as a number. A 2023 tutorial gives per-account limits of 512 MB RAM, 100% of one CPU, 250,000 inodes and 20 processes, without splitting them by plan. The terms say unlimited disk and bandwidth may only be used for files of the hosted websites. The dedicated servers page lists no plans or specs.

You can export databases from phpMyAdmin in cPanel, and a help article says this works on Shared and Business hosting. The cPanel Backup Wizard for full-account downloads isn't included on newer Shared and Business plans, and we didn't see another full-site download guide for them; backups from the add-on can be downloaded with an S3 browser. To move a domain away, you turn off the registrar lock and request the EPP code in the Client Area, and we didn't see a transfer-out fee. The help center says cancelling deletes your data at once, so you need to download it first.