Host Papa Web Hosting Ratings

A good web host for professionals, not if you are a beginner. Slightly expensive too.
Click here to visit Host Rocket’s website

Summary

Currently celebrating their 10th year anniversary, Host Rocket is a hosting company specializing in hosting with additional services being an added cost. The company is smaller in size compared to others, but operates its own servers (as opposed to another company maintaining them). Because they host their own servers, downtime is not an issue with customers.

Quick Facts About Host Rocket

• Host Rocket has been in operation since 1999, based out of Clifton Park, NY
• Are hosting over 50,000 websites
• Prices are dependent on length of contract. Start at $11.98/month going down to $5.99 for a 24 month contract.
• 30 day money-back guarantee.
• Phone (US only): 1.866.519.7079, Outside US: 1.518.371.3421

Products and Services by Host Rocket

Host Rocket is definitely geared towards professionals who want complete control of their hosting experience. The services offer unlimited bandwidth, domains, FTP accounts, email accounts, and free site backups through Cpanel. It includes basic software support, such as MySQL, Perl, PHP, and SSH access, but does not include any easy install software solutions.

The hosting services are based upon the length of your contract. It starts off at $11.98/month, then $8.99/month for six month contract, $7.99/month for a 12 month contract, and finally down to $5.99/month for a 2 year plan. The $5.99 price point is slightly higher than other companies, but you do get a lot of value for the price.

They do have a web design service available, but the prices are fairly expensive for someone looking to start their own website. Design services start at $350 for a basic site, $999 for a custom design, and $600 for a content management system (Joomla, Drupal) or a eCommerce Shopping Cart. Even a blog install starts at $150 and that is a fairly straight forward operation.

Hostorian’s Review of Host Rocket

Host Rocket’s Performance

HostMonster offers a 99.5% uptime guarantee, with 24/7 network monitoring, UPS power backup, and courtesy site backups. They control their own servers so any problems are resolved quickly on site. They offer additional remote backup services that cost $5 per backup.

Host Rocket’s Features

There are no additional features that are included in the package other than the ones mentioned above. The other features listed are fairly standard to find (ie web-mail access, web file manager through CPanel, phpMyAdmin, etc).

In order to get a website up and running, you will have to do a lot of the work yourself. If you want to install WordPress or Joomla, you will have to manually upload the files and go through the web installer. There are no free web templates to use, either.

Support and Customer Care by Host Rocket

Support for Host Rocket is rather limited compared to some of the other support systems.

Support is given by 24/7 phone support, live chat, and email. They do have a FAQ/Knowledge base system on their website, but there is no way to input your own questions and there is no community feedback for helpful tips. You rely solely on the knowledge of the technicians at Host Rocket. The questions they answer are fairly diverse, but the answers do not have any videos or screenshots to help guide you through the process.

Pros

• Offers unlimited bandwidth, hosting space, domain hosting, email accounts and more.
• Servers are controlled by company allowing problems to be resolved quickly
• Nearly 10 years of hosting experience to help you succeed.

Cons

• Only one hosting package available, price dependent on length of contract.
• Additional services offered are expensive.
• No quick install software options (WordPress, Joomla) – geared towards professionals.

Actual Customer Reviews for Host Rocket Web Hosting

“As for everyone running professional business on the Internet, resilience is of great importance for me. In the past I have had certain problems with server network availability caused by lack of redundancy. It is difficult to assess the actual character of redundancy promised by hosting providers. But with Host Rocket I hit the nail on the head! I’m not strong in technical specs, and the words “redundant CSS switches” convey little meaning to me. Still I’m greatly satisfied with the performance of my site – and it’s enough to entrust Host Rocket with my further Internet projects.” - Jimmy Wanders

“If you want to resell hosting,I think HostRocket is best.If you think about rate,its really wonderful. But,if you look HostGator,they take $25 for 24 GB Hosting.You never over sell HostGator hosting. But,you can over sell RocketHost hosting.They give you 1000GB WHM reseller hosting!I think it is best in the world.No any company can offer like this.What you think?” - Chris

“saw the review commenting on customer service, and I’d just like to say that the email system of customer support works incredibly well and the guys there – Don is particularly brilliant! – are so good at sorting stuff out, including anticipating where problems might arise and warning me. The phone system isn’t perfect but I’ve never had too much need of it, given the promptness with which the support tickets are dealt with.” - Anonymous

Verdict of this Host Rocket Review

I was a bit surprised when looking over the feature list for Host Rocket and finding it so limited. They do offer a lot for professionals by giving away unlimited bandwidth, hosting space, email accounts, domains, etc. But there are no simple answers for starting up your own web site. The price to pay for their design services to install a blog, for instance, are not worth it when other hosting companies include it in their price or you can find people to do it for free or $5.

That being said, having the company host their own servers allows them to get them up and running quickly if problems do arise. The prices you pay for this service are more expensive than the rest, but if you do commit to a 2 year plan, it will be well worth it.

Based upon the price point and the limited feature set available to people, I can only rank them a 3.5/5, but for people that know what they’re doing, it would be a great company to work with.

Click here to visit Host Rocket’s official web site.

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5. Decide what you want from your website and your web host

While being able to host unlimited domains is critical, there are other features that must not be overlooked based upon what you are doing.

Two main reasons that unlimited domain hosting is sought after

The first is because domain/website sellers/resellers need to be able to display their domains and websites in order to make sales.

The other reason why many people need unlimited domain hosting is because they will be working on building multiple websites at once.  They are improving promising websites, and selling the others.

Regardless of why you need to host a large number of domains, let’s take a look at some other important features that are critical to keep in mind.

Disk Space

It won’t matter that you can host 100 domains if there is not enough disk space to support your websites.  If you lack disk space, you can upgrade your package to get more space, but it is even more ideal to have enough disk space regardless of how many domains you are hosting.

Many unlimited domain hosting services also offer unlimited space, but be sure to read the fine print.

While you may have “unlimited space” in the perfect world, there is often a limit on how quickly you can use up your disk space.

In actuality, it is up to the hosting company to give you the additional space as it is needed.  This will rarely be a problem if you grow your portfolio slowly. It can be an issue if you plan on transferring 100 full-fledged websites at once.

Bandwidth

Just because your unlimited domain hosting company will let you host as many domains as you want, that doesn’t mean that you will be given the bandwidth all of your websites need.

Additionally, many hosting companies will charge you extra if you use up more than your allotted bandwidth on a monthly basis.  Even worse, if you do not have enough bandwidth, your websites will load extremely slowly and even dedicated users may start to fall off the bandwagon.

Unlimited domain hosting has become a critical feature, but it is important to keep the disk space that you are allotted, and the bandwidth that you can use.  If either of these two features fall short, not just one of your domains will be affected, but potentially all of them.

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