WestHost Review

WestHost Editor's Review

WestHost was founded in 1998 and was acquired by UK2 Group late 2008. Since then, WestHost customers continue to enjoy using WestHost for their web hosting needs. Based on our own research, we've found that most customers are very happy with WestHost for web hosting.

WestHost currently offers several options for web hosting including shared web hosting, cloud hosting, reseller hosting, and dedicated servers. For shared web hosting, they offer three packages called Personal Hosting, Preferred Hosting, and Business Hosting. The Personal Hosting package by WestHost has limited disk space and bandwidth and only allows you to host one domain. The upgraded packages such as their Business Hosting package have unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited hosted domains for a higher cost. See our WestHost Hosting Plans page for more details and specifics.

WestHost has a 60 day money back guarantee for you to test their service to make sure their hosting is right for you. This give you up to 60 days to try and use their service to make sure it will do everything you need.

Editor's Comments About WestHost Price Value

WestHost, as we mentioned, offers many flavors for web hosting. For our pricing evaluation, we used their Preferred Hosting shared hosting package which offers a lot of disk space and bandwidth with the ability to host unlimited domains, something we've compared on all web hosts.

With the WestHost Preferred Plan, we found their pricing to be priced higher than average compared to our most popular web hosting providers we list on customer hosting reviews. However, since WestHost does not appear to oversell and overload their servers with ultra cheap "one size fits everything" type hosting, customers should expect a better web hosting experience with fast page load times and better overall server performance.

After reviewing the other packages that WestHost offers, we've determined that the overall pricing value of WestHost is slightly less than average. We'd like to see lower prices for WestHost premium web hosting plans so that more customers can afford and sign up to their service.

Editor's Comments About WestHost Reliability

WestHost is known to provide reliable and trustworthy web hosting service. We'd surveyed the internet for reviews and information outside of WestHost's own website and found that many people suggest, use, and recommend WestHost to other people looking for web hosting.

WestHost uses top tier datacenters that provides premium bandwidth to all of their web hosting customers. With the WestHost Preferred Account, you'll have access to free continuous data protection with the ability to schedule backups of your data to off-site servers. Should there be an absolute catastrophe, you'll have piece of mind that your data is backed up and protected.

Editor's Comments About WestHost Control Panel

All web hosting accounts through WestHost feature cPanel as their control panel except for the cheap Starter package. cPanel is the most popular control panel for web hosting and comes fully featured. WestHost includes a custom script installation called Softaculous 1-Click Installer that will install WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, and Typ03.

Editor's Comments About WestHost Customer Support

WestHost customer service was put to the test in 2010 by a large multiple day outage that effected most of their customers. WestHost said that an inspection by their fire department resulted in a false trigger that set off their fire suppression system. Multiple servers had to have hard drives and other hardware replaced as a result. This problem was caused by a non-WestHost employee.

In the end, WestHost was able to fix the problem but not without many complaints all over the internet. Part of the problem was WestHost didn't alert customers quickly enough to the problem and some customers were left without service for over 3 days (some weren't effected at all).

Overall, WestHost handled the situation and one the approval of several popular web hosting forums. Since then, we haven't seen many complaints regarding customer service and most consider WestHost Group and their WestHost brand a great web host.

• US-based in-house customer support (expensive!)
• 24/7 Toll-free telephone technical and sales support
• 24/7 International telephone technical and sales support
• Direct email addresses for all departments
• 24/7 live chat
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Community Forum
• Company Blog

We tested WestHost live chat and were able to talk to an agent by the name of Adam within 20 seconds of initiating a live chat. Adam answered our question within 10 seconds of coming in to our chat request and answered our additional questions promptly and accurately. Here is the chat log of our WestHost communication.

Adam: Hello!  Thank you for contacting WestHost.  Please allow me one moment to review your question.
Scott: What control panel do you use for WestHost?
Adam: We use Cpanel.
Scott: Does it offer Fantastico or similar easy install script system?
Adam: Our Cpanel comes with the Softaculous  instant application installer.
Scott: Ok, thank you Adam.
Adam: You are welcome..

Overall, based on our experience with customer service, we could tell that their agents are in the USA which is what they advertise. We are very satisfied with WestHost customer service and rank them as excellent with a score of 5/5.