HostPapa delivers web hosting under a wide range of scalable plans. Tap into their options for shared, WordPress, VPS, and reseller hosting, with additional services that include managed hosting, plus domain acquisition and a website builder.
This company mostly caters to small businesses spinning up or maintaining their web stores or business sites. HostPapa guarantees a 99.9% uptime and delivers hosting management that is supported by a user-friendly interface and an excellent support team. That said, there are a few caveats to be mindful of when considering this hosting option, like HostPapa’s lack of free automatic backups on all plans and often expensive pricing.
About HostPapa
HostPapa is a Canadian web hosting company founded by Jamie Opalchuk in 2006. It’s headquartered in Burlington, Ontario and operates using strategically placed data centers in North America and Europe.
Today, it hosts hundreds of thousands of sites while remaining a privately-owned company that provides customers with full-featured web hosting packages. The service operates globally, from Canada and the United States to the United Kingdom, India, Hong Kong, and beyond. Interestingly enough, HostPapa has a surprisingly strong fan base in New Zealand and Australia in particular.
In addition to hosting plans, HostPapa also offers a website builder, a domain marketplace, email and office software packages, and unique security offerings that help protect your online properties.
HostPapa Health and Stability
HostPapa is a leading provider of web hosting and website solutions. Its main mission is to provide every customer with a full-featured hosting package, backed by efficient customer service and powered by renewable green energy.
HostPapa has acquired over 19 organizations, with one of the most recent being a logo design business called Deluxe on January 31, 2023. It also has a loyal customer base who swear by the service, so it’s safe to say HostPapa isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
HostPapa Pricing
HostPapa offers a range of affordable and scalable pricing tiers for their hosting options. Just keep in mind that when you renew your plan, it becomes slightly less affordable over the long haul.
Note that the pricing is different for different hosting solutions, with individualized rates for shared, VPS, reseller, WordPress, and managed WordPress hosting. Its website builder also offers different pricing tiers depending on your site’s needs. Make sure you know what you’re signing up for before committing.
HostPapa Pricing Structure
On top of individual tiers for each hosting option (with each unlocking more resources and features) HostPapa also offers an array of contract terms.
In most situations, a three-year term locks in the best monthly rate, so we’ll discuss most pricing below in terms of a 36-month commitment. But you can also opt for terms of one month, three months, six months, one year, or two years. Rates tend to go up about $1 at each threshold for shorter terms. So, a three-year rate of $2.95 per month goes up to $3.95 per month for two years, $4.95 for a single year, and so on.
HostPapa Trials and Guarantees
HostPapa offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so if you’re unhappy with the service during the first month, you can ask for a refund with no questions asked.
HostPapa Shared Web Hosting Provider Review
As a web hosting provider, HostPapa’s shared hosting is suitable for a wide range of users and businesses. It offers a generous array of features on its affordable plans, along with adequate storage and a wide range of additional features like unlimited MySQL databases, website staging, and the Softaculous app installer.
Together with its highly efficient customer service, HostPapa can be the perfect solution for a lot of site owners.
What Makes HostPapa Web Hosting Provider Great
Above-average speed: HostPapa servers are seriously fast, with some tests showing load times of an amazing 11 milliseconds in the United States. Even for cities outside of the western hemisphere, like Singapore and Bengaluru, the slowest pings came back no slower than one-fifth of a second, which is quite impressive. According to experts, HostPapa performs really well in continental Europe and the United Kingdom as well, thanks to HostPapa‘s data centers in Toronto and Amsterdam. Plus, built-in caching further improves your website’s response time if you’re running a site that’s heavy with images or other elements.
Elite customer support: HostPapa has a friendly, polite, and proficient customer support team available 24/7 to answer your questions in English, French, Spanish, or German. That’s some extra-mile service that you won’t find from many other hosting providers. Aside from their team of support executives, you can also use HostPapa’s extensive knowledge base of self-help articles and video tutorials to resolve issues or learn new hosting management and optimization techniques yourself.
Impressive storage: Web hosting storage has a direct impact on how your website functions and performs. Plus, it’s crucial for sites that keep a lot of imagery and video on-site, like web stores, blogs, and agency portfolios. You won’t have storage problems with HostPapa, as its cheapest plans come with 100 GB of storage—compared to other hosting providers that offer between 5 and 20 GB—which bumps up to unlimited storage on its two highest-priced plans (the lower of the two still starting at just $5.95 per month for a three-year commitment).
Great freebies: HostPapa offers free domain registration and SSL certificates with all of its hosting plans. You’ll secure a domain for one year from the date of registration, after which you’ll just have to pay renewal fees. SSL certificates are renewed automatically for free upon expiry. HostPapa also offers free and quick website migration if you’re switching to them from another provider. Their experts take care of everything, from handling databases and files to avoiding downtime while moving your site content.
Staging environment: HostPapa offers an innovative staging tool on three of its four shared hosting plans. This allows you to create a replica of a website to test out new designs before pushing them out to the public. Fine-tune different elements of your site without interrupting functionality, causing it to crash, or losing business. Also, thanks to the user-friendly interface, creating a staging site and then launching it when it passes muster is easy and straightforward.
Eco-consciousness: Not many people think about the toll that web hosting takes on the environment, but it takes a lot of energy to keep multiple data centers up and running for website owners that expect virtually no downtime. HostPapa is doing its bit to ensure a greener earth, which is something that needs to be applauded. The company purchases electricity from a clean energy supplier to run its servers, infrastructure, and offices, making it one of the few eco-friendly and responsible web hosting providers you can find.
Where HostPapa Web Hosting Provider Falls Short
Expensive renewals: HostPapa’s pricing starts out quite affordable, but it can jump up significantly after your introductory rate period ends. Shared hosting tends to renew at around $11.99 per month, which can be quite a shock after starting out at something closer to $3 per month. This further justifies opting for a longer initial commitment if you can afford the upfront payment. Locking in a rate of $2.95 for three years puts that expensive rate on hold for a good while and only costs you $106.20 at checkout (which is less than a year’s worth of hosting at the renewal rate).
Underwhelming key extras: Admittedly, HostPapa has a fairly complete feature set for its web hosting plans, but there are some key differences that can make other providers more appealing. For example, its one-month money-back guarantee is a good bit shorter than some of its competitors. In addition, HostPapa only provides automated website backups for its lower plans as a premium add-on that costs an additional $47.99 per year, whereas many competitors provide weekly backups as part of their hosting plans at no additional cost.
HostPapa Web Hosting for WordPress Review
HostPapa offers a solid hosting option that’s laser-focused on WordPress as well. You’re getting a similar array of resources and features as its shared hosting, with extras like Jetpack Free included and a WordPress auto-installer.
There are some tradeoffs, though. While the hosting provider ensures enhanced speed, efficient support, and accelerated performance, the lack of free backups and its expensive renewals (in the same vein as our gripes with its shared hosting plans) can lead to a lot of hassle down the line.
HostPapa Managed WordPress Hosting Review
You’re getting a comparable array of features, including automated backups and real-time security monitoring, but the costs are steep compared to HostPapa’s competitors.
One thing in HostPapa’s favor when it comes to managed WordPress hosting is that every plan comes fully featured. You don’t have to pay for the mid-tier or highest-priced plan just to unlock useful elements like WooCommerce enablement, automated theme and plugin updates, Git integration, single sign-on, 24/7 support, and more. That can make its Launch plan (starting at $19.95 per month) a good enough deal for a site owner without huge resource needs.
HostPapa Website Builder Review
In addition to its web hosting services, HostPapa offers a DIY website builder with customizable templates. This means you don’t have to be a developer to create your own website. Just choose a template, customize with your brand’s colors, add custom copy and images, and your website will look professional and polished in less than a day. Using a template for website design means you don’t need to hire someone to help you get started, and with a few tweaks, you’ll be able to launch your website almost instantly.
Another feature we love is that all of HostPapa’s templates are mobile friendly out of the box, which means you don’t have to do anything special to optimize your site for mobile. HostPapa has already taken care of the heavy lifting for you. But if you do have some advanced website building experience, HostPapa allows you to add custom code to differentiate your website and help it stand out from the crowd even more.
HostPapa’s website builder plans start at $3.99 per month. If you want to add ecommerce features, you’ll need to upgrade to the Enterprise plan for $40.99 per month.
Final Verdict
HostPapa is a solid web hosting provider that delivers great performance and customer support at a competitive price in some categories like shared hosting. Additionally, its website builder is a solid option for new website owners who want to get their sites up and running quickly. Overall, it can be a good choice for small businesses looking for an all-in-one web host and website builder as it makes building your first website an easy and painless process.