HostPapa Review

HostPapa started business in year 2006 and it is one of the earliest green hosting companies. For only $5.95 customers can enjoy unlimited disk space, domain hosting, and bandwidth. At this time of writing, Hostpapa operates business from both United States and Canada.

Hostpapa Overall rating

HostPapa Inc. Website: http://www.hostpapa.com Features : Support : Pricing : Reliability : Overall Rating : B+ *Recommended!

What’s good about HostPapa Hosting?

Hostpapa $3.95/mo, with coupon: AS89

Hostpapa hosting is highly recommended for those who are searching for a budget host. The hosting cost only $3.95/mo (after discount) if you signup on a 3-years plan and I believe this is the cheapest hosting service you can ever get online! Simply apply coupon code ‘AS89′ upon signup and you’ll get a sweet $36 discount on all hosting plans at Hostpapa.

99.9% Uptime Guarantee

Hostpapa offers pretty standard features – unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited addon domains, free domain…etc etc. These are more or less the same hosting features you’ll get from most other web hosting services.

What draws my attention to Hostpapa is their outstanding server uptime guarantees. In fact, server reliability is where Hostpapa outranked most other web hosts. Hostpapa is offering a 99.9% uptime guarantee to all of their shared hosting users and this is some real sign of confidence! I don’t run any website at Hostpapa right now but I find such strong guarantee is very convincing and if I would have to buy a new web host today – Hostpapa will be my first choice.

Green Hosting from Hostpapa

Hostpapa is one of the earliest that went green. The web host has taken the initiative of going green since year 2006 by buying renewable energy to power their servers and office.

How green hosting works at Hostpapa?

Of course Hostpapa does not have a wind turbine or a solar panel farm on top of the data center.

After an energy audit by a third-party provider (Green-e.org, for example) to calculate Hostpapa electrical energy consumption from traditional sources, HostPapa purchased "green energy tags" from a certified clean energy supplier. That supplier calculates the total energy consumption of Hostpapa operation (from hosting websites to office admin works) and uses their suppliers of green energy to pump in 100% equivalent energy back into the power grid.

This effectively cuts down on the carbon dioxide-producing (CO2) energy that we normally would have required from non-green energy sources.

What might goes wrong with HostPapa?

*Important: Expensive cancellation fees during refund period

I found this when I was reading Hostpapa’s terms of service: Should you become dissatisfied with our services within the first 30 days of your account activation, HostPapa will refund your hosting fees, subject to the money back guarantee terms listed in this agreement.

Further investigations shows that Hostpapa is charging quite a lot on customers who are trying to cancell their account in the first 30 days. First, there’s a $29.95 one-time setup fees, next the free domain that you go upon signup will cost you another $24.95. In other words, you’ll lose about $50+ when you ask for your refund during the 30 days trial period.

Telephone and live chat goes off during non-office hours in weekends

It’s kind of strange to see Hostpapa is not offering 24/7 live chat support during weekends. For weekdays, Hostpapa live chat support is 24/7; however when it comes to weekends, the live chat will only be available from 6:00 a.m.-7:00 p.m. (EST).

Hostpapa Discount Coupon & Promotion

The best promotion you can from Hostpapa is the price cut with this special coupon code – AS89. By applying this code you’ll get a $36 discount on your total bill. Other than this, here are some other addon offers that come a long with Hostpapa hosting plans.

Free $50 Ask Sponsor Listings	Free $25 Miva Ads credits
Free $25 Yahoo! Marketing credits	Free $25 Google Adwords credits

HostPapa Customer Reviews

Inconsistent and ridiculous ToS! “Before signing up I told HostPapa what my website was about (a social network). I also asked them explicit technical questions, including “Do you allow wildcard DNS?” (which they also allude to on their website). I was told explicitly “Yes” to the DNS question. After I sign up I asked about how to do this and was told “no, we don’t allow this”. When I called their support department to find out what the heck was going on confusion reined, and lame excuses flew. When I asked them why they lied I was told my use of their service would break the terms of service. This brings up another complaint: their terms of service are much stricter (ridiculously strict) than some other comparable services. With HostPapa you can’t allow users to upload any images, photos, pdf, etc. Not for a user profile o your website, not for a phpBB forum or blog hosted with them, nothing. Do yourself a favor – don’t waste your time with HostPapa.” – Drew @ May 30, 2009.

HostPapa = Excellent! “You get excellent prices with Hostpapa and that sold me. The price comes with a 3-year plan but when you see everything you get, trust me it’s worth it not having to worrying about quality hosting for the foreseeable future. I love the cPanel and Fantastico too and u can install all kinds of applications easily. I’m no Al Gore when it comes to the environment (lol) but I was impressed that a company can be environmentally friendly and still provide excellent quality services at competitive prices. I was also one of those folks who saw the money back guarantee and thought “why not give it a try?”. I’m glad I did.” Charles A. @ February 4, 2010.

Avoid HostPapa! “Setting up was not an easy process, I could not log in at first for over a day. The up-time was terrible, my website went down for hour long periods on a weekly (more recently before they deleted my account, daily) basis. The features sound good but I have given them 2 stars, because ‘unlimited’ really means ‘limited’. They have deleted all of my data because i used more than 15GB (so much for unlimited data). The support staff ignore all support tickets for more than 72 hours now. When phoning they are rude, and say that ‘its not our department and you cant speak to the right one over the phone, make a ticket’. One even hung up on me. They will not provide me with a backup. Dont expect any manners from support, I felt like I was back at school. They still owe me 9 months of hosting, for which no refund is given and all requests for one are simply ignored. The price is not as cheap as some – yet the service/features etc are terrible when compared. You can find better hosts for much less money.” – Sam Clark @ March 30, 2010.

Hostpapa saved my business! “I was hosting with 1&1 for a couple of years and had huge issues with their uptime on my server, I then transferred my domain name over to Justhost as I got a coupon from a friend and that was an even worse experience (the customer support people there barely speak English). I then decided it was time to try and hopefully find a provider that will deliver on their promises and I found Hostpapa from a green web hosting review site. Moved my site over with the support of their friendly staff and was up and running. I had a few issues with my website and they helped me through all of it – and I found their customer service exceptional. The server uptime is excellent I highly recommend Hostpapa.” – John P @ April 21, 2010.

Conclusion: Is HostPapa recommended?

I used to run a charity website (back in year 2006, if not mistaken) on Hostpapa and I am very happy with their server reliability. I mean, I didn’t track the server uptime 24/7 as I do nowadays but I hardly remember any significant downtime with Hostpapa. This leaves me very good impression on them and this is why I am recommending them here. However, do note that not all Hostpapa customers enjoy their “stay” as I did – In fact I see quite a number of negative feedbacks recently on Hostpapa so you might want to check out with other webmasters before you making any decision on them.

*Important: I receive special discount code from Hostpapa monthly (normally it will give $36 discount on your bill) and normally update it via my Twitter account; in case you miss my tweet, you can ask for it at jerry [a] webhostingsecretrevealed.com.

Save $36 – Order HostPapa here with special discount!