Host1plus, which based in London, is an international hosting company trusted by users worldwide. It provides various hosting services like shared hosting, VPS hosting, Dedicated Server and reseller hosting, it also provides domain registration, SSL certificates. In this entry, I am presenting you a review of it's VPS service, which was made upon my personal test.
First, I am showing you my test environment, my VPS is the Gold plan which comes with 2GB menory, 2 CPU cores. I am running Cent OS 7 and Sentora for control panel.
Introduction
There are three kinds of VPS, unmanaged VPS, semi-managed VPS and managed VPS, what Host1Plus provide is unmanaged VPS. Unmanaged VPS is not like shared hosting or managed VPS, you have to install Apache, Mysql, PHP and other server environment by yourself, there is no control panel like CPanel or DirectAdmin, you have to install your own control panel or use command line commands to manage your VPS. It's a headache for bloggers who are not good at server management, Host1Plus also provides addons services to ease your pain, such as Extra-Care support, Cpanel, DirectAdmin, backups for extra cost, by the way, you can buy up to 32 IPs for every VPS.
Price
Price is not the most important aspect when choosing a VPS, but for startups or personal bloggers, the cheaper, the better. Let's take the 2GB plan for example, if you choose Los Angeles datacenter, Host1Plus is a little cheaper than DigitalOcean and Linode, they are of the same level, all of them provides 2 CPU cores, 40GB SSD/HDD storage. Here is a illustration of their detailed information.
Datacenter
When choosing a VPS, datacenter always plays an important role, there is a rule that the closer to users, the faster pages will be showed. Host1Plus offers 5 datacenters, they cover Europe (Germany, Frankfurt), North America (USA, Los Angeles and Chicago), South America (Brazil, Sao Paulo) and South Africa (Johannesburg).
Unfortunately, you can not migrate your VPS from one datacenter to another, If you want to migrate, you have to create a new VPS and delete the previous one. It's not that convient, especially they are unmanaged VPS, you have to install server environment again.
Performance
Performance is alwasys the priority for choosing a VPS. I am showing you two test results from two different tools: Linux server info script and UnixBench. Generally speaking, the performance is worth its price.
Here is a screeshot of test result of Linux server info script, we can see server inforamtion and the Download speed and IO speed directly. Because of the limits of bandwidth was set to 50Mbps, the download speed is not excellent, users may got network errors when there are traffic spikes.
Here is a screenshot of test results of UnixBench.
I run stress test and found the bottleneck of bandwidth, when the bandwidth getting close to 50Mbps, the pages are showed slowly, but the load of the server is pretty low, from the result of command "top", the load average is less than 1.
50Mbps of bandwidth is suitable for most of the time, but for traffic spikes, it could cause page latency. Here is an advice for Host1Plus, increasing the bandwidth could improve the performance.
Support
Support is very important, you will come across problems definately during the subscribtion. If you are familiar with servers, you may face less problems, if you are not, good support is one the most important key to make you happy.
First, I have to say that its support team is well-knowledged and kind harted, your problems will be solved in minutes. Second, they offer four languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Lithuanian), it's convenient and will help you to solve problems quickly.
There are tutorials and knowledge base, some of them are very detailed, but some are not and there are only four articles in knowledge base. A rich knowledge base could save a lot of precious time, Host1Plus should add more informative tutorials and articles to its knowledge base. Nevertheless, you can find a lot of useful information in their tutorial section where they put ‘‘how-to‘‘ tutorials about server and website management. In addition to this, you can find their YouTube channel, where there are a lot of video tutorials as well.
Conclusion
In this review, I covered several aspects which are important when choosing VPS, and I hope it will help you to know more about Host1Plus's VPS.
According to my test, the performance is worth its price. In my personal experience and under most circumstances, this VPS will be able to handle more than 10 thousand page views a day.
