JustHost Review

JustHost Review

JustHost was founded in Glendale, California by Chris Phillips in 2002. It was originally owned by JustDevelopIt, a software development company based in the UK. In 2012, it was acquired by Endurance International Group (EIG), a web hosting company that owns BlueHost, HostGator, and A Small Orange, among others.

They provide shared web hosting, VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Hosting services. JustHost has offices in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia. The company’s primary US data centre is located in Provo, Utah. While its secondary US data centre is in Orem, Utah. This means that you won’t find any servers near, or in England.

Pricing

JustHost provides four types of web hosting plans. These plans are named Basic, Plus, Prime, and Go PRO. The said packages can be seen below:

The cheapest plan is called Basic and costs GBP 3.01 per month if you pay for 36 months upfront. This totals to GBP 108.36. However, if you want to pay on a month-to-month basis, it will cost you GBP 6.09 per month. You can also opt for annual and biennial payment terms.

The said prices are currently promotional prices and are valid for the first term only. Regular rates will apply upon renewal of the hosting service. Thus, when you renew the Basic plan, it will cost you GBP 7.24 per month if paid on a triennial term.

The Basic package allows you to host one website in your account. You are allowed to have 5 parked domains and 25 subdomains. Storage space is at 50GB. This means, you can only have 50GB worth of data in your hosting account. Although other hosting companies provide an unlimited amount of storage, 50GB is still generous if you just have one website in your account.

Bandwidth is unlimited. This means you have an infinite capacity to transfer data from the hosting company’s server to the website viewer’s device requesting for it. Which also means you can have an unlimited amount of traffic and you won’t get charged for it.

You can have 5 mailboxes of which storage is at 100MB per account. You can at least leave one email for the owner of the website. The other four emails can be given to other people in charge of a specific department or area of the website (or business).

Finally, they have a 30-day money back guarantee. If you think they’re not the right fit for your website, then you can simply ask for a refund.

Support Options

JustHost provides you with various options for support. These include the following:

• Knowledge Base
• Ticket Submission
• Phone Support
• Online Live Chat Support

The self-help Knowledge Base contains loads of tutorials (text, images, and videos) to help you manage your account and the products you paid for. Phone support, ticket submission, and online live chat is available 24/7.

Reviews of their customer support system were MOSTLY negative. It takes a long time for them to reply to questions via live chat. Even simple questions can take hours before the problem is actually answered. Some reviews stated that their chat support feature suddenly goes offline in the middle of the conversation.

Upon trying out their live chat feature, we only waited for a few minutes before we got hold of a representative. We simply asked a few questions about the features of their Basic Web Hosting Package. However, the representative doesn’t seem to know which features belong to the plan we’re asking for (as opposed to other plans such as Plus and Prime). We we’re in a looped conversation wherein we try to state the question in other words just so the representative understood what we’re trying to convey. In the end, we had to end up the conversation without getting our answers from the support team.

Pros

There are a few pros to signing up with JustHost. Some of them are outlined below:

Unlimited Bandwidth

With unlimited bandwidth comes unlimited traffic. This means, you don’t have to pay extra for an unusually large amount of website viewers. This comes in handy during peak seasons or in cases where your website instantly becomes popular due to a certain news or press release.

30-Day Money-Back Guarantee

In case you think their service is not the solution to your hosting needs, then you can opt for a money-back guarantee. This comes in handy when you’re still a starter who’s looking for the right company out there. Trying them out and armed with the fact that you can have your money back can give you the peace of mind you need.

Cons

Here come the cons:

No UK data centre

As mentioned in the summary, this is a massive reason to avoid this one. If you’re hosting in the UK, it only makes sense to have a decent data centre in or near the UK (even Amsterdam would work very nicely). But hosting in the US… makes no sense unless you reallllly want to and then use a CDN.

Limited Email Accounts

On the cheapest plan, you can only have 5 email accounts of which storage is at 100MB per account. But what if you have 10 people in charge of different departments of your website? Then, you would need more accounts.

If you do need more email accounts, the next plan, Plus, gives you a 100.

Poor Uptime

According to most reviews, the uptime percentage of JustHost is below that of the average. This is seriously not a good sign. If your website experience downtime, you could lose customers and sales. What if your website is down during peak seasons? Then, that’s a whole lot more loss for you.

Poor Customer Support

Yes. They do provide a lot of options for customer support. But more doesn’t mean better. Most reviews state that their customer support system is subpar. Our experience confirms that their representatives do not know how to answer simple questions. And that’s from a company that promises 24/7 support. Well, you don’t need a support team that’s awake all the time but isn’t actually productive in troubleshooting problems.

Slow Page Loading Speeds

Page loading speeds of websites hosted in JustHost are below average. This is another bad sign. One SEO factor of Google is the page loading speed of the site. If you have poor loading speeds, you automatically get a place at the bottom of search engine results.

How about your customers? Well, if they get frustrated from opening a page that loads slow, then they’ll definitely end up in the competition’s website. You frustrate your customers and you lose credibility because of a poor-performing website. This, in turn, leads to fewer customers, and ultimately, less profit.

3-Year Commitment

In order to receive the price advertised on their web hosting page, you need to commit to about 3-years worth of hosting services. So if you want to switch mid-way through, you’re kinda stuck.

No free SSL

You only get an SSL certificate if you go for their PRO plan at £11.40/mo… which is odd considering basic SSL certificates are free, and now pretty much required as Google is actively labelling sites without SSL as “not-secure”. This is why the majority of hosts offer SSL for free… because it’s FREE. I don’t really get their reasoning here.

Conclusion

As mentioned in the intro summary, we don’t recommend JustHost, there are a lot of better alternatives out there. You can read more about the best ones by checking out our choices for the top UK web hosts or have a look at our country-specific web hosting comparisons.