Awardspace Hosting Reviews

Awardspace.com offers lower than average hosting prices that also deliver slightly fewer features than other, more expensive hosting options. Basic shared hosting gives you two domains and two databases, while the max pack plus will give you unlimited domains, databases, and storage. The customer service and security features are fairly limited on all plans. It’s a good hosting service to get things running for low cost, but you’ll find some limitations throughout.

Plans

Basic
The basic shared hosting plan comes with two domains, which can be nice if you need to build two different websites on a single plan. Keep in mind that you’ll only be getting 50MB over two databases, though, so storage is extremely limited. If you’re going to build anything with more complex graphics packages or bigger files, that’s not going to be enough storage. However, it’s more than enough for basic sites, such as a business homepage, small blog, or portfolio with minimal images/video.

The plan also comes with up to 20 FTP accounts, which is plenty of access for a small team. Other developer tools are also limited to this plan, such as SSH access or Crontab support.

In addition, email features on this plan are fairly standard, providing more than enough accounts (up to 1,000) and SPAM protection via SpamAssassin to keep your mail secure. Just don’t expect to create any mailing lists with the basic plan. In short, mailing lists are useful ways to send an email in bulk to multiple addresses and are useful for business or eCommerce sites.

All plans also come with access to Awardspace’s Zacky site builder tool, which functions as a drag & drop site builder. Overall, the Awardspaces’ site builder fulfills its goal of offering customers a free, easy to use website builder, requiring no dev support. However, those who have used site builders like WordPress, Wix, or SquareSpace will find Zacky to feel outdated in both its user interface and site templates.

Ultimately, you’ll have limited data and functionality from the basic plan. However, the plan is a good entry point for those simply looking to host a personal blog or a basic small business website.

Web Pro Plus
With Web pro plus, your database size is doubled, increasing to 100MB of data across ten databases. Disk Space and bandwidth are now “unlimited” but (like most hosting providers) the terms of service lays out some limitations for functionality you’ll want to be aware of. To start, using more than 250K inodes (data structures) could result in a warning or suspension.

Moreover, if your site uses more than 20% of the shared CPU or RAM capacity, then you could have your site suspended without warning. You’re limited to 4999MB of usage, 3000MB of email hosting, and 1000MB of databases. Ultimately, this is a non-issue for most site owners and is mostly put in place to stop those from hosting downloading or streaming sites. More developer tools are also made available from this tier, such as SSH Access and Crontab support.

You’ll also get up to 10 domains and 20 subdomains on the Web Pro Plus plan. Overall, it’s a great plan for setting up small blogs and business sites that need more than 50MB storage, or even a small eCommerce operation. The ten domains are helpful if you’re trying to run a few different sites at once. However, most users will hardly make use of this.

Max Pack Plus
The highest-tier plan, max pack plus users will get unlimited domains, unlimited databases, and unlimited storage. It’s a great option for starting multiple smaller sites or even a medium functionality, early-stage eCommerce site. The max pack plus carries the same disk space and bandwidth restrictions as above, so reference the web pro plus plan for that information.

You’ll also have access to the full suite of ASP.Net development tools on this plan, which is a great developer feature that allows you to create a more secure, faster, and scalable website.

Pricing

The discounted, promotional prices for all three plans are some of the cheapest on the market, with respect to their included resources. If you’re willing to pay for a whole year at once, you’ll be getting a great deal. However, after you’ve paid for the first year, the renewal prices are only a little bit cheaper than most other comparable plans. The basic plan will cost only a couple of dollars for a full year of service–but it jumps up to almost $5 a month after that initial year. Web pro plus is only about $4 a month on promotion but is almost $6 a month afterward. Compared to most of the hosts we review, those after-promotion prices are about average, sometimes a bit higher.

Also, keep in mind that the basic plan doesn’t come with a free domain name, meaning you’ll spend about $15 to $20 extra for your hosting. All of the plans advertise a $0 activation fee. However, most companies don’t charge activation or setup fees as standard.

The refund policy has a bit of fine print around domain names and the Zacky website builder, but is generally inclusive and should allow you to freely test services without committing financially.

Customer Support

Customer support is helpful for new users who are navigating the world of website building and hosting but is also essential for pros who experience technical issues. While customer support for many hosting companies includes live support specialists and community forms, awardspace.com is limited to trouble tickets and phone support.

If you need help with something, you’ll have to log in to your control panel and submit a ticket, which may take a few days to solve. They do, however, advertise that they will contact you within the hour. While it doesn’t mean that your issue will be resolved in an hour, opening the ticket is at least a start.

There’s also no mention of website migration support across plans. Only providing a blog post on how to migrate a WP site. If you’ve been tinkering with WordPress for a while now and have built some stuff you like, make sure that migration won’t be a headache for you.

Additional Features & Benefits

Application-Specific Hosting (WP/Joomla/Opencart)
Awardspace.com also features application-specific hosting packages for applications like WordPress, Joomla, and Opencart. WordPress hosting is fairly standard, and their shared plans that we discussed above are all available with WordPress. But they also house their WordPress sites on specific, WordPress-optimized servers, promising a better performing WP hosting solution.

Custom cPanel
Awardspace.com has modified and created their own cPanel configuration, which is cleaner and more simple than many other control panels. It’s also customizable. For many website users, there will be some builder features that are useful, and others that you won’t touch. You can make it easy for you and your team to get work done by customizing the cPanel.

Website Statistics
The custom control panel also features website statistics, which can give you valuable data about what is connecting with your fans and customers, and what is not. Stats include a graph of traffic over time, error logs, and Webalizer stats. Webalizer stats let you see usage on individual pages and the times, regions, and reports for traffic.

“Free Domain Name for Life”
While awardspace.com proudly tells you that you can have a free domain name for life, it’s important to read the finer print here. Only some of their hosting registration plans, the higher cost ones, come with a free domain name. Additionally, your domain name will only technically remain “free” if you keep it with a hosting company that is paying for registration. So as soon as you want to transfer it, you’ll be paying a different registration service.

Final Thoughts

Awardspace.com is an economical, effective platform to grow a website from startup to semi-dedicated hosting. Their shared hosting plans have excellent price points for the first year, and average price points after that. The basic plan limits some of your data and speeds, but otherwise offers fairly good end to end service. Ultimately, you’ll get a cheaper site, but plans do lack some essential features such as site migration support, security add-ons, or free CDN access. Customers may also find the overall customer support to be quite limited. If you think that you’re going to need a lot of help to get up and running, you might want to look for a hosting provider with offering support channels.