HOSTLIFE.net review

First impression

Simple and user-friendly website, a lot of packages offered. The descriptions are full and informative. It’s possible to choose the server location for each package, even for Shared hosting ones. The available locations are: Ukraine, Russia, Germany and Netherlands. Speaking of Shared hosting. The price are slightly higher than others have: from $2.5 to $40 per month. The plans are divided into Standard, Premium and CMS. All of the packages claim to have unlimited bandwidth, email accounts, databases and disk space. The Premium Shared packages have twice as much CPU and RAM resources as Standard ones. CMS packages are designed to work with a specific CMS. The monthly price is discounted, if you you purchase for 3+ months.

VPS package price depends on the country where the servers are located and varies from $10 to $128 dollars per month. The company offers nice resources and SAS SSD hard drives that are quicker than SATA ones. For instance, the most expensive VPS in USA has the following parameters: 8 CPU cores, 12GB RAM, 192 Gb disk space and 25 Gb of backup storage.

Dedicated servers price-quality ratio is well balanced. You can choose the server capacity and find the server needed for your website.

Trial period

HostLife provides 7-day trial period for all of their Shared hosting packages. In addition, the company offers a 20-day moneyback guarantee for all hosting plans.

Billing cycle

Monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, annual, biennial and triennial billing cycles are available for Shared hosting packages; monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and annual - for VPSs. As for Dedicated servers, they have only monthly billing cycle.

Control panel

cPanel or DirectAdmin are available for Shared hosting plans. Depending on the package, you can choose between Vesta, ISPmanager 4, 5 or Business; DirectAdmin or cPanel for VPS plans. All of them, except Vesta, are paid. ISPmanager, cPanel or free DirectAdmin can be installed on Dedicated servers. Only DirectAdmin is free.

Limits

Although the disk space, bandwidth, the number of databases and email accounts are unlimited for Shared hosting, it seems to be not quite true. For instance, it is stated in the company’s ToS (Terms of Services) that the maximum disk space is 100 Gb for Standard and CMS hosting and 200 Gb for Premium hosting. Also, the outgoing mail is limited to 25 emails/hour. Moreover, backups are limited as well. In case your account is more that 10Gb or has more than 100000 inodes (or 20 Gb and 200000 for Premium packages), it will not be backed up automatically. Regarding the bandwidth that should be unlimited for VPS and Shared hosting, it is possible to use not more than 5-10% of network port capacity. Besides, VPS and Dedicated servers have their usual CPU cores, RAM and disk space limits.

Security

Shared hosting packages include basic anti-DDoS and anti-spam (SpamAssassin) protection, as well as an virus and malware scanner called Ai-Bolit. For VPS and Dedicated the security is under your own responsibility. The only thing offered for them is paid anti-DDoS protection, starting from $100/mo. However, this feature is available only for servers that are located in Netherlands. In addition, backup storage is rather small: 10-20 Gb for Shared and 25 Gb for VPS and Dedicated packages. Though, HostLife offers remote backup services, starting from 50 gb and $3/mo.

OS

CloudLinux runs on the Shared hosting servers. CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, CloudLinux or Windows Server 2012 (Standard and Datacenter) can be installed on VPS or Dedicated servers. The latter two OSs are paid. It’s also possible to install any other operating system on Dedicated servers, if you have the OS image.

Support

HostLife provides 24/7 ticket, chat (Skype, ICQ) and phone support. The representatives are quick and polite, however, not very accurate and proactive. The knowledge base covers all basic topics.

Conclusion

Shared hosting is well protected, however, rather overpriced. It is possible to find cheaper and more advantageous solutions. Moreover, the backup policy is not very satisfying. In case you have more than 1 or 2 small websites, it is required to purchase additional backup storage. Additionally, the security policy seems strange: expensive anti-DDoS protection only for Netherland servers. Nevertheless, the VPS and Dedicated hosting seem very nice and resourceful. So, for this company, only the latter two packages can be considered as qualified and worth a try.