Impreza.Host review

First Impressions

Impreza is a decentralized hosting provider that first started providing hosting services in Brazil in 2013 but later moved their operation to the Seychelles in 2015 where they could have more security and freedom to operate the way they like. This provider provides DMCA-free hosting, actively contributes to the Tor network (this network is also known as the The Onion Router, and is a free, open-source privacy network that enables anonymous internet browsing), and offer services such as shared hosting, Tor hosting, offshore dedicated servers, offshore VPS servers, and crypto node compatible servers, to name just a few. They have a data center presence in the United Kingdom, North America, Turkey, India, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Iceland, Finland and Romania, and guarantee an uptime of 99.9%.

Trial Period

If you feel this provider might be perfect for your needs and you want to try them out first before signing up, you are out of luck as they don’t offer any free trials. However, they do offer a short 7-day money back guarantee on their hosting plans, which is somewhat of a safety net if they don’t live up to your expectations. If you decide to cancel within this period of 7 days, they will provide you with a full and deduct any additional costs such as domain registration or transfer fees.

Billing Cycle

Shared hosting is only available in annual commitments, so you will need to pay up-front if you need this service from them. Luckily, their VPS and dedicated servers offer a bit more options. Users can choose between paying monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, annual, biennially, or triennially. The longer the commitment, the more discounts they apply at checkout.

They currently accept Cryptomus, CoinPayments, PayPal, Stripe, Visa, or bank transfers, as valid payment methods.

Control Panel

When it comes to managing your hosting, Impreza keeps things straightforward with a few solid control panel options. Shared hosting plans come with the ever-popular cPanel thrown in for free, so you get all the usual features, such as email management, databases, managing SSL certificates, and more. For VPS and dedicated servers, you've got a bit more flexibility. You can go with cPanel/WHM if you want the full powerhouse experience, but keep in mind you'll need to bring your own license for that. If you'd rather avoid the extra cost (well, not entirely), they also offer several free panels like aaPanel, CloudPanel, CyberPanel, and VestaCP, though they do charge a one-time $20 setup fee to get those installed for you.

On top of all that, there's Impreza's own backend tool called the Impreza Agent, but one needs to be aware that this isn't for managing your websites at all. It's purely for server-level tasks like rebooting, reinstalling operating systems, joining VNC consoles, resetting root passwords, and that sort of thing, all doable in a couple of clicks.

Limits

Impreza’s shared hosting plans, available in 3 categories, namely Cloud Hosting, Linux Hosting, and Tor Hosting, all come standard with the CloudLinux OS, Accelerate WP, JetBackups,a free SSL certificate, POP/IMAP email accounts, DDoS protection, and Imunify360. These plans range from 10GB disk space on the “Linux Hosting 1” plan, all the way up to 150GB disk space on the “Pro Cloud” plan. Unfortunately, they don’t disclose the number of CPUs and RAM that is allocated to each plan, and it is important to note that these still run on standard HDDs and not super-fast SSD drives.

Their VPS plans on other hand, are all KVM based, and range from 1 CPU, 1GB RAM, 20GB super-fast SSD disk space, and 5TB bandwidth, on the “VPS I” plan for only $17 per month, all the way up to 16x CPU, 16GB RAM, 180GB super-fast SSD disk space, and 5TB bandwidth, on the “VPS VI” plan, which goes for $105 per month. Users have the option to choose between Ukraine, Russia, Iceland, or Romania for their server location. In my opinion it is good value for money.

Website Builder

Impreza offers their users an integrated AI agent that can help you to create a website. One needs to note though that this isn’t a proprietary drag-and-drop proprietary website builder like the ones most hosting providers offer these days. All their plans also come standard with one-click installations for popular content management systems such as WordPress, which is a tool one can use to build a website quickly and without any coding knowledge.

Security

All their plans, whether it be shared hosting, VPS, or dedicated servers, include DDoS attack protection with their mitigation using rate limiting, connection filtering, and IP reputation control. The rest is however, dependent on the type of service you sign up for. For all shared hosting plans Impreza includes a free SSL certificate by Let’s Encrypt, and the cloud hosting plans also include anti-malware. On the email front they provide advanced anti-Spam filtering on their Titan Email plans, as well as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC DNS settings to prevent email spoofing.

They also offer advanced malware scanning through SiteLock, spam filtering through SpamExperts, and CodeGuard for your backups, but these will cost you extra per month.

OS

All their shared hosting plans run on the CloudLinux operating system, a very popular OS amongst hosting providers because of its stable, secure, and self-managing platform. At its heart is a technology called LVE (Lightweight Virtual Environment), which acts like a set of invisible traffic cops, as it ensures that a sudden spike in traffic on one website never slows down or crashes other websites that are hosted on that same server.

Their VPS servers on the other hand offer users an array of options that include AlmaLinux, Debian, Fedora, Rocky Linux, CentOS, Oracle, Ubuntu, Suse, as well as Windows server options, however, these will need to be requested specifically and comes at an additional cost.

Support

When it comes to support, the onus is on them to provide the initial setup of the server, and after that they deliver the server configured and working. The user is then responsible for its use, security updates, patches, and more, as the VPS servers they offer are self-managed. If you get stuck, you can contact their support agents via their ticketing system, an AI chat bot, which will provide answers to most issues, or their live chat. In my experience, responses are not that fast, and it also seems to be available only during certain times of the day. Definitely some room for improvement here.

Conclusion

In my opinion, Impreza is a very good option if privacy and flexibility are the main things you look for in a host. They are 100% DMCA ignored and will let you operate your website just the way you like without ever interfering. Their plans are well priced and also very reliable, but their support falls short on expectations, and security could be better. That being said, if you are in the market for offshore hosting, they are worth checking out.