Kualo.com review

First impression

Kualo, which interestingly stands for Knowledge, Uptime, Accountability, Love, and Originality, was founded in the year 2000 and has since established itself as a reliable and innovative provider of fast, secure & rock-solid hosting, backed by a team who just get it. They have grown to host over 100,000 websites for customers in over 90 countries worldwide from their two world-class hosting facilities, one in Hemel Hempstead, UK, and one in Tampa, USA, both powered by 100% renewable energy.

They currently offer Shared Hosting, WordPress Hosting, VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Server Hosting on Linux, with a 99% uptime & a robustly secured environment guaranteed.

Trial Period

Kualo doesn’t offer a free trial period but rather a 60-day money-back guarantee, which is double the industry standard. If you change your mind and don't wish to continue your hosting contract with them, simply cancel at any time within the first 60 days and they'll refund you your money back - no questions asked. 

New domain registrations or transfer fees are non-refundable; however, you'll be able to continue to use them elsewhere should you decide to move away.

Billing Cycle

Their Shared Hosting plans give customers the option of choosing to pay on a monthly basis, annually, biennially, or triennially, with some tasty discounts on offer for those who want to pre-pay for longer periods. Cloud VPS and Dedicated Server plans are only available in monthly or annual options.

They accept all major Credit and Debit Cards, Paypal, and Bank transfers as valid payment methods.

Control Panel

cPanel, the world's number one control panel, comes standard on all Kualo Shared & VPS plans. This intuitive and feature-rich control panel allows users to effortlessly administer every facet of their website hosting with a simple, point-and-click software interface.

Limits

For Shared Hosting, Kualo customers will have 3 plans to choose from – Solo, Startup, and Performance. All come standard with SSL Certificates, a Site Builder, an App Installer, 30-Day Account Backups, and a free domain on an annual commitment, all of which are free of charge. The allocated space, on SAN Storage SSD Drives, ranges from 10GB on the Starter plan up to 50GB on the Performance plan. As the name suggests, the Performance plan also has twice the resources of the standard plans and comes bundled with Acceleration Technology like Redis and Memcached Caching.

Their VPS hosting features 5 plans, starting with the “Small” which features 2GB RAM, 2 Core Processor, and 40GB SSD Disc space, right up to “XXL” which boasts 16GB RAM, 8 Core Processor, and 180GB SSD space.

Website Builder

Offering a website builder is a rising trend among hosting providers these days, and Kualo is no different. They flaunt their own custom builder called ProSite. Packed with over 200 stunning templates, image galleries, maps, and more, it allows its users to create quality, mobile responsive, and SEO-friendly websites quickly and easily with a user-friendly drag-and-drop builder.

One should note though that this builder isn’t free of charge and will come at an extra monthly cost.  

Security

Kualo employs a range of technologies that help keep their servers stable, and their customers' websites safe. Their data centers are designed with industry-leading physical security in mind right from the start, with iris scanners, 3m security fences, blast-proofed windows, computer-controlled motion detection, and much more, to ensure that the computer systems and data within are completely secure.

To limit server overloads, downtime, or worse, critical security problems, all their accounts are fully isolated with a caged file system that prevents privilege escalation and information disclosure attacks. Each customer is allocated its own resource pool, meaning other users can't cause downtime or slow performance. Besides these measures, they also have automatic malware scanning as well as multiple firewall layers in place, featuring machine learning and collective intelligence to keep bots and hackers at bay. 

For VPS solutions users can secure their environment with paid-for services like full 256bit Data Encryption in the form of a Comodo SSL Certificate, CodeGuard Backup Solutions, Advanced Security & Malware scanning by SiteLock, or Multi-layered DDoS protection.

All their Shared Hosting plans also come standard with a complimentary SSL certificate by Let’s Encrypt.

OS

Kualo runs CloudLinux on their Shared Hosting plans whilst their Fully Managed VPS servers offer users to choose between CloudLinux and the community-supported Alma Linux and CentOS Operating systems.

For their Unmanaged VPS plans, you can select from an extensive array of different Operating systems like Ubuntu, Debian, Open SUSE, and RedHat to name just a few.

As Kualo is a Linux-based hosting solutions specialist, there are unfortunately no Windows hosting options and thus will limit the options for users that may require Windows specifically for certain applications or technologies.

Support

Kualo prides itself on incredibly responsive support that is available 24x7. Should you run into a problem or just need some sales advice on new products, you can chat with them via Live Chat, Phone, and by logging Support Tickets, and they'll respond in minutes, not hours. In fact, if they ever fail to respond to a support ticket within the hour, they will go as far as to credit you to say sorry! 

Their support agents are well trained and when I put them to the test on Live Chat, I got a friendly reply within 5 seconds from their patient hosting gurus, they did equally well on email with a response time of 1 minute. For technical issues, customers are however encouraged to log support tickets rather than contacting them via Live Chat, so they can do a proper investigation of the issue.

Conclusion

Kualo is a reputable hosting provider with a proven track record. They are well known for their excellent customer support and offer a wide array of performance-driven and robust plans, that are not only scalable but come with great uptime and decent security. They might be a bit more costly than most providers, and personally, I would have liked to see some security features, like DDoS protection to be included free of charge, but if your budget isn't a deciding factor in choosing a hosting provider, then Kualo should definitely be on top of your list.