PlutusHosting.com review

First impression

Plutus Hosting is a web hosting firm founded in 2010 and is headquartered in Gauteng, South Africa. They offer their services from Shared Hosting to Domain Registration, Email Solutions, and SSL certificates. Their key customers are primarily starters and small businesses. 

Trial Period

There is no free or trial way of testing and experimenting with their services, however, as this web hosting service does not have trial accounts on their Shared Hosting plans. They do mention, however, that they offer a '100% money back guarantee' on their website, so you have no risk. I could not make sure of the terms exactly since they are not part of their terms of service, and they could not ensure it.

Billing Cycle

Plutus Hosting offers Shared Hosting plans only and the billing periods are monthly for the lower plans or annually for the 2 largest plans. 

They accept all major credit cards via PayFast, a well-known and trusted South African web payment processor. 

Control Panel

They offer the cPanel control panel with all their 5 web hosting plans. The popular web hosting control panel features a graphical user interface along with automation tools designed to simplify hosting a website and automates the majority of the web hosting operations, such as the installation of email accounts, management of databases, and creation of backups, reducing the need for manual intervention. It even features Softaculous, which allows the user to install hundreds of web applications, including WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, with a single click. 

Limits

Plutus Hosting offers five Shared Hosting plans to suit different needs. The Starter plan offers 1GB disk space, 10GB bandwidth, and 50 POP/IMAP email accounts. The Plus plan offers 2GB storage, 20GB bandwidth, and 75 email accounts. For even greater needs, the Ultimate Home plan offers 3GB disk space, 30GB bandwidth, and 200 email accounts. The Corporate Starter plan offers 4GB storage, 40GB bandwidth, and 500 email accounts. Their top plan, the Corporate Ultimate, offers a massive 50GB of disk space, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited email accounts. Besides this, all plans come with a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt. 

Website Builder

Unfortunately, Plutus Hosting does not offer a website builder in their hosting packages. However, they do offer Softaculous, which is part of cPanel. Softaculous is a script library that is paid-for and installs web applications automatically onto a website. It simplifies the installation of web applications such as content management systems (CMS). In our case, CMSs such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal can be installed with a single click. These systems offer tools that allow users to create websites easily and without programming knowledge.

Security

They secure their hosting environments with a network firewall, to shield accounts from unnecessary unwanted malicious traffic, DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack protection, and free unlimited SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt. Keep in mind, anti-spam and anti-virus software are not included in their plans.

OS

Plutus Hosting employs the CentOS operating system (OS) for their Shared Hosting offerings. CentOS, which stands for Community Enterprise Operating System, is a Linux distribution that provides a free, enterprise-class, community-supported computing platform and is also well-known for being stable, efficient, and for being low-cost.

Support

Plutus Hosting provides assistance via support tickets and email with their technical staff seeming to be online all the time. You need to log in to submit a ticket. Their representatives, however, are not so quick to respond, and you may need to wait for a day or two before you receive feedback to your support requests. 

Conclusion

With Plutus Hosting, the service seemed to be a side project (and hasn't changed much since). Their website still has loads of placeholder text and logos you usually see in default themes, which means that not much effort was put into its creation. Their support service is also one of the worst I've ever had the displeasure of using, and their security is poor. While their prices might be attractive to newcomers, I would personally be cautious about signing up to utilize their hosting plans.