Smartape.ru review

First impression

User-friendly interface and attractive prices. There are lot of discounts for all of the packages. For example, 50% off, if you purchase Shared hosting for 3 years. Also, with this kind of hosting SmartApe provides a free .ru or .рф domain name. Moreover, the company offers separate Bitrix hosting designed and set up specifically for this type of CMS.

VPS hosting is fairly cheap. You get to choose the hard drive type: HDD, SSD or NVMe (a kind of SSD but way more faster). The prices vary from $5.88 and up to $178.52 per month, depending on the resources and hard drive. What’s more, great discounts are available for these plans: 30% off for semi-annual and 50% off for annual billing cycles. Generally, the price-quality ratio seems to be good.

Dedicated servers packages are quite affordable. The prices are lower in comparison to other hosting providers. For instance, for 8Gb RAM, two 120Gb SSD disks and 100 Mbit bandwidth you’ll pay only $40 per month. Furthermore, you can configure your server.

Additionally, SmartApe offers Cloud Data Center. It is an isolated private cloud with a flexible management system. It can be used to create virtual workplace for a company or as an addition to existing resources, to expand them.

Trial period

SmartApe offers a 14-day trial for all Shared hosting packages and 10-day trial for all VPS hosting packages, excluding Ultra.

Billing cycle

Monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, annual and triennial cycles are available for Shared hosting packages; monthly, semi-annual, annual and triennial- for Bitrix Shared packages; monthly, semi-annual, annual - for VPS and Dedicated hosting packages. Cloud DC can be purchased on a monthly or yearly basis.

Control panel

ISPmanager is included to each Shared hosting package for free. As for VPS and Dedicated packages, it’s possible to choose a software bundle instead of a control panel. Apart from Vesta (both Russian and English versions) and ISPmanager panels (at $2.96/mo for VPS and free for Dedicated hosting packages), you can pick, for example, LAMP stack or Bitrix Environment bundle. However, it is possible to choose either the bundle, or the control panel, but not both. Besides, there’s also a possibility to use the packages without a control panel or install any other one that’s not in the list.

Limits

Although the plan description states that disk space, bandwidth, number of domain names, FTP-users, email accounts and MySQL databases are unlimited for Shared hosting plans, there are certain limitations. For instance, maximum disk space is 100Gb and it is possible to use not more than 20% of the total server bandwidth (1Gbit/s).In addition, you can add up to 500 domain names, 100 mailboxes, 100 MySQL databases. The mailbox and database size is 10Gb. The maximum email size is 50Mb. So much for ‘’unlimited’’. Moreover, the hosting account may be suspended, in case it is overloading the server. As for VPS and Dedicated servers packages, the limits are indicated in the package description. All hosting packages cannot be used for mining, chat-bots, file sharing, distributing any adult content, torrent trackers etc.

Security

There is not much information regarding servers security on the website. The company provides anti-DDoS protection for all of their servers. Also, free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate is included for all Shared hosting plans. As for back-up, this feature is free only for Bitrix Shared hosting, if the account meet the following criterias: up to 100000 inodes and up to 20Gb disk space used. For other plans it is paid, starting from $0.74 per month.

OS

CloudLinux runs on Shared servers. For VPS hosting the following operating systems are available: CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu and FreeBSD- free; Windows Servers 2016 or 2012 - from $5.80 to $17.14 per month depending on the package. For Dedicated servers the same OSs are offered, however, all of them are free. Moreover, it’s possible to install any other system at no additional cost. You’ll just need to upload an ISO image during checkout. Ubuntu, Fedora, Oracle, Debian, CentOS and Windows Server 2008, 2012 or 2016 can be installed on Cloud DC.

Support

Phone and chat support work from 10am to 7pm Moscow time. The ticket support is 24/7, however, it is quite slow. The knowledge base is quite poor: not much articles, all of them in Russian. Also, the company provides basic set up for Dedicated servers.

Conclusion

The overall impression is more or less positive. The company offers nice discounts and wisely composed packages (VPS and Dedicated). The prices are fairly competitive. However, according to the ToS (Terms of Service) almost all of the software set up, configuration and management is under your responsibility. Moreover, the 24/7 ticket support is slow. It takes them hours to reply. So, we assume that this hosting is mostly suitable for experienced users that are capable of handling issues on their own.