Timeweb.com review

For more insights into other services and an in-depth look at Timeweb, take a look at the posts below.

Timeweb VPS

First impression

TimeWeb, which is one of the most popular hosting companies in Russia, was established in 2006 in St. Petersburg. They possess a strong team of over 325 hosting experts, and they own a few Tier 3 data centers in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Poland. From these data centers, they host an increasing number of customers, which has already surpassed 200,000 clients and over 700,000 websites. Their clients primarily consist of clients from Russia and nearby countries.

TimeWeb offers various services such as Shared Hosting, VDS (Virtual Dedicated Server), Dedicated Server, and VPS hosting services, and Domain Registrations.

Trial Period

When you register for Shared Hosting or a Website Builder with TimeWeb, you get a 10-day free trial automatically, so you can test their service, and make sure they are the best for you, before paying, a nice change from the usual.

For as long as VDS (Virtual Dedicated Server) and Dedicated Servers are involved, they are offered with a trial period of 3 to 5 days depending on the product.

Billing Cycle

TimeWeb clients can pay on a monthly or annual basis for Shared Hosting plans. For their VDS (Virtual Dedicated Server), Dedicated Server, and VPS (Virtual Private Server) plans, clients can pay monthly, quarterly, every two years, or every year. Reasonable discounts are offered for longer durations.

They do take payment through different mediums, including all major Credit Cards (they get processed by Stripe), YuMoney, Qiwi, CloudPayments (pretty much just for their Kazakh customers), and SberPay.

Control Panel

In order to manage your hosting environment, TimeWeb boasts its own proprietary panel known as the TimeWeb Control Panel. The intuitive and user-friendly control panel contains everything that you might ever need to manage all features of your hosting plan with ease. For geeks, there is even a dark theme.

Also, there are ISPmanager, BitrixVM, or Fastpanel packages already installed, to mention just a few, that give you access to the server directly to install any software you need.

It should be noted that the absence of cPanel in their builds, it can always be installed manually whenever needed.

Limits

Their Shared Hosting plans offer four: Year+, Optimo+, Century+, and Millennium+.

Year+ plan features 10GB storage on lightning-speed NVMe SSD drives, and 1 MySQL database, and a single website can be hosted. Optimo+ features 30GB NVMe SSD storage, unlimited MySQL databases, and 10 websites hosting. Century+, for commercial use, features 40GB NVMe SSD storage, unlimited MySQL databases, and 25 website hosting. Millennium+, on the other hand, features 50GB NVMe SSD storage, unlimited MySQL databases, and 50 website hosting, and this provides the best solution for big e-commerce ventures. Unlimited traffic, POP/IMAP email accounts, and free SSH, sFTP/FTP, and SCP are available in all the plans.

Their VPS plans, which are powered by Intel Xeon Gold 6230R, AMD EPYC 7502, or Intel i9-9900KF processors, consist of three plans which are scalable or can be customized based on a user's requirement. Their Cloud15 plan provides 3.3 GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, 15GB NVMe SSD disk space, 200 Mbit/s connectivity, and dedicated IP. Alternatively, their Cloud40 plan provides 2x 3.3GHz CPUs, 2GB RAM, 40GB NVMe SSD space, 200 Mbit/s connectivity, and dedicated IP.

All sites include a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate.

Website Builder

For non-coding users, TimeWeb also offers its own website builder, the Configurator, for an extra monthly fee. The Configurator is a drag-and-drop editor with a large number of high-quality templates and pre-designed blocks, and it is easy to build a professional and responsive website.

The builder is available in three options: Base, Premium, and Ultra. The Base package includes 150 templates and 170 blocks, limited to one website. The Premium option encompasses everything in Base, along with SEO settings, an analytics system, online store capabilities, applications in Telegram, designer tools, and the ability to create up to five websites. The Ultra package includes all the aforementioned features, API access, and the capability to use it for up to 20 websites.

Security

TimeWeb operates Tier 3 certified data centers in Russia and Europe, featuring multiple power and cooling pathways and seamless maintenance processes without downtime. With an impressive expected uptime of 99.982%, translating to only 1.6 hours of annual downtime, these sites are safeguarded by armed guards, access control measures, and round-the-clock video surveillance.

They offer their hosting plans with advanced protection against DDoS (L3, L4, and L7), virus, technical error, and malicious code. TimeWeb filters spam and other threats using advanced software programs. They offer free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates, and advanced certificates like RapidSSL and RapidSSL Wildcard (for subdomain and domain protection) for a fee. The advanced certificates offer 128 or 256-bit encryption and TLS 1.2 and X.509v3 standard support.

In addition to that, TimeWeb provides Firewall as a Service (FWaaS), which is a cloud-based service to manage incoming and outgoing traffic to servers and cloud services according to user-defined rules. No operating system level adjustment is required; rules can be defined and servers and services can be allocated through the control panel. 50 rule groups per account can be supported and up to 100 rules can be inserted per group for incoming and outgoing traffic for up to 200 services.

For further security, customers may also opt for supplementary services like Website Defender, providing effective defense from infection and hacking, and Advanced Antivirus Protection, scanning pages for infection and erasing discovered malicious codes. These can be taken for an additional monthly fee.

As an additional security option, 2FA (2-factor Authentication) can also be activated on all accounts.

OS

The majority of Timeweb's shared servers remain on Ubuntu 18.04, but they will be upgrading the servers to Ubuntu 22.04 (version 18.04 is soon to be removed).

Contrary to that, Timeweb's VPS and Dedicated Server packages provide a wide range of Operating Systems, including Ubuntu 22.04, CentOs 7, Debian 10, Windows Server 2012, Arch Linux 1, Astra Linux CE 1.12, and AlmaLinux 8.5.

Support

TimeWeb's technical support staff is 24/7 accessible on a toll-free Russian phone line, a Ticketing System through the dashboard of your own account, Live Chat, or Social Networks with a promise of response within 20 minutes or less. I was surprised at the amount of support I received and was dealt with within 5 minutes by email and under 30 seconds through their Live Chat. The agents were not only courteous and knowledgeable but also phoned me back within a few hours to ensure my problems were fixed. The agents I communicated with in spite of my initial fear of a language barrier spoke impeccable English.

Conclusion

TimeWeb provides hosting plans at remarkably low prices without compromising on support and quality infrastructure. Their plans are customizable and scalable, and they provide excellent uptime. Their customer support I have found to be flawless, no language gap - that was probably my biggest concern. If you require a hosting provider in Russia, TimeWeb is an excellent choice.