Xneelo.co.za review

First impression

Xneelo, formerly Hetzner (Pty) Ltd, was founded in 1999 by Hans Wencke and his brother-in-law, Martin Hetzner. They are extremely well-known for their ultra-reliable hosting infrastructure and excellent, unparalleled customer service. Xneelo hosts individual website owners and businesses of all sizes, and they have hosting solutions for any hosting need. They offer services such as Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, Dedicated Server Hosting, and Domain Registrations, and host more than 500,000 websites on their servers.

Trial Period

They offer a 30-day free trial on their Managed WordPress hosting so that you can try and experience their services, and 10-day on Shared Hosting, which is quite enough time for you to decide whether they are suitable for you or not.

Xneelo has a money-back guarantee that is 30 days. You may cancel the first 30 days and obtain a complete refund of the hosting fee if you are not satisfied with their hosting. You also get your fee for registering a domain name reimbursed if you cancel the first 7 days.

Billing Cycle

Xneelo clients can either pay by Debit Order or Credit Card (Visa & Mastercard) / EFT (electronic funds transfer). If they opt to pay by Debit order, they can do so Monthly, Quarterly, Bi-annually, or Annually, but Credit Cards and EFT are Annually in advance.

Control Panel

Up to now, Xneelo offers two control panels within their hosting plans: KonsoleH and their own Xneelo Control Panel. KonsoleH is a company product of Hetzner Online GmbH, a web hosting company based in Germany and a partner company before the rebranding of Xneelo. Xneelo now has their own control panel, so KonsoleH will be phased out in the near future.

They also have a new control panel that is user-friendly and multi-device compatible, where you can control your tasks from anywhere. While as good as KonsoleH did the job, the new panel has several improvements, where you can control everything that has to do with your account with ease, such as accounts, domains, and webmail. 

Limits

Xneelo Shared Hosting packages, with unlimited traffic and super-fast SSD drives, are available in four flexible plans. The Basic package offers 5GB of SSD disk space, the Starter 10GB, the Advanced 15GB, and the Master 20GB of SSD space. CPU and RAM resources are shared by all domains on each server, and there are no fixed allocations. The amount of memory that their site can use can be set up by users with the PHP Configuration tool in the Xneelo Control Panel, up to a maximum of 512MB per domain on Shared hosting.

All Shared Hosting packages come with a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate, daily backups retained for 14 days, and you can host your website in South Africa or Germany. 

Their VPS plans also come in four. The Managed package has 500GB SSD storage, 8GB ECC RAM, and a 1x Intel Xeon Quad Core 3.2GHz processor. The Managed Plus has 1TB SSD storage, 16GB ECC RAM, and the same processor type. The Managed Commerce package has 1TB SSD storage, 16GB ECC RAM, and the same processor. Lastly, the Managed DE (Hosted in Germany) has 500GB SSD storage, 32GB ECC RAM, and a 1x Intel Core i7 Quad Core processor.
All Managed VPS Servers feature a 1 Gbps uplink for added traffic and transfer speed and are equipped with a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate, just like their Shared Hosting packages. 

Website Builder

They utilize the SiteBuilder site builder and provide two paid plans to customers: SiteBuilder Lite and SiteBuilder Basic. The variance is in what the users are provided with in terms of features. SiteBuilder offers a large number of professionally crafted templates that are easy to customize and are versatile. Users can easily drag and drop content and also click to substitute colors, fonts, and images. The content can be easily changed, and the users can adjust their site as and when they desire. 

Security

They provide security features like a Network Firewall that guards against malicious hosts and IP addresses, an integrated ModSecurity Web Application Firewall (WAF) to guard against malicious web traffic and standard attacks, Advanced DDoS protection & mitigation, Email Spam Filtering, and an SSL certificate by Let's Encrypt for free.

OS

Xneelo Shared Hosting plans are currently on Debian 10 (Buster), but they will be updating to Debian 11 (Bullseye) in the future. For Managed VPS Servers, Debian is still the operating system of choice. But in Self-Managed VPS Servers, AlmaLinux, CentOS, Debian, or Ubuntu can be chosen. And full root/administrator access is also provided, which allows users to have their preferred option of the operating system installed.

Support

Xneelo provides excellent support from extremely professional and capable agents whom you can contact 24/7 via Live Chat, Phone, Email, or Support Tickets. You receive answers in seconds on Live Chat, and Emails are answered within an hour. For the do-it-yourselfers, they have a huge knowledge base with over 400 step-by-step articles for the most common questions on their website. Their support staff is a pleasure to work with.

Conclusion

I've been using Xneelo as a client for more than a decade, hosting some of my accounts with them. Their equipment is extremely reliable, their packages are well structured, and in the unlikely case of running into trouble, their support staff, always pleasant and keen to help, is available twenty-four hours a day. There may be cheaper providers, but with Xneelo, you get what you pay for and then some! I would definitely recommend them.