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The web hosting world is large and varied, with many services competing for your trust and dollars. There are plenty of worthy choices, and AccuWeb Hosting is one of them, thanks to the many robust hosting plans that offer great flexibility. AccuWeb Hosting’s dedicated hosting packages, in particular, are well rounded. Although there are no payment options for shared hosting per month and the Windows plans do not allow unlimited email accounts to be created, AccuWeb is still one of the best web hosting services available. This is our AccuWeb Hosting review.
Getting started
The Accu Web Hosting website has some very in-depth comparison tables of the different plans, useful when choosing what is best for you. Most of these tables also include prices for different subscription lengths. If you have spent time shopping for hosting, you know that many providers bury vital details, so it is good to see that Accu Web is more upfront with its customers.
We selected the cheapest shared hosting plan and were offered a small selection of optional extras:
- A premium SSL certificate for $49.99 per year.
- CDN support for $3.95 per month.
- Spam filtering is based on SpamExperts to protect up to 100 mailboxes for $5.85 per quarter ($1.95 per month).
Creating an account is a little more secure than usual (or involves more hassle, depending on your perspective). In addition to requesting your name, physical and email address, and cell phone number, the company validates your identity by sending you a one-time password text. Accu Web Hosting supports payment via card and PayPal. We paid via PayPal in the usual way, and while we were doing that, a text came in with our password.
Once verified, Accu Web Hosting quickly set up and activated our account. Within 15 minutes, a welcome email arrived with logins, FTP data, nameservers, and any other detail you would like to know.
AccuWeb Hosting Review: Creating a site
Logging into Accu Web Hosting took us to a trusted WHMCS-based account management dashboard, as used by most smaller web hosts. This doesn’t have much visual appeal, but it contains all the account, product, and support features you need, and if you’ve used a few other hosts, you’ll probably recognize it right away.
A few clicks will take you to the full cPanel setup of Accu Web, where you will find various tools to help create a site. Softaculous is available for easy installation of WordPress, MediaWiki, PrestaShop, and hundreds of other web apps. The RV site builder is a simple drag-and-drop website builder. It doesn’t have many templates, but there are plenty of widgets and editing options, and we are glad it has been included in Accu Web’s plans.
The standard cPanel File Manager allows you to create and organize folders, upload and edit files, and generally get your webspace in order. There are also all the usual functions for website management, including tools to work with domains and subdomains, create and manage databases, create and manage email accounts and, when you are at work, get in-depth statistics about your website visitors.
All websites get into trouble from time to time, no matter what your host is, but Accu Web Hosting has more ways to help than most: live chat, email, phone, web knowledgebase, and several busy social media sites.
There is a tremendous amount of content available on the knowledgebase alone: 28 articles on CDN hosting, 39 on email client settings, even 63 Plesk tutorials. The articles help with practical tasks (‘How to install a WordPress theme’) and the installation and troubleshooting, making the support site a beneficial resource.
AccuWeb Hosting Review: Performance
The speed of the web host matters, even when you buy the most basic of shared hosting. Your website visitors shouldn’t be left hanging if a slow server regularly awaits them. To get a feel for the performance of Accu Web Hosting, we signed up for an elementary shared hosting account and uploaded a straightforward website.
Next, we used Uptime.com to check our test site’s availability and response time with an interval of five minutes over seven days (that’s more than 2,000 individual checks). The results showed that our site had 100% uptime, with no faults detected. This is what we expect for a short term test, but some hosts fail.
The response times were, on average, 285ms, almost identical to the 289ms we saw during the last review, in the middle of what we would expect for a basic shared hosting package. (And don’t forget, that’s what we are testing. These results don’t tell us anything about what you might see of Accu Web Hosting’s other products).
Accu Web Hosting also scored for its consistency. The results ranged from 248-485ms, but there are only a handful of measurements above 400ms, and our site usually gave results in a very acceptable range of 250-300ms.
Accu Web’s shared hosting starts with the Personal Web Hosting plan. This imposes different limits, but as we said above, there is nothing that will affect the average small site: 10GB of storage space, 150 email accounts, and ‘only’ 500GB of traffic is enough for many users. (Even with a bulky web page of 5MB, that’s 100,000 pages per month).
Unusual, even this startup plan allows you to host as many websites as you need, within the storage limit (most providers limit you to host a site on their startup plan). Elsewhere, the plan includes all the features you would expect: free SSL, cPanel site management, a free domain, a bundled website builder.
Prices range from $3.25 per month on the six-month plan (there is no monthly billing, unfortunately) to $3.09 per month over three years. That’s a reasonable price, and as we said above, keep in mind that this is the standard price, not some special introductory agreement. It is not going to jump on renewal.
There are two other shared hosting plans, but they essentially give you more storage space, emails, and bandwidth, although the Enterprise plan (starting at $9.99 per month) also includes a dedicated IP.
Shared cloud hosting offers a more scalable product, beneficial for dealing with websites that regularly have large peaks in traffic. Specs are similar to regular shared plans, and prices start at a reasonable $4.79 per month. Some providers have more attractive offers, at least at first glance. HostGator’s Baby Plan, for example, gives you unmeasured storage and bandwidth of $2.75 per month.
AccuWeb Hosting Review: WordPress hosting
Accu Web’s WordPress hosting plans have a range of features, including several welcome benefits. All plans support unlimited website hosting; the company will import an existing WordPress site for free; SEO and a performance-enhancing Hyper Cache plugin will be pre-installed. Daily backups will be made. Advanced features include GIT-based version control and WP-CLI to manage WordPress through the command line, while staging allows you to edit your WordPress project without affecting the production site.
Prices are barely different from Accu Web’s regular shared hosting, starting at $3.49 per month for three years for 10GB storage and 500GB traffic. There are more capable managed WordPress plans left over. Bluehost and IONOS WordPress Pro plans both automatic support updates of plugins, but also WordPress itself, for example. These more high-end products can also cost 2, 3, or more times as much as the Accu Web offerings. If you start with WordPress and don’t create a business-critical site, it makes sense to start with a budget product and upgrade later if you need the extra features.
AccuWeb Hosting Review: Servers
Accu Web Hosting’s VPS range aims to improve website performance by providing you with dedicated RAM and CPU resources. Starting prices are low and are billed monthly for only $5 (yes, monthly – no long-term contracts required), but that’s because the basic plan is relatively inadequate: self-managed, 1GB RAM, 20GB storage, and only 150GB traffic (even A2’s most basic shared hosting plan gives you 500GB).
The managed SSD Saturn VPN plan gives you 4GB of RAM, four CPU cores, 50GB of storage, and 650GB of bandwidth, all for $48 per month on the annual plan.
Comparing plans with other hosts is difficult because there are so many factors to consider. Still, to take a single example, Bluehost’s Enhanced VPS includes similar 4GB RAM, two CPU cores and 60GB of storage, and a hefty 2TB of bandwidth. The introductory price is fractionally lower at $29.99 for all plan lengths but doubles to $59.99 when upgraded. If you need the extra bandwidth, Bluehost looks good; if CPU cores and long-term costs are a priority, Accu Web might be best.
Accu Web’s dedicated plans are so configurable that there is no room to cover them here. Still, essentially you can select a data center and then choose from a large number of basic servers, each supporting the addition of a RAID card, control panel, SQL Server (Express, Web, Standard and Enterprise editions), mail server, CDP backup plan, firewall, IPv6 address and much more. Bandwidth allocations are high, with even the cheapest U.S. server giving you 20TB, and prices start at a $118 bargain.
AccuWeb Hosting Review: Customer support
AccuWeb Hosting offers both web chat and 24/7 telephone customer support. When you ask a question via web chat, AccuWeb Hosting provides links to a knowledge database. When I asked about the difference between regular hosting and cloud-based hosting, AccuWeb Hosting gave me a satisfactory answer. If the knowledge base doesn’t help, you can talk live via web chat, and the answer is amazingly fast, answering my questions in a minute.
Final words
AccuWeb Hosting is a feature stacked web hosting service that shines in the dedicated hosting category. However, if you want an unlimited number of email accounts (if you sign up for an AccuWeb Windows-based plan), you may need to look elsewhere. No marketing tricks, no misleading headlines, and no ‘unlimited’ accounts that really aren’t – Accu Web Hosting has a strong range of quality products, highly configurable and fairly priced, and quality support.