Awardspace Hosting Reviews

Introduction

AwardSpace has been providing flexible and scalable hosting solutions for basic and advanced websites for over 10 years. With an entry-level hosting, which is free of cost, to shared and dedicated hosting plans, AwardSpace has something for everyone. That pretty much explains why AwardSpace is growing strong with 2.5 million users and counting.

AwardSpace also offers a free website builder, which is easy to use and requires no technical skills.

With virus and SPAM protection that runs across all the plans, including the basic one, and an uptime of 99.95%, AwardSpace is one of the most reliable hosting service providers across the globe.

Awardspace Hosting Server Performance

Average hosting uptime

Uptime is one of the most important metrics to consider when choosing a hosting provider. Even 1 minute of downtime can make you lose out on first-time visitors as well as customers trying to make the purchase.

AwardSpace has been maintaining the uptime of 99.95% for a long time, which comes as standard with all the paid plans on offer, except for the free hosting plan.

Website Speed

The faster your website loads, the more visitors will it retain and more will be the chances of conversion. Better website speed also means better ranking across search engines.

AwardSpace scores highly on server speed and has been popular among beginners and veteran website owners alike. Its average speed is recorded ______, which is capable of giving your users a fast, lag-free browsing experience.

Server Response Time

Server Response Time determines how fast the overall content on your website loads. The content may include embedded videos, plug-ins, images, and text. We measured Awardspace’s Server Response Time across different locations, and the results were quite impressive.

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Data Center locations

Awardspace’s data center is strategically based out of Sofia, Bulgaria, Europe. Bulgaria being one of the top 20 countries with the fastest Internet network enables the company to offer premium and free hosting packages at low prices as compared to the US or UK-based hosting providers.

Resource protection / Security Options

Awardspace offers Firewall security features that ensure protection against viruses, SPAM and several other website risks.

Load Test

We ran Awardspace through Load Test to determine how well it can handle traffic throughput. By sending up to 100 virtual users to the test site, we measured the stability, and it turned out to be more stable than we anticipated.

If you are opting for one of the premium hosting plans, your website will be able to handle the traffic quite well, regardless of how thick and fast it is coming.

Awardspace Hosting Features

Let’s have a look at Awardspace’s hosting features:

Beginner-Friendly / Easy to Use

Awardspace comes with an easy-to-use website builder that helps you build a nearly customized online presence, in a couple of steps. With simple drag and drop features, it requires no technical skills to implement a website on Awardspace.

WordPress Installer

WordPress installation is easy with Awardspace’s premium as well as free plans. WordPress hosting packages come with anti-virus and anti-spam protection to keep your website secure and responsive at all times. You will also get WordPress tutorials to understand how it’s done and what are the possibilities for building your website with this amazing feature.

Backups & Restore

Your data is important, and you, as a client, are important for AwardSpace, which is why their WordPress hosting package features weekly backups and automatic updates to help you keep up with the latest technology and trends.

Flexible Hosting Choices

With AwardSpace, you can choose from 4 different hosting plans as per your needs and budget. Following are the hosting packages:

• Free Web Hosting
• Shared Hosting
• Reseller Hosting
• Sem-dedicated hosting
• VPS Cloud Hosting
• WordPress Hosting

We’ll discuss each hosting plan in the latter part of this review.

For now, let’s have a look at various plans in general:

Other features that come as standard with Awardspace hosting:

SSL Certificate

Awardspace provides SSL certificates to secure your online payment pages and website as a whole. You can choose from various SSL certificates according to your budget and different levels of security needs.

Migration Policy

You can easily migrate your domain from any hosting provider to Awardspace.

Upgrade Policy

Awardspace’s each hosting plan is flexible and scalable. Regardless of your current plan, you can always upgrade to a better hosting plan to accommodate your growing needs. With Awardspace, upgrading is simple and can be done with a few clicks.

Unlimited Hosting

Awardspace offers unlimited hosting for selected plans.

SSD storage

VPS hosting by Awardspace features a more reliable and faster SSD storage. SSD storage does not have any movable part, which means it is less likely to wear out or fail.

SSD stores the data onto the flash memory for enhanced performance.

Customer Support

Awardspace offers highly responsive customer support service via telephone, live chats and video tutorials, which are free of cost. For all hosting plans, including the free version, Awardspace guarantees 24/7 customer support, as well as 1 hour response time for the paid plans.

Also, you can simply log on to your cPanel and generate Trouble Ticket to get a ticket number, which can be used to check the status of your problem and get an estimated troubleshoot time. There’s no waiting in the dark.

Moreover, their video tutorials and blogs offer useful insights into several hosting-related issues. They are so detailed and on-point that most of the time, you will not need customer support.

What’s more?

Affordable renewal rates

30-Day Money-Back Guarantee to ensure your peace of mind

Awardspace Hosting Plans & Features

Awardspace is a popular hosting provider based out of Germany, catering for over 2.5 million users across the globe. There are 5 types of hosting plans offered by Awardspace. Let’s get into the details so that you can decide on the most suitable hosting plan according to your needs and budget.

Plans:

• Free Hosting
• Shared hosting
• VPS cloud hosting
• Semi-Dedicated hosting
• WordPress hosting

Free Hosting

It might appear as a surprise to you, but Free Hosting actually exists in today’s cruel, cruel world, thanks to Awardspace.

You will get a free account for a lifetime, and there are no hidden charges in the beginning or along the way. You will pay only for the premium features that you may use. Free hosting plan is absolutely scalable and can be upgraded to any premium plan, whenever you want.

Highly recommended for small businesses who need a digital storefront that should interact with their prospects while they are away or asleep.

It’s free but definitely not substandard. Awardspace guarantees 99.9% uptime, which runs across all their free and premium hosting plans.

Features you can expect with Awardspace’s free hosting plan:

1 Domain, 3 Subdomains, and 1 email account

You will get to host your primary domain and will have 3 subdomains for hosting temporary websites or blogs.

And it feels great to own a domain’s email account. It shifts your image 180 degrees instantly.

Free website builder

The free website builder is spot on with a wide range of design options to allow you to create a nearly personalized online presence.

100% ad-free

If it’s free, it doesn’t mean you have to bear with annoying ad pop-ups. You can use it for free, as long as it meets your requirements.

1GB SSD Storage

It’s not just 1 GB of disk space; it’s SSD – more reliable, faster and durable.

5 GB Monthly Traffic

That’s more than what your small website will use. You don’t have to worry about your website crashing down due to high traffic influx.

24/7 Customer Support

You can reach out to customer support anytime you want.

WordPress & Joomla installer

It takes a few clicks and a couple of minutes to get your WordPress website ready and running.

Firewall Protection

Even if you opt for free hosting plan, you will get firewall protection against spammers and hackers.

Customize your dashboard the way you want. Pin those frequently used features to the top and you will never have to rummage through options every time you arrive at the control panel.

Fast network connectivity

Your website visitors need not know that you are on a free host, and Awardspace makes sure they don’t. They provide high-speed network access to their free and paying customers alike.

Shared hosting

Why should you upgrade to Awardspace’s shared hosting plan when you are getting free hosting in the first place? Well, that’s because free hosting cannot handle anything beyond a basic site, which sits there and does nothing.

Your website will grow as your business grows. There will be more visitors to your website, and you will need to make sure there’s enough bandwidth available to handle the throughput.

Shared hosting is the answer to nearly 90% of web hosting requirements across the globe. Since the bandwidth is distributed among a definite number of users, and so are the server expenses, shared hosting is also the most affordable hosting ecosystem.

With Awardspace’s Shared Hosting plan, you will get unlimited disk space, higher speed and unlimited traffic handling. Plus, there will be extra security features and a dedicated database for better site performance. While you will be focusing on your core business operations and the website, Awardspace’s expert will be handling the server’s maintenance.

Web-based cPanel

With shared hosting comes an easy-to-use cPanel that enables you to manage your site, add a database and create email accounts easily.

Plans and Price Of  Shared Hosting

Shared Hosting offers a choice of 3 different plans as mentioned below:

Shared hosting is definitely better than free hosting. Unlike free hosting, shared hosting has unlimited disk space, unlimited monthly traffic, backups and much more.

Semi-Dedicated Hosting

If your website has outgrown shared hosting, and you are looking for a better and faster alternative, then semi-dedicated hosting is the next you will want to consider.

Unlike other hosting service providers, Awardspace offers semi-dedicated (not entirely dedicated) hosting plan, which is better than the shared one but available at a fraction of the cost of a fully dedicated hosting plan.

Advantages of semi-dedicated hosting:

• Increased processing power
• Little to no usage restrictions
• Less accounts on server means more bandwidth available to your website
• Accommodative of higher traffic
• More reliable
• Control panel is similar to that of shared hosting

Awardspace offers three Semi-dedicated hosting plans for you to choose from:

If you are still skeptical about upgrading to semi-dedicated hosting plan, have a look at the additional features you will get:

• CPU Usage up to 50% of 2,.4 GHz
• Up to 50% of RAM
• Unlimited ASP.NET Websites
• Unlimited INODES

Awardspace understands that not all businesses need dedicated hosting immediately after outgrowing a shared plan. A website might linger between shared and dedicated hosting for months and even years. That is why, an intermediate semi-dedicated hosting plan works for a large number of businesses out there.

Additionally, you will get almost all the space and support of a dedicated hosting plan, but at a less price. This is where Awardspace can be your saving grace.

VPS Cloud Hosting

Bring more power and control to your hosting ecosystem with VPS Cloud Hosting that guarantees better performance, storage and prompt customer support – everything that you need to enjoy an independent, more flexible web hosting experience.

VPS Hosting is technically shared hosting since there’s only one physical server for multiple websites. But each website is allocated a virtual private server that acts as a dedicated server to provide full power and functionality at a fraction of the cost.

Each virtual server will have its own operating system and custom configurations, and on top of that, Awardspace provides an easy-to-use control panel to manage everything with ease.

The following features and benefits of VPS Cloud Hosting will make you want to switch as soon as your website needs it. Have a look:

#1 With VPS Cloud Hosting, you will get the flexibility and authority to install any software and configure your OS as you wish.

#2 You will get an independent virtual server, which means your website will have all the disk space and bandwidth needed to handle any amount of traffic.

#3 With a dedicated mail server, you can reach out to people you wish to and won’t ever get into SPAM blacklist or see your website crashing down because of other websites on the same server.

Let’s have a look at three sub-plans under VPS Cloud Hosting:

With self-dependency, better performance and reliability, VPS Hosting is the answer to your growing website traffic. Also, when your website grows, you will want to make sure it’s not getting too complex or difficult to manage. VPS Hosting takes care of that and just about everything else.

With VPS Hosting, you will get 99.9% uptime, 30-day money-back guarantee and 24/7 dedicated support with 1 hour of response time.

WordPress Hosting

WordPress websites are easy to build and even easier to manage. With more and more businesses creating WordPress websites, many leading hosting providers are offering hosting plans fully designed and optimized for WordPress.

Have a look at different WordPress hosting packages:

What else does Awardspace promise with its WordPress hosting plan?

WordPress hosting by Awardspace comes with an assurance of 99.9% uptime and anti-spam protection to keep your website running as fast as ever.

It has a 1-click WP installer, as well as a complete set of tutorials to help you install and manage the website easily. Once your website is live, WordPress will take weekly backups so that you do not lose important data.

In order to give you a seamless hosting experience, which gets better every day, Awardspace has provisions for automatic WordPress updates.

If you face any problem, at any stage, Awardspace’s 24/7 support has got you covered. If you have one of the premium plans, you will be assisted within 1 hour of dropping an email.

Other Services Of Awardspace

Alongside website hosting, Awardspace provides a full suite of services to help you improve your online presence and discover newer possibilities to grow your business and revenue.

Awardspace provides the following services to its customers.

• Free Reseller Hosting
• SSL Certificates
• Affiliates
• Domains

Free Reseller Hosting

Awardspace is the pioneer in reseller hosting, helping people build a fully functional reseller hosting website in a jiffy – no investment; no obligation. After you successfully drive a large amount of traffic to your reseller site and build a client-base, Awardspace will take it from there. The services rendered to your clients will be entirely handled by Awardspace.

With a reseller website of your own, you can offer all kinds of hosting plans, as well as SSL certificates and Domain names to your clients which Awardspace offers.

SSL Certificates

With Awardspace’s SSL certificates, your website will be safe and unstoppable. We all agree upon the fact that the online world is full of hackers, and in order to protect your business and customers from any kind of data breach, Awardspace provides 256 bit SSL encryption, which protects every online transaction taking place on your website.

Affiliates

Awardspace not only helps you build a strong online presence but also allows you to get a reward out of it. With the affiliate program, you can lead new sign-ups to Awardspace and get an assured commission of $110 if it converts into a registration. It’s as simple and straightforward as it can be.

Promote Awardspace’s service on your website and redirect referrals to its official website. If they register, you will get up to $110 per conversion.

Domains

Register a domain and own it for the lifetime, free of cost. But there’s a catch. Free domains are available only with certain hosting packages as mentioned below.

• Web Pro Plus Plan: 1 free domain for life
• Max Pack Plus Plan: 2 free domain for life
• Semi-Dedicated Plans: 1 free domain for life

If you have registered your domain name with a service provider other than Awardspace, you may make a switch to enjoy exclusive perks and benefits of being part of the Awardspace community.

Switching over to Awardspace will get you

• 1-Year Domain Renewal
• Complete WHOIS control
• 24/7 Customer Support
• Complete DNS Control
• EPP Key Control
• Domain Locking Control

Refund & Cancellation Policy

With Awardspace, you can cancel your subscription anytime and get assured prorated refund.

For cancellations within the first 30 days, a full refund will be credited to your account.

FAQs

Q1: Does Awardspace offer unlimited space on shared hosting plans?

Ans: Yes. Awardspace offers unlimited disk space across all shared hosting plans, allowing you to store unlimited data.

Q2: Are there any Site Transfer charges for switching over to Awardspace?

Yes. Awardspace will charge you a one-time website transfer fee, but at the same time, it makes the process a lot easier and straightforward.

Q3: Does Awardspace offer an SSL certificate?

Ans: Yes. When you sign up with Awardspace, you can purchase SSL certificate to encrypt every transaction that takes place on your website.

Q5: Can I host my Magento website on Awardspace?

Ans: Yes, you can install your Magento website on an Awardspace server.

Q6: Does Awardspace take back-ups automatically?

Ans. Yes. Awardspace values your data as much as you do, and enables you to configure data back frequency – weekly or monthly – as per your requirements.

Q7: How many email addresses do I get with Awardspace?

Ans: Awardspace offers 1 to unlimited emails, depending on the plan you take. For instance, with free hosting, you will get only 1 email, but as you move up, the number of email accounts goes up to 1000 to unlimited.

Q8: Does Awardspace offer Money-back guarantee on all hosting plans?

Ans: Awardspace initiates a full refund as soon as you cancel the subscription within the first 30 days, in case you are not satisfied with the service. However, if you want to get the hang of their services without getting your money stuck, try their free hosting plan first and make premium purchases once you are satisfied.

Q9: Does Awardspace offer reseller hosting plan?

Ans: Yes. In fact, Awardspace is the pioneer in reseller hosting plans that offer great benefits as well as the same level of service and reliability.

Q10: How many programming languages does Awardspace support?

And: Awardspace supports various programming languages, including PHP 5, Python and Ruby.

Q11: How can I reach Awardspace’s customer support?

Ans: Awardspace offers 24/7 customer support across all hosting plans, as well as 1 hour of response time across premium plans. You can reach Awardspace via live chat, ticket, and phone.

Q12: Can I get Windows hosting from Awardspace?

Ans: No. Awardspace offers hosting plans for Linux only.