HostUpon are a Canadian hosting company that is situated in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Their main data centre is located in Toronto, but they also have data centres in Dallas, Seattle, and Washington. This makes them a great choice for anyone based in North America, however customers from other parts of the world should still get a good ping rate as their network has three backbone bandwidth carriers (and you can always improve performance further by using a content delivery network).
They are a true global hosting provider with over ten thousand customers from over one hundred and twenty countries around the world.
The company only uses reliable brand hardware such as IBM and Dell and HP servers, IBM storage systems, and Cisco networking equipment and virtualization software.
Another thing that has brought HostUpon accolades is their approach to being a green web hosting company. They utilise energy efficient hardware to reduce electricity costs and use Energy Star-certified appliances in their offices. HostUpon employees are encouraged to work from home from time to time too.
Being a green hosting company that is something that most hosting customers do not really care about, but pollution from website hosting is growing so I think it is great that the company has taken steps to reduce their carbon footprint. Plus I imagine it is only a matter of time before governments step in and force hosting companies to do this anyways so it shows that they are planning for the future.
Let's take a closer look at the type of hosting solutions that HostUpon offers.
Hosting Plans
HostUpon offers five different types of hosting plans: Shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting, cloud hosting, and dedicated hosting. They also offer domain registration and offer a free domain to shared hosting customers.
Shared hosting is a cut throat market with very small margins for hosting companies. Many companies are happy to take a loss with shared hosting if it means grabbing potential long-term customers.
Without doubt, HostUpon have priced their shared hosting plans competitively. Their plans start from only $3.95 per month.
Like all website hosting companies, HostUpon market their shared hosting plans as having unlimited hosting resources. No such thing exists as no company can offer unlimited hosting. This is simply a tactic used to market entry level hosting plans to new website owners because they do not know what type of hosting plan to purchase.
I cannot criticise HostUpon for using this marketing technique since all hosting companies do it and their shared hosting plans offer fantastic value for money. Most shared hosting plans around the $5 mark limit the account to hosting one website, but HostUpon's entry plan allows an unlimited number of domains to be added and an unlimited amount of email accounts.
Their business shared hosting plan costs $7.95 per month and adds a dedicated IP address for your hosting space. Upgrading to the $15.95 per month premium plan adds an SSL certificate and use of a premium backup service that backs up your website every few hours and stores data for five days.
HostUpon's reseller hosting plans use a white label platform so that you can brand cPanel with your own logo. You get full access to the WHM hosting control panel, a free website builder, and a variety of one-click installation scripts. A security suite is also provided.
Their reseller plans start from $19.95 per month for 15GB of storage, unlimited bandwidth, two dedicated IP addresses, and unlimited bandwidth. This is more than enough to help you get started in hosting reselling.
Virtual Private Server hosting is the natural progression from shared hosting. It gives you much more control over your hosting space and access to a lot more resources.
HostUpon's VPS hosting plans have some cool features such as FFmpeg support so that you can create a video website. You will also gain the ability to reboot your server at any time and you will be connected to a 1Gb/sec connection. CentOS with root access is provided too.
VPS plans retail from $49.95 per month for 20GB of storage, 100GB of bandwidth, 512MB of RAM, and two dedicated IP addresses.
Cloud hosting is a popular choice with many website owners due to the ease at which resources can be scaled. There are security benefits too from not having one single point of failure.
The cloud hosting plans offered by HostUpon are powered by CloudLinux and use CloudFlare's content delivery network to improve performance further.
Their cheapest cloud hosting plan costs $24.95 per month for 25GB of raid-protected storage, 100GB of bandwidth, five MySWL databases, and two add-on domains.
A dedicated hosting plan from HostUpon will give you complete control over a server. You will have full root access to the server and you can scale resources as and when needed. For example, you can add more storage or RAM to your server in the future if you desire.
HostUpon use IBM Enterprise servers and provide 1Gb/sec on a premium multi-gigabit network. Each server comes pre-configured with CentOS, PHP, MySQL, Apache, CSF Firewall, Curl, GD Library, ImageMagick, and more. This saves you from having to set up everything yourself.
Their dedicated hosting plans retail from $175 per month for 75GB of raid-protected storage, 2GM of RAM, 5TB of bandwidth, and two dedicated IP addresses.
As you can see, HostUpon provides hosting solutions for every type of website owner. They can provide hosting to beginners who just blog occasionally all the way up to large companies who need a dedicated hosting solution.
Support
Good quality support is usually what makes the difference between a good hosting company and a bad hosting company.
It is commonplace within the hosting industry to use third-party support companies from Asia in order to provide 24/7 support. HostUpon is one of the few companies that keeps all of their support in-house from their Toronto base. No support is outsourced.
To help customers HostUpon have developed a large Knowledgebase that is packed full of useful articles. You will also find video tutorials on their website.
Direct support is provided via a ticket support system and live chat. Dedicated hosting customers also receive telephone support.
Final Thoughts
HostUpon have positioned themselves as one of the best options within the Canadian hosting market, though they can provide hosting to anyone around the world.
Their shared hosting plans are very competitive. For less than four dollars a month you can host as many websites as you want on their shared hosting packages. That is something that few competitors do. With most other hosting companies you need to upgrade to the $10 per month shared hosting plan in order to host additional websites.
Their other hosting plans are fairly priced, but you can find cheaper hosting alternatives online. It is however important to remember that cheaper hosting sometimes comes at a cost.
Most hosting companies that offer extremely low prices use cheaper tech for servers and outsource most of their support. In contrast, everything is kept in-house with HostUpon. They control their own data centres and their support is all provided from their base in Toronto in Canada.
I highly recommend checking out HostUpon. All of their plans come with a thirty day money back guarantee and they have a good reputation for support.
Thanks,
Kevin