Crazy Domains hosting review 2024

Unlike your typical US or Europe-based hosting providers, Crazy Domains is based in Australia. Initially known as a domain registrar, it has since expanded its repertoire to include web hosting and other website-related services, much like Namecheap and GoDaddy.

Though it’s popular, opinions on this host vary wildly. Some users rave about its great performance while others criticize its glitchy website and lackluster support. Naturally, I was curious to see how it measures up against hosting provider market leaders.

To provide you with a full picture, I’ve looked into the provider’s performance, security, pricing, customer support, and other aspects. Find out how it fares in this Crazy Domains review. Here’s a quick overview first.

⭐ Rating:	3.9 ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
💵 Price:	From $7.50/month
📑 Uptime guarantee:	99.9%
⚙️ Hosting types:	Shared, Business, WordPress, WooCommerce, and Windows hosting
🌎 Server locations:	Australia, UK
👨‍💻 24/7 live support:	Yes
🔥 Coupons:	Crazy Domains coupon 25% OFF!

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Crazy Domains hosting pros and cons

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Pricing and hosting types

Crazy Domains is on the pricier side across the board. However, your exact pricing depends on your location as the provider charges differently based on where you are. While it offers various hosting solutions such as WordPress, WooCommerce, and Windows hosting, its Linux web hosting plans are the most popular.

Plan	Features	Price (3-year plan)
Economy	1 website, 10GB SSD storage, unmetered bandwidth, standard CPU and memory, and 5 email accounts.	$7.50/month
Premium	5 websites, 25GB SSD storage, unmetered bandwidth, standard CPU and memory, and 25 email accounts.	$14.50/month
Ultimate	10 websites, 50GB SSD storage, unmetered bandwidth, enhanced CPU and memory, and 50 email accounts.	$19.50/month

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Crazy Domains doesn’t offer any free plans. Instead, it has three paid shared hosting plans, starting at $7.50/month. You’ll see the lowest price if you commit to the longest billing term – 3 years. Going for a shorter term means a higher price tag, which is standard practice for most providers.

What I really liked about Crazy Domains is its extended 60-day money-back guarantee. This ensures you have plenty of time to test the hosting service out without full commitment – you can always cancel your plan if you change your mind.

That said, I found the provider rather tight-fisted with its resources and features. Sure, you get the basics like SSD storage, SSL certificates, and even unmetered bandwidth, but that’s about it. I’ve seen other providers offer much more for less. For instance, Bluehost has an entry shared hosting plan that supports 10 websites and comes with 10GB storage, free domain for a year, DDoS protection, and AI tools all for just $1.99/month.

Crazy Domains management – is it easy to use?

Crazy Domains has a straightforward setup process and easy-to-navigate interfaces. However, my experience was far from easy or smooth. Much of this was because the platform frequently breaks down, with issues popping up regularly. What should have been done in minutes often ended up taking days because of said glitches.

Hosting setup and website creation

Before setting up your account and creating your website, you’ll first need to choose a Crazy Domains plan that’s right for you. Next, select whether to connect your existing domain or get a new one.

I appreciated that I could choose various add-ons, like advanced SSL certificates, site backup, and Google Workspace, during the setup. Keep in mind that Crazy Domains quite craftily automatically includes the advanced SSL certificate and site backup add-ons to your plan. Be sure to remove them if you don’t want these extras.

In the final stage of the setup, you’ll see the checkout page. This is where I noticed that a .store domain was slyly added to my cart. It’s advertised as free for the first year, but be cautious – it renews at a whopping $78.00/year after the first 12 months. Nonetheless, once you sort everything out, you can register for an account.

Managing your website with Crazy Domains

After successful registration, you’re directed to the main dashboard. This is where you can find all the management options, though the exact features depend on your chosen plan. Generally, on the left, there’s a menu that contains sections like My Profile, Domain Club, Help Center, and more.

The My Profile tab is where you can find your account details, payment card info, and other general settings. Meanwhile, Domain Club is a membership program you enter by registering a domain. You can earn bonus points and unlock discounts. Frankly, this seems unnecessary to me unless you manage numerous websites or resell domains. The typical users won’t get much value from it.

After spending some time with the dashboard, I found it clean and simple enough to navigate without major issues, though it might not be as sleek or smooth as what you’d get from bigger names like Bluehost, Hostinger, or SiteGround. My one complaint is that Crazy Domains’ site frequently breaks down, turning even basic tasks into time-consuming (and frustrating) efforts.

Beyond the dashboard, Crazy Domains provides cPanel for advanced functionalities. It can be accessed quite easily by simply clicking Manage under the Web Hosting tab. You’ll then be taken to a new page. From there, click the bright green button to get to cPanel. Crazy Domains cPanel is the standard version, with no additional features or unique tools.

Crazy Domains hosting performance

Performance is one of the areas that Crazy Domains does really well, boasting strong uptime and excellent speed. However, it isn’t the best at handling traffic surges, making it more ideal for smaller sites with fewer visitors.

To determine if it’s a reliable provider, I assessed Crazy Domains using a Grafana Synthetics test. Over the course of two months, it maintained an incredible 100% uptime. This is expected, considering that the provider promises a 99.9% guarantee.

Apart from uptime, I looked into Crazy Domains’ speed. This provider’s data centers are located in Australia and the UK, but regular servers and EEP servers are dispersed across the globe. This means you can pick the server closest to your target visitors to reduce latency.

I used the webpagetest.org tool to check the provider’s page performance:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) measures how fast the biggest chunk of the page loads. Ideally, it should come in under 2.5s to ensure your website ranks higher on search engine result pages.
• Fully Loaded Time indicates when your website is 100% interactive. For the best user experience, this metric shouldn’t exceed 3s.
• TTFB (Time to First Byte) indicates the server’s responsiveness. Under 0.5s shows that the server is quick at processing requests.

To perform the test, I connected to two different locations: Dulles, Virginia (the US) and Sydney (Australia).

In Australia, Crazy Domains’ LCP took 2.283s to load, which I’m quite satisfied with. Having said that, the results weren’t mindblowing and I’ve seen other providers, such as SiteGround and DreamHost, with better LCPs. The Fully Loaded Time came to 1.943s and the TTFB result was 1.243s. Overall, a decent result.

In the US, Crazy Domains was much slower. The LCP result was 4.293s, the Fully Loaded time was 3.501s, and I measured the TTFB metric at 2.342s. So, if you’re located in the US, Crazy Domains hosting might not be the best option.

Reliability and speed aside, I also wanted to make sure that Crazy Domains can handle traffic surges. Unfortunately, this is where it struggled. Using Grafana k6, I sent 50 VUs (virtual users) over five minutes, generating around 23 requests per second at the peak. Most of the requests failed and I had to reduce the number of VUs and requests gradually.

Next, I tried 30 VUs but received similar results. Even scaling back to 10 VUs didn’t show any significant improvement. So, if your website expects large traffic, Crazy Domains isn’t the best option.

Crazy Domains security features

Crazy Domains’ security protection is on the thinner side for my taste but it does offer a few bare basic features. Here’s how it protects its users:

• Free SSL certificate. All Crazy Domains plans include an SSL certificate to encrypt data sent between your website and visitors’ browsers. This helps keep your users’ personal, payment, and other sensitive information safe from unauthorized access.
• Automated backup. Crazy Domains automatically creates weekly backups of your website to safeguard against data loss. It keeps a 30-day backup to ensure you can restore your website to a previous version in case of emergencies or technical failures, which is sorely needed considering Crazy Domain glitches often. Additional on-demand backups are available as paid add-ons.
• DDoS protection. DDoS attacks flood your website with a high volume of traffic or requests to disrupt it. Crazy Domains remains vague about its exact measures but states that it monitors for these attacks 24/7 and has necessary countermeasures.

Crazy Domains customer support

Crazy Domains offers 24/7 support via live chat and email. Phone support, however, is only available from 6 AM to 10 PM (AEST). Fortunately, if you prefer to troubleshoot on your own, you can use a knowledge base.

	Crazy Domains
Live chat	✅ Yes
Email	✅ Yes
Phone line	✅ Yes (limited to business hours)
Knowledge base	✅ Yes

To test Crazy Domains’ customer support, I reached out for help with connecting to the server via SSH. Although I was told the wait time would be around five minutes, I ended up waiting over 15 minutes for an agent to hop on. The support agent was fairly professional, though I didn’t ask very specific or technical questions.

However, my inquiry was redirected to a different support agent before it was fully answered due to recurring issues on their end. It appears that Crazy Domains’ site tends to break quite often.

After that, I turned to the provider’s knowledge base for some self-help. From browsing the articles, I found them to be rather limited and confusing. Readers have to click link after link to find answers to simple questions, if those answers were even available at all. In fact, many articles barely scratched the surface, which is likely to leave readers – especially the beginners – even more puzzled.

Overall, I found Crazy Domains’ customer support in need of improvement. While it offers multiple channels, the experience is often hampered by technical glitches. Plus, its knowledge base articles could greatly benefit from clearer and higher-quality articles.

Final thoughts

To put it in a nutshell, Crazy Domains could be a decent hosting provider for certain users. For instance, it might work well if you’re in the market for an Australian host for a basic website such as a blog or personal portfolio. However, for other purposes, I’d recommend considering other hosting providers.

In terms of pricing, Crazy Domains offers multiple hosting solutions, but it’s not the cheapest option – prices start at $7.50/month. However, it is fairly beginner-friendly with an easy website creation process and a clean dashboard. A standard cPanel is also provided for advanced functionalities. However, you’ll need to be very careful during checkout as it automatically includes add-ons in your cart, which can add up significantly.

As for Crazy Domains performance results, the host demonstrated descent speeds and a solid uptime of 100%, in line with its 99.9% uptime guarantee. However, it couldn’t handle traffic surges, making it better suited for small to mid-sized websites. The security features suite is also lacking and doesn’t provide that many security measures besides the basics:. SSL certificates, weekly backups, and DDoS protection.

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