HostArmada review: the next big web host?
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HostArmada is a new web hosting provider in the game. But since its release in 2019, it has made waves in the industry by offering excellent performance, easy management, and strong security measures at budget-friendly prices.
Or, at least, that’s what all the HostArmada reviews out there are saying. But, frankly, that sounds a little too good to be true and we all know that the best way to find out is by testing it yourself. If you don't like what you're offered, there are plenty of alternatives to check out.
To understand if the HostArmada is worth your money, I tested it myself. For this review, I’ve researched, compared, and ran extensive tests on the provider – from pricing and performance to security and customer support. And, of course, I come with proofs to back it all up.
| ⭐ Rating: | |
| 💵 Price: | From $2.49/month |
| 📑 Uptime guarantee: | 99.9% |
| ⚙️ Hosting types: | Shared, WordPress, VPS, reseller, and dedicated |
| 🌎 Server locations: | The US, Canada, the UK, Germany, India, Singapore, and Australia |
| 👨💻 24/7 live support: | Yes |
| 🔥 Coupons: | HostArmada coupon 75% OFF! |
Pros and cons of HostArmada
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HostArmada pricing and plans
HostArmada’s most popular solution is shared hosting – where prices start from $2.49/month. Its other offerings include WordPress, VPS, dedicated and reseller hosting types.
| Hosting type | Best for |
| Shared and WordPress hosting | Beginners and those building smaller websites, including bloggers and small businesses. |
| Reseller hosting | Digital agencies and entrepreneurs that create customized hosting solutions for their clients. |
| VPS hosting | Mid-level resources, more control over the server, and advanced security and performance. |
| Dedicated hosting | Web applications, large organizations, and high-traffic websites that want significant control over the server. |
Typically, shared hosting is the ideal solution for most people and what most of us start with. That’s why in this review, I'll focus on shared hosting services alone.
HostArmada has 3 shared hosting packages. All of them come bearing things like unmetered bandwidth as well as a free domain name, unlimited email accounts, free website transfer, cPanel, and free SSL for all domains.
| Plan | Features | Price |
| Start Dock | 1 website, 15GB SSD storage, 7 daily backups, and up to 30,000 monthly visits. | $2.49/month |
| Web Warp | Unlimited websites, 30GB SSD storage, 14 daily backups, and up to 60,000 monthly visits. | $4.11/month |
| Speed Reaper | Unlimited websites, 40GB SSD storage, 21 daily backups, and up to 120,000 monthly visits. | $4.94/month |
As you can see, HostArmada’s aren’t exactly the most liberal with its resources. But the plans do come at very affordable prices.
Talking about WordPress hosting, HostArmada uses a cloud-based WordPress hosting infrastructure. This means that it distributes resources across multiple servers, which helps it maintain uptime and performance.
HostArmada offers 3 WordPress plans. Each package includes automatic updates, a free domain name, unmetered bandwidth, unlimited email accounts, free website migration, cPanel, and free SSL for all domains.
With its WordPress hosting, HostArmada also offers some new useful features. For example, you can use the zoom-out view feature to see a clearer picture of your website's design. There's also a Fluid typography feature, which ensures that your website and its font sizes will scale fluidly and look good on different devices and screens. Additionally, if you need to preview your content in various formats and environments, you can use its Preview Options API feature, which is especially handy for developers.
One core feature that sets HostArmada apart from other providers is the flexibility to choose billing opportunities. You can choose from monthly, 12-month, 24-month, or 36-month billing cycles, with longer terms offering even more savings. The longer your billing cycle, the lower the monthly rate will be, giving you more value for your commitment. My only gripe is that the renewal price can jump significantly, which may be a dealbreaker for some users while still acceptable for others.
It’s also worth noting that for the shared hosting plans, the provider has a 45-day money-back guarantee. That’s longer than most providers’ standard 30-day guarantee and should be enough to cover any change of heart.
All in all, HostArmada offers competitive and affordable options with its good-value plans. Just be aware that you’ll have to fork out more when it’s time to renew.
Hosting management: is it easy to use?
HostArmada uses a combination of a custom dashboard and cPanel for management, also used by the best web hosting providers. The dashboard is neatly organized and intuitive and houses several crucial features. Meanwhile, cPanel is where you go for more advanced features.
When you log in, you’ll be met with HostArmada’s dashboard. This is what it looks like:
Navigating the dashboard is easy. Everything is straightforward, and HostArmada keeps things uncluttered by only having the necessary items here. You can find things like services, domains, billing, and support.
However, you can get add-on boosters under the Order Products section if you need more tools. For example, you can get an ad-don called Elastic Search or OpenSearch. It helps turn searches into sales by instantly displaying the most relevant search results to customers, making it easier for them to find what they're looking for. Or, if you want to be serious about the protection, you can get the Positive SSL ad-don, which will encrypt the connection between your domain name and your visitors. The choice is nearly limitless.
HostArmada also supports the cPanel, which looks and works like every other cPanel out there. Using it will give you multiple email settings, valuable statistics about site visitors and errors, and various security tools.
In cPanel, you can install WordPress, add subdomains, and even use an easy-to-use SitePad web. It offers several different but professional-looking SitePad themes directly in the cPanel, so check it out.
Performance: is HostArmada fast?
To test HostArmada's performance, I asked the Cybernews research team to help me perform some speed and stress tests on it. Also, I contacted its support team to see how it works. You can see my results below.
HostArmada uptime test
Throughout the 2 weeks of monitoring and tests, HostArmada remained online 100% of the time. That's a perfect result with 0 outages.
The response time was also pretty stable, averaging 95ms and fluctuating around 100ms. This makes HostArmada both reliable and speedy.
Of course, I'll keep my eyes peeled on this one to see if such a trend continues in the long run.
HostArmada speed test
We tested HostArmada's speed using a WordPress site and started by measuring the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – the time it takes for the largest visible element (such as an image, video, or text block) to load fully. For HostArmada, the LCP was around 1.9 seconds. To put this into perspective, anything under 600ms is exceptional, so while 1.9s is decent, there's still room for improvement.
For the best user experience, the load time should be under 3 seconds, and HostArmada met this benchmark without issue.
Plus, HostArmada has 23 data centers worldwide, including Europe, North America, South America, Australia, and Asia. Hence, wherever your target audience is based, you should see similarly speedy results by picking the server closest to them.
Also, you can always opt for the Speed Reaper plan if you want better speeds. It puts your site on a LiteSpeed WEB server, allowing it to handle thousands of requests with minimum resources and boosts PHP performance.
HostArmada stress test
For the stress test, I sent 50 virtual users (VUs) to my page to see how it handles traffic. And it passed.
I’m looking for a stable and flat speed line (the blue line) as the number of visitors (the gray line) increases. It’s also vital that failure (the red line) makes itself scarce.
Another important thing is the 95th percentile (P95), which measures the response time for the slowest 5% requests. This metric will show me how the server performs under heavier loads.
HostArmada's P95 server response time was 35ms, which is excellent compared to other hosting providers. The web server performed steadily, handling traffic quickly without any issues. I have no complaints.
Security: is HostArmada secure?
HostArmada has the full stack security solutions in place. It has you covered with measures like SSL certificates, daily backups, DDoS protection, malware scanning, and live server monitoring.
Here’s a brief look:
- SSL certificates – there’s free SSL from Sectigo for all the domains hosted on it. This is a pretty standard offering and will help to enable an encrypted connection between your site and your visitors.
- Backups – depending on your plan, HostArmada offers daily backups – between 7 and 21 backup slots. Although a vital feature, it’s standard only to see weekly backups for shared hosting plans – especially budget ones. So, HostArmada is ahead of its competition in this regard.
- Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection – DDoS is an attack where traffic from various compromised systems floods your site to disrupt it. This attack can be devastating so it’s great that HostArmada is armed with server-side protection that includes ModSecurity integration, per-IP throttling, SSL renegotiation protection service, and reCaptcha.
- Firewalls – includes web application firewall (WAF) that analyzes, monitors, and blocks HTTP traffic at the application layer to prevent XSS attack or SQL injection. This is always a great security measure to minimize your web server’s vulnerability.
- Malware scanning – HostArmada performs automated security scans for exploits and code-injected malware. You have the option to initiate a security scan via cPanel, too.
- Monitoring – there’s 24/7 live server monitoring to ensure that any threat or incident could be mitigated promptly.
Overall, I’m impressed with HostArmada’s sweeping security measures. The features are comprehensive and considerably more than what’s offered by most of its competitors.
Will HostArmada support help me?
Like every other modern web host, you can contact HostArmada’s customer support team 24/7 via live chat, phone, email, and ticketing. Plus, it also has a very helpful knowledge base with a wide selection of articles and guides.
My favorite support channel is 24/7 Live Chat. I’ve contacted HostArmada’s customer service team multiple times to see how it fares, and so far, my experience has been really pleasant.
The queue/wait time is close to nil each round, as customer service replied in seconds. During the conversations, the agents were never pushy or in a rush to sell a plan. Instead, they were super helpful and took the time to answer questions or explain things in detail. Additionally, the agents appeared well-versed in web hosting and knew their stuff.
HostArmada also has a fantastic knowledge base. Sure, it might not be as massive as other providers’ collections, but it’s worth remembering that HostArmada is still in its infancy. We should see many more articles soon.
Its knowledge base is already pretty comprehensive and straight to the point. You’ll find articles covering topics such as cPanel/WHM, domains/DNS, SSL/security, Open Source Applications, Web Hosting Services, and many others.
After testing the support, I was satisfied. The live chat was fast, helpful, efficient, and its knowledge base was convenient and detailed.
HostArmada review: the final verdict
All things considered, this HostArmada review is a reminder that good web hosting isn’t limited to just those offered by the main players.
Here’s a summary of its services:
| Feature | Rating | Description |
| Pricing | HostArmada is quite a mid-range provider with plans starting at $2.49/month. Resources aren't vast, but other features bring good value. | |
| Ease of use | It uses a custom dashboard with cPanel integration. Both are modern, intuitive, and functional. | |
| Performance | The provider aced all the tests. It’s fast, reliable, and can handle surges in traffic seamlessly. | |
| Security | HostArmada has the full stack. You’ll get free SSL, daily backups, DDoS protection, firewalls, and more. | |
| Support | You can reach HostArmada’s team via live chat, phone, email, or ticketing. The support is swift, efficient, and helpful. |
I’d recommend HostArmada – especially to beginners and those building small to mid-sized sites. It performs well and comes with excellent tools and features.
Alternatives to HostArmada
HostArmada is a great new addition to the web hosting industry. But, it might not be right for you or your project. In that case, you would want to check out some of the alternatives below.
Bluehost
Bluehost is a great alternatives to HostArmada. Its great performance and impressive price of just $1.99/month promise everything a potential user needs to host their website or business. And just like HostArmada, it offers responsive and helpful customer support.
Overall, if you're into WordPress CMS, there isn't a better provider than Bluehost, mainly because it is WordPress's longest-running recommended host. Besides, its customization ensures that anyone can have the website they want.
Hostinger
Hostinger is the best alternative, with cheap plans starting at just $2.78/month. Apart from its affordability, it’s also popular for its easy-to-use control panel and outstanding customer support.
Performance-wise, Hostinger is a great alternative, too. It’s reliable and fast, with data centers in 8 locations across the world.
HostArmada FAQs
Where is HostArmada located?
HostArmada is a US-based provider. But, it has data centers in Europe, North America, South America, Australia, and Asia.
Is HostArmada reliable?
Yes, HostArmada is reliable. It can handle surges in traffic effortlessly. Plus, the security features included are very good.
Is HostArmada suitable for developers?
Yes, HostArmada is suitable for developers. It offers SSH access, WP-CLI support, and multiple PHP versions, allowing developers to manage and customize their projects efficiently. Also, it includes the user-friendly cPanel interface, which simplifies the development process and makes it a solid choice for beginner and experienced developers.
Does HostArmada limit inodes?
Yes, HostArmada limits inodes on its shared hosting plans. However, it has a unique inodes manager plugin for cPanel, which helps users manage and reduce their inode usage efficiently.
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