HostPapa Review

Where HostPapa shines is with shared hosting, which offers affordable and feature-rich plans geared toward helping both website and small business owners grow their online presence.

HostPapa wants to be more than just a web host, according to CEO Jamie Opalchuck, who told us that the company aims to be a 1-stop shop for small businesses looking for a seamless and simple experience to help them grow.

"We're looking for a person that we can bring in for $4 a month and help him become more and more successful," he said. "Our goal is to find that person that just doesn't have the IT support they need. They can call us, and we'll actually answer the phone."

Once we signed up and got our hands dirty with HostPapa's services, we found they are poised to achieve that and more. A ton of features make marketing, ecommerce, and email a breeze.

Beyond Google Apps or Microsoft Office 365, HostPapa also offers two in-house email plans with a user-friendly interface and modest functionality. HostPapa's email storage limits pale in comparison to the Gmail or Outlook offerings, but the price — less than half of Google and Microsoft — makes HostPapa a great alternative.

"Our plan might be more economical, but it's not necessarily for everyone," Jamie said of HostPapa's email packages. "We want to act as consultants and help our customers reach new heights."

In addition to unlimited bandwidth and CloudFlare's content delivery network, Business Pro plan customers can also boost speed and performance with Rocket Fast Premium Servers — double the RAM, double the hard drives, and up to three times faster.

HostPapa's 99.9% uptime guarantee isn't spectacular but should be plenty sufficient for most users.

Need extra help getting started? HostPapa is the only hosting provider that offers one-on-one sessions with one of their support experts. The 30-minute conference, done via phone or video chat, is included in HostPapa's Business or Business Pro plans.

If you've outgrown shared hosting and are ready to take on new challenges and customers, consider expanding with HostPapa's high-performance VPS hosting.

The company's Linux plans simultaneously give users high levels of both control and flexibility. The affordable, fully managed solution is easy to scale as your site or application grows.

We found HostPapa's 2GB RAM and 60GB of SSD storage to be a touch shy of competitors, but users can quickly scale resources to upward of 32GB RAM and 1TB of storage.

HostPapa makes up for the slightly limited specifications with fully managed services, however.

"Managed" can mean anything to hosts, but HostPapa definitely puts its technicians to work for you. Included in those services are automation, performance and firewall troubleshooting, email and backup configuration, software upgrades and migration, and security audits.

"We're doubling down on support," CEO Jamie Opalchuk said. "We're doubling down on a lot of things that make the client experience better."

Pair that with HostPapa's award-winning support teams, who are available 24/7/365 via telephone, email, and chat, and you've got a solid managed VPS hosting plan ready to help you move on from shared hosting.

Nearly all hosts these days include easy installations and support for WordPress, the world's leading content management system. While HostPapa is no different, we discovered the company's ultra-attentive support team can help new users navigate the sometimes challenging platform.

Available through Softaculous, we found the WordPress installation to be incredibly simple — find the WordPress logo in your control panel and follow the prompts to set up your site with the appropriate title and tagline.

Paired with all the apps and features HostPapa offers for marketing, ecommerce, and email, WordPress hosting opens the door to millions of plugins that should take care of all your needs.

Also, you can give WordPress an extra boost by taking advantage of HostPapa's partnerships: CloudFlare's content delivery network for speed, SiteLock protection for security, and Let's Encrypt SSL certificates for additional safety and ecommerce capabilities.

"Our play is what we can supply a small business owner to help in any kind of way with their web properties," CEO Jamie Opalchuk said when we sat down with him. "Keep it simple; that's our place."

If you run into trouble, PapaSquad support is only a phone call, email, or chat message away. Technicians are available 24/7/365 to help, as are HostPapa's video tutorials, downloadable manuals, and knowledgebase.

"We're doubling down on support," Jamie said. "We're doubling down on a lot of things that make the client experience better."

WordPress can be challenging at times, and HostPapa is the only hosting company that provides 30-minute sessions through video or phone with one of the company's support experts. Those sessions are included in Business or Business Pro plans but are available to other customers for a fee.

Despite a few limitations that might not matter to rookie site owners, HostPapa offers an easy-to-use web builder with a surprising number of features.

Coding experience or not, designing a website can be a long, confusing process. Hiring someone to do it for you can be expensive, stressful, and still doesn't guarantee you'll end up with something you like.

CEO Jamie Opalchuk told us how HostPapa's site builder lets you avoid all the hassle and get a beautiful, professional website by yourself in a matter of minutes.

Build and manage your site on your own, whether you're starting from scratch, getting a fresh look, or looking for a better tool.

We dug into the drag-and-drop editor, which is intuitive for the earliest of beginners — just click on the text you want to edit or area where you'd like to upload an image. For the more advanced users, you can customize your site even more by taking a swing at the HTML or CSS code.

When we started our site, HostPapa showcased more than a dozen responsive template options. Once we made our selection, we could see more than 100 other choices. Not many site builders allow you to change templates once you've started adding content, so we appreciate the flexibility that HostPapa allows.

HostPapa's builder really shines, however, in the number of widgets you can add to your site. Easily add text, images, maps, videos, and social media widgets right from the start, or upgrade to include one-click publishing to Facebook or an ecommerce store.

You can build forms with HostPapa's own tool or through Wufoo, just like you can add email marketing features through a Constant Contact integration.

"Our play is what we can supply a small business owner to help in any kind of way with their web properties," Jamie said. "We want to provide a seamless, easy experience."

Once your site is set up, you can preview how it will look on both desktops and mobile devices. You can always update on the go, from any web browser.

The site builder is included for FREE with HostPapa's shared hosting plans, or you can buy builder-specific plans to add even more features.

If all else fails, HostPapa offers Do It For Me managed web design services. The company will write your copy, design your site, and optimize it for search engines and mobile devices. Contact HostPapa when you need to update your site, and they'll take care of you.