WebHostingBuzz powers more than 250,000 websites in 140+ countries.
That’s no surprise given their uptime has been solid (99.96%) and page loading times have been fast (405ms) over the past 24 months.
Bloggers will love access to over 450 popular applications like WordPress, while advanced webmasters will enjoy access to the latest programming languages.
WebHostingBuzz has a transparent and straightforward 45-day money-back guarantee so you don’t have to jump through hoops if you decide to cancel your subscription. This is good news, considering there’s no special new customer pricing and a strange termination clause that could trick you before renewing.
Let’s dig in.
Pros of Using WebHostingBuzz
WebHostingBuzz has posted fast loading times and reliable uptime for the past few years. Their plans provide access to over 450+ applications that can be installed with just a few clicks. And they have a 45-day refund policy for anyone who’s not completely sold on their service.
Here is an in-depth look at their performance over the past 24 months:
1. Fast Page Load Times (405ms)
Speed is important when choosing a host because it has a direct impact on your visitors’ experience. A whopping 79% of buyers won’t purchase again from a site that has a bad performance.
And if your host is slow, to begin with, it’ll only get slower as you start building out new pages, directly hitting you where it hurts — your wallet.
WebHostingBuzz has been consistently quick over the past few years. In the last 24 months, they’ve kept an average page loading time of 405ms, which places them easily among the top 10 fastest hosts we’ve reviewed. As of 2019 they’ve shown even better speeds of under 300ms — we’ll have to wait and see if they can maintain this speed going forward.
Last 12-month average speed:
2. 45-Day Money-Back Guarantee
WebHostingBuzz has a 45-day money-back guarantee for all shared, business, and reseller accounts. VPS accounts, on the other hand, are eligible for a refund within 30 days of purchase.
Other additional services, from dedicated servers to IP addresses, SSL certificates, and domain names will not be refunded. Like other hosts we’ve reviewed, a domain name fee will be deducted from any refunds.
However, unlike the standard ~$15 range we’ve seen with domain names, WebHostingBuzz will only charge you $10.99 for a .com or .net.
3. Over 450 1-Click Applications and Free Migrations
WebHostingBuzz comes fully-loaded with over 450 popular apps. Most can be automatically installed within just a few minutes and a couple of clicks. No messy code to get your hands dirty.
If you already have an existing website that you want to bring over, WebHostingBuzz’s team will migrate it for free.
And if you’re a developer who wants access to more advanced features, you’re also in luck. Their servers fully support everything from HTML5 and JavaScript to PHP 5, MySQL 5, Perl, and more.
4. Uptime Almost as Good as Advertised
WebHostingBuzz has posted a 99.96% uptime over the last 24-months.
The last few 12-months have been especially strong, fluctuating from 99.98% to 100% (except June 2019). However, go back to spring 2018 and WebHostingBuzz struggled with consistency. One month would be a flawless 100%, while others would be an unsatisfactory 99.83%.
We’ve seen similar reports of inconsistent uptime around the same time period from other customers.
Last 12-month average uptime:
- January 2020 average uptime: 100%
- December 2019 average uptime: 100%
- November 2019 average uptime: 99.98%
- October 2019 average uptime: 100%
- September 2019 average uptime: 99.98%
- August 2019 average uptime: 100%
- July 2019 average uptime: 99.98%
- June 2019 average uptime: 99.31%
- May 2019 average uptime: 99.98%
- April 2019 average uptime: 100%
- March 2019 average uptime: 99.99%
- February 2019 average uptime: 100%
5. Green Web Hosting
WebHostingBuzz has made an environmental commitment and has sponsorship and partnership with The Woodland Trust.
The goal is to offset the energy demand from their servers and keep all of their hosting services carbon neutral.
6. Annual Prepayment Discount with Same Renewal Price
The initial sticker price for WebHostingBuzz isn’t that cheap compared to other hosts (more on that below).
But there are two pricing benefits that do fall in your favor.
The first is that they have an annual prepayment discount. So if you paid for the year, you could get two months free across the board on all plans. So the breakdown looks like this:
• Personal: $49.99
• Developer: $99.99
• Business: $249.99
On top is the monthly price for each plan, with the annual option underneath:
The second advantage is that renewal rates don’t increase.
Many other hosts will double your monthly price when your plan automatically renews. However, according to WebHostingBuzz’s billing FAQ, the price you pay basically “freezes” and gets applied to all future renewals, too. So you don’t have to worry about an expensive surprise showing up on your credit card statement a year from now.
Cons of Using WebHostingBuzz
WebHostingBuzz performed well across the board. Uptime and page loading times were both great. The free migrations are a nice perk, and the refund policy is also more than fair.
Unfortunately, there were a few categories that still let them down at the end of the day.
Here’s a quick summary of the biggest issues we experienced:
1. No New Customer Discount
Some of the cheapest web hosts on the market might only cost you a buck or two each month.
How can they possibly afford to be so cheap?
New customers get special pricing to help sweeten the deal. So plans renew at a higher rate later on. This, combined with prepaying for up to three years, can help you lock in a really low rate with a new host.
It seems like almost all of the 30+ web hosts we’ve reviewed follow this same trend. Except for WebHostingBuzz.
For starters, there is no long-term discount. You pay $4.99/month for the cheapest personal plan. This comes with a single website, 20GB of SSD storage, 1GB of memory, unlimited bandwidth, and free SSL. That’s pretty good on the surface, but the storage amount is fairly low. (In comparison, some other hosts, like iPage, give you unlimited storage). This basic plan does not come with a free domain name or daily backups, either.
If you wanted to upgrade to one of their bigger plans to get these features, the Developer plan costs $9.99/mo, and the Business option is $24.99/mo. You can prepay for the year, as discussed above, to bring the cost down a little bit. And your renewal pricing will not jump up, either.
But you also lose the opportunity to enjoy a new customer discount and save a bunch over the course of three or so years as you get with most other hosts.
2. Limited Support (~6 Hour Delay)
Almost every single host we’ve reviewed offers 24/7 live chat support so customers can get relatively instant answers.
Once again, WebHostingBuzz bucks the trend.
They have the usual knowledge base and support tickets. But they do not offer phone or live chat support.
They have a little icon in the lower right-hand corner that looks like live chat. However, we checked it at two different times of the day (a Monday evening and Tuesday mid-morning), and both times we got the same response:
So the live chat basically served as a glorified ticket-based system, where we submitted a question and had to wait for an email reply to come about six hours later. (They apologized for the delay in response time, which does seem to suggest they’re aware of the issue.)
The answer was direct but not complete. We asked about the price per site migration, because even though one free migration is included, usually anything above and beyond that is paid.
Since we’re working through email instead of a live chat, we are forced to send another reply to get the needed details, and that may take a while to arrive.
This is frustratingly slow compared to pretty much every other host out there.
3. Odd Termination Clause
When you sign up for a new host, you’re usually excited to get a new project off the ground. You’re probably not thinking about what might happen down the road if an issue or problem pops up.
We took a look at the fine print that is usually buried deep inside a host’s Terms of Service.
This is the place where you can usually find something that might prevent you from getting your money back or the service running like you think it should.
WebHostingBuzz has its own variation on this, too. There’s an odd termination clause that dictates how plans renew and how you can cancel to prevent being automatically charged for the next term.
Here’s what it says: “Notification of Your intent to terminate must be provided to WebHostingBuzz no earlier than 10 days prior to Your billing date but no later than three days prior to Your billing date.”
Two key points there:
1. You can’t tell them you want to cancel too early — no earlier than ten days before your billing date, and
2. You also can’t cancel later than three days before the billing date.
Sounds odd, right? You have this tiny window of time to notify them you want to cancel; otherwise, it sounds like they can basically just say “no.”
To us, that sounds like they’re just trying to build in a backdoor to not accept the majority of cancellations without at least trying to get you to pay the renewal rate for the next term, first.
WebHostingBuzz Pricing, Hosting Plans & Quick Facts
Here’s an overview of their shared hosting plans and pricing:
| Personal Plan | Developer Plan | Business Plan | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | $4.99/month | $9.99/month | $24.99/month |
| Websites | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Bandwidth | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered |
| Storage | 20GB | 100GB | Unmetered |
| Email Accounts | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Other Features | • 100% CPU Speed • 1GB Memory • 5Mbps I/O Speed |
• 200% CPU Speed • 2GB Memory • 10Mbps I/O Speed |
• 300% CPU Speed • 3GB Memory • 20Mbps I/O Speed |
All their shared hosting plans come with cPanel, and you’ll be given a free domain name upon registration of a new account with them.
Quick Facts
- Free Domain: Yes.
- Ease of Signup: Very easy signup process.
- Money-Back: 45-day money-back guarantee.
- Payment Methods: Credit Card, PayPal, WebMoney, Dwolla.
- Hidden Fees and Clauses: Account termination can’t happen before ten days or after three days before the renewal date. You also can’t use more than 25% of their resources for over a minute or have 5,000+ files opened at the same time, or send over 200 emails in the span of an hour.
- Upsells: Few upsells.
- Account Activation: Quick activation.
- Control Panel and Dashboard Experience: cPanel.
- Installation of Apps and CMSs (WordPress, Joomla, etc.): Quick installation of popular apps and CMSs via Softaculous.
Do We Recommend WebHostingBuzz?
Yes, we do.
WebHostingBuzz has performed pretty well in our tests. Uptime and page loading times have both been above average.
They have access to hundreds of applications for beginners, as well as the latest and great tech stacks for power users. Their 45-day refund policy is legitimate, too.
Unfortunately, our customer service experience was slow and disjointed. We had to wait for hours for a reply and didn’t even get a complete answer.
Their termination policy is written in a way that suggests you only have a tiny window to actually cancel before your card is charged again. And while the annual payment pricing is good, there’s no new customer discount to lock-in an extremely low rate for the first three years.
Overall, they’re not quite good enough to make the TOP 5, but still a good choice.
P.S. If you want to see hosting providers that ranked above WebHostingBuzz, check our top hosts here.
Do you have any experience with WebHostingBuzz? If so, please leave a review below. We welcome all honest and transparent reviews – good or bad.
