HostArmada Review: Current 2 1/2 Year Customer Experience

Welcome, to my Host Armada Review 2023.

After using Host Armada web hosting services for 2 years, I’ve decided to update you all on how its going.

Besides, if you’re searching for hosting alone – they’re one of the best hosting services to start your brand new website hosting journey without breaking the bank.

Host Armada

Host Armada offer services for all levels, from individuals, small businesses, up to enterprises.

Their primary focus is to be transparent while providing all website users with reliable and fast web hosting services, which is backed by their 24/7 customer support. Furthermore, this hosting company does provide free services for website migration. They also have features of SSD storage, multiple server locations, daily backups, and their panel is user friendly.

What Are The Pros And Cons Of Host Armada?

Certainly, there are pros and cons of using Host Armada, especially if you’ve never used a web hosting provider before. Below, I have listed what I found as being a pro and a con. Again, I am a current customer of Host Armada, and I have used their service for almost 3 years. This website you are visiting right now is hosted on Host Armada.

Pros Of Choosing Host Armada As A Hosting Provider

After comparing several web hosting service pricing, Host Armada pricing beat most of its competitors. Currently, the promo pricing is slashing its pricing by at least 80% for a one time discount. For example, HostAramda web hosting was offer customer a package for as low as $1.99 per month. While other well-known hosting providers promo pricing was almost an entire dollar more. They came in at $2.95

While pricing shouldn’t be the sole determining factor when it comes to choosing the prefect web hosting service provider. It’s important to consider other things that you will be receiving for the price, such as the quality of their service, understand how their customer support handles things, the performance and the reliability of the service.

This is your website that we’re talking about and you want to make a decision based off the entire service not just the price.

HostArmada Plan Shared Hosting: Start Dock, Web Warp, Speed Reaper

HostArmada has several shared hosting plans. Below you will find the pricing for each.

We all know that the speed of your website can effect many assets. The faster your website, the higher your conversions. Also, the better your SEO rankings, and your bounce rate can be drastically reduced. 

Another reason, why you should be concerned with website speed is that, Google does care about your website speed. In 2010, the indicated that site speed is a new signal for search ranking algorithms. The point is, you don’t want to be caught with a website, that has the speed of a tortoise. 

With Host Armada hosting, you won’t have to worry about that. One of their key features is called LiteSpeed Web Servers.

By the way, LiteSpeed Web Servers is one of the first to implement  HTTP/3. 

What does that mean?

Yeah I know, all those techy words makes no sense.

It’s the same service that’s used by huge companies such as: Facebook, Google, or Safari. 

In Layman’s terms Host Armada hosting offers technology that makes your website -one of the fastest out there – At first, honestly, I didn’t really understand the difference from my Host Armada web hosting verses my other web hosting.

Until a few things happened. First I received a comment, asking me about my web hosting company because, he felt like the website was fast.

After that comment, it made me do further speed testing – and this is what I discovered.

GTmetrix Web Hosting Speed Test

First I tested with GTmextrix to see how well the website performs, with the hopes that it reveals any slow speeds so that it can be optimized.

The image on the left is when I had the Elementor Pro theme builder with Generate press theme on the website.

The image on the right is when I installed an entirely different theme. Both test shows that the web hosting is still fast.

Pingdom

So, I test even further just to make sure that I can relay on Host Armadas claims of being fast web hosting.

On the left is where Elementor page builder was installed. While on the right a different page builder was installed. However, both were still using the Host Armada web hosting service.

Web Page Test

WebPageTest is a tool that Google recommends you to use if you need to test your website speed. As you can see on the left when using Elementor Pro the site speed did struggle according to their metrics.

On the other hand, using my current theme which is Bricks, the website passed all metrics will flying green colors.

By doing this testing, it has revealed that Host Armada web hosting service is fast. However, it also seems to get even faster if you have a clean coded theme.

Google Page Speed Insights

There was a test done with the Google Page Speed Insights as well.

On the left Elementor is installed. It seems that web hosting struggles with this page builder. On the other hand Bricks works really well with Host Armada webhosting.

One More Test With Superb Themes Website Speed Tester

Then I stumbled across one more website that gives free speed testing. Their a team of tech friends that’s been around since 2018. Anyhow, with their free tool, my website scores using Host Armada as the web hosting provider with Elementor Pro page builder installed, suffered to the point that Superb Themes recommended a new web hosting company.

On the other hand, the website did not suffer at all with my Bricks theme while using Host Armada as the web hosting provider. In fact, it passed the test with 100/100. To sum it all up this test in itself gives me a conclusion that not only does your web hosting matter, it also depends on what theme you are using.

What exactly does Host Armada mean by they are transparent? In general, when a company claims to be transparent, it can be many different aspects, such as disclosing their prices, fees, outlining data collection, usage, or simply open communication with customers.

With that in mind, Host Armada discloses that they don’t have a high number of clients on each server, and as a result, this allows for low server load and more optimal website performance for you.

They also disclose what a “shared hosting” environment implies. Therefore, they don’t hide the fact that many users have to share the available web hosting resources because, you are on the same server. As a result, whenever there is a spike in traffic, the server resources must be fairly shared between those members on the same server without limiting anyone’s websites performance.

Furthermore, Host Armada does this by having something called, “Acceptable Bandwidth Usage.” By the way, there are some web hosting providers which claim to have unlimited bandwidth. Truthfully, there is no web hosting service that has truly unlimited bandwidth.

There is always a metric that the web hosting provider has to set. With Host Armada the acceptable bandwidth usage for the shared hosting plans are as follows starting with the basic plan going up to the top shared hosting plan:

Now that you know that information, it’s also important to note that Host Armada is transparent in disclosing that their shared plans are not designed to support projects that are using higher amounts of acceptable bandwidth usage of higher than 90 GB, bandwidth.

In case your website does go over this type of bandwidth, Host Armada will recommend a solution that can handle and stimulate further growth for your website. Their main concern is customer satisfaction without compromising under any circumstances, especially when it comes to user experience.

There are web hosting providers that do not offer 24/7 support, and certainly not for the entire year. However, most reputable web hosting companies do offer year round support but, some of the budget friendly hosting companies may have limited support hours.

If having 24/7/365 customer support is important to you, it is advisable to carefully review the support options and hours provided by different web hosting companies before making a final decision. With Host Armada, you will have 24/7/365 support. They offer support by chat, email, and phone.

Cons To Consider Before Choosing Host Armada

One potential concern that you may have is the possibility of price in crease. So, that you are fully prepared for a price increase and not surprised by this, when regular pricing kicks in Host Armada shows you what you would owe in advance, after you become a customer. They also can tell you in advance what you’re regular pricing would be, before you become a customer.

On a positive note, over the last 2 1/2 years of using HostArmada web hosting service, I can say that they are committed to making customers satisfied, I have seen them send out up to 20% renewal discounts for their existing customers.

Furthermore, as of May 2023, HostArmada sent an email stating that their roadmap is full of new and exciting features, services, and innovations. With that being said, a price increase is a valid concern. It’s also my concern when renewal time does roll around. In fact, at the moment its my only concern that I have with them.

To sum it all up, price should not be the only concern, you have to take into account everything as a whole, weighing the pros and the cons. After that, then you can decide which is best for you.

What Are The Host Armada’s Key Features?

There are several key features that I believe HostArmada does well in.

Performance: Best In Class With 9 Data Centers

According to HostArmada, they have the best hardware, with the start of the art cloud platform.

Geographically selected, Host Armada provides fast connectivity for your website. After testing the service myself, I can admit that the web hosting is decently fast.

Knowing that, you’ll be able to sleep at night without having to worry about the availably of your website because Host Armada’s tried and tested uptime is, about 99.958%.

During the last two years while having shetriedthat.com hosted with HostArmada, thankfully, I’ve only experienced two incidents where my website was down for a total of 22 minutes. However, this did not happen all in one day. In fact, one of the days was due to an emergency maintenance.

Overall, the speed of your website is important, and having several data centers at your disposal does help play a role into that.

In addition to that, after doing a tad bit of research, 9 datacenters is way more than some of the other web hosting competitors have.

The impressive part is that the 9 datacenters are located on 4 different continents – America, Asia, Europe, And Australia – which is supposed to help with the fast connectivity and unmatched availability.

The bottom line here is to choose a website hosting company that has reputable data centers because, this is crucial to your website performance and reliability. Having a well-maintained and secure data center helps ensure that your website remains accessible to your audience. It also provides them with fast loading times, and offer stability to you and your customers.

In fact, according to HostArmada the geolocation of the your websites servers hosting really DOES matter. For instance, if your current server is located in Dallas, you need to make sure when transferring to a new web hosting company that your new server is also located in Dallas.

PHP Matters

Did you know that PHP 8 version, is the newest and most requested PHP version available?

Well, good news because, Host Armada has made it available on all hosting solutions.

Furthermore, HostArmada programming language for WordPress websites uses the newer version of PHP 8.2. With this PHP version you should receive regular security updates which can increase your websites performance. To update your website PHP version in the future, this all depends on your webhosting company handles the request.

Now that you know this is an important feature to have. With HostAramda, the cPanel automatically updates the PHP versions for your entire hosting account. However, you would still need to assign the PHP version you’d like to use.

For instance, WordPress recommends using at least a 7.4 or higher PHP.

Therefore, if your hosting offered an 8.1 PHP. You could go as high 8.1 or as low as 7.4 if you’d like.

HostArmada makes it really easy to manually decide which updated PHP version you’d like to go with. To access the change, you would go right to your cPanel, and select “PHP Selector.” From there you decide which version, you’d like to go with.

The point here is that not every webhosting provides an 8.1 PHP. In fac the chart below demonstrates how many websites are currently running on a PHP verses all the other PHP versions.

And if you ever never need to request an updated PHP version. All you need to do is kindly send an email or chat to your web hosting support team and ask them. I provided a template that you can use below, if you’d like.

Remember to always take a backup of your website before making any changes to your website.

Daily Back-ups + Security Beyond Your Expectations

There are some web hosting companies that do not offer automatic backups for their lowest plans. Having access to automatic backups is important and its a time saver.

It protects you against data loss in case you accidently delete things that you didn’t intend to delete or worse case scenario a hardware issue takes place.

Security Beyond Your Expectations

Impressively, HostArmada backs up your website at least 7 times a day, even on the lowest plans.

Also, with their more advanced plans they offer even more daily backups. 

Thanks to today’s technology, each Host Armada customer is protected across all servers from common code injections.

By the way, common code injection is one of the most common attacks that a website owner can have.

Unfortunately, we live in a world, where people are always up to no good.

Therefore, hacking WordPress websites and infecting it with malware – is a real thing. 

But, with Host Armada hosting, all clients websites are scanned for malicious malware.  Thank goodness, for those website security guards.

Low Clients Per Server

According to Host Armada, there are a low number of clients per server.

This might possibly, explain why they boast about the fast website speeds. It makes me wonder how many clients are actually on one server?

For whatever reason I’ve never come across too many hosting companies that reveal the number of clients on one server – unless, you have a dedicated hosting server.

So, I honestly do not know how many clients are per server, and unfortunately HostArmada hasn’t revealed this number either.

So, until then we’ll just have to take their word on this.

HostAramda Webalizer And Awstats Reveals Traffic Stats

I found this to be one of the most interesting features that HostArmada provides because, after trying several web hosting companies – this is the first time I’ve ever seen the traffic that is coming to my website based on my hosting traffic algorithms.

Either way, I thought that was pretty insightful- especially, knowing that I did not work on this website or visit it during the entire pandemic – but according to Host Armada it still received traffic.

What lead me up to really looking into this feature is because, I was trying to decide if I should trash the website or continue working on it. So, I checked Google Search Console and Google Analytics – they both appeared to report my traffic data as being almost scarce. So, I started to wonder were these real numbers?

Well, who else to ask but, Host Armada themselves.

I asked the representative two things:

Are the numbers I’m looking at in Webalizer Traffic stats real?

…and then I asked her…

Are my visits counted in those numbers while I work on this website?

The representative told me that if you would like to know the real traffic that is coming to your website – go to your dashboard, and click on Awstats – which I did.

Awstats Gets More Interesting

When I arrived to Awstats the numbers got more interesting. I mean I was absolutely shocked because, again, Google says one thing and Host Armada is saying another.

Either way, as you can see in the image above the live chat representative said your visits will also be counted.

However, when you view more details on Awstats dashboard, you’ll soon discover that every traffic hit is separated into groups.

There’s all kinds of data, that Awstats list.

• One of them being unique visitors.
• The other is the total of all visitors -so unique visitors would be the visitors that visited your website for the first time.

• Total visitors can be anything from bots, bookmarks, spiders, robots, and on.

The point is Host Armada reveals the traffic from visitors that arrive to your website daily, hourly, and monthly.

From a website scaling point of view this could be really important information to have access too. At least in my opinion because, you can see the blog post that visitors visit the most. You can see the devices, the countries, you’ll have access to lot of data.

What devices are being used, their operating systems, and so on.

In addition to that, they share all the robots, spiders, and bookmarks or links that people use to arrive to your website.

I thought that was pretty interesting to learn.

The image below shows how many visitors arrived to my website in Jan. Feb. and March.

Those were the same months that I never logged into my website because, Google Analytics said I had no traffic to this website. I’m slowly learning that was incorrect.

I did have visitors, emails, and comments waiting on me that entire time.

In my opinion, another plus for HostArmada.

Customer Support

After having recurring interaction with customer support for different situations, while using HostArmada for almost 3 years, I must admit there is only one representative that I feel is a customer service mismatch. My overall experience with HostArmada customer service is positive but, there is that one time that I wasn’t fully satisfied.

On the other hand, all other representatives are wonderful to work with. With that being said, it happens! As with any business customer service can vary, its not uncommon to have occasional mismatches with your customer service representative because, we all have bad days.

Either way, typically the customer service is impressive. They are always there to help you when you need it. So, if you’re a beginner, in need of help HostArmada will help guide you to a solution. In fact, it seems as though, you always work with the same representatives which is pretty cool because, you start to feel like you know them.

Furthermore, whenever you have any hosting issues, the HostArmada representatives always make sure that they can help you get the issue fixed before letting you go., and if they can’t fix the problem immediately which is rare, they’ll put in a support ticket for you which is answered immediately, at least from my experience.

Management Of Server Infrastructure

Overall, the website performance while using HostArmada hosting is optimal especially, if you use a theme that is optimized, compress your images, and choose lightweight plugins.

Working with all the above and a web host that can help you maximize your performance is a good idea. With HostArmada there is no concern about their hosting performance. I believe this is due to them not wanting to damage their reputation or risking user experience.

Scheduled Maintenance Procedures

At least once a year I’ve noticed that HostArmada has done scheduled maintenance. When this happens you’ll get an email informing you of the dates and times that the scheduled maintenance will take place.

The scheduled maintenance can involve:

• Upgrading the SSD storage
• Include any software updates that will also cover security updates of the web server
• Kernel updates
• Also server cleanup
• And general server optimization

To sum it all up, they’re always doing their best in making sure that your website is performing well when it comes to your hosting.

Maximum possible performance

Achieving complete satisfaction with a web hosting provider depends on your individual needs. You should identify your requirements, research and compare other web hosting services, evaluate their reliability and performance and don’t forget to check out their customer support.

Fast Web Hosting

This is not a joke. After testing HostArmada for a couple of years using two different themes and page builders, HostArmada has lived up to their words.

Scheduled Maintenance

Every feature HostArmada offer is custom made to have best performance.

Smart Stability

If you’re website is down for more than an hour, HostArmada will compensate you for any additional downtime.

100

First Contentful Paint

1.2 s

Speed Index

0 s

Largest Contentful Paint

2.8 s

By the way, Web Page Test website which is one of the speed test tools recommended by Google. They currently have a free course, that goes into more detail of analyzing your website speed and how to fix it.

99%

Speed grade

A

Score

94%

Speed grade

N/A

Speed grade

Global Performance

If you’re curious about HostArmada’s, global performance, this is what was discovered.

Using a website called Sucuri this can be done for free.

In Singapore, it takes about 1.892seconds for the website to fully load – which can be that load time can be improved by signing up to a free Cloudflare CDN account.

Downtime

After 26 months of being a client with this company, I’ve seen my website go down for the first time. It was down for at least 22 minutes. To be more specific, the website was down for 4 minutes on one day and 18 minutes on another. Of course, I almost panicked when I seen this happen. I contacted HostArmada right away, and I was told there was an emergency maintenance work order.

They also proceed to tell me not to worry because, it would be back up within 30 minutes. Thank goodness it didn’t take that long. The point is, the downtime, with HostArmada is 99.958% within the last 30 days. In the image below as you can see I have been tracking my downtime with Uptime Robot.

Ease Of Use

If you’re a beginner just starting out with web hosting, HostArmada might have a slight learning curve, b but fret none. It’s a hosting service designed to be user-friendly so that you’ll quickly get a hang of it.

In addition to that, HostArmada offers knowledge based articles that can help guide you to a solution. Also, there 24/7 customer support is happy to assist. The system is quite straightforward and once you familiarize yourself with initial steps, I believe you’ll be okay.

Safety Issues

As far as safter issues, there is no concern of having any safety issues. Therefore, if you’re wondering if HostArmada is a scam, no there’s not. HostArmada has 4.9 rating on Trustpilot out of 554 reviews.

After skimming through the reviews, the majority of the reviewers are completely satisfied with the service. However, as with any business a few unhappy campers totally think the opposite. The handful of complaints that I did come across, were mainly about their account being flagged for security reasons.

Please be aware that HostArmada takes safety on the internet seriously. They use an advanced AI verification system that can flag or pass online web hosting orders. This system can also helps them reduce fraud.

If you register and your account happens to get flagged, this means that HostArmada is only trying to make sure that the person signing up is the same person making the purchase. Therefore, there is a procedure that must be completed before they can set up the account. In most cases, HostArmada will give you options to pass their verification process.

I’m sure you would appreciate that a company is actually checking that you’re credit card is not being used by a stranger. I know I certainly, appreciate it. Essentially, that’s all the verification process is doing, trying to keep you safe.

In addition to that, if you’re searching for a PCI compliance addon, this feature will only be available on the VPS and Dedicated Server plans. Moreover, website security, malicious codes, and hackers 95% of the time this is down through loopholes within your website’s code, plugins, themes, or modules.

For this reason, its important to keep your WordPress theme, plugins, codes, modules, or any apps up to date. Luckily for you, HostArmada is always wanting to you to prosper online. Therefore, they do their best in the background to help you eliminate any tasks that prevents you from focusing on your website, this includes your websites security. If you ever need help updating various applications, HostArmada customer support does this free of charge.

Overall Effectiveness

Overall, HostArmada isn’t well known like many of their competitors but, in my opinion, they do a great job in being transparent. Also, their webhosting is reliable with their uptime being around 99.958%. This has been tried and tested over the last 2 years.

In addition to that their customer support, is very responsive, along with the features of the hosting being worth the price. With that being said, sometimes, you can not make a final decision of any web hosting company until you have compared HostAramda with other hosting providers in terms of features, pricing, and customer reviews.

How Does It Compare Against Competitors?

Comparing HostArmada to other web hosting services, can help you make a more informed decision. Therefore, I have listed two other web hosting companies that. One being from a very well known affiliate marketing community, and the other is a well known web hosting provider that many beginners decide to host their websites with.

Host Armada vs Wealthy Affiliate Web Hosting

I’ve decided to compare HostArmada webhosting with Wealthy Affiliate. The reason for this is that, when I first started blogging, I had no idea there was a difference between stand alone web hosting and integrated web hosting. At least that’s what I call it.

Standalone Hosting VS. Integrated Web Hosting

HostArmada specializes in nothing but, webhosting. Therefore, all the features that you get will be a tool that is for your web hosting speed and services only. So, if you don’t know how to start, maintain, or handle a website, HostArmada knowledge base is limited in that area.

On the other hand, Wealthy Affiliate web hosting is integrated with their online platform. This platform focuses on affiliate marketing training and tools. It’s a community that will teach you how to start a website, maintain, and eventually make money from it.

Transparency

HostArmada seems to be more transparent than Wealthy Affiliate when it comes to web hosting. Many of the features that HostArmada has listed on their website, were not listed on Wealthy Affiliate web hosting website.

In order to get your questions answered before you even purchase, you have to either know a member or send them WA an inquiry through their contact us page. I asked site support about the Core CPU and GB RAM but unfortunately, they did not disclose this information which tells me that WA web hosting for whatever reason isn’t as open about their features as HostArmada.

Transparency in my opinion, is important especially, when you’re trying to scale your website. If you were curious about this web hosting, I did write a more in-depth Wealthy Affiliate hosting review.

Basic Hosting Annual Pricing Comparison And Features

If we were to compare the annual pricing for both web hosting services, HostArmada and Wealthy Affiliate, it would appear something like the chart provided below.

HostArmada vs BlueHost

I then compared HostAramda to one of the most popular web hosting providers and this is where the two companies differ.

StandAlone WebHosting

Both companies offer stand alone web hosting because, this is what they specialize in.

Transparency

I noticed that HostArmada has almost all the information that you need listed right there in the open on their website. In fact, all the information is listed on their homepage with their pricing plans.

Basic Hosting Annual Pricing Comparison And Features

Below you will find how HostArmada and BlueHost web hosting compares to each other. One thing, I noticed about BlueHost is their lower plan did not offer automatic backups. This is something you’ll need to verify if you decide to go with this company.

Frequently Asked Questions

Final Thoughts Of This HostArmada Review

We’ve covered a lot today. 

So, if you gotten this far into my HostArmada review, thank you for taking the time to read what I had to say. 

I have firsthand experience using HostArmada web hosting for the last 2 1/2 years.

To sum it all up, with this comprehensive understanding of how there services work, I can assure you that this company is good for beginners. They offer support 24/7/365. Also, the speed that your website experiences is reliable and you do not have to worry about the downtimes.

Sure HostArmada might be the baby in the hosting game but, that doesn’t matter when they can clearly stand up to the big dogs. 

I’m happy with their service, security, and website speed.

When I started this website I had no clue what to do or where to start.

Host Armada crew took me by the hand and guided me every step of the way – when it came to linking my domain and web hosting together.

If I wasn’t happy with Host Armada I would have never written the review below.

So, what are you waiting for, will Host Armada be hosting your new site?

If so, please let us know…

Well, that’s all folks!

I hope you have a better understanding of HostArmada the hosting provider.

If not, please leave your questions below and I’ll be glad to assist to the best of my ability.

I do have a few questions for you. Have you ever used Host Armada Web Hosting yourself? What was your experience good or bad, we all want to know.

P.S… By leaving your comments or questions below, it helps us all learn from past or current experiences.