If you are in the market for a web hosting company then we have a treat for you. They are called CometNine. Never heard of them? You’re not alone as they are pretty small but don’t let that scare you off as we have found them to be a breath of fresh air.
I will admit, we started our search looking for companies that can compete with the feature set owned by certain EIG brands (avoid these!) and stumbled upon CometNine’s Shared Hosting plans. We can just say our experience was positively different :-)
Let’s start with pricing. CometNine only has 2 simple plans which appear to be the same in every way except for how many websites you can host:
- Pro – You can only host 1 website on this plan which starts at $3.91 and includes a free domain for life (a HUGE plus)
- Pro+ – You can host unlimited websites on this plan which starts at $6.28 and as above, includes a free domain for life
Expecting another plan promising boosted performance, more resources etc? Not at CometNine. You get the best of the best on all plans just limited by the number of domains. Now isn’t that simple!
Support can make or break a web hosting company. With so many hosting companies for you to choose from you have the right to expect quick response times that will resolve your issue. With that becoming standard (and yes, CometNine does deliver on this) how does one differ? Well, they say on their website ‘hosting by people who care’ and they certainly do. Don’t expect a response telling you to contact your developer right away, they do take the time to try and resolve issues even if it is outside the scope of support for most companies.
I imagine the above would have its limits though, especially given what they’re charging. For simple tasks (they seem especially good at WordPress issues) they will take the time to assist before likely passing you onto your developer.
Performance is the other thing that can make or break a web hosting company. Now CometNine wasn’t the fastest provider we have tested but we certainly had no complaints. They do offer Redis for caching database queries which is a nice feature (the other common one in the hosting market is Memcached) though it appears CometNine does not offer this and opts for Redis instead.
Overall? We’re very happy to recommend CometNine to our readers. Not only do they offer cheap hosting with a free domain for life included but they just care. That is something you don’t see at a lot of web hosting companies so if you want a provider that will support you as your website grows, check out CometNine. We haven’t tried their WordPress Hosting but for their Shared Hosting plans we can certainly recommend.
