Russian company Best-Hoster (sometimes without the dash, and sometimes with the .ru extension) has been providing website hosting since 2006. The company owns its own Tier III data center and has more than 10,000 customers. Its website is available in Russian.
Features and Ease of Use
Best-Hoster’s shared hosting plans come with the following core features:
- 77% uptime according to third-party website Ping-Admin.ru
- Weekly backup included, plus daily or extended backups available at extra cost
- One free .ru or .rf domain name
- 6, 21, 41, or unlimited domains
- Free SSL certificate
- From 3000 MB to 15,000 MB disk space
It’s nice to see a host that owns and operates its own data center because it means the company can respond quickly to technical issues. It’s also nice that this is a Tier III data center because it means there should be less than 1.6 hours of downtime per year. Best-Hoster doesn’t offer an uptime guarantee, but it links to the third-party Ping-Admin.ru testing tool that indicates an average uptime of 99.77%.
Web hosting beginners will be pleased to see a one-click script installer and a website building tool included in all shared hosting plans, although it would nice to see a bit more information about these tools on the website.
Web hosting experts will like the support for various versions of PHP, along with Perl and cURL, but sadly no Ruby or Python. You also get Cron jobs and SSH access.
Pricing and Support
The prices are affordable, and there’s certainly a package to suit most budgets. You can purchase hosting on one-month to three-year terms, and you get a deep discount if you sign up for longer than a year. You always have to pay extra for SSL certificates.
New customers receive a complimentary .ru or .rf domain, which may not be of much use to non-Russian customers. Additionally, non-Russian customers might encounter difficulties on this vendor’s checkout page due to its poor translation into English.
Support can be accessed by calling a Moscow or St. Petersburg number, sending an email, or initiating a live chat. There may also be additional support on offer when you log in as a customer. I’ve used the live chat option a few times – to confirm server locations and business hours – and have received immediate responses as you can see here:
There is an FAQ page to help you help yourself, but it’s not particularly pretty.
