ByetHost is the child product of British web hosting provider iFastNet. It offers free shared hosting as well as premium hosting solutions, including shared hosting, VPS, email hosting, dedicated servers, and domain registration.
Despite once being based in the United States, the ByetHost servers are now in a data center in Newcastle, England.
While the ByetHost website looks a bit old, and much of the information isn’t updated, it is pretty easy to navigate. You can view it in English, and all prices are shown in U.S. Dollars.
Features and Ease of Use
ByetHost offers free shared hosting with 5 GB of disk space, unlimited bandwidth, 5 email accounts, unlimited MySQL databases, and a website builder. This plan is suitable for beginners or the casual blogger. However, I wouldn’t recommend it for serious website owners or small businesses with medium to high traffic.
That’s why ByetHost also has paid shared hosting plans; Premium and Business. It divides Premium Hosting into two plans – Super Premium and Ultimate – both available on a monthly or annual basis.
Here are some of the Premium Hosting features:
- Unlimited SSD disk space
- 250 GB to unlimited bandwidth
- Free domain
- cPanel
- Softaculous installer
- Free SSL certificate
All Premium Hosting plans are hosted on 24 core Intel Xeon multi-processor SSD servers. This is a nice touch since SSD disks perform much faster than traditional disk drives.
The user-friendly interface and numerous plugins of the industry-standard cPanel make website management easy for you. You can effortlessly install a variety of CMS apps and scripts (such as WordPress, Drupal, PrestaShop, Joomla!, etc.) using a single click through Softaculous.
ByetHost isn’t very proactive when it comes to safeguarding your website. It offers a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate, Hotlink protection, and SiteLock to protect you from hackers and malware. However, I don’t see more advanced tools to evade DDoS and BruteForce attacks.
In summary, ByetHost doesn’t provide anything out of the ordinary to help it stand out from its competitors.
Pricing and Support
You will pay a moderate price for ByetHost’s paid hosting packages, but it’s certainly not the cheapest. However, I like that it doesn’t hit you with setup fees, and it’s pretty generous with the free domain name offerings. You get one free domain name registration with these endings – biz, .us, .in, .pw, .eu – and between 5 to 20 free domain names for OO.GD (depending on the plan).
You can pay for your package via PayPal or major debit/credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, etc.). Unfortunately, ByetHost doesn’t offer a money-back guarantee.
Even though the ByetHost knowledgebase is empty – no articles or tutorials – it does have a link to iFastNet’s blog that contains several articles covering major support topics.
Also, all support queries are handled by the iFastNet customer support team through a support ticket system. To open a ticket, you’ll need to create an account first.
I opened a ticket with a bunch of generic questions and received a detailed response within less than 15 minutes. Nevertheless, I would’ve loved to see more support channels such as email, live chat, and phone.
