Hostripples Review 2024: Good Prices, Poor Speeds

Indian Web Hosting with a Global Outlook

Hostripples instantly gives a great impression with a smart, professional website and a wide range of hosting plans. It’s clearly an ambitious host that aims to attract global customers who want to host their website in India, the US, the UK, or Poland.

You can even pay for your hosting with Bitcoin, which is always nice, especially if you prefer to remain anonymous.

Sounds good, right? Well, I set up a test website and hosted it with Hostripples for three months to see what it can actually offer. I discovered that Hostripples has a couple of flaws you need to know about. There’s nothing wrong with its features or resources, as such, but I had an issue with loading speeds in India that put a dent in its score.

Despite the inherent problems of an Indian web host loading slowly in India – Alanis Morissette would call that ironic, and this time she’d be right – Hostripple could be a decent option if you’re looking for a web host in India. Read on to find out more.

Generous Plans… But Where Are My Backups?

Hostripples has three so-called “managed” WordPress plans. Well, they are “100% WordPress compatible” plans. There are no specific WordPress features, so there isn’t much to distinguish them from normal shared hosting, although the blurb says that the hosting is “optimised” for WordPress.

Let’s not be too critical. These plans are pretty generous even if the marketing is a little ambitious.

We’ve got the standard menu of three plans: Smart, Business, and Enterprise. All have unlimited bandwidth. Disk space and RAM steps up incrementally from 20GB/ 2GB on Starter to 50GB/ 3GB on business and 80GB/ 5GB on Enterprise.

The cheapest plan limits you to one website. The Business plan lets you host 10, and Enterprise has no limits on the number of sites you can create. Email accounts are unlimited across all plans, and all of them get spam protection.

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All plans come with free SSL certificates, which will help to boost both your users’ privacy and your Google ranking. Specifically, having SSL means that any data sent to or from your website will be encrypted. Any host worth their salt will include free SSL so it’s always the first feature I look for.

If you’re moving from another host, Hostripples will move your website from your old host to your new Hostripples account for free. Always a nice touch, that.

One-Click Installers Make Life Easy (Well… Easier)

You can use Softaculous to install WordPress and dozens of other scripts too: shopping carts, forums, classic business CMSs, and more. Heck, want an old-fashioned early ‘00s forum? You can do that.

Installing the software you need is as simple as clicking the button on the app’s page, and filling out a little basic information.

Backups are, Unfortunately, a Hands-on Affair

In cPanel, you’ll find the usual backup menu, along with a wizard that streamlines the process. But backing up your site will be a dreary, manual process because there are no automatic backups at Hostripples.

Hostripples has sailed through this section without any issues so far, but the lack of backups is always a red flag. It’s unwise to run a WordPress site without backups. A backup service is available as a paid add-on, but I always suggest comparing the cost with third party services before choosing paying the host to do something they should be doing anyway.

The Weebly Site Builder Comes Standard

All plans come with the Weebly website builder, but only the basic Weebly plan is free. You can upgrade it to a different plan at checkout if you need to. If you’re interested in exactly what this site builder can do, check out our Weebly review.

Smooth and Simple – Just Dodge the Upselling

Hostripples has a nice website that combines good content and clear navigation. Signing up for a plan is also super-simple. However, beware of upselling in the checkout.

Otherwise, your hosting and management experience should be smooth sailing. If you’ve used cPanel before, you’ll be all right. If you haven’t, you’ll get used to it. You’ll almost have to, as almost every major host uses some version of cPanel.

Installing WordPress

You can install WordPress in a few minutes using Softaculous, which is located within the cPanel interface. Search for WordPress and click the blue Install Now button. You’ll just need to set up a few basics, like your site name and your login details.

Very Disappointing Loading Speeds in India

I set up a real website with Hostripples to see how it would perform on speed and uptime. I collected data using three tools: GTMetrix, the Sucuri Load Time Tester, and UptimeRobot.

And now we’re going into more specific details. If that’s your thing, read on. If not, you can skip down to the Support section.

My site was at https://autonomous-shoes-india-m.in. After testing, the account was closed down. I always do this when I test web hosts, to ensure that the host can’t artificially manipulate the performance after the review is published.

If you’re interested in how these tests are run, this article explains it in more detail.

GTmetrix

My GTmetrix tests showed that Hostripples’ loading times were slow. This test measures the time taken for a website to fully load from a particular data centre (Mumbai, in this case). The fastest result was 2.6s, and the slowest was 4.9s. The average fully loaded time was 3.4 seconds.

This one is pretty close to the average:

When testing a website from a server in the same country as the data centre, there’s a simple rule: anything below 2 seconds is too slow. Visitors expect to see a page appear within two seconds, and a loading time longer than this could push them back to the search results.

My site had a size of approximately 1.4MB. Some compression was applied to reduce it to 1.22MB. However, other hosts were able to compress the page to less than 1MB, so it’s not the most impressive result.

Sucuri Load Time Tester

Sucuri reported very fast speeds. But there is a caveat. (Isn’t there always?)

Sucuri measures page loading times from different data centres around the world. I ran this test nine times and more than half of the tests failed to report any data.

Among the ones that did, the average response time was 2.9s.

This test below is one of the ones that actually returned results. As you can see, some of the speeds here were incredibly fast. My site was hosted in India, yet three data centres in Europe loaded it in around half a second:

Those failed tests could have changed things. Maybe it was the host’s fault, maybe it wasn’t, we can’t really judge either way.

UptimeRobot

Hostripples achieved 99.98% uptime across a full month of UptimeRobot testing. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good. I’d go with that.

I noticed a mix of uptime guarantees promised on the website – mostly 99.9%, sometimes 99.99%. Whenever a host is unclear on an important figure like this, I go read the Terms of Service so you don’t have to. And there is no uptime guarantee in the terms at all. If your site performs like mine, then you might not need to worry. But if it doesn’t? Hmmmm.

To be clear, that’s a bad “Hmmmm.”

Amazingly Fast and Detailed Live Chat Support

Hostripples provides support 24/7, 365 days a year. Phone, ticket, and live chat support are all available, and responses were speedy and detailed every time I contacted someone for help.

Here’s a tech support query about installing WordPress. Mark answered quickly and you can see from the timestamps that the conversation flowed quickly too.

I also gave Hostripples the chance to step in with some optimisation tips before I started to test my website. I’ve asked dozens of hosts this question. Many of them just say they can’t help. But Hostripples went to great lengths to give me lots of actionable and useful tips.

Just three minutes for seven different tips. On live chat. Wow!

Finally, a tricky technical question. I ran into a problem uploading a WordPress theme. This is a pretty common issue, but it can be difficult for a hosting novice to resolve without some help. Again, this is a great answer.

Paul, you’re killing it. Nice job.

Competitive Pricing on Long-Term Contracts

If you pay monthly, Hostripples is at the more expensive end of the pricing scale compared to some other hosts in India.

But longer contracts yield generous price reductions of up to 50%, so it’s worth thinking about stretching your plan over a longer term. You can choose to pay monthly, quarterly, annually, 6-monthly, 12-monthly, 24-monthly, and 36-monthly. The longer you commit, the more you save.

Some plans also include a free domain name, but mine was one of the few that didn’t. 

You can pay for your hosting using more than 13 different payment methods, including credit card, bank transfer, PayPal, Paysafecard, MolPay, AliPay, and Bitcoin.

There’s no free trial at Hostripples, but there is a 30-day money-back guarantee. I dove into the terms again to check this out, and it really is a genuine guarantee with no catch. If you’re unhappy, you can get your money back without question; all you have to do is tell Hostripples why.