Indian hosting company Seawind was founded in 2009. It has offices in India and the U.K., and it purports to offer shared web hosting (and related services such as VPS) in India, the U.K., U.S.A., Australia, and Canada.
You can switch between three distinctly different websites for its India, U.K., and global presences, all of which are in English. I found some instances of “lorem ipsum” placeholder text, which was somewhat offputting.
Features and Ease of Use
Seawind sells five Linux shared hosting plans, five Windows shared hosting plans, and three Java shared hosting plans. The Windows and Linux plans provide the same levels of resources at the same prices, but the feature sets vary slightly because (for example) the Windows plans support SQL Server databases. The Java plans are priced differently, and they share some of the same features plus JSP application development.
With the Linux plans, you can expect to find the following features:
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- Weekly backups
- Free Weebly website builder
- cPanel control panel
- Softaculous installer
- Free website transfer
The popular and user-friendly cPanel control panel makes it easy to manage your website files, email accounts, FTP accounts, backup intervals, and more. The Softaculous installer is one of the easiest one-click installers on the market, and it allows you to install a range of CMS and other applications such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, PrestaShop, TYPO3, and phpBB.
One of the highlights of this host is the Weebly website builder. It allows you to select from a variety of pre-designed templates and customize them by easily adding text and media using the drag-and-drop interface.
Pricing and Support
For the features and resources on offer, Seawind’s prices are slightly high, but this may be because Windows and Linux plans are priced the same whereas many hosts charge more for Windows hosting. Java hosting is more expensive still.
Regardless of whatever prices the hosting plans are advertised in (e.g., USD or GBP), they are all converted into Indian rupees (INR) at the checkout. You can choose to be billed quarterly, semi-annually, and annually, with bigger discounts for longer commitments. First-time customers get a very generous 45-day money-back guarantee, so you can change your mind within the first six weeks if you’re not entirely happy.
Payments can be made using PayPal or a credit/debit card.
Since there was some conflicting information on this vendor’s website, I wanted to seek clarification with the customer support team that should be contactable via telephone, ticket, or email. Unfortunately, my exploratory email and test support ticket both seemed to fall on deaf ears. This wouldn’t be so bad if there were sufficient self-support resources, but the knowledge base is pretty bare:
