Viacom Informatika (VI) has been providing website hosting since 2006. A Hungarian company, it co-locates its servers in the GTS Datanet center in Budaörs, Hungary. The website is available in Hungarian only.
Features and Ease of Use
VI sells a simple selection of shared hosting plans that come with the following core features as standard:
- Daily backups retained for 30 days
- One .hu domain name free in annual plans
- Up to twenty add-on domains
- Free SSL certificates available
- Up to 20GB disk space
- Unlimited traffic data per month
VI does not own its own data center. Instead, it co-locates its servers in an independent Hungarian data center. Although it’s not ideal, it is quite common, but the low uptime guarantee at 99.6% (confirmed with support) is disappointing.
The plans do come with support for popular CMS programs such as WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal, but aside from that, the plans are heavily geared towards experts. There’s support for PHP versions 5 through 7, phpMyAdmin, FTP access, MySQL databases, and PostgreSQL databases. There are also Cron jobs, so you can keep your site running optimally, and if you want non-SQL databases, you can do so through MongoDB.
You do get website visitor statistics as standard, but it’s important to note that this is only available in Hungarian, which is potentially an issue for international customers. Daily automatic backups are taken and retained for a generous 30 days, which is longer than many hosts.
I confirmed with customer support that there aren’t any beginner friendly features such as a one-click installer or website building tool, so these plans aren’t ideal for beginners.
Pricing and Support
The prices are in line with similar companies, if a little higher only because of the low level of beginner friendly features. That said, you do get a free SSL certificate and .hu domain (annual plans), so that reduces your overall cost.
You can either purchase the plans in six or twelve month terms, with the exception of the most expensive plan which can also be bought in month-to-month plans. There isn’t any type of refund or free trial, so unless you go for the highest plan, it’s quite a lengthy initial term.
Customer service is available by phone, email, and although there is a live chat linked to in the header, I couldn’t get it to open. Also, I’d like to tell you the business hours, which are on the website, but there’s an issue with the website design which makes the hours illegible (slightly concerning as this is also a web design company!).
I can confirm that when I emailed the team around lunchtime on a Wednesday, I received a response within an hour. They answered my questions thoroughly and in English.
