TechRadar Verdict
AccuWeb Hosting's limits on bandwidth and storage might put off some, but its allowances are generous, and its lengthy feature lists ensure you're getting plenty for your money.
Pros
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Data centers around the world
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Very consistent results during performance tests
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Windows and Linux options
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Highly configurable
Cons
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Bandwidth, storage and other limits on most plans
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No introductory discounts
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No monthly billing for shared hosting
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Founded in 2003, AccuWeb Hosting is an experienced US provider with a huge range of web hosting products and services.
There are shared hosting, VPS and dedicated servers, for instance. WordPress hosting and application hosting. cloud hosting, reseller hosting, load balancers, backup schemes, domain registration, SSL certificates and more.
You're not restricted to Linux products. Just about everything in the range is also available in a Windows flavor, though for a small price premium.
Shared plans can be hosted in US, Europe, Singapore, South Africa, India and Australia, and VPS and dedicated plans add more options (Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, South Korea, Japan, more.)
Most products are highly configurable. Looking for an unmanaged VPS, maybe? Control panel options include cPanel, Plesk and DirectAdmin, or the company can install free options like ISPConfig, Ajenti or ZPanel. You're after a US dedicated server? AccuWeb has so many options - hundreds - that the website uses eight separate filters to help you find what you need.
- Want to try AccuWeb Hosting? Check out the website here
AccuWeb Hosting plans don't claim to offer unlimited bandwidth and storage, but we don't see that as an issue. The limits are generally set very high; even the cheapest shared hosting plan includes 10GB storage and 500GB monthly bandwidth, probably enough for most consumer and many business sites. And in reality, all providers have limits: they just hide them behind vague 'fair usage' clauses in the small print, ensuring no-one knows what they are.
Headline prices aren't quite the lowest, but they're very reasonable (shared hosting from $3.09 a month on the three year plan, VPS from $10 on an annual plan), and they often get better when you drill into the details (VPS plans are fully managed, for instance.)
(When you're comparing prices, keep in mind that AccuWeb doesn't do introductory discounts, making it look a little more expensive than it really is. That's bad if you're hoping to save a pile on money by getting cheap hosting over three or four years. But it's good over shorter plans, as it means your costs aren't going to double or more on renewal.)
24/7 support is available via email, live chat and telephone (US) if you run into trouble, and you're protected by a 30-day money-back guarantee (7-day for VPS plans.)
Shared hosting
AccuWeb's shared hosting begins with its Personal Web Hosting plan. This imposes various limits, but as we mentioned above, there's nothing that will affect the average small site: 10GB storage, 150 email accounts and 'only' 500GB traffic is going to be enough for many users. (Even with a bulky web page size of 5MB, that's 100,000-page views a month.)
Unusually, even this starter plan enables hosting as many websites as you need, within the storage limit (most providers limit you to hosting one site on their starter plan.)
Elsewhere, the plan includes all the features you'd expect: free SSL, cPanel site management, a free domain, a bundled website builder.
Prices range from $3.25 a month on the six-month plan (there's no monthly billing, unfortunately) to $3.09 a month over three years. That's good value, and as we mentioned above, keep in mind that this is the standard price, not some special introductory deal. It's not going to leap on renewal.
There are two further shared hosting plans, but they essentially just give you more storage, emails and bandwidth, although the Enterprise plan (from $9.99 a month) also throws in a dedicated IP.
Shared cloud hosting offers a more scalable product, particularly useful for handling websites which have regular large spikes in traffic. Specs are similar to the regular shared plans, and prices start at a reasonable $4.79 a month.
Some providers have more appealing deals, at least at first glance. HostGator's Baby plan, for instance, gives you unmetered storage and bandwidth from $2.75 a month.
Check out the details, though, and it's a different story. HostGator's 'unmetered' doesn't mean 'unlimited', for instance; the Baby plan only enables hosting one site, while AccuWeb plans have no fixed limits; and although the Baby plan looks cheap at $2.75, you must sign up for three years to get that deal, and it renews at $6.75, more than twice AccuWeb's price.
WordPress
AccuWeb's WordPress hosting plans have a capable set of features, including some welcome pluses. All plans support hosting unlimited websites; the company will import one existing WordPress site for free; SEO and a performance-boosting Hyper Cache plugin come preinstalled, and daily backups are thrown in.
Advanced features include GIT-based version control and WP-CLI to manage WordPress via the command line, while staging enables editing your WordPress project without affecting the production site.
Pricing is barely any different to AccuWeb's regular shared hosting, starting at $3.49 a month over three years for 10GB storage and 500GB traffic.
There are more capable managed WordPress plans about. Bluehost and IONOS WordPress Pro plans both support auto-updating of plugins, as well as WordPress itself, for instance.
But these more high-end products can also cost 2, 3 or more times as much as AccuWeb's offering. If you're getting started with WordPress and not creating some business-critical site, it makes sense to start with a budget product and upgrade later, if you find you need the extra features.
Servers
AccuWeb Hosting's VPS range aims to boost website performance by giving you dedicated RAM and CPU resources.
Starter prices are low at only $5 billed monthly (yes, monthly- no long-term contracts required), but that's because the base plan is relatively underpowered: self-managed, 1GB RAM, 20GB storage and only 150GB traffic (even A2's most basic shared hosting plan gives you 500GB.)
Its managed SSD Saturn VPN plan gets you 4GB RAM, four CPU cores, 50GB storage and 650GB bandwidth, all for $48 a month on the annual plan.
Comparing plans with other hosts is difficult as there are so many factors to consider, but to take a single example, Bluehost's Enhanced VPS includes a similar 4GB RAM, two CPU cores and 60GB storage and a chunky 2TB bandwidth. Its introductory price is fractionally lower at $29.99 for all plan lengths, but doubles on renewal to $59.99. If you need the extra bandwidth, Bluehost looks good; if CPU cores and long-term cost is a priority, maybe AccuWeb is best.
AccuWeb's dedicated plans are so configurable that there's no space to begin to cover them here, but essentially you're able to select a data center, then choose from a large number of base servers, each of which supports adding a RAID card, control panel, SQL Server (Express, Web, Standard and Enterprise editions), mail server, CDP backup plan, firewall, IPv6 address and more.
Bandwidth allocations are high, with even the cheapest US server getting you 20TB, and prices start at a bargain $118.
Beware, though: specs and prices vary considerably, depending on the data center you choose (Singapore has only a handful of servers, and even $500 a month systems only give you 10TB traffic a month, although you can add more.) Browse the Dedicated Server product pages carefully to see if they are right for you.
Signing up
The AccuWeb Hosting website has some very in-depth comparison tables of its various plans, handy when you're trying to choose whatever is best for you.
Most of these tables include pricing for various subscription lengths, too. If you've spent time shopping for hosting you'll know that many providers bury those that vital details, so it's good to see AccuWeb being more up-front with its customers.
We selected the cheapest shared hosting plan, and were offered a small selection of optional extras: a premium SSL certificate for $49.99 a year, CDN support for a monthly $3.95, and SpamExperts-based spam filtering to protect up to 100 mailboxes for $5.85 quarterly ($1.95 a month.)
Creating an account is a little more secure than usual (or involves more hassle, depending on your point of view.) As well as requesting your name, physical and email address and mobile phone number, the company validates your identity by sending you a text with a one-time password.
AccuWeb Hosting supports payment via card and PayPal. We paid via PayPal in the usual way, and while we did that, a text arrived with our password.
Once verified, AccuWeb Hosting set up and activated our account at speed, and within 15 minutes a Welcome email arrived with logins, FTP credentials, nameservers and every other detail you might want to know.
Creating a site
Logging in to AccuWeb Hosting took us to a familiar WHMCS-based account management dashboard, as used by the majority of smaller web hosts. This doesn't have much visual appeal, but it includes all the account, product and support features you need, and if you've used a few other hosts you'll probably recognize it right away.
A couple of clicks takes you to AccuWeb's full-featured cPanel setup, where you'll find several tools to help create a site.
Softaculous is on hand for easy installation of WordPress, MediaWiki, PrestaShop and hundreds of other web apps.
RV sitebuilder is a simple drag-and-drop website builder. It doesn't have many templates but there are plenty of widgets and editing options, and we're glad it's included in AccuWeb's plans.
The standard cPanel File Manager enables creating and organizing folders, uploading and editing files and generally getting your web space in order.
There are all the usual website management features, too, including tools to work with domains and subdomains, create databases, create and manage email accounts and, when you're up and running, get in-depth stats on your website visitors.
All websites run into problems occasionally, whatever your host, but AccuWeb Hosting has more ways to help than most: live chat, email, telephone, a web knowledgebase and some busy social media sites.
There's a huge amount of content available on the knowledgebase alone: 28 articles on CDN hosting, 39 covering email client settings, even 63 Plesk tutorials. The articles help cover practical tasks ('How to install a WordPress theme') as well as installation and troubleshooting, making the support site a genuinely useful resource.
Performance
Web host speed matters, even when you're buying the most basic of shared hosting. Your website visitors may not stick around if they're regularly kept waiting by a sluggish server.
To get a feel for AccuWeb Hosting's performance, we signed up for a very simple shared hosting account and uploaded a very basic website.
Next, we used Uptime.com to check the availability and response time of our test site at five-minute intervals over a 7-day period (that's more than 2,000 individual checks.)
The results showed our site had 100% uptime, with no outages detected. That's what we expect for a short-term test, but some hosts don't manage it.
Response times averaged 285ms, almost identical to the 289ms we saw during the last review, in the mid-range of what we would expect for a basic shared hosting package. (And remember, that's what we're testing. These results tell us nothing about what you might see from AccuWeb Hosting's other products.)
AccuWeb Hosting scored for its consistency, too. Results ranged from 248-485ms, but there are only a handful of readings above 400ms, and our site mostly returned results in a very acceptable 250-300ms range.
Final verdict
No marketing tricks, no misleading headline prices, no 'unlimited' accounts which really aren't - AccuWeb Hosting has a strong range of quality products, very configurable fairly priced, honestly described and with quality support. Go take a look.
