HOSTMETRO VS. HOSTMONSTER

Review of Features

Below you will find a detailed feature-by-feature comparison of my reviews for both of these companies. Based on my experience, I strongly recommend HostMetro over HostMonster, but please take a look for yourself:

	HostMetro	HostMonster
HOST	--- Visit this host ---	--- Visit this host ---
PRICE	HostMetro offers relatively inexpensive hosting. While they are not the absolute cheapest, they are below the average. With our HostMetro Coupon you will be able to get the best deal possible. The best part about the HostMetro pricing is that they do not increase renewal prices. Part of their Metro Max Guarantee is a price lock guarantee, ensuring that loyal customers get rewarded instead of being hammered with high renewal rates. Out of all the web hosting companies I have reviewed I have yet to see another offer anything like this.	HostMonster falls into the same pattern of many hosts: their intro rates seem perfectly reasonable, and then double after the first year without informing you. While many hosts do this, HostMonster is the most deceptive about it, hiding their regular rates in a tiny bit of text at the bottom of the page that doesn't even look linked. Even if $10.99 / month isn't bad, that's with their Basic plan, which is unfortunately limited. Even their Plus plan, a good $4 more per month, has a lot of retrictions. Their Prime plan offers the same features and options as most host's basic plans, only they're charging $16.99 / month for it.
FEATURES	Of course, a low price means nothing if there aren’t any features to go along with it. HostMetro does not skimp on features, and they are pretty transparent about what they offer. One of the biggest marketing gimmicks in web hosting today is the idea of “unlimited” disk space and bandwidth. There is no such thing as unlimited resources. I don’t know who started it, but it was made up to make customers think they can do whatever they want, which simply isn’t the case. HostMetro offers “Max” hosting space and bandwidth, meaning that they do have initial limits for each (10gb disk space, 100gb bandwidth/month) but if you need more you contact them and they can increase these. The initial limits are big enough that 95% of customers won’t have an issue (my test account took up less than 1gb of total disk space). They also provide a free domain name, the ability to host unlimited domain names, unlimited email accounts, two free website builders, $100 in Google AdWords credit, and more. The list of features that HostMetro includes is impressive. I can’t think of anything a customer would need that they do not offer.	As mentioned earlier, HostMonster's lower-tier plans are extremely limited in features. Almost nothing but bandwith is unlimited at anything below "Prime" and there's a hard cap for file counts with every one of their plans. Their Basic plan offers just one website at 50gb max with five email accounts and no option for SSL, spam filters, or domain privacy. Considering the price of that plan, I would expect a lot more features to be available. Even if you do pay more for the "unlimited" features, they still have policies in place that state they're allowed to terminate your account WITHOUT WARNING if you exceed their "acceptable usage" terms. "Unlimited" really doesn't mean much here.
RELIABILITY	As explained earlier, HostMetro has new, top of the line servers for all of their customers. This is one of the biggest positives of being a newer host in the industry. There is no outdated technology for you to worry about. All of their servers are RAID protected as well to ensure that there is no data loss. HostMetro also provides automated weekly backups as a safeguard for your account. If you get hacked, accidentally delete a file or folder, or make a huge mistake on your website they will be able to restore your previous files. In the event you need more frequent backups of your account they also offer a free backup tool within cPanel that can be used at any time. HostMetro also uses industry leading technologies CloudFlare and CloudLinux to ensure the highest stability and reliability of their servers. I did not enable CloudFlare on my account because I wanted to be sure that I was not running cached versions of my website from a CloudFlare server (for the sake of this review only), however I always recommend enabling CloudFlare when it is an option. It is a free way of increasing your website speed and security. After a 6 month test my website has been up for a total of %99.958 of the time, which puts them in the top 3 of all the hosts I have tested. This is an extraordinary number for a shared web host, especially one so afordable. I was thoroughly impressed with the speed and reliability of their servers.	Despite the fact that they, like many hosts, guarantee 99.9% uptime, they don't keep this promise. According to my test account, it does still average 98.5% uptime, but the response time is poor. HostMonster uses a Universal Power System to protect their servers from electrical outages, but that means very little when they're overloading their servers with too many users (from other EIG hosts, too) and slowing everyone down. No amount of live server upgrades and power protection can compensate for breathing room and well-organized servers. Their backup options leave something to be desired, as well. While they do offer backup service (for a fee) their basic plans don't cover this and you'd have to upgrade to a much more expensive plan. Not to mention, there's this in their Terms of Service: "IT IS SOLELY SUBSCRIBER'S DUTY AND RESPONSIBILITY TO BACKUP SUBSCRIBER'S FILES AND DATA ON HOSTMONSTER SERVERS, AND under no circumstance will HostMonster be liable to anyone FOR DAMAGES OF ANY KIND under any legal theory for loss of Subscriber FILES AND/or data on any HostMonster server." Not responsible for loss of data on their own servers? Their terms of service explicitly shift the blame to the customer, presumably to pressure you to upgrade to their Pro plan with more backup options.
TECH SUPPORT	Having been a support representative for several hosting companies over the course of about 4 years I know what questions to ask that annoy employees. I’ve been there. When you contact support you should fully expect them to be able to help you with your questions. What I look for most in a good support team is if they make me feel like I am bothering them with my questions. Some support representatives for other companies made me feel like I should know these things already, almost as if I was an annoyance to them. HostMetro does not have this problem. They were always friendly and courteous when I called or started a live chat. They were able to help me in a quick, concise manner, as well.	Like I’ve said a couple of times already, HostMonster is owned by EIG, who owns over 50 other web hosting companies. HostMonster shares support representatives with other brands of EIG, so when you try connecting to a live chat you have to explain what brand you host with, wait for them to pull up the system for that host, and then get started. This also means that support reps really only have a general knowledge of things since they have to support so many different companies, all with different features. HostMonster doesn't outsource their support, which is a pro, but even non-outsourced support can completely fail to understand their customers on even a basic level. Since their support is hired by EIG, you're not going to get personalized help, and sometimes the rep won't fully understand the question you're asking, instead sending out canned responses to problems you don't have. It can be very frustrating and very time-consuming, and it happens even without outsourcing their support, which is a shame.
CONCLUSION	HostMetro’s price, coupled with their reliability and customer service makes them my #1 web host for personal websites. They do everything you should expect from a great web host, and they do it better than the rest.	HostMonster comes with a lot of asterisks. I highly recommend reading the complete terms of service before signing up with them, or better yet avoid them altogether. Their features are severely lacking on their most basic plans, they have limits hidden in the fine print, and it seems like their support was one of the hardest hit by the EIG takeover. I wouldn't waste your time when there are plenty of far better hosts out there.

Key Differences

These are some choice differences between these two hosts. Note that this is not a complete list of features offered by both companies, but rather the most useful and popular features requested by clients for their websites.

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