HOSTMETRO VS. JUSTHOST

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 Justhost, but please take a look for yourself:

	HostMetro	Justhost
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.	As is standard with all EIG brands, you will be enticed by a low price of $2.25/month to sign up. Your renewal rates will skyrocket 344% to $9.99/month for a 1 year term. While they do disclose this on their home page, it is intentionally misleading. It says $2.25/month for a 48 month term with renewal rates of $6.99/month. What they don’t say is that the $6.99/month renewal is on a 3 year account only. A 2 year account, as seen above, renews at $8.99/month. They have to charge this much for renewals to cover the ridiculously high commissions that they pay affiliates for every sale.
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.	Like I said above, JustHost offers nothing special in the way of features. They have the standard gimmick of “unlimited” disk space and bandwidth, but in the terms limit you by CPU usage, memory usage, and also a file number limit of just 50,000 files. Keep in mind every single part of your website, email, databases, and anything else stored on your account is considered a file. Considering a Joomla installation itself is over 4,500 files there’s not much to their “unlimited” plan.
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.	Where to start. Well, first off, JustHost doesn’t offer any type of uptime guarantee. I asked in a live chat just to be sure because I couldn’t see it anywhere on their website or in their terms. Our friendly chat rep P.T. said that “guarantees are unrealistic” because of outside factors. Every single web host that offers an uptime guarantee puts in their terms that outside factors (natural disasters, mainline cuts, things like that) do not contribute to this guarantee. This is no reason not to offer one. P.T. goes on to explain that they average 99.98% uptime. Not on my server they didn’t. My test account (which was not active for the EIG data center outage last month) had a stellar uptime of 89.35% over a 5 month period. I ran a WordPress test website on my account with JustHost, and when the server was up my website was slow to respond and failed to load images on multiple occasions. The ultimate question is this. If you average 99.98% uptime why don’t you offer a guarantee? Sounds to me like if you really were at 99.98% you could afford to offer it without any problems at all.
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.	JustHost’s support is average at best, however very inconsistent. The chat above, where I asked about an uptime guarantee, is a standard question asked by plenty of customers over the course of the day. There are predefined replies that are accessible to everybody so that these questions can be answered quickly. After a 5 minute wait for a chat rep, it still took a good 3-4 minutes for him to answer my question. My biggest issue is the fact that EIG has support representatives handling multiple brands at once. In the chat image above you can see at the top that it says “Provider: Just Host.” This information is given to the rep to know that I opened this chat from the JustHost website as opposed to BlueHost or iPage or any other EIG brand. It just makes for slower, less accurate support.
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.	JustHost has the ability to be a good host, just like any other EIG brand. They have a huge amount of money that they could be putting toward providing a great service, but instead they put this money toward being highly ranked on affiliate websites and paying out high commissions for the sales that these affiliates generate. It’s a backwards way of doing business if you ask me, but it gets new customers who don’t know any better to sign up. My advice would be to stay away. They do not provide reliable service in the least bit.

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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