WebHostingPad Review 2021 - Is It Good Web Hosting or Scam?

We have been asked a lot of times that whether WebHostingPad is worth going. To provide the right answer for our readers, we started to host a tested website with this company in last July, and kept monitoring its performance closely with a 5-minute interval. As a result, we found that the site didn’t run with a good performance.

In addition, we have browsed this company on the Internet to learn what other customers think about the overall service they got, finding a lot of complaints on the poor service. So we have drawn the conclusion that WebHostingPad is not a reliable and trust-worthy hosting company. In below, we have worked a comprehensive review based on our personal experience and real customer reviews. The evidence of WebHostingPad scam includes:

• The cheapest price $1.99/mo only works for a 4-year plan.
• Hidden fee & terms behind their 30 days money back guarantee.
• Poor web hosting uptime, much worse than their 99.99% uptime.
• Bad site loading speed especially during the business time.

After getting a quick view on WebHostingPad, let’s move on to more information about this company.

WebHostingPad Review > Reputation

Founded in 2005, WebHostingPad is a web hosting company offering one of the most affordable Linux hosting services to nearly 200,000 hosted domains. According to our survey, almost all customers are satisfied with the low price, but just 31.3% are satisfied with the overall service, reliability and technical support. Check out the customer satisfaction rate in the following chart, or read through the customers’ concerns at this page.

WebHostingPad Review > Price

WebHostingPad has released 2 hosting plans named as Power Plan and Power Plan Plus, the regular price of which starts from $4.95/mo. Now, the company is offering a 59% discount for the 2 plans, which enables customers to cut the price down to $1.99/mo. However, this cheap price is only valid for 3-year, 4-year, and 5-year billing cycle, so customers who subscribe at this rate will be locked to a long term of at least 3 years.

Besides, WebHostingPad doesn’t allow monthly billing, which is very inconvenient for new customers who have no confidence with the reliability of this web host. In addition, the renewal price is much higher than this rate.

Money Back Guarantee

What’s more, the WebHostingPad money back guarantee is only a marketing term because it never gives a full refund even within the guaranteed 30 days. The company claims to do so, but the fact is that the refund excludes domain name registration ($14.95/year) and those so-called additional services including WHM/cPanel license ($12/year), Softaculous($12/year), IP addresses, site builders, etc. If a customer cancels the account in only several days after signing up 4-year plan, he will get back less than $56, instead of the full payment of $95.52.

Features

WebHostingPad doesn’t disappoint us in terms of features. For instance, it offers unlimited disk space and monthly data transfer, unlimited domain hosting and e-mail accounts, cPanel control panel and Softaculous 1-click WordPress installer, etc.

All of these features are useful for beginners to set up a simple site with ease, but for some geeks or professionals, this hosting package lacks some advanced technologies like override .htaccess support, custom Cronjobs, and Ruby on Rails.

Besides, some security measures like SSL certificate and SSH access are only included in WebHostingPad Power Plan Plus, meaning that customers needing these technologies have to pay more money than the basic Power Plan.

It is worth noting that although WebHostingPad offers free domain name, it is only valid for 1 year of domain registration. After the first year, domains will be priced at the regular rate of $14.95/yr.

Uptime

WebHostingPad utilizes 1 data center located in Chicago, IL, which is featured with redundancy in power, HVC, fire suppression, network connectivity and security, designed to offer secure, redundant and flexible online service to all of their customers. Six months ago, we have set up a brand-new WordPress site with WebHostingPad Power plan, and have monitored its online accessibility at a 5-minute interval with Pingdom until now. As a result, this web host achieves a 99.47% uptime on average.

As we learned from their hidden terms, WebHostingPad uptime guarantee does not work in many aspects, such as the quality of backbone providers, fiber line failure, DNS problems, and more. As a result, whatever connection problems customers have with WebHostingPad, that’s surely a problem out of their control and cannot be counted for the downtime. As almost all the kinds of problems are not applicable to their guarantee, WebHostingPad is definitely and absolutely a scam.

WebHostingPad Review > Page Loading Speed

Choosing WebHostingPad is just the start of a nightmare. Customers may soon find the website loads quite slow during the business time. If they are using PPC like Google AdWords or Bing/Yahoo Search for the traffic, it’s just wasting the money. No reader can be patient for more than 10 seconds for a webpage been to be fully loaded.

We compared the loading speed of the same WordPress site with the same content hosted with WebHostingPad, HostGator, JustHost and InMotion. Read the following comparison chart to learn the server response time of the 4 companies in the past 30 days.

PHP Scripts Compatibility

Just like many other web hosts which claim to be 100% friendly for all the popular scripts, WebHostingPad also promises to offer the richest hosting environment for proper application running. According to the feature listing, it offers PHP and MySQL, but does not present their versions clearly, so we cannot figure out whether WebHostingPad has met the minimum technical requirements of PHP 5.2.4 or greater, and MySQL 5.0 or greater for the basic working of WordPress, Joomla or Drupal.

In addition, we fail to find any information indicating that this web host utilizes suPHP to ensure the safest hosting environment, meaning that the sites hosted with WebHostingPad may have secure vulnerabilities.

Technical Support

WebHostingPad claims 24×7 US based technical support through toll-free phone call, email and live chat to provide instant response and effective assistance for troubled customers to deal with their problem. However, according to our survey, there are just one third of customers satisfied with their support.

Talking with support staff via phone or live chat is usually a waste of time and energy because they don’t respond to the issue directly but always try their best to persuade the customers sitting back and waiting for another a couple of hours, again and again, until the customers give up.

WebHostingPad > NOT RECOMMENDED

From what we reviewed and other WebHostingPad customers’ voice, this company is really not worth going. However, in the past 10 years, we have reviewed more than 200 web hosts and found dozens of reliable and reputed hosting companies, among which the following three are highly recommended. Learn more about the 3 trust-worthy web hosts in the following table.