Hawkhost Review
Hawkhost Brief Introduction
Hawkhost is originally called Devoted host which is created in year 2005. From the begining, devoted host is featured for reseller hosting and recommended by webmasters who is tired of downtime with other hosting companies. In year 2007, devoted was renamed to hawkhost officially in offerring affordable litespeed web hosting services. Till today, hawkhost has several data centers on multiple locations including Amsterdam, Singapore, Dallas, Washington, San Jose and Seattle in the U.S.
Hawkhost Hosting Spotlights
We do not have an account with hawkhost hosting service at the moment. Everything is written through our client's experience in the last few months, they're satisfied by hawkhost support with lots of positive comments. After checking their website and communication with their hosting support, they have following unbeatable offers.
- Excellent hosting features – Hawkhost is a standard cpanel hosting provider with every cpanel add-on services. Except for the basic services from other hosting provider, there're more from hawkhost such as latest php & mysql update, cpanel skin options. The best of the best is you can get SSH Access with any hawkhost shared hosting plan. Not many hosting providers could offer this service for various issue but hawkhost did it.
- Fast web server – Hawkhost use advanced web server solution "Litespeed" which is recognized as 10 times faster than Apache.
- E-commerce compatible – E-commerce is considered mostly when people choose a web hosting provider, since you will collect money from your website, you have to make sure your ecommerce site will be running perfectly with less downtime. Hawkhost is simply on the figure, almost every open sourced e-commerce applications can be installed on hawkhost server and running smoothly.
- Affordable Hosting plan – Hawkhost prepared total of four shared hosting plans and it starts as cheap as $3.29/mon. It's definitely in the cheapest hosting service list for such price! Unlike many cpanel hosting based provider who have many restrictions such as number of file limitation, cpu limitation etc, hawkhost doesn't have such, they will notify you by email and ask you fix problems but not simply shutdown your website.
- Fantastic Datacenter – Hawkhost manages multiple world class datacenters, when you sign up the hosting plan you have the option to choose the one you desired.
- Fast customer support – Hawkhost offers both live chat and ticket support. You get response from live chat within 30 seconds and 10 ~ 30 minutes with ticket system. Their support is available 24 x 7 x 365. You won't lose support during holidays like from other hosts.
There're mutiple hosting solutions available from hawkhost including shared, VPS, Reseller and semi-dedicated hosting. All hosting plans come with following offer
- Unlimited Email Accounts
- SSH (Secure Shell), SSL, FTP Support
- CGI, Ruby, Perl, PHP (5.2, 5.3 & 5.4) Support
- Free Site Builder
- LiteSpeed Web Server
- 24/7 Sales/Support
Visit http://www.Hawkhost.com for hosting plans!
Another unbeatable feature with hawkhost is you're not forced to sign up yearly or 2 years upfront. you have choice to register monthly, quarterly with the same price rate! It's extremely useful when you just like to use the hosting for short periods. Most other web hosts will charge high monthly fee plus setup cost if we just purchase monthly service, things are completely different with hawkhost.
What might be the weakness of hawkhost?
The biggest weakness of hawkhost should be the nameless from the industry. If you search hosting related stuff from the search engine you get little information about this company. For us, if we're not notified by clients, we would never know this company. I think the company is growing up quietly and only focus on service quality but pay less attention to business marketing. Also, if you search hawkhost user feedbacks or reviews on the web you won't get too much either because of it's quiety.
Update: Hawkhost is a well known brand today comparing to above writing from 2 years before. From editorial experience today, there's no real weakness of hawkhost service for its high performance and affordable price! if you're in need of reliable and honest hosting services, hawkhost is perfect choice!
How is hawkhost rated comparing to their competitors?
If we talk about service quality, hawkhost will never fail to compare with any web hosting service as for above outstanding hosting features. It's worth a try if you're looking for affordable and reliable cpanel hosting provider, Their litespeed web server hosting is still leading comparing two years before. Time has approved hawkhost is offering honest and reliable service to any size business. Especially in professional litespeed hosting service, hawkhost does not have a real competitor. The company collected good experience on how to make full use of this service and generate the biggest success to each website!
Is there any hawkhost coupon available?
Sure there is! There're several different hawkhost coupons to sign up. It will save you 25% ~ 50% according to the service you're going to sign up. They have officially offered 50% off hawkhost coupon on website, but they provided more nice promo codes as following:
Nice work on your article, but I have to add that you failed to mention that you cannot reach Hawk Host’s phone support line on the phone AT ALL EVER. Their chat doesn’t work most of the time, and they don’t reply to most tickets or emails. Most web hosts have at least 24 hr chat, but these guys don’t have even that much. Heck hosts that are cheaper and offshore than Hawk Host have better and more reliable options to get support. I understand you said you don’t need support but one day you will, and you will change your mind once you try to get help.
Brain F. the operations manager will readily admit they don’t man the phones. They have a lot of down time (you need to run 3rd party monitoring, you’ll find out you aren’t up as much as you think you are) and their staff is really not knowledgeable as they don’t get the most basic server administration functions. They deleted my databases and screwed up one of my website. There’s a ton of bad reviews on this company and Frog Host, their child company. There’s so many better hosts that are available on the phone 24/7/365. You say you don’t have problems needing to call, but one day you will and when you have an emergency and can’t reach them you’ll be updating this blog. Hawk host is as bad as Host Gator, they are sub par “you get what you pay for” type of hosting. I’d recommend In Motion way before I’d suggest Hawk Host. Good luck using them, hope you don’t have to deal with the same problems I did with Hawk Host. But When you do don’t be shocked that you can’t get support.
It’s sad to hear about your experience. Yes, Inmotion is in our top recommendation list among best performance hosting.
HawkHost recently stole $67 from me.
I signed up for a VPS using Bitcoin, and whilst they only took about 5 hours to respond to my ticket concerning the payment not being accepted, everything else has been abysmal. I thought I was safe using their service because of the reassuring “30 Day Guarantee” I see plastered all over the site. The neglect to tell you however, this doesn’t apply to VPS accounts. The only place this can be found is buried in the TOS, they don’t bother to mention this on the VPS sales page or the “Money Back Guarantee / Satisfaction Guaranteed” page.
At some point in the signup process the system lost the domain name I was going to use, in the first reply Brian informed me of this and asked what name I was using. I replied and waited. A few hours went by and I was wondering why there was no reply, and why the chat support is constantly showing “offline.” I knew already that this company would not be a fit, and after reading a few reviews like the one on this page, I replied again and asked for a full refund. Keep in mind this is before any work had been done to setup the account.
Instead of receiving a concerned reply back in response to my wish to cancel, I only received an update stating that my ticket was passed on to billing support level 2. I continued to ask for a refund for the next two days until finally someone replied explaining my account was now active … what?! I explained that I did not want the service and that they wasted their time creating the account because they already received multiple replies and tickets stating I wanted my money back. I was then told that I needed to use the account cancellation form if I wanted to cancel the account, so I went ahead and did this and again asked for my money back in the comments.
Finally Brian replied again stating that they don’t offer refunds on Bitcoin payments but offered 50% off next months bill. By this point I was fuming because they made me jump through all sorts of hoops only to be told that they’re not going to refund me. I replied back and noted the satisfaction guarantee and that I would take a refund via PayPal… no response. This is when I discovered the TOS and how it states no refunds on VPS accounts… “how convenient” I thought. They purposely ignored my support tickets and setup the VPS because they thought I would have no recourse under the TOS.
I wrote another email to them explaining that I found the TOS section but thought that it was very unfair, and asked them to consider what they were doing and if they would enjoy being treated the same. I also noted that there are likely provisions under the UCC which would allow me to recover the funds regardless of what they think the TOS allows them to do. Like typical scammers, they haven’t bothered to reply. I am now working with CoinBase to try and recover the funds since I paid through their interface and HawkHost also has a merchant account with them. They explained “We take reports of merchant fraud very seriously and we have made record of your notification,” and I will be submitting all details for review.
A word of WARNING for anyone thinking about using HawkHost … DON’T … they really are HAWKERS, more like VULTURES! The support is beyond terrible, they will not act honorably and they will completely ignore your requests.