AccuWeb Review 2019 - Quality, Speed, Price and Comparison

The web hosting world is a large one, with many services competing for your trust and dollars. There are plenty of worthy choices, and AccuWeb Hosting is among them, thanks to its many robust hosting plans that offer plenty of flexibility. In fact, AccuWeb Hosting's dedicated hosting packages in particular are so well rounded that they get our Editors' Choice nod. While the service lacks month-by-month shared hosting payment options, and its Windows plans could come bundled a skimpy number of email accounts, AccuWeb is still one of the best web hosting services around.

Shared Web Hosting

AccuWeb Hosting has an impressive variety of shared plans. If you're not hip to shared hosting, here is a brief rundown. Shared hosting places your website on a server with other sites; in other words, your site shares system resources with other websites on the server. This roommate environment lowers the hosting cost, resulting in cheap web hosting plans. You get what you pay for, however. Your site might slow down if one of its roommates gets on the front page of Reddit. If you get a massive traffic spike, on the other hand, you might find your site throttled to prevent your roomies from slowing to a standstill. Some services might even take you offline if your shared hosting traffic gets too far out of line.

AccuWeb offers numerous Linux- and Windows-based shared server plans. The lower-end, Linux-based solid-state servers start at $19.51 total for six months of service. With that, you get unlimited domains, 10GB of storage, 150 email accounts, and 60GB of monthly data transfers. The priciest plan is the Windows-based Enterprise package; it's $448.52 for three years of service. In addition to three years of hosting, you get five domains, 50GB of storage, 600GB of monthly data transfers, and 150 email accounts. One point against AccuWeb is that it offers no single-month shared options, which are preferred by people who have extremely short-term hosting projects or very tight budgets.

These are quality shared hosting plans, but HostGator, the category's Editors' Choice, tops them all. That web host's shared packages all boast unlimited storage, bandwidth, and email addresses—and unlimited domains if you sign up for either the Baby ($11.95 per month) or Business ($16.95 per month) plans. Likewise, DreamHost's shared packages have unlimited storage, domains, email, and monthly data transfers.

VPS Web Hosting

If your business demands a website with more power than what shared hosting offers, virtual private server (VPS) hosting is the way to go. Sites built on VPS servers have dedicated system resources, so your site will likely survive a link going viral. You're still renting a part of a shared server, but your site is more isolated from its server mates. If shared hosting stablemates are like roommates, sites on the same VPS server are more like tenants living in their own apartments in the same apartment building.

AccuWeb Hosting has multiple wallet-friendly Linux- and Windows-based VPS plans for webmasters to consider, ranging from VPS Mercury (from $8.99 per month) to Windows VPS Emerald (starting at $84.97 per month). The Mercury plan includes 20GB of storage, 1GB of RAM, 150GB of monthly data transfers, and unlimited website hosting. The Emerald package ups things with 125GB of storage, 8GB of RAM, and 1TB of monthly data transfers. Note: You can create 250 email accounts with a Windows VPS plan; you can create unlimited email accounts with a Linux VPS plan.

The number of AccuWeb Hosting packages isn't very different from Hostwinds'$3.50 at Hostwinds - Shared offerings. Still, Hostwinds retains its position as the Editors' Choice for VPS hosting. The company includes unlimited monthly data transfers and unlimited email with every VPS plan, and has a high-end $247 per month plan that boasts an impressive 96GB of RAM and 750GB of storage.

Dedicated Web Hosting

Dedicated hosting is for people who are deadly serious about their web hosting. With dedicated hosting, your website gets an entire server for itself. That means that it'll have a ridiculous amount of system resources at its disposal to handle large amounts of traffic. To continue the living-arrangements metaphor, dedicated web hosting services are akin to living in your own single-family home—and, depending on the plan you subscribe to, it might be a mansion.

AccuWeb Hosting has five excellent tiers of configurable, Linux- or Windows-powered dedicated hosting servers. The most affordable plan is the $105-per-month plan that includes 8GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, and 20TB of monthly data transfers. The top-tier plan, which starts at $360 per month, boasts a baseline 16GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, and 20TB of monthly data transfers. As with the VPS plan, AccuWeb's Windows-based dedicated hosting plan lets you create up to 250 email accounts; with a Linux-based dedicated plan, you can create unlimited email accounts.

Regardless of the plan you start with, you can outfit AccuWeb's dedicated servers with up to 512GB of memory, 2TB of storage, and 50TB of monthly data transfers. As a result, AccuWeb Hosting's dedicated hosting plans surpass those of Hostwinds, the former category champ. AccuWeb reigns as the Editors' Choice for dedicated hosting.

WordPress Web Hosting

Webmasters who are serious about their WordPress installations will be happy to know that AccuWeb Hosting offers WordPress-specific hosting that gives your site the white-glove treatment. This includes a preinstalled content management system, automatic updates, and multilayer DDoSprotection.

The WordPress Personal Web Hosting plan (starting at $25.99 for six months of service) offers unlimited domains, 10GB of storage, 60GB of monthly data transfers, and free WordPress migration and domain name registration. The WordPress Business Web Hosting plan (starting at $18.99 for three months of service) ups the numbers to 30GB of storage, and 100GB of monthly data transfers, and includes search engine optimization and page caching plug-ins. The top-tier WordPress Enterprise plan (starting at $37.99 for three months of service) builds upon the other tiers with 50GB of storage, 200GB of monthly data transfers, and a free Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate. All the plans include one-click installation, Google Apps integration, and free daily backups.

These packages nearly rival the ones offered by A2$3.92 at A2 Hosting - Shared, the Editors' Choice for WordPress hosting. A2's Linux-based WordPress hosting (starting at $7.99 per month) boasts unlimited storage and monthly data transfers at each tier. A2 states that its optimized WordPress environment is six times faster than traditional hosting. If you want to go the WordPress route, A2 is the path you should walk.

Reseller Web Hosting

If you're looking to get into the web hosting business for yourself, but you don't want to deal with managing servers and other infrastructure matters, check out AccuWeb's Linux- or Windows-based reseller hosting packages. With reseller hosting, you rent server space from an established player and resell it to your own customers.

AccuWeb's plans, starting at $8.54 per month, have unlimited email, 10GB of storage, and 100GB of monthly data transfers. AccuWeb also lets you apply your own branding to the servers you rent, and it supplies 24/7 tech support, too.

Competitor Hostwinds goes the extra mile with stacked specs in a variety of server categories, however, including unlimited email, disk space, and monthly data transfer across all plans. As a result, Hostwinds remains the Editors' Choice for reseller hosting.

Cloud Web Hosting

Cloud hosting is a unique form of web hosting that sees your site draw resources from multiple servers instead of just one as with traditional hosting. Cloud hosting's use of multiple servers gives it certain advantages over traditional hosting. For example, if your website experiences a sudden traffic spike, it can pull resources from another server to prevent slow page loads or, worse, the site going down. In addition, cloud hosting makes it incredibly simple for you to scale resources up or down, as needed.

AccuWeb Hosting also offers Linux Cloud Hosting (starting at $29.94, with a six-month agreement), Windows Cloud Hosting (starting at $18.25, with a three-month agreement), Linux Cloud VPS ($18 per month), and Windows Cloud VPS ($37 per month).

By comparison, DreamHost has excellent packages that start at $4.50 per month (for 512MB of RAM, 100GB of storage, and unlimited monthly data transfers) and top out at $48 per month (for 8GB of RAM, 100GB of storage, and unlimited monthly data transfers). As a result, DreamHost is our co-Editors' Choice for cloud hosting services. That's right: co-Editors' Choice. DreamHost is the reigning champ for small business cloud hosting, while 1&1 Ionos holds it down for enterprise-level cloud hosting.

Building a Website

Creating an AccuWeb Hosting account is quite simple. After signing up for a plan, I received welcome emails and a note that it could take up to 48 hours for AccuWeb Hosting to set up my account. Fortunately, I didn't have to wait two days; the URL was up and running roughly two hours later.

I appreciated AccuWeb Hosting's custom cPanel back-end interface, as it's far easier to read and navigate than the traditional cPanel. I used it to access the Softaculous software library and to install WordPress as the content management system. I'm quite familiar with WordPress, so it was a breeze to create posts and pages and apply an attractive theme. In fact, even if you aren't familiar with WordPress, it should be simple to use. There is also non-WordPress website building software, including Joomla and RVsitebuilder.

E-Commerce and Security Options

As part of my testing, I used Magento to create an online AccuWeb store. It let me quickly create an attractive ecommerce shop in just a few minutes, mostly spent dragging and dropping website elements. I like that Magento has the flexibility to house multiple storefronts and integrate eBay accounts.

AccuWeb Hosting gives you plenty of options for safeguarding your website from those who would do harm. You can add a 128-bit SSL certificate ($49 per year), SpamExperts spam blocker (starting at $5.85 per quarter), and ID protection (for $8 per year). If you're serious about your site's security, you should look into all of these options.

Top-Notch Uptime

Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. While your site is down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services—and they might not come back.

For this testing, I used a website-monitoring tool to track my AccuWeb Hosting-hosted test site's uptime. Every 15 minutes, the tool pinged my website and sent me an email if it was unable to contact the site for longer than one minute. I looked at the data for the most recent two weeks for each site's review. In my latest tests, AccuWeb Hosting proved incredibly stable. In fact, my website didn't go down a single time. As long as it keeps on this course, you can count on it to deliver a rock-solid web hosting experience.

Impressive Customer Service

AccuWeb Hosting offers both web chat and 24/7 telephone customer support. When you ask a question via web chat, AccuWeb Hosting serves up links to a knowledge database. When I asked about the difference between regular hosting and cloud-based hosting, AccuWeb Hosting linked to me satisfactory answers.

I also gave the 24/7 telephone support a call with the same question. The rep also gave me a satisfactory answer. I was incredibly pleased by AccuWeb Hosting's help squad. It was easily one of the best customer service teams I've encountered in the Web hosting space.

If for some reason you're not satisfied, AccuWeb Hosting has a decent 30-day money-back guarantee, one that DreamHost bests with an impressive 97-day money-back guarantee.