HostPapa Review

Posted on by j

HostPapa delivers web hosting under a wide range of scalable plans. Tap into their options for shared, WordPress, VPS, and reseller hosting, with additional services that include managed hosting, plus domain acquisition and a website builder. 

This company mostly caters to small businesses spinning up or maintaining their web stores or business sites. HostPapa guarantees a 99.9% uptime and delivers hosting management that is supported by a user-friendly interface and an excellent support team. That said, there are a few caveats to be mindful of when considering this hosting option, like HostPapa’s limited data center coverage, lack of automatic backups, and often expensive pricing. 

HostPapa brand logo image for Quick Sprout review.

HostPapa Compared

Because of its serious caveats, HostPapa didn’t make the cut on our list of the best web hosting providers. While it isn’t a bad option, I find Hostinger to be the better choice for most people because of its greater affordability for similar reliability and fast speeds. Get started with Hostinger for just $1.99 a month.

Want to know more about these alternative options to HostPapa? See all of our recommendations for the best web hosting companies.

About HostPapa

HostPapa is a Canadian web hosting company founded by Jamie Opalchuk in 2006. It’s headquartered in Burlington, Ontario and operates using strategically placed data centers in North America and Europe.

Today, it hosts hundreds of thousands of sites while remaining a privately-owned company that provides customers with full-featured web hosting packages. The service operates globally, from Canada and the United States to the United Kingdom, India, Hong Kong, and beyond. Interestingly enough, HostPapa has a surprisingly strong fan base in New Zealand and Australia in particular. 

In addition to hosting plans, HostPapa also offers a website builder, a domain marketplace, email and office software packages, and unique security offerings that help protect your online properties.

HostPapa Health and Stability 

HostPapa is a leading provider of web hosting and website solutions. Its main mission is to provide every customer with a full-featured hosting package, backed by efficient customer service and powered by renewable green energy.

HostPapa has acquired over 19 organizations, with the most recent being a logo design business called Deluxe on January 31, 2023. It also has a loyal customer base who swear by the service, so it’s safe to say HostPapa isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

HostPapa Pricing

HostPapa offers a range of affordable and scalable pricing tiers for their hosting options. Just keep in mind that when you renew your plan, it becomes slightly less affordable over the long haul. 

Note that the pricing is different for different hosting solutions, with individualized rates for shared, VPS, reseller, WordPress, and managed WordPress hosting. Make sure you know what you’re signing up for before committing.

HostPapa Pricing Structure

On top of individual tiers for each hosting option (with each unlocking more resources and features) HostPapa also offers an array of contract terms. 

In most situations, a three-year term locks in the best monthly rate, so we’ll discuss most pricing below in terms of a 36-month commitment. But you can also opt for terms of one month, three months, six months, one year, or two years. Rates tend to go up about $1 at each threshold for shorter terms. So, a three-year rate of $2.95 per month goes up to $3.95 per month for two years, $4.95 for a single year, and so on.

HostPapa Pricing Comparison

At $2.95 per month, HostPapa’s baseline shared hosting is certainly affordable. But it’s not like it’s doing anything wildly different compared to other web hosting solutions. For example, DreamHost and Bluehost both often run their starter plans at the same rate if you opt to pay annually. 

Here’s the deal—all popular web hosting providers more or less have the same rates at the lowest end of hosting, so it doesn’t make much of a difference, money-wise, when you’re choosing between shared hosting providers. It’s when you need greater resources or something closer to dedicated hosting that pricing differences really start to appear.

For example, HostPapa’s managed WordPress hosting starts at around the same rate as Bluehost and DreamHost, but its highest-priced plans for that end up being about $5 to $10 more expensive per month than those two (while Hostinger doesn’t offer managed WP hosting at all).

HostPapa Trials and Guarantees

HostPapa offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so if you’re unhappy with the service during the first month, you can ask for a refund with no questions asked.

HostPapa Shared Web Hosting Provider Review

As a web hosting provider, HostPapa’s shared hosting is suitable for a wide range of users and businesses. It offers a generous array of features on its affordable plans, along with adequate storage and a wide range of additional features like unlimited MySQL databases, website staging, and the Softaculous app installer. 

Together with its highly efficient customer service, HostPapa can be the perfect solution for a lot of site owners.

What Makes HostPapa Web Hosting Provider Great

HostPapa customer support team contact options.
HostPapa has a dedicated customer support team called PapaSquad to ensure users 24/7/365 days prompt support.

Above-average speed: HostPapa servers are seriously fast, with some tests showing load times of an amazing 11 milliseconds in the United States. Even for cities outside of the western hemisphere, like Singapore and Bengaluru, the slowest pings came back no slower than one-fifth of a second, which is quite impressive. According to experts, HostPapa performs really well in continental Europe and the United Kingdom as well, thanks to HostPapa‘s data centers in Toronto and Amsterdam. Plus, built-in caching further improves your website’s response time if you’re running a site that’s heavy with images or other elements.

Elite customer support: HostPapa has a friendly, polite, and proficient customer support team available 24/7 to answer your questions in English, French, Spanish, or German. That’s some extra-mile service that you won’t find from many other hosting providers. Aside from their team of support executives, you can also use HostPapa’s extensive knowledge base of self-help articles and video tutorials to resolve issues or learn new hosting management and optimization techniques yourself.

Impressive storage: Web hosting storage has a direct impact on how your website functions and performs. Plus, it’s crucial for sites that keep a lot of imagery and video on-site, like web stores, blogs, and agency portfolios. You won’t have storage problems with HostPapa, as its cheapest plans come with 100 GB of storage—compared to other hosting providers that offer between 5 and 20 GB—which bumps up to unlimited storage on its two highest-priced plans (the lower of the two still starting at just $5.95 per month for a three-year commitment).

Great freebies: HostPapa offers free domain registration and SSL certificates with all of its hosting plans. You’ll secure a domain for one year from the date of registration, after which you’ll just have to pay renewal fees. SSL certificates are renewed automatically for free upon expiry. HostPapa also offers free and quick website migration if you’re switching to them from another provider. Their experts take care of everything, from handling databases and files to avoiding downtime while moving your site content.

Staging environment: HostPapa offers an innovative staging tool on three of its four shared hosting plans. This allows you to create a replica of a website to test out new designs before pushing them out to the public. Fine-tune different elements of your site without interrupting functionality, causing it to crash, or losing business. Also, thanks to the user-friendly interface, creating a staging site and then launching it when it passes muster is easy and straightforward.

Eco-consciousness: Not many people think about the toll that web hosting takes on the environment, but it takes a lot of energy to keep multiple data centers up and running for website owners that expect virtually no downtime. HostPapa is doing its bit to ensure a greener earth, which is something that needs to be applauded. The company purchases electricity from a clean energy supplier to run its servers, infrastructure, and offices, making it one of the few eco-friendly and responsible web hosting providers you can find.

Where HostPapa Web Hosting Provider Falls Short

HostPapa renewal pricing.
HostPapa looks affordable at first glance, but renewing the plans becomes considerably costlier.

Expensive renewals: HostPapa’s pricing starts out quite affordable, but it can jump up significantly after your introductory rate period ends. Shared hosting tends to renew at around $11.99 per month, which can be quite a shock after starting out at something closer to $3 per month. This further justifies opting for a longer initial commitment if you can afford the upfront payment. Locking in a rate of $2.95 for three years puts that expensive rate on hold for a good while and only costs you $106.20 at checkout (which is less than a year’s worth of hosting at the renewal rate).

Limited server locations: HostPapa’s servers are mostly clustered within North America, though they tend to add new data centers semi-regularly. While their coverage is pretty good (as mentioned above in the observations on load times in the U.S., Europe, and Asia), higher latency is still a serious potential issue for international site visitors. Keep this in mind if a lot of your website’s audience or target customers are located outside of the United States, Canada, or western Europe.

Underwhelming key extras: Admittedly, HostPapa has a fairly complete feature set for its web hosting plans, but there are some key differences that can make other providers more appealing. For example, its one-month money-back guarantee is a good bit shorter than competitors like DreamHost and InMotion that offer a generous 90-day refund period. In addition, HostPapa only provides automatic site backups as a premium add-on that costs an additional $19 a year, whereas many competitors provide weekly backups as part of their hosting plans at no additional cost.

HostPapa Shared Web Hosting Compared

Overall, HostPapa makes for a fair option for a web hosting provider, but I recommend looking into other options. Hostinger is my top choice because of its superior affordability and reliability. Check out our top picks for the best web hosting companies to learn more.

HostPapa Web Hosting for WordPress Review

HostPapa offers a solid hosting option that’s laser-focused on WordPress as well. You’re getting a similar array of resources and features as its shared hosting, with extras like Jetpack Free included and a WordPress auto-installer. But, it hasn’t made it on our list of the best web hosting for WordPress websites for a couple key shortcomings. 

While the hosting provider ensures enhanced speed, efficient support, and accelerated performance, the lack of free backups and its expensive renewals (in the same vein as our gripes with its shared hosting plans) can lead to a lot of hassle down the line. Furthermore, you’ll find better rates, more WordPress-oriented bonus features, or both from a lot of other providers.

HostPapa Web Hosting for WordPress Compared

While HostPapa has several things going for it, it falls behind our top picks for the best web hosting for WordPress.

  • Hostinger – Most affordable WordPress host
  • Cloudways – Best for flexibility and extensive options
  • SiteGround – Best for ecommerce websites with easy site migration
  • Bluehost – Best for creating your first WordPress website
  • Scala Hosting – Most freebies with WordPress hosting plans

HostPapa Managed WordPress Hosting Review

HostPapa doesn’t feature on our best managed WordPress hosting services list, either. You’re getting a comparable array of features, including automated backups and real-time security monitoring, but the costs are steep compared to HostPapa’s competitors.

One thing in HostPapa’s favor when it comes to managed WordPress hosting is that every plan comes fully featured. You don’t have to pay for the mid-tier or highest-priced plan just to unlock useful elements like WooCommerce enablement, automated theme and plugin updates, Git integration, single sign-on, 24/7 support, and more. That can make its Launch plan (starting at $19.95 per month) a good enough deal for a site owner without huge resource needs.

HostPapa Managed WordPress Hosting Compared

We’ve covered a lot of options for managed WordPress hosting on our post covering the top providers. Here’s a summary of our top list from that post, with the situations or needs we think they’re best for:

  • Hostinger — Cheapest managed WordPress hosting
  • WP Engine — Most popular managed WordPress service
  • DreamHost — Best for high-traffic websites
  • Bluehost — Best marketing tools for managed WordPress hosting
  • A2 Hosting — Best for speed
  • SiteGround — Best low-cost managed WordPress hosting plans
  • Nexcess — Best features for ecommerce sites
  • Flywheel — Best for agencies
  • Kinsta — Best for scalability

HostPapa Virtual Private Servers (VPS Hosting) Review

Unfortunately, HostPapa also doesn’t make the cut for our best VPS hosting solutions. Once again, their prices are just too steep compared to the rest of our favorite options, especially when factoring in the resource allocation for each plan. More expensive competitors deliver much more processing power and memory, while ones similar in price to HostPapa (or cheaper) deliver virtual private servers that are every bit as powerful as those in HostPapa’s data centers.

HostPapa Virtual Private Servers (VPS Hosting) Compared

Consider the following VPS hosting providers that strike the right balance between cost-effectiveness and top-notch performance:

HostPapa Reseller Hosting Plans Review

Reseller hosting—whereby you can acquire web hosting services that you can then pass along to clients—is a unique and competitive subcategory of web hosting providers. HostPapa didn’t make our list of the best reseller hosting plans because of its expensive renewals (which can upset your clients when you have to pass along the rate hike to them) and lack of important reseller features like automatic backups.

HostPapa Reseller Hosting Plans Compared

If you’re looking for trusted hosting providers that you can resell the services of to your client base, here are your best options:

  • SiteGround — Best for existing agencies
  • InMotion — Best for starting a web hosting business
  • GreenGeeks — Best for developers who prioritize eco-friendly hosting
  • HostGator — Best cost-effective reseller plans
  • Liquid Web — Best for hands-off server maintenance and upkeep
  • A2 Hosting — Best for scaling small-to-medium-sized client lists

Final Verdict

HostPapa is a solid web hosting provider that delivers great performance (particularly in North America and Europe) and customer support at a competitive price in some categories like shared hosting. Overall, it can be a good choice for some businesses, but the steep renewal rates and lack of some features should make you carefully compare it to other options to make sure you’ll be happy with it for the long haul.


Source: quicksprout

HostPapa Review