JustHost is a web hosting company which has been around for some time. The company is founded by Chris Philip – the same guy who also founded Dot 5 Hosting (sold), Just Develop It (a web development company) as well as cloud storage company Just Cloud.

Back in 2009/2010, JustHost was one of the fastest growing hosting companies; it was one of the first which introduced an Anytime Money-back Guarantee; and the one-and-only web host with free MySpace ad credits ($50).

The hosting deals at JustHost are now different and have been updated accordingly in this article. I believe the people as well as culture behind the company are very different today.

About Endurance

Just in case you have no idea who the heck EIG is – they are probably the biggest player in today’s web hosting industry. It was first founded as a web hosting company in 1996 and is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts.

JustHost Server Performance

Our experience & thoughts:

JustHost Hosting Uptime

Uptime tracking was performed on a random user’s site (Dave, read his story below).

We started tracking Dave’s site in May 2015 and the following are some results we have recorded.

JustHost Speed Tests at Bitcatcha

 Tests last updated 26th February 2018

JustHost Speed Tests at Webpage Test

Despite showing decent performance in ratings on BitCatcha, JustHost consistently under-performed in one critical area of Webpage Test – Time to first Byte.

Test site #1 – JustHost Plus Plan, test from Singapore

Test site #2 – JustHost Plus Plan, test from Chicago

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JustHost Customer Care

Our Experience & Thoughts:

On JustHost Unlimited Hosting

This is written clearly in JustHost’s TOS (User Agreement #7 Usage Polices and Definition), read underlined text.

#7) 1d. Unlimited Hosting Space; excessive MySQL files

[…] Accounts with a large number of files (inode count in excess of 200,000) can have an adverse affect on server performance. Similarly, accounts with an excessive number of MySQL/PostgreSQL tables (i.e., in excess of 1000 database tables) or of database size (i.e., in excess of 3GB total MySQL/PostgreSQL usage or 2GB MySQL/PostgreSQL usage in a single database) negatively affect the performance of the server. Just Host may request that the number of files/inodes, database tables, or total database usage be reduced to ensure proper performance or may terminate the Subscriber’s account, with or without notice.

JustHost Server Limitation

To further on my point that all unlimited hosting is in fact limited, the following table is published in JustHost TOS.

Note that JustHost limit users’ server usage by limiting file count (inodes) and database tables. The number of allowed inodes for Starter and Plus Plan is actually slightly below industry standard (not too bad, but most hosts allow up to 100,000 inodes for a ~$5/mo host).

On the side note, it seems that Pro Plan is a pretty good deal – provided that you are signing up on the promo price of $9.95/mo (news at $22.99/mo). Quoting words from the same TOS page –

The Pro Package has 80% less accounts per server which allows the use of more resources per account (more CPU usage, disk usage, bandwidth). It offers more speed, more power, with less users. More CPU, memory and resources For $24.99 / month (Saves you over $225 per year over the cost of buying these features separately!)

JustHost Anytime Money Back Guarantee

JustHost offers an Anytime Money Back Guarantee with all its hosting plans.

The cancellation policy is very simple according to the officials – if you cancel your hosting account, JustHost will provide you with a refund for the remainder of the term. The refund will exclude any setup fees that were charged when you signed up and any domain registration fees that you paid. But you do get to keep your domain name.

After digging further into JustHost TOS, it seems that JustHost actually allow a full refund (including the domain fees!) if you cancel your new account within the first 3 days –

*If you cancel within 3 days and you purchased a .com, .net, .biz, .info, .org, and .us domain, you will receive a full refund.

Also the domain registration will be released. Domain names can only be cancelled and refunded within 3 days. Domain registrations for UK domains such as .co.uk and .org.uk cannot be cancelled.

JustHost live chat experience

Calling the service a live chat is a little iffy in my point of view. After filling in some basic information a pop-up chat screen appeared.

However, I’m pretty sure they were using a chatbot, and not a very good one either. User experience was extremely poor, given that responses took AGES to come back. At times it took so long that I thought it was an email system instead. Eventually, I simply gave up.

JustHost Video Tutorials

Although there are video tutorials, the interface doesn’t really bring to mind anything really visual. Also, there are a grand total of 17 videos, that’s it.

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JustHost Shared / VPS Hosting Features

Today JustHost offers both shared and VPS hosting services. Let’s take a look at each.

JustHost Shared Hosting

JustHost offers three shared-hosting plans; namely Basic, Plus, and Prime.

The Basic Plan starts at $3.95/mo where it is only good for one website that goes not more than 50 GB of storage and 5 email accounts.

In contrast, both the Plus Plan ($6.95/mo) and the Prime Plan ($6.95/mo) offer bigger capacity and allow users to host more websites – 10 for Plus and unlimited for Prime. You also get 100 email accounts for Plus and unlimited emails for Prime, although Plus limits each email account size to 500MB. (*Note – Prime renews at $14.99/mo while Plus renews at $10.99/mo)

What differentiates the two is that the Prime Plan comes with more perks, including domain privacy protection, $200 value in marketing coupons/vouchers, plus almost unlimited resources in all areas.

There is also what Just Host calls Go Pro for $14.99/mo, which one-ups Prime with   a Dedicated IP address and SSL Certificate.

JustHost VPS Hosting

JustHost VPS Hosting choices – Standard, Enhanced, Premium, and Ultimate.

JustHost VPS hosting plans are divided into four different offerings:

• Standard: $14.99/mo; single core server, 2 GB of RAM, 30 GB of storage, 1 TB/month, and 1 IP.
• Enhanced: $29.99/mo; dual core server, 4 GB of RAM, 60 GB of storage, 2 TB/month, and 2 IPs.
• Premium: $44.99/mo; dual core server, 4 GB of RAM, 60 GB of storage, 2 TB/month, and 2 IPs.
• Ultimate: $59.99/mo; quad core server, 8 GB of RAM, 240 GB of storage, 4 TB/month, and 2 IPs.

All VPS hosting plans include a free domain name, cPanel control, and root access. As usual with all EIG hosting brands, prices listed above are for first term only, renewal will come at higher rates  – $24.99/49.99/74.99/99.99 monthly for Standard/Enhanced/Premium/Ultimate.

 

JustHost User Review by Dave Scott

 Jerry’s note

I had a JustHost account back in 5 or 6 years ago but have cancelled it in 2012 to cut down operation costs.

In 2015 I bumped into Dave Scott on a popular blogger job board. I was searching for bloggers who can write me unbiased reviews on several hosting brands and Dave has an existing site hosted on JustHost  To give you a better view of JustHost service, I asked Dave Scott to share his experience with us. The following review (on pros & cons and bottom line) is written by Dave. 

Background on Dave and JustHost

Just over 6 years ago I was looking for a company to host the website for our new business. I looked at all the ‘big name’ companies, read all the “Top Tens” and reviews but still had a hard time deciding.

Dave’s Considering Factors

Being a new business, as well as new to building web sites, a few things were important to me;

1. Cost, obviously – Some hosting sites were really cheap but were also really poorly put together, had poor uptime statistics and ‘nickeled and dimed’ you after the signup process. Others looked great as far as services, uptime and options, but cost way too much for what was being provided.
2. Availability – No point in having a great site if the servers are always down.
3. Web site builder – I know web site builders generally are pretty poor for creating a good professional looking site, but I needed a quick start and a builder that would get me up and running quickly and easily.
4. Space – I wasn’t sure exactly how much I would eventually need but at the beginning I was looking to use the server for some pretty heavy file storage, so I didn’t want to hit a wall for available space or data transfer limits.

After several days of searching I was down to 2 or 3 choices, all pretty much offering the same services at the same price.  The deciding factor for me was the complete package;

Why JustHost? The Goods

The costs are very reasonable for my continuing unlimited plan, no sudden rises in fees after the first year!  There have also only been 2 or 3 outages of more than a few minutes over the 6 years which is very impressive.

There are a selection of site-builders, none of them 5 star but all usable and easy to learn.  I quickly realized that a site built with these tools isn’t very good and started to use Dreamweaver, but they’re great to start with.

Yes there have been brief outages, yes there has been a billing snafu once, yes there has been a frustrating experience with a support person whose English and technical knowledge both left a great deal to be desired.  However, the outages have been brief, the billing issue sorted out very quickly and efficiently and the technical issue escalated in a very acceptable time frame to a technician with greater knowledge (of both servers AND English).

Probably the only issue I have is that I have to do manual backups.  This is something that should be included , simply for disaster recovery.  It is simple to run and download my own backups but I think it should be done by the hosting company.

Why JustHost? The Goods

The costs are very reasonable for my continuing unlimited plan, no sudden rises in fees after the first year!  There have also only been 2 or 3 outages of more than a few minutes over the 6 years which is very impressive.

There are a selection of site-builders, none of them 5 star but all useable and easy to learn.  I quickly realized that a site built with these tools isn’t very good and started to use Dreamweaver, but they’re great to start with.

Yes there have been brief outages, yes there has been a billing snafu once, yes there has been a frustrating experience with a support person whose English and technical knowledge both left a great deal to be desired.  However, the outages have been brief, the billing issue sorted out very quickly and efficiently and the technical issue escalated in a very acceptable time frame to a technician with greater knowledge (of both servers AND English).

Probably the only issue I have is that I have to do manual backups.  This is something that should be included , simply for disaster recovery.  It is simple to run and download my own backups but I think it should be done by the hosting company.

Quick Glance: JustHost Pros vs Cons

To recap, here’s what Dave think of JustHost –

Verdict: Should You Go with JustHost?

In Dave’s opinion, JustHost rates 5 stars; (in his words) not because they are perfect but because any negatives are too insignificant to rate them down for.

As he mentioned, he has never regretted his decision to use JustHost. Dave mentioned that his website has matured and become more complex, what’s good about JustHost is that it had no problem keeping up.

From my experience, JustHost is an okay-host with a very cheap price tag. The best part about what they offer is in the price – however, this has changed slightly and they now offer about par prices compared to other cheap web hosting companies out there. However, I am unsure how JustHost would perform for large sites with lots of data or traffics (see limitation listed above).

Order / Visit JustHost Online

 Click: https://www.justhost.com