Smart Hosting Reviews 844

I've been a Smart Hosting customer for 2-3 years and have never had any problems with them - support responses are good (both in the speed and quality/helpfulness of the reply), site speed is better than most, and the prices are reasonable. Having had a reseller account with both Smart and Heart Internet, I'm currently in the process of transferring all of my client sites away from Heart Internet and over to Smart. Everything about them just seems better.

Despite the recent price increase (which some other reviewers seem to think justifies a bad review!?), Smart Hosting provide a really good service with excellent support. Heart Internet were also good to begin with (been with them for many years), but standards seems to have dropped recently - if supporting Smart with their recent price increase (which isn't actually that much of an increase, for me and my business) means that the same doesn't happen with them, then that can only be a good thing.

I'm a self-employed web designer/developer and use a reseller account for most of my clients websites, including my own. Quality of service is more important to me than cost - if I have to pay a little more for a better service, then that's fine by me. I'd rather have better resources (servers, support, uptime, etc) at my fingertips than simply something that's as cheap as possible - especially if that means being on overloaded shared servers that run slowly and suffer regular outages... just so the company can slap "unlimited" all over their advertising. I appreciate the pros of "unlimited", but also the cons from a technical standpoint. Being self-employed, my time is often limited - I'd rather spend that time designing and building websites, than dealing with complaints from my clients about hosting problems or mailbox connectivity (looking at you again, Heart Internet).

I don't normally bother writing reviews for things, but noticed that Smart's overall rating was dropping and wondered why. Just doing my bit with a well-deserved 5-star review to try and balance things in the right direction. All the negative reviewers are welcome to leave - you're just slowing things down for the rest of us, and you're probably the type of customers that this pricing restructure is intended to cull, anyway!

Well done, Smart Hosting - keep up the good work!

After receiving the price increase email, I decided to switch to Unlimited Web Hosting.

Smart Hosting was a very good hosting provider until they had to lift up their prices which is not a small increase. IT IS A BIG INCREASE!

Don't host here!

I originally had a reseller account with Heart Internet signed up at £19.99 pm, but after price increases after price increase when they hit £44.99 pm I finally had enough and moved to Smart and signed up for unlimited at £8.99 pm, left to my own devices to migrate the websites I had as technical at Smart could not help me migrate, no problem, took time but did it.

Forward approximately a year from sign up and price increase to £14.99 pm, no problem I thought still good value, but I should have heeded the warning signs!

Purchased by Krystal Hosting and surprise, surprise unlimited accounts are no longer, reseller accounts are limited to ridiculous low limits forcing people to upgrade and add bolt-ons that are expensive, don't take my word for it just read the reviews here.

The reason for the new limits and (which ever way you paint it) price increase, is for some non tangible increase in performance and support in exchange for very tangible money.

It has now left me dealing with a company I feel cannot trust, uncertainty on pricing, uncertainty that sites I host or build might take me past a limit that I will end up paying a fortune to host.... Its an uncomfortable feeling.

I now have the unenviable task of telling the few people I host sites for that they will have to pay substantially more (and risk loosing them), move hosts and tell them that their sites will be disrupted again or swallow the costs, not a great place to be, maybe if I promise that their site will be faster and their support will be better they will stay and agree to pay more....yeah! right!

Now, before you read the inevitable reply from Smart here is the last response to my complaint via their ticketing system:

"We're aware of the impact that these proposed changes will make on our servers and systems and the general response has actually been quite well received, we are however aware of the unhappy few that have taken to TrustPilot.

We wish you the best of luck in wherever you choose to continue with your hosting."

Really? People hosting at Smart are happy to have their accounts limited when they signed for unlimited, forced to pay for upgrades and add-ons just to keep their sites live? I just don't believe these people exist and to top it all, Smart could not care less if I go, speaks volumes to me.

Smart have always had my back when it comes to shared hosting, they always use the latest version of cpanel and server security is top notch (rare to see in most shared hosting plans) . The price rise to me didn't come as a shock. It's clear to see that Smart hosting & parent company Krystal Hosting have invested heavily in new servers and the performance side of it can defo be felt when loading heavy or large websites. As someone who works with servers daily as a sysadmin ,I come to smart hosting for all my personal projects knowing that i can trust the servers and the team to keep the service to a high standard. Whilst the price increase could have been carried better ( such as keeping old pricing for existing customers and only introduce the new pricing for new sign ups - As I have seen done in other companies ) It generally didn't surprise me when i received that email warning me about the price changes. Hopefully Krystal / Smart Hosting will keep quality of their product high in the future and not let me down.

I've been paying £2.99 per month for their unlimited web hosting plan, for over a year, and I've been happy with my time with them. However, recently, they have decided to increase the price of my current plan by 200%. In countless other reviews, they say that not everyone sees a price increase of that much, but I and several others do, and that's not pleasing.

They say that they are improving speed, increasing staff and keeping their hardware to the latest specs. So... to increase staff and keep their specs updated, they will have to increase pricing by 200%? This doesn't seem very thought out.

No matter what, I don't want this "better service". I don't want anything besides what I pay for and what I paid for over the last year. Nevertheless, current customers are forced to either comply to these absurd price increases or move to competitors.

Never in my entire life have I witnessed such absurd price changes.

First Class Support following an Issue I had with losing my complete site
Many Thanks for Your Speedy Help

Disappointed and not happy ,after couple of month I got restriction on my usage, I signed up as reseller because of your 100 cpanel plan and unlimited disk space . luckily I did not bring all of my client to this server , now I have to look for alternative place . Thank you

If you want price stability for your hosting don't choose smart hosting. I'm sorry but the latest price increase is just unacceptable for me. I bought into smarthosting initially because of the great value for money and I was paying £8.99/month for my reseller package. Then the merger happened and the price was increased to £17.99, almost double the cost I thought I had commited to.

Neverless, I reasoned that the support was excellent, the performance and general experience good so this was probably on par with what I maybe would expect to pay, although obviously not as good value a proposition as before. But I could understand them wanting to ensure the business was on a more sustainable footing, as they argued at the time.

Now I'm told they need to increase my costs again by another large amount, 66%, to achieve what they said they were intending to achieve from the previous cost hike!

Not acceptable. They're making no allowance for people like me, a small business owner / startup, don't make much money right now as I try and grow. Maybe I could have tolerated a smaller increase of 10 to even 30%, maybe, but yet another huge increase is just taking advantage of existing loyal customers. I guess they're no longer interested in dealing with the likes of me, they just seem to want to keep and attract those people who are higher earners and able to pay more money.

And when will the next price rise be?? Because on this track record you can be sure it will arrive at some point in the not too distant future.

Why not apply this to new customers only? Then at least they will be commiting to smart hosting in the (hopefully...) certain knowledge of what they will be paying, and existing users can continue using the service on the basis they planned for?

I can see you're moving from being a provider of great services at a competitive cost to being a higher end provider, with no flexibility of plans to allow those with lesser needs to continue being with you (the whole point of smarthosting in the first place). This is such a shame as I like to support UK companies, but I guess I will now need to look elsewhere and will start preparing to move.

I want to say thanks to the Smarthosting tech and support teams who have been brilliant since I joined, I've nothing but praise for the service I've received up until now, but I won't be taken advantage of and this move has deeply effected my view of the company.

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Regarding the company's reply:

You have chosen to 'take your service to another level' without any consultation among your users of whether they want or need this (maybe you did but I haven't heard anything). Personally I was very happy with the service, performance and features as they were at the price point they were at.

'If you want to gain the major improvements we detailed we are simply asking you to pay for it' - No I do not want to gain these improvements, the service was just fine for me, but its your way or the highway, you offer no options for those customers not requiring these changes.

Your previous price increase took effect on renewals after 1st Sept 2017, about a year and a half ago, not over two years as you claim.

Its not just that you're increasing the cost AND decreasing the number of accounts and storage capacity available at the same time, but the extent to which you have chosen to do it. You have also been unable to concede that anyone who has left a negative review so far might have any kind of reasonable viewpoint on their side.

Over a year ago Smart Hosting was taken over by Krystal. Brilliant you would think... On the transition day many smart customers lost all their websites. After several days server was restored but with no communications from Smart. My previous review regarding this was reported by Smart and hidden.

All was going well for about a year so I decided to forgive smart and pay for another years hosting. I have now received an email informing me that my next renewal will be increasing by over 200%

Looking at the reviews on smart that have been posted in the last week it also seems that somebody is adding fake 5 star reviews to cover up all the 1 start reviews being received. You can tell because most of the reviewers have only ever reviewed 1 thing before and it was something short and sweet. But that is just my opinion...

As a long term customer of Smart Hosting (Best Web Hosting) I must say that I've always been extremely satisfied with the service I have received. This opinion has held true from my very first product purchase (reseller hosting) through to the standard of the customer support i have received since. Recently I decided to make the move from VPS hosting back to reseller, I felt that this went without a hitch and I was fully supported by excellent customer service agents along the way. In terms of the package I now use the features included within the package are second to none and I want for nothing in terms of how my hosting service now operates.
I would strongly recommend Smart Hosting to anyone looking to make a start in this area!

Peter

WOW what can i say website wasn't working but thanks to the support team member JOXY. It was fixed in minutes. Once again their support excels all hosting companies out there.

We at Landscape Lifestyles want to show our apprecatation for the services carried out. We know the value of customer opinons and reviews. So we thought that spite the potential "negative" reivews that would come up due to the price increase now would be the time to leave a nice and warm review.

Our journey with Smart Hosting started on Registration Date: 19/01/2016

Throughout the years, we have been 100% happy with our provided services, along with the few support issues that we needed sorting. Everything has been ship-shape and above board.

We've recently undergone a website refresh and with the use of Smart, we've been allow to update our website nearly real-time with the use of Git Version Control. It's been a time-saver!

The only issues that I can recall from our initial setup is that of emails not working and slow reponse times from when an email has been sent. (when talking about the slow reponse, I mean to our address, NOT a slow response from Smart Hosting Support.)

Been with this company for a while now from before it became Smart but the latest price increase is just not acceptable and this comes not long after they increased domain renew costs. Moving to Certa Hosting on to their "Pro" package which offers what Smart used to. Can not complain about uptime or customer service but the latest price is just to much.

We have seen it time and time again. Unlimited web hosting services degrading into chaos because they can not sustain it. I've used countless unlimited hosting and it's done just that.

Servers and infrastructure is expensive, hosting is cheap. It's really hard to make enough profit to pay staff and increase the infrastructure to manage that amount of users. Especially since unlimited get's exploited.

Really look into the packages you have, do you really need unlimited? Are you using unlimited? If that's the case you need to choose the right package. This is a smart move for Smart Hosting. It's better to have them do that, than have no Smart Hosting at all.

Remember, you get what you pay for, Smart Hosting will continue to bring an exceptional service - but better. Compare it to something like HostPresto! that also has great reviews, the pricing is still very competitive.

If you are on a budget there are plenty of budget hosting around, Smart Hosting has outgrown that. Again, remember, you get what you pay for!

Used to best but now they should rebrand like their new charges to worst web hosting

Over doubled their pricing, if you are looking for web hosting look elsewhere these guys just don't care!

Response from their don't care reply below
Service has not improved for us, in fact we were offered a server move due to very poor performance of the server we were on we said yes this this but over 3 months later we are still waiting!!!!

Our point is that any company that puts their prices up this dramatically with very little notice it is really unfair and the arrogant many in which I was spoken to on the phone was terrible.

For existing customers a phasing in would have been much better received. One thing stated on the phone was suspended accounts were taking up too many resources could be easily resolved by have a enforced policy that suspended accounts would be automatically removed from servers after 30 days

They have doubled their price with 60 days notice as they want to change the goalposts for 'unlimited'.

AVOID

EDIT: I have around 3 websites that are simple landing pages, just html and a picture, around 5mb in size, getting minimal visitors too.

The Number One Provider for me!!!
Since joining Smart Hosting several years ago, the team have given me nothing but confidence in their service and ability to meet my demands. Exceptional Service Backed By exceptional staff ..

..Back in 1999 I used approximately 70 different web hosts for the services I run.Now use only a few and these are top of the list..

Outstanding customer support when faced with some technical issues - Jack was particularly helpful

Crazy price policy, are you serious?

I'm currently paying 25GBP/mo to host some little websites, using 280GB of space (mainly e-mails, very low bandwidth usage). Yesterday I received an e-mail about their new prices and I can't believe that: price is jumping from 25GBP/mo to 69,99GBP/mo and I still can't host my sites because the space is reduced to 250GB and there is no way to buy additional space.

I will move my sites very soon, it's an unacceptable price bump!

I have been using the hosting service before it changed to smart hosting and it's gone down hill. The price spiked as soon as they took over and the support system always says it's very busy.

The only benefits was the uptime, space and bandwidth offered which they are removing to the basic package of 25gig, They are no longer competitive with other providers you can get the same service at a lower price with more space. Any new customers I would be very wary and do your research first else you are stuck with the pain in moving all your sites.

They will lose a lot of customers which I don't feel they care about too much with little incentive to stay.
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Thank you for your reply and I appreciate you being honest.

"you are purely price driven with quality an afterthought, then we would not keep you hostage "

Don't agree on that for instance eUKhost can offer the same quality at the same price with more resources. I also did email you with my feedback but as with your support system that reply came 20 hrs later!!