WinHost Review 2021 - 5,500+ Words! 8,438 Views
This in-depth WinHost review is generated from webmaster working experience and side by side evaluation upon WinHost plan features, price value, support availability and server uptime stats. The sole purpose is to give an unbiased conclusion to WinHost service and help our readers find the suitable windows hosting service.
WinHost is known to be Microsoft Golden Hosting partner and it specializes in presenting customers dependable and reasonable hosting services. As a Microsoft Golden Hosting partner, the company always keeps updated with the latest and user-friendly Windows hosting technologies and services to make it one of the best ASP.NET hosting with an affordable price in the market. WinHost Windows 2012 hosting platform is perfect for meeting the ASP.NET. Now, the company hosts hundreds of thousands of developers and businesses around the world. Each site (SQL database, email, and website) is hosted on separate servers to offer superior constancy and resource accessibility.
WinHost has been in this business since 2000. WinHost is providing its services to 50,000 and over ASP.NET websites now and going to be the biggest company. With nearly two decade’s development, WinHost now hosts thousands of websites and it’s still fast growing with approximately 500 new customers for each month. To be frank, with such a tremendous customer base and popularity, WinHost is undoubtedly a reliable Windows hosting provider. WinHost offers 30-days money back guarantee. They provide a budget product with cutting-edge technology that businesses, small or large, can surely appreciate. WinHost is still a medium-sized web hosting company if compared with the companies that are working in the market for over 10 years. But as the ASP.NET providers, this company is the largest professional one in comparison of more over 20 companies including GoDaddy, MidPhase, HostGator, DiscountASP.NET, SmarterASP.NET, and others.
As a growing web hosting company, WinHost devotes itself to premium asp.net hosting solutions based on shared servers. This company has many unique advantages, like self-owned servers, its office near to the datacenter, the self-designed control panel, the latest MS features, and so on. If you are looking for a web host or have looked into WinHost for their services then you should take a look at this review. The WinHost Review in below will analyze the data center, technology, features, prices, support and ease to use of WinHost. After the review, readers will know WinHost deeper and know whether WinHost is good to sign up as well. Hopefully, this can help you decide if they are the right choice for your web hosting needs.
More than that, WinHost has always purchased servers and updates them frequently. The servers are Dell brand, with a high configuration like dual quad cores, 32 GB RAM, RAID 10 disk arrays and 64-bit software.Most importantly, WinHost hosts each website in isolated application pools to decrease effect from other websites. Furthermore, the company hosts each element of hosting on separate servers as well. For example, SQL databases are on a server. Websites are on another server. Emails are hosted on another server too.
The prices for the plans are $3.95, $7.95 and $15.95 respectively. The amazing prices are offered only if you choose to sign up with WinHost for 2 years. Otherwise, you will have to pay a slightly higher price if your subscription time is shorter ($4.95, $9.95 and $19.95 if you pay for one year’s subscription). Approximately, 5-30 FTP users, 100-500 MB site memory and 500 MB-5 GB SQL / MySQL disk space are provided. Disk space, bandwidth, SQL / MySQL database and email with storage depends on the plan selected.
The disk space that is available for you is 3 GB with your WinHost Basic plan and unlimited for the other two plans. The bandwidth is 50 GB for WinHost Basic and again, unlimited for the other two plans. All hosting plans are on Windows Server and you get one SQL database with space for 500 MB of data in the WinHost Basic plan, an unlimited number of SQL databases of 2 GB and 5 GB for the WinHost Max and WinHost Ultimate plans respectively. Additional features include: Free Microsoft SQL Hosting, SQL Data Hosted on Separate Servers, Microsoft SQL Server Database Versions, SQL DBO Rights, Full Text Search, SQL Backup and SQL Restore, Attach MDF File Tool, SQL Management Studio Access Allowed, ASP.NET ReportViewer Control, Microsoft Access Database Hosting and MySQL Database Hosting Disk Space.
Max Plan: The Max Plan is just a step above the Basic Plan and it actually has more rewards to it. The best price for the Max Plan is $7.95 per month and this is for those willing to stay for two years. The one-year payment price is $9.95 per month while the three-month price is $11.95 per month. Max Plan costs more than the Basic Plan for some reasons. First, it offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth and up to 2GB SQL and MySQL. It has all the benefits attached to the basic plan. The plan is suitable for new businesses and developers.
Ultimate Plan: The 3rd windows hosting plan is suited for sites with a lot of database and email storage requirements. It combines every feature on the basic and Max plans and is the most recommended for sites that deal with commercial activities. It has SQL and MySQL of up to 5GB. Like the other plans, a minimum contract period of three months is required. A three-month contract starts with $21.95 per month while one-year and two-year plans cost $19.95 and $15.95 respectively. The Ultimate plan grants users the opportunity to transfer domain names to WinHost by selecting domain extensions. You can also use international domain names and have up to 100 FTP users.
Power Plan: The last and newly added plan is the Power Plan. There are a few differences between this plan and the Ultimate plan. These include the amount of disk space (10GB vs 5GB), Site Memory Allocation (1GB vs 500MB), the number of FTP Users (250 vs 100) and the last but not least it uses Windows Server 2016 and IIS 10.X. All other features are the same as Ultimate plan. The pricing for power plan, however is more than double the price of Ultimate plan. So, if you don't need these features you can stick to the Ultimate plan and pay less than half the price.
WinHost shared hosting plans are based on Windows Server 2008, 2012 or newly added Windows Server 2016 for the Power Plan. Accordingly, WinHost supports IIS 10, 8 and IIS 7 along with IIS manager remote access. Each solution contains other features such as isolated application pools, full trust, medium trust, URL Rewrite Module, site memory allocation, web deploy, etc.Moreover, WinHost supports the latest MS SQL 2014 as well as previous versions. ASP.NET is updated to 4.5.2 version too. Customers will take advantage of MVC, RIA services, Silverlight, Web Sockets for Windows 2012, AJAX, Entity Framework, LINQ and much more.
Although WinHost runs Windows Server, you can still install PHP, one of the most popular open source scripting languages today. This is great news and a relief for webmasters that used to face difficulties installing PHP on Windows servers. If you have programmed your website to access MySQL databases, you shouldn’t have any issues at WinHost because you can install them too. If you are running an intranet, say for your company or business, you will be glad to know that at WinHost you have the option of installing and using Kentico CMS. The list goes on. Whether you own a simple blog (you can install WordPress) or are the owner of an online store (nopCommerce can be used) you can install it all at the click of one button in your control panel.
What makes WinHost outstanding and popular is its feature-rich ASP.NET hosting service. In addition, there are many other softwares, applications and components like SmarterStats website analytics, the compatible of visual studio, visual web developer express, WebMatrix, Dreamweaver, ASP.NET report viewer control and etc. Its email hosting also comes with rich features, like webmail access, auto-responders, SPAM filtering, virus scanning, web calendar, and task list. In terms of server management, the simple web-based ASP.NET control panel of WinHost is remarkable, which could be considered as one of the best one in the industry. It is fully developed by the engineers of WinHost. This icon-based control panel offers many easy-to-use features, such as contact information manager, resource usage information, web application installer, DNS management tool, schedules task tool, plan upgrade/downgrade and others to help its customers easily manage website setup, files, databases, IIS setting, billing, domain and account information.
WinHost also provides easy 1-click application installer in the web-based control panel, with which its customers could install DotNetNuke, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and many other applications effortlessly. If customers need to transfer from old web host, then WinHost will offer free site migration services, to help them start with WinHost quickly and easily.
• 1-Click Application Installer
One of the best features offered by WinHost is that their control panel hosts a wide assortment of One-Click-App Installers of some of the most popular open source web applications around. This allows for customers to gain instant access to PHP apps such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and phpBB, as well as ASP.NET apps like DotNetNuke, Orchard, BlogEngine and nopCommerce.
• Database Infrastructures
Also provided with their hosting plans are the database infrastructures for these apps, along with free Microsoft SQL and MySQL. Other applications included with WinHost are Moodle, Gallery Server Pro, Kooboo CMS, mojoPortal, MediaWiki, dasBlog, Shopping Cart.NET, Umbraco CMS and many others. No matter what kind of website you are hosting with WinHost, these applications provide you with the tools you need to improve your site and give a better service to your customers. From publishing platforms, customizable shopping carts, e-Commerce solutions and many more apps, WinHost provides very useful tools at affordable prices.
• PHP and MySQL
WinHost Hosting Features In the past, PHP didn’t run well on a Windows server, but over the last several years, Microsoft has improved IIS and now PHP runs very well on Windows hosting platforms, which means famous open source apps like Joomla, WordPress and Drupal can run well on WinHost Windows hosting plans. In addition, by supporting MySQL as part of their Windows hosting platform, a popular open source relational database system, WinHost enables customers to use a lot of popular open source apps.
• SQL Server
WinHost hosts data on separate SQL servers and promises never to host websites and SQL databases on the same server. Besides, they support integrated full-text search, stored procedures and ASP.NET SQL Session, which makes their customers get DOB right and manage SQL database remotely using SQL Management Studio or SQL Management Studio Express.
• ASP.NET 4.5/5 Hosting
Their hosting plans support ASP.NET 4.5/5 hosting on their Windows 2012 platform, which is compatible with Visual Studio 2013/2012, and their Windows 2008 hosting platform also fully supports ASP.NET 4.0 and is compatible with Visual Studio 2010, which enables customers’ applications to be written in any language that is compatible with the common language runtime, including Visual Basic and C#.
• Windows 2012 Hosting
They use Windows server 2012 - the latest Windows operating system comes with IIS8 to deliver customers with more options for their web applications including support for .NET, ASP and PHP. What’s more, they support Full Trust to make customers’ sites isolated from one another for greater reliability and security.
For system software, WinHost leverages the latest stable technologies to setup an industry-standard server environment, which includes Windows Server 2012 R2, Internet Information Services 8.x, and etc. Each client will be assigned to their own isolated application pool for free so that the poorly coded applications written by the other customers won’t take down their sites.
It’s easy to use and provides all information related to your needs. Our editors (non-technician) can get started to build the website in minutes only. Unlike some control panels for Windows web hosting such as DotNetNuke, WinHost control panel is very reliable and bugless. You won’t be bothered by the painful exceptions, especially in IIS/website configuration.
WordPress is great. Maintaining it is not. Between WordPress core updates, plugin updates and theme updates, it can seem like something needs to be taken care of every time you log in to your WordPress site. What's worse, if you don't log in to the admin section very often, missing those updates can be dangerous, opening your site up to exploits and compromises. Winhost managed WordPress hosting frees you from WordPress maintenance tasks, and as a bonus, includes a hardening service that increases overall security and makes it more difficult for the bad guys to exploit your site.
What is WordPress hardening?
WordPress hardening is a comprehensive security overhaul to make your WordPress installation more secure. It includes a number of things such as :
WinHost pours most energy and money into its products, which enables customers to get excellent hosting at the best possible cost. You can send inquiries to WinHost through their online support desk. You can also do so by copying their email address and sending a message through your email account. Whichever way you choose, your queries, questions and concerns will always get replies within 12 hours even if you send emails on a weekend. Before contacting WinHost's customer support, people can find and check out the knowledge base first. WinHost develops the standard online knowledge base about how to setup and manage the ASP.NET servers, domains and accounts. In this way, customers will find answers and tutorials to commonly asked questions as well as troubleshooting solutions for common errors. In fact, customers can even post programming, debugging questions and finding solutions in WinHost's forum. WinHost engineers are really good at ASP.NET. Just as most people know, the control panel of their web servers is fully self-developed by WinHost employees using ASP.NET. Hosting every site with a company full of experts is really a pleasant thing.
• High-quality Windows hosting
Unlike other web hosting services that may spread their resources too thin, WinHost focuses their efforts on providing high-quality Windows hosting and nothing else.
• Lots of hosting features
Almost all available windows and ASP.NET technologies are offered in WinHost plans. Some famous features such as ASP.NET, MVC, SQL Server, Crystal report, IIS Remote manager, etc are fully supported by WinHost, the difference is the amount you will get from different service plan. In order to catch up with the different requirements from web developers, PHP/MySQL technologies are also introduced into their system. In this way, no matter if you want to program with MS technologies or PHP scripting, WinHost server is fully compatible. It's extremely helpful to developers who need different technologies support.
• Lowered price for New users
If you search around the web for web hosting related stuff, most hosting companies are Linux based, few ones have windows service plan or the price is pretty high. WinHost is an exception in the industry who can offer affordable service to every people. If you're ASP.NET developer or SQL server developer, WinHost actually provides a good environment to deploy your projects. Because of the affordable price, it's absolutely worth a try.
• One click installation of popular applications
WinHost gives you access to the most popular open source web applications with their subscription, all of which can be installed in just a single click.
• In-house developed Hosting Control panel
WinHost never uses third party hosting control panel software in order to have everything under control. Instead, their people programmed their own hosting control panel by .NET technologies. The control panel only keeps customer needed functions with simple navigation. All web service can be setup easily with no much learning.
Go to http://www.WinHost.com and check control panel demo.
• Ease of Use
The good thing about having your site hosted on a Windows-based server is that you will find it much easier to handle than if you were to work on, say, a Linux server. This is because, for the most part, the whole world uses Windows for their day-to-day computing activities. But WinHost makes it even easier to work on its servers by including a control panel that allows you to tweak and configure your site from a central place. You can use your WinHost control panel to do everything from changing your password to balancing your books and even making payments to your customers. If you want to make sure that your site looks and works perfectly on mobile devices you can use the goMobi link that is also on your control panel. Everything is so straightforward that anyone with the basics of computing can do amazing things with their websites.
• Easy Site Migration
If you already have a website hosted elsewhere and would want to move it to WinHost, worry not as they offer free and easy site migrations.
• 30-day money back guarantee
This company offers a 30-day money back guarantee on their subscriptions plans so customers can take it out for a test run without practically any risk.
• Excellent technical support with great customer service
• Great speed and great value
• 100% uptime with maintenance
• User-friendly interface with affordability offered
• Access to popular web applications with their subscription
• No need to struck in long-term contracts
• Freedom to Upgrade or downgrade plans yourself
• Minimal basic features : WinHost's most basic subscription has a little less to offer than most of the basic subscriptions of other competitors in the market.
• Shared Hosting Only : What WinHost offers is a shared ASP.NET hosting only, which means if customers' websites have high needs on server resources, security or they want to change the server configuration which WinHost doesn't offer, they have to change a web host.
• Expensive Domain Name Registration : With costs starting at $15.87 a year, domain name costs with WinHost are a little more expensive compared to other competitors.
• Limited Customer support (Live chat and real-time support option is not available)
• Limited Bandwidth
• Only three tiers of service offered
• Backups must be done manually with the help of control panel
• ISS adaptive Silverlight streaming is not enabled
• OLE objects are not possible to be used
If you are looking for a quality web hosting service to go with then WinHost is definitely a company to consider. They may not be the most versatile web host but they are the best in what they do. You get affordable pricing for their different Windows hosting subscriptions and even enjoy a 30-day money back guarantee in case you change your mind after subscribing. The company offers an excellent host of tools to go along with all of their subscription plans so you are sure to provide the best experience to your web visitors. That said, their most basic subscription plan might be, well, a little too basic for some, and their domain name is quite pricey compared to most. Other than that, however, you are still getting a very good service.
Near to the datacenter, WinHost is convenient to manage its servers. Plus, advanced servers and separated hosting, WinHost is reliable, speedy and secure. It gathers the latest MS features and is easy to use due to the self-built control panel. Prices are within affordable ranges. Support is 24 hours a day. So, we highly recommend WinHost for Windows hosting customers. Also, their customer support is really friendly when hosting your ASP.NET site with them. For more information, please visit the company website.
WinHost was founded in the year 2000 by a group of professionals in windows server development.
WinHost Introduction
As the name suggests, WinHost is a dedicated Windows web hosting provider. WinHost provides various types of hosting solutions to meet your different website requirements at an affordable price without any kind of long-term contracts. Their people have collaborated with many windows projects for seamless co-operation with Microsoft. They keep improving and offering latest MS technologies to clients. WinHost won the Best ASP.NET Hosting Award for the year 2015. Based in California, the company has developed its own control panel. Specialized hosting for Microsoft Access, Microsoft WebMatrix, Kentico CMS, PHP, WordPress, goMobi, SiteLock, DotNetNuke, nopCommerce, BlogEngine, AJAX, and Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch is available for the clients.WinHost is known to be Microsoft Golden Hosting partner and it specializes in presenting customers dependable and reasonable hosting services. As a Microsoft Golden Hosting partner, the company always keeps updated with the latest and user-friendly Windows hosting technologies and services to make it one of the best ASP.NET hosting with an affordable price in the market. WinHost Windows 2012 hosting platform is perfect for meeting the ASP.NET. Now, the company hosts hundreds of thousands of developers and businesses around the world. Each site (SQL database, email, and website) is hosted on separate servers to offer superior constancy and resource accessibility.
WinHost has been in this business since 2000. WinHost is providing its services to 50,000 and over ASP.NET websites now and going to be the biggest company. With nearly two decade’s development, WinHost now hosts thousands of websites and it’s still fast growing with approximately 500 new customers for each month. To be frank, with such a tremendous customer base and popularity, WinHost is undoubtedly a reliable Windows hosting provider. WinHost offers 30-days money back guarantee. They provide a budget product with cutting-edge technology that businesses, small or large, can surely appreciate. WinHost is still a medium-sized web hosting company if compared with the companies that are working in the market for over 10 years. But as the ASP.NET providers, this company is the largest professional one in comparison of more over 20 companies including GoDaddy, MidPhase, HostGator, DiscountASP.NET, SmarterASP.NET, and others.
As a growing web hosting company, WinHost devotes itself to premium asp.net hosting solutions based on shared servers. This company has many unique advantages, like self-owned servers, its office near to the datacenter, the self-designed control panel, the latest MS features, and so on. If you are looking for a web host or have looked into WinHost for their services then you should take a look at this review. The WinHost Review in below will analyze the data center, technology, features, prices, support and ease to use of WinHost. After the review, readers will know WinHost deeper and know whether WinHost is good to sign up as well. Hopefully, this can help you decide if they are the right choice for your web hosting needs.
Table Of Contents
- WinHost Introduction
- Benefits of Windows Hosting
- Datacenters and Technology
- Pricing
- Detailed Information On Each Plan
- WinHost Rich Features
- ASP.NET Hosting Features
- Reliability, Uptime, Speed and Security
- Control Panel
- Managed WordPress Hosting
- Support Service for ASP.NET
- Money Back Guarantee
- Awards and Recognition
- WinHost Advantages (Pros)
- Drawbacks Of WinHost (Cons)
- What if I don't like WinHost hosting?
- Cancellation Policy
- WinHost Coupon
- Conclusion
- WinHost FAQs
Benefits of Windows Hosting
.Net Framework: If you prefer using .NET, Visual Basic, MS SQL, etc. to build websites, Windows hosting is your best option. Actually, it is the only option since Unix server platform does not support those. FrontPage Extensions: Microsoft FrontPage is a popular website builder, especially for individual websites. And Windows hosting is more compatible with Microsoft FrontPage than Unix hosting. Access databases: If you want to use Access databases, Windows hosting is a better alternative as well. Microsoft support: Windows operating system is a proprietary OS of Microsoft. And Microsoft maintains and updates the OS from time to time.WinHost Review on Datacenters and Technology
WinHost gives 99.9% uptime guarantee to its customers around the world. Websites hosted on its servers have fast page loading speed and nice security. Check how WinHost makes it in below. WinHost selected a local data center near to its offices. Therefore, its technical staff will walk to the datacenter and check its servers anytime. As for the data center itself, it has redundant electricity from local plants, UPS backup battery power, and standby generators. In addition to that, air conditioning systems maintain the temperature stable, which is beneficial to hosting.More than that, WinHost has always purchased servers and updates them frequently. The servers are Dell brand, with a high configuration like dual quad cores, 32 GB RAM, RAID 10 disk arrays and 64-bit software.Most importantly, WinHost hosts each website in isolated application pools to decrease effect from other websites. Furthermore, the company hosts each element of hosting on separate servers as well. For example, SQL databases are on a server. Websites are on another server. Emails are hosted on another server too.
Pricing
In this WinHost review, I like to discuss it’s pricing plan first. This company offers one of the cheapest windows hosting opportunity in the industry. With only $3.95 per month, you can upload anything on your website. The pricing depends on the kind of service you are looking for. WinHost only has shared Windows hosting but has 4 different level solutions to meet various demands. The 4 solutions are Basic plan, Max plan, Ultimate plan and newly added Power plan.The prices for the plans are $3.95, $7.95 and $15.95 respectively. The amazing prices are offered only if you choose to sign up with WinHost for 2 years. Otherwise, you will have to pay a slightly higher price if your subscription time is shorter ($4.95, $9.95 and $19.95 if you pay for one year’s subscription). Approximately, 5-30 FTP users, 100-500 MB site memory and 500 MB-5 GB SQL / MySQL disk space are provided. Disk space, bandwidth, SQL / MySQL database and email with storage depends on the plan selected.The disk space that is available for you is 3 GB with your WinHost Basic plan and unlimited for the other two plans. The bandwidth is 50 GB for WinHost Basic and again, unlimited for the other two plans. All hosting plans are on Windows Server and you get one SQL database with space for 500 MB of data in the WinHost Basic plan, an unlimited number of SQL databases of 2 GB and 5 GB for the WinHost Max and WinHost Ultimate plans respectively. Additional features include: Free Microsoft SQL Hosting, SQL Data Hosted on Separate Servers, Microsoft SQL Server Database Versions, SQL DBO Rights, Full Text Search, SQL Backup and SQL Restore, Attach MDF File Tool, SQL Management Studio Access Allowed, ASP.NET ReportViewer Control, Microsoft Access Database Hosting and MySQL Database Hosting Disk Space.
Detailed Information On Each Plan
Basic Plan: The basic plan is recommended for students who want to launch a small website or a blog and is ideal for affordable windows hosting with no requirements to have multiple databases, large email storage or excessive disk space and bandwidth. Basic plan beneficiaries also become members of the WinHost community forum where they learn more from others who are doing the same thing. They have access to raw log files, unlimited sub domains, unlimited domain pointers and they can register with an international domain name. It is important to note that potential basic plan users have to make up their minds to subscribe for a minimum of three months which attracts a fee of $5.95 per month. The one-year plan goes for $4.95 per month while the best plan requiring a two-year subscription demands a deposit of $3.95 per month.Max Plan: The Max Plan is just a step above the Basic Plan and it actually has more rewards to it. The best price for the Max Plan is $7.95 per month and this is for those willing to stay for two years. The one-year payment price is $9.95 per month while the three-month price is $11.95 per month. Max Plan costs more than the Basic Plan for some reasons. First, it offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth and up to 2GB SQL and MySQL. It has all the benefits attached to the basic plan. The plan is suitable for new businesses and developers.
Ultimate Plan: The 3rd windows hosting plan is suited for sites with a lot of database and email storage requirements. It combines every feature on the basic and Max plans and is the most recommended for sites that deal with commercial activities. It has SQL and MySQL of up to 5GB. Like the other plans, a minimum contract period of three months is required. A three-month contract starts with $21.95 per month while one-year and two-year plans cost $19.95 and $15.95 respectively. The Ultimate plan grants users the opportunity to transfer domain names to WinHost by selecting domain extensions. You can also use international domain names and have up to 100 FTP users.
Power Plan: The last and newly added plan is the Power Plan. There are a few differences between this plan and the Ultimate plan. These include the amount of disk space (10GB vs 5GB), Site Memory Allocation (1GB vs 500MB), the number of FTP Users (250 vs 100) and the last but not least it uses Windows Server 2016 and IIS 10.X. All other features are the same as Ultimate plan. The pricing for power plan, however is more than double the price of Ultimate plan. So, if you don't need these features you can stick to the Ultimate plan and pay less than half the price.
WinHost shared hosting plans are based on Windows Server 2008, 2012 or newly added Windows Server 2016 for the Power Plan. Accordingly, WinHost supports IIS 10, 8 and IIS 7 along with IIS manager remote access. Each solution contains other features such as isolated application pools, full trust, medium trust, URL Rewrite Module, site memory allocation, web deploy, etc.Moreover, WinHost supports the latest MS SQL 2014 as well as previous versions. ASP.NET is updated to 4.5.2 version too. Customers will take advantage of MVC, RIA services, Silverlight, Web Sockets for Windows 2012, AJAX, Entity Framework, LINQ and much more.
WinHost Rich Features
WinHost offers its clients an amazing array of free applications when you sign up with them. As a webmaster, you will not be hindered from realizing your dream website because you can’t run an application on your hosting plan or because you can’t afford to pay for it. Browsing through the list of applications, you can find something for almost any job. In the WinHost control panel, you can install applications like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, phpMyAdmin and phpBB for open source apps and the likes of DotNetNuke, nopCommerce, BlogEngine and Orchard for .NET apps.Although WinHost runs Windows Server, you can still install PHP, one of the most popular open source scripting languages today. This is great news and a relief for webmasters that used to face difficulties installing PHP on Windows servers. If you have programmed your website to access MySQL databases, you shouldn’t have any issues at WinHost because you can install them too. If you are running an intranet, say for your company or business, you will be glad to know that at WinHost you have the option of installing and using Kentico CMS. The list goes on. Whether you own a simple blog (you can install WordPress) or are the owner of an online store (nopCommerce can be used) you can install it all at the click of one button in your control panel.
What makes WinHost outstanding and popular is its feature-rich ASP.NET hosting service. In addition, there are many other softwares, applications and components like SmarterStats website analytics, the compatible of visual studio, visual web developer express, WebMatrix, Dreamweaver, ASP.NET report viewer control and etc. Its email hosting also comes with rich features, like webmail access, auto-responders, SPAM filtering, virus scanning, web calendar, and task list. In terms of server management, the simple web-based ASP.NET control panel of WinHost is remarkable, which could be considered as one of the best one in the industry. It is fully developed by the engineers of WinHost. This icon-based control panel offers many easy-to-use features, such as contact information manager, resource usage information, web application installer, DNS management tool, schedules task tool, plan upgrade/downgrade and others to help its customers easily manage website setup, files, databases, IIS setting, billing, domain and account information.WinHost also provides easy 1-click application installer in the web-based control panel, with which its customers could install DotNetNuke, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and many other applications effortlessly. If customers need to transfer from old web host, then WinHost will offer free site migration services, to help them start with WinHost quickly and easily.
ASP.NET Hosting Features
Note that the plans differ from each other when it comes to the basic features, such as data transfer, MySQL database, disk space, FTP accounts, etc. More details are well-organized as follows. The service offered by WinHost includes most of the technologies on ASP.NET, such as MS Only focusing on ASP.NET hosting service. WinHost is absolutely one of the best ASP.NET hosting providers that offer the most highlights, although there are thousands of ASP.NET hosting companies on the market. In below, we have listed the main features the company has integrated with their 3 ASP.NET hosting plans.• 1-Click Application Installer
One of the best features offered by WinHost is that their control panel hosts a wide assortment of One-Click-App Installers of some of the most popular open source web applications around. This allows for customers to gain instant access to PHP apps such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and phpBB, as well as ASP.NET apps like DotNetNuke, Orchard, BlogEngine and nopCommerce.
• Database Infrastructures
Also provided with their hosting plans are the database infrastructures for these apps, along with free Microsoft SQL and MySQL. Other applications included with WinHost are Moodle, Gallery Server Pro, Kooboo CMS, mojoPortal, MediaWiki, dasBlog, Shopping Cart.NET, Umbraco CMS and many others. No matter what kind of website you are hosting with WinHost, these applications provide you with the tools you need to improve your site and give a better service to your customers. From publishing platforms, customizable shopping carts, e-Commerce solutions and many more apps, WinHost provides very useful tools at affordable prices.
• PHP and MySQL
WinHost Hosting Features In the past, PHP didn’t run well on a Windows server, but over the last several years, Microsoft has improved IIS and now PHP runs very well on Windows hosting platforms, which means famous open source apps like Joomla, WordPress and Drupal can run well on WinHost Windows hosting plans. In addition, by supporting MySQL as part of their Windows hosting platform, a popular open source relational database system, WinHost enables customers to use a lot of popular open source apps.
• SQL Server
WinHost hosts data on separate SQL servers and promises never to host websites and SQL databases on the same server. Besides, they support integrated full-text search, stored procedures and ASP.NET SQL Session, which makes their customers get DOB right and manage SQL database remotely using SQL Management Studio or SQL Management Studio Express.
• ASP.NET 4.5/5 Hosting
Their hosting plans support ASP.NET 4.5/5 hosting on their Windows 2012 platform, which is compatible with Visual Studio 2013/2012, and their Windows 2008 hosting platform also fully supports ASP.NET 4.0 and is compatible with Visual Studio 2010, which enables customers’ applications to be written in any language that is compatible with the common language runtime, including Visual Basic and C#.
• Windows 2012 Hosting
They use Windows server 2012 - the latest Windows operating system comes with IIS8 to deliver customers with more options for their web applications including support for .NET, ASP and PHP. What’s more, they support Full Trust to make customers’ sites isolated from one another for greater reliability and security.
WinHost Reliability, Uptime, Speed and Security
WinHost web hosting reliability is outstanding compared to other comprehensive web hosting companies. UptimeAs Microsoft certificated gold partner and by utilizing the latest servers and network infrastructure, WinHost guarantees 99.9% uptime on each hosting account. The company has set the uptime monitoring system for a sample site hosted, which ensures the scans for the availability of website in every 5 minutes. This process results in minimizing the downtime, which is the surety of 100% uptime availability of ASP.NET hosting in practical format, as committed by the Win Host Company. They also provide 24×7 server monitoring service from the centralized network operation center. All kinds of server and network break are alerted immediately and automatically, they will be taken with the proper actions to get them resolved as soon as possible. Their world-class data centers are equipped with redundant connection to almost all ISPs and are backed up with redundant power. Besides, the data centers and servers are both reachable for WinHost engineers, thus they can handle any maintenance job at any time. |
 SpeedTo gain better speed for ASP.NET, WinHost only uses premium Dell servers backed up with the latest 64-bit software, dual quad-core, 32 GB RAM and RAID 10 disk arrays, which are much powerful than what the other web hosts provide. Besides, all of these servers mentioned above are placed in its top data centers, along with 24/7/365 server monitoring system backup to ensure them work faster and smoother. |
 Web Page LoadingBy leveraging the power of quality servers and world-class data center, WinHost is able to guarantee a fast page loading speed. Besides, it hosts each element of their services on separate servers to avoid slowing down the website performance. For instance, the e-mails are hosted on e-mail servers, databases are hosted on database servers, and stats are hosted on stats servers.According to the performance testing of an e-commerce site hosted with WinHost Basic package, the server response time is 317ms, which is far exceeded the average of budget shared ASP.NET web hosts. |
 SecurityWinHost provides isolated IIS application pool per hosting account. Every website is running with the different processes but not the thread-base. That guarantees no customer will be badly affected by the failures of the neighbors on the shared server. Besides, by the dedicated memory allocated for each hosting account, you don’t worry about that your server resources will be over-used by your neighbors. In WinHost hosting architecture, different elements of the services are hosted on their own servers. For example, websites hosting service, SQL databases, email, and etc, each of them is on a separate set of servers. It costs more, but it’s more reliable and more secure in this way. |
WinHost Control Panel
WinHost ASP.NET web host provides a well-designed and visual control panel as the following screenshot.It’s easy to use and provides all information related to your needs. Our editors (non-technician) can get started to build the website in minutes only. Unlike some control panels for Windows web hosting such as DotNetNuke, WinHost control panel is very reliable and bugless. You won’t be bothered by the painful exceptions, especially in IIS/website configuration.WinHost Fully Managed WordPress Hosting Introduction
WinHost Managed WordPress Hosting Includes :- WordPress hardening for maximum security
- Monthly updates of WordPress core, Plugins and Themes
- A WinHost security expert will personally examine your WordPress installation every month, looking for malicious files and signs of compromise. If your WordPress installation is compromised or hacked, They will clean it up.
- WordPress installation, including database set up, Plugins and Themes
- Free website migration for a quick, smooth transition
- Configuration of automatic WordPress site and database backups
- WordPress-specific support and personalized assistance at no extra charge
- All of this in addition to everything you get with the Winhost Max Plan
WordPress is great. Maintaining it is not. Between WordPress core updates, plugin updates and theme updates, it can seem like something needs to be taken care of every time you log in to your WordPress site. What's worse, if you don't log in to the admin section very often, missing those updates can be dangerous, opening your site up to exploits and compromises. Winhost managed WordPress hosting frees you from WordPress maintenance tasks, and as a bonus, includes a hardening service that increases overall security and makes it more difficult for the bad guys to exploit your site.
What is WordPress hardening?
WordPress hardening is a comprehensive security overhaul to make your WordPress installation more secure. It includes a number of things such as :
- Enabling IP restrictions
- Disabling editing of WordPress theme files
- Preventing executable files from running in your uploads folder
- Installing plugins to block malicious URL Requests
- Enabling automatic updates (based on your needs - can include minor WordPress core updates, plugin and theme updates, and major core updates)
WinHost Support Service for ASP.NET
As Microsoft Golden hosting partner, WinHost engineers are well-trained to solve all the issues related to Windows hosting and even better, the company is founded by a group of ASP.NET geeks. All of their technical support members are kindly, enlightened and knowledgeable on either Windows server platform or SQL Server database.They are also willing to help diagnose customers’ ASP.NET scripts problem during the site hosting. A service they cannot get from most of the traditional hosting service providers. For any ASP.NET related hosting issues, customers can feel free to contact WinHost via its Support Portal, which is accessible in the control panel. Customers just need to log in the support portal by their login credentials of the control panel. Then they can submit their tickets and within 12 hours WinHost technicians will reply the tickets. The support representatives are responsible for giving timely response and professional assistance. Note that WinHost does not provide live chat and phone support options, but WinHost guarantees to respond each support ticket in 12 hours and it offers complete online support 24/7/365 from support portal. With the support portal, customers can contact both WinHost technical support and billing departments easily. According to WinHost customer reviews, majority of its customers are satisfied with the help they received from WinHost because the technicians of WinHost will reply and offer solutions patiently and rapidly. The lack of phone service is precisely another reason for its low cost.WinHost pours most energy and money into its products, which enables customers to get excellent hosting at the best possible cost. You can send inquiries to WinHost through their online support desk. You can also do so by copying their email address and sending a message through your email account. Whichever way you choose, your queries, questions and concerns will always get replies within 12 hours even if you send emails on a weekend. Before contacting WinHost's customer support, people can find and check out the knowledge base first. WinHost develops the standard online knowledge base about how to setup and manage the ASP.NET servers, domains and accounts. In this way, customers will find answers and tutorials to commonly asked questions as well as troubleshooting solutions for common errors. In fact, customers can even post programming, debugging questions and finding solutions in WinHost's forum. WinHost engineers are really good at ASP.NET. Just as most people know, the control panel of their web servers is fully self-developed by WinHost employees using ASP.NET. Hosting every site with a company full of experts is really a pleasant thing.
WinHost 30-Day Money Back Guarantee
Customers' purchases with WinHost is risk-free. Owing to the fact that they are very sure of the kind of service they render, WinHost offers a 30-day money back guarantee to all first-time users and on all services that require payments. If you feel you were misinformed and that the company is not living up to its expectations as written in the contract terms, you can seek a refund within thirty days and you will surely get back your money. Their first priority is to make clients happy and to see that everybody has a reason to call again or refer a friend to their services.Awards and Recognition
Having satisfied numerous clients in previous years, WinHost has bagged a lot of awards as a mark of diligence. It has also got the Accredited Host Seal and is considered as one of the top picks in web hosting services.WinHost Windows Hosting Advantages (Pros)
The biggest advantage from WinHost is their dedicated efforts in offering windows hosting service. WinHost people be able to focus on this platform and optimize their windows server with max reliability. Instead of using all available solutions for windows server setup. Their developers programmed lots of self-technologies to enhance security and performance. All WinHost servers are centrally managed and monitored.• High-quality Windows hosting
Unlike other web hosting services that may spread their resources too thin, WinHost focuses their efforts on providing high-quality Windows hosting and nothing else.
• Lots of hosting features
Almost all available windows and ASP.NET technologies are offered in WinHost plans. Some famous features such as ASP.NET, MVC, SQL Server, Crystal report, IIS Remote manager, etc are fully supported by WinHost, the difference is the amount you will get from different service plan. In order to catch up with the different requirements from web developers, PHP/MySQL technologies are also introduced into their system. In this way, no matter if you want to program with MS technologies or PHP scripting, WinHost server is fully compatible. It's extremely helpful to developers who need different technologies support.
• Lowered price for New users
If you search around the web for web hosting related stuff, most hosting companies are Linux based, few ones have windows service plan or the price is pretty high. WinHost is an exception in the industry who can offer affordable service to every people. If you're ASP.NET developer or SQL server developer, WinHost actually provides a good environment to deploy your projects. Because of the affordable price, it's absolutely worth a try.
• One click installation of popular applications
WinHost gives you access to the most popular open source web applications with their subscription, all of which can be installed in just a single click.
• In-house developed Hosting Control panel
WinHost never uses third party hosting control panel software in order to have everything under control. Instead, their people programmed their own hosting control panel by .NET technologies. The control panel only keeps customer needed functions with simple navigation. All web service can be setup easily with no much learning.
Go to http://www.WinHost.com and check control panel demo.
• Ease of Use
The good thing about having your site hosted on a Windows-based server is that you will find it much easier to handle than if you were to work on, say, a Linux server. This is because, for the most part, the whole world uses Windows for their day-to-day computing activities. But WinHost makes it even easier to work on its servers by including a control panel that allows you to tweak and configure your site from a central place. You can use your WinHost control panel to do everything from changing your password to balancing your books and even making payments to your customers. If you want to make sure that your site looks and works perfectly on mobile devices you can use the goMobi link that is also on your control panel. Everything is so straightforward that anyone with the basics of computing can do amazing things with their websites.
• Easy Site Migration
If you already have a website hosted elsewhere and would want to move it to WinHost, worry not as they offer free and easy site migrations.
• 30-day money back guarantee
This company offers a 30-day money back guarantee on their subscriptions plans so customers can take it out for a test run without practically any risk.
• Excellent technical support with great customer service
• Great speed and great value
• 100% uptime with maintenance
• User-friendly interface with affordability offered
• Access to popular web applications with their subscription
• No need to struck in long-term contracts
• Freedom to Upgrade or downgrade plans yourself
Drawbacks Of WinHost (Cons)
Like every other hosting providers, WinHost has its weaknesses except all good features. No live chat support would be the biggest disadvantage for nowadays business. Especially when people need instant support but not good at speaking, Live Chat is the best way to get problem solved. If Live Chat can be introduced to their support system, I believe more people would like to deal with this company. WinHost uses email for primary contact and ticket support is followed. It's rare compared to most their competitors.• Minimal basic features : WinHost's most basic subscription has a little less to offer than most of the basic subscriptions of other competitors in the market.
• Shared Hosting Only : What WinHost offers is a shared ASP.NET hosting only, which means if customers' websites have high needs on server resources, security or they want to change the server configuration which WinHost doesn't offer, they have to change a web host.
• Expensive Domain Name Registration : With costs starting at $15.87 a year, domain name costs with WinHost are a little more expensive compared to other competitors.
• Limited Customer support (Live chat and real-time support option is not available)• Limited Bandwidth
• Only three tiers of service offered
• Backups must be done manually with the help of control panel
• ISS adaptive Silverlight streaming is not enabled
• OLE objects are not possible to be used
What if I don't like WinHost hosting?
Who to choose if I don't like WinHost? There're several top alternative options but Arvixe is definitely the NO.1 recommendation. Except for all the advantages from WinHost, you can get instant live support from arvixe and arvixe windows hosting plans are actually on the same level with WinHost. As far as I can tell, we're 100% satisfied with arvixe service.Cancellation Policy
For cancellation of services, the customer needs to log and select Close Site link. Cancellation is in force at the end of the current billing period. For security reasons, all customer data and files are destroyed and deemed as unrecoverable. No refund is provided for cancellation request at the end of the first 30 daysWinHost Coupon
Previously, signing up yearly hosting will get extra 2 months free hosting service. Means we pay 12 months fee for 14 months' service and overall discount is about 10%! But They just revised the entire site design and order system. This promotion is removed from order system. Instead, they involved coupon system for any discount offer. But you have to contact their sales support in order to get any code since the code is dynamic.Conclusion
Undoubtedly not a suitable option if you prefer Linux hosting, WinHost provides only Windows hosting services. Also, they don’t offer any virtual private server (VPS), Dedicated or cloud server at all. What they do is providing three high-powered Windows hosting plans with quite low charges, a money-back guarantee of 30 days, and a team with ASP.NET expertise. But WinHost is one of the best Windows hosting providers in this industry. Its reputation rests on its popularity with the customers. With feature-rich plans, inexpensive pricing and custom packages, there is something for everyone. WinHost’s ASP.NET is ideal for small businesses, individuals, and ASP.NET developers. The company believes in updating its solutions and technologies to make best cheap hosting in the market.If you are looking for a quality web hosting service to go with then WinHost is definitely a company to consider. They may not be the most versatile web host but they are the best in what they do. You get affordable pricing for their different Windows hosting subscriptions and even enjoy a 30-day money back guarantee in case you change your mind after subscribing. The company offers an excellent host of tools to go along with all of their subscription plans so you are sure to provide the best experience to your web visitors. That said, their most basic subscription plan might be, well, a little too basic for some, and their domain name is quite pricey compared to most. Other than that, however, you are still getting a very good service.
Near to the datacenter, WinHost is convenient to manage its servers. Plus, advanced servers and separated hosting, WinHost is reliable, speedy and secure. It gathers the latest MS features and is easy to use due to the self-built control panel. Prices are within affordable ranges. Support is 24 hours a day. So, we highly recommend WinHost for Windows hosting customers. Also, their customer support is really friendly when hosting your ASP.NET site with them. For more information, please visit the company website.
WinHost FAQs
When did WinHost setup?WinHost was founded in the year 2000 by a group of professionals in windows server development.
How many hosting plans offered by WinHost?
There's total of 3 web hosting plans offered by WinHost: Basic, Max and Ultimate.Why WinHost limit their database size?
WinHost offers limited database size because you will not use more than 1 GB for most of the cases. In case you need more space than this limit, it means your website is no longer suitable to be hosted under shared hosting environment and you need to upgrade.What's the windows server OS from WinHost?
WinHost uses both windows server 2008 and server 2012, you can choose the platform with your preference.What's the WinHost server hardware specification?
WinHost introduced 100% DELL servers with multiple Intel XEON processors, 32GB RAM, RAID 10 and 1000 Mbits internet bandwidth of connection.How many clients/websites being hosted by WinHost?
There're more than 50,000 websites hosted by WinHost and there's stable monthly growth about 500/month.How do I cancel account with WinHost?
If you would like to cancel account with WinHost, just raise a support ticket and they will follow up your request. If there are unused funds in your account, they will refund you.What's the general waiting time for WinHost support?
The general waiting time is 30 minutes.Do we recommend WinHost service?
Yes, WinHost is a golden partner of Microsoft that's dedicated in windows hosting service. Their server specifications and service features are all configured up to date. For now, they offer super affordable hosting plan at $4.95/month plus extra two months FREE service!
Published : Thu 05 Apr 2018
Updated : Sat 09 Jan 2021
Updated : Sat 09 Jan 2021
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