Just Host review

Just Host was created in 2002 by Chris Phillips and, at the time, it was one of the fastest growing companies on the market. A decade later, Just Host became one of many web hosting companies that were swooped up by EIG (Endurance International Group). For years, they’ve managed to provide shared hosting solutions both to individuals and different-sized businesses, and all of that at budget-friendly prices. 

In addition, Just Host offers VPS and dedicated servers as well, but it seems that these options were exclusive for the customers located in the US for a certain amount of time. We did manage to see these products with all of their features, although we almost missed them. We assume that since we are situated in Europe, VPS and dedicated servers weren’t displayed as prominently as shared hosting options. On the contrary, they felt almost hidden, being tucked away at the bottom of Just Host’s landing page.

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At the moment Just Host has one available data center and it is located in Utah (USA).

The visual design of Just Host’s main website is simple and somewhat reminiscent of many websites we’ve seen before, many of them belonging to its sister companies. This is not a critique, but rather an observation, since the website is functional in every way and designed with ease-of-use in mind. It seems it has first-time users in mind as well, to whom it tries to appeal with its all-rounded and feature-packed shared hosting plans offered at very attractive prices. 

Just Host currently doesn’t have an official blog and, although they have presence on Facebook and Twitter, both accounts have been collecting dust for the past year.

Plans and pricing

Shared hosting is highlighted on Just Host’s landing page together with a promise of “up to 74% discount”. Still, if you study them in detail, you’ll notice that none of three presented plans offers that exact discount. Though the numbers are close enough, this seems like an example of known “misleading marketing” practices. Nevertheless, the Basic shared hosting plan has enough to offer: 50GB of website space, unmetered bandwidth, e-mail storage of 100 MG per account and a free SSL certificate. This product costs $3.95 (“normally” $11.99) per month, which is a decent value for money.

If you’re interested in VPS hosting, Just Host offers four hosting plans ranging from €16.42 ($19.45) to €49.28 ($58.36) per month. Similarly, there are three plans for dedicated server hosting and they start with €65.54 ($77.61) and go up to €98.31 ($116.41) on a monthly basis.

Although Just Host provides all of its users with a 30-day money-back guarantee, you should keep in mind that this doesn’t include a domain name nor any of the purchased add-ons.

As for payment methods, credit cards and PayPal are supported.

Ease of use

Signing up with Just Host is a done through straightforward procedure which you are surely accustomed with if you had any prior experience with any of the other hosts. After deciding upon a type and hosting plan, you’ll have to select a new domain name or transfer an old one, provided you have it. Then you’ll have to enter an expected amount of your personal data, such as name, phone number, an email address and so on. The next decision is about the billing cycle, which can be performed on a monthly, annual, biennial or triennial basis. It should be pointed out that a first domain registration is free-of-charge only if you decide on an annual plan at a minimum.

Just below you’ll encounter a number of add-ons, some of which will be already pre-selected, so if you don’t want them, you’ll have to deselect them one by one. Interestingly, when we choose to unselect “Domain Privacy + Protection'' (which costs $0.99 per month), a short “warning” popped up informing us of the potential consequences of our choice to remain indifferent to the problem of data security. We did not change our minds after this, although we did appreciate the “warning”.

In the final stage of signup, you’ll have to provide a payment method with all details and proceed to checkout. A few moments later you’ll receive an e-mail from Just Host with all the necessary information. Conveniently, JustHost will point out a one-click installation of WordPress to the newcomers, including the ones for popular applications such as Drupal, Joomla and Magento. It’s important to mention that Just Host has a full-featured cPanel installation with all the tools you’ll need to manage your newly-created website with ease.

If you want to manage your website on your own, you’ll probably be glad to hear that Just Host includes SimpleScripts with which you will be able to effortlessly install a myriad of popular scripts such as phpBB, Form Mail and osCommerce.

 Speed and experience 

A GTmetrix test placed the speed of Just Host’s main website above the average. 6.0 seconds were required for the page to fully load, which looks good in comparison to the average result of 8.1. At the same time, 82 requests were needed, which is slightly below the average of 87. To conclude, GTmetrix ranked Just Host’s website with a B (86%) which is a full grade higher than average and a promising speed performance.

Just Host promises nothing less than an “outstanding uptime”. They elaborate this statement by mentioning that they possess high performance quad processor servers and that their data center is equipped with a UPS power back-up generator. Additionally, they claim to perform round-the-clock network monitoring and therefore can address any potential problem without delay. While all of this sounds good in theory, we had to put it to the test to check how it holds up when put into practice.

After performing an uptime test by UptimeRobot on Just Host’s main website for more than a month, we recorded only one instance of downtime that lasted for 8 minutes. Evidently, they did indeed react rather fast and this one-time issue shouldn’t significantly affect their overall performance.

Support

If you choose Just Host’s “Help Center” you’ll notice that it functions in a similar manner to a knowledgebase. The most popular content is highlighted and it mostly consists of step-by-step guides on various questions, concerns and issues. However, some of the articles are almost ten years old and some things have changed since then (at least the interface), so an update would be welcome.

Besides, the support is offered by Just Host’s agents via telephone, 24/7 live chat and e-mail.  Conveniently, users are able to check the availability of live chat and phone support. There are two numbers for the latter option: one is for the US-based and is toll-free, while the other, for the users outside the USA isn’t.

In order to properly evaluate their support, we threw a couple of trivial questions to the live chat support team and got our answers within a few minutes. These answers were spot on and delivered in a very friendly way, which left us pretty pleased with Just Host’s customer support.

The competition

Hostgator and Just Host are children of the same parents, but they are not exactly in the same league. Both hosts can offer a bit of something for everyone, but when it comes to newcomers, Hostgator gets the prize. Its plans can get you more value for less money, including a free domain with all of its plans and a free website builder.

StableHost is another US-based host. Both of them offer some variety of hosting-related services (StableHost more so), above-average performance and user-friendly cPanel with access to every popular app. However, StableHost puts less restrictions on its beginner plans at a cheaper price.

Both Bluehost and Just Host are US-based companies and part of EIG. They offer a decent variety of hosting options and features and at pretty similar prices, which are even more affordable for users willing to commit. However, Bluehost offers a free domain with all of its plans, while Just Host doesn’t.

At first glance, when compared with PowWeb, Just Host simply seems to have more to offer. And it does, when it comes to different hosting types and options, since it offers VPS and dedicated server hosting besides shared hosting. However, PowWeb‘s one-size-fits-all hosting solution has no limitation on disc space and offers a free domain name for a year as well as an easy-to-use website builder.

Final verdict

Although Just Host does leave a good impression at first, to get all the benefits with their hosting plans, you’ll have to pay more and commit to do so for a longer period of time. Ultimately, in comparison to other web host providers (especially to its sister companies Hostgator and Bluehost) Just Host doesn’t offer enough to stand out and is therefore hard to recommend.

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