5,374 reviews from customers, Reddit, and YouTube, ranked by what people actually say.
From customers, and from around the web with the source linked.
Has a dedicated server with Liquid Web bought in 2024 and was told it would rise about 51% on 17 days notice. The old price can only be kept by paying twelve months up front, which they find hard to afford as a self-employed customer.
“They say I can keep my old price of $355 if I pay for 12 months up front. That's $4260 I have to come up with to avoid the 51% hike!!”
My domains have sat at Gandi since around 2009. Back then the mailboxes came free with each domain and renewals were never something I thought about. Since the company was bought, both changed. Mail became a paid add-on, so I moved it to another provider and only kept the free forwarding, and my .com renewals now cost more than three times what I pay at Porkbun. The DNS editor is still clean and I can't remember a single outage. Twelve domains moved so far, the rest will go as they come up for renewal.
Freelancer here. I run 11 small client WordPress sites on one Hetzner VPS with the Essentials plan. Unlimited web apps on a single server is what makes the maths work for me. The panel takes care of the dull parts: setting up the stack, free SSL, picking the PHP version per app, scheduled backups, and one staging site where I test plugin updates first. Keep in mind you still pay Hetzner for the server, RunCloud only manages it. Prices have gone up more than once since I signed up, and API access is now only on the Business tier, which annoyed me. One time an agent update failed and I had to update it by hand over SSH. Support is ticket based, they answered within a day and were polite but it's not instant.
Been on a Cloud VPS 20 with them since early 2024. It hosts my Nextcloud, a Gitea instance, Uptime Kuma and a few Docker side projects. 12 GB of RAM for what they charge is still hard to beat anywhere I've looked. Know what you're buying though. The vCPUs are shared and you can see steal time in htop during European working hours, so anything CPU heavy runs noticeably slower than on my Hetzner box. Disk is fast, no complaints there. Uptime has been decent for me. Two unplanned outages so far, one about 40 minutes, plus a maintenance reboot announced with very little notice. Support tickets get answered but slowly and the first reply is usually a template, so I don't count on them for anything. The panel looks old but does what I need: reinstall, snapshots, rescue mode. I keep restic backups off the server anyway. For self hosting by someone who can manage Linux it's great value. I wouldn't put a client's shop on it.
Already runs a VPS with netcup and is happy with it. Ordering a second one took just under 48 hours to provision with no status note, which they accept, and they praise the service and use the servers for AI testing and non-production work.
“Edit: soon after writing this message, the server start up email came through. So I think it was a little less than 48 hours. I’m OK with that. I love their service.”
Got the same Liquid Web renewal email but their increase is only 5% on a good original deal. Notes the price freeze now requires paying twelve months up front instead of monthly, and they do their own monitoring and troubleshooting anyway.
“Last time they did this we had the option to freeze the price with a 12 month contract, but still paying monthly. This time the 12 months has to be paid up front,”
Was a Liquid Web customer for close to a decade and had several frustrating support experiences. When the renewal email threatened a 12% increase unless a one-year commitment was signed, it confirmed the decision to move to another host.
“At the time I had several frustrating experiences with LW support, and no longer trusted their quality. I was already in the process of moving to a new host,”
KVM 2 for about 8 months, running n8n, a Postgres container and a couple of small APIs in Docker. 8 GB RAM at that price is hard to beat, and the panel makes snapshots, OS reinstalls and firewall rules easy. I barely touch it beyond SSH. Then I ran a heavy scraping job overnight and the server got throttled hard, everything crawled until the next day. Support pointed me to their CPU usage limits. Uptime otherwise has been fine. Check the renewal price before you pay. The intro rate only covers the prepaid term, after that it's a lot more.
About two years building client sites on it, mostly Next.js. The developer experience is still the best I've used. Push to GitHub, every branch gets its own preview URL I can send the client, merge and it's live. Pages are fast and downtime has been a non issue.
Moved the bakery's WordPress site and email here almost three years ago because the first year was so cheap. For a long time it was fine. cPanel is the normal one, installing WordPress took about ten minutes, and the chat agents were polite even if half the time they just sent me a knowledge base link. This year was rough. Renewal came in at more than double what I first paid. Then in August the whole thing was down for most of a day, site and mailboxes, and live chat was down too, so the only updates I could find were posts on X. Customer orders that came in by email didn't reach me until the next day. A couple of times around holidays the site also showed a resource limit page when traffic went up. Fine for a hobby site. If your business runs on email, put it somewhere else. I'm moving mine this month.
Was with Liquid Web from the start and left two years ago. Says the company went from a favourite to one that made them sick after the private-equity buyout, and recommends looking elsewhere.
“Left them 2 years ago. Was with them from the start. The minute the vultures bought them out, it became from one of my favourite companies to one that made me physically sick.”
Uses Fastmail as main email and works well with aliases, rules and subfolders for separate addresses.
“I use Fastmail as my main email. Works quite well, you can also effectively have multiple addresses by using aliases, mail rules, and sub-folders of your inbox well.”
Has had really good experiences with Fastmail.
“I've had really good experiences with FastMail.”
A newer OVH VPS-2 plan gave absolutely awful, CPU-starved performance for a game server, unlike their earlier VPS-3.
“i got the vps-2 plan this time only planning on hosting one server. The performance has been absolutely awful. Starved CPU with constant 20-80ms frame times. I'm gonna be looking for another provider ASAP.”
Trying Fastmail so far so good and migrated easily.
“Trying FastMail myself. So far, so good. Migrated easily.”
Wix refused to cancel on request and billed a year they would never use after five years as a customer.
“They refused to cancel our service upon request and billed us for a year that we will never use after being a customer for 5 years. They will not let”
Used to find Wix easy and intuitive but now spends hours fixing things that fall apart after a change.
“It used to be so easy to put up a good site, very intuitive and drag and drop. Now if I go on to make a change your hours later”
A few years on Fastmail with a positive experience.
“I’ve been using Fastmail for a few years now and I’ve had a positive experience. I’m happy to recommend it.”
Proton email is blocked at the college where they work, so student applications never get a response.
“It is blocked at the college I work for as well. Any email from Proton goes into a black hole. Makes it really fun for students who apply and never get a response.”
Opened their Fastmail account in March 2014 and renews happily every year without ever having an issue.
“I just checked and I opened my Fastmail account in March 2014. I happily renew every year because I've never had an issue.”
Happy with Fastmail for email.
“I've been happy with fastmail and use mega for cloud storage + vpn.”
Started on Proton and switched to Fastmail with no issues and a happy family.
“Started with Proton and switched to Fastmail. No issues and family is happy with it too.”
Stopped using Railway after security incidents and because prices skyrocketed once there was some traffic; now on cheaper Hetzner servers.
“as soon as I had any traffic and a few users the prices skyrocketed really fast”
Tried several providers and recently switched to Fastmail a month ago; it has been great.
“I’ve tried several over the years. Recently switched to Fastmail a month or so ago. It’s been great.”