Choosing a web host as the foundation for your website means juggling several factors, including price, effective site-building tools, and helpful customer service. Ultahost offers a wide range of hosting options at affordable prices, multiple site-building tools, and 24/7 assistance. Plus, its macOS and video game server support give it extra appeal. Ultahost falls behind in a few areas, especially around email creation, inconsistent visitor caps, and Windows-based servers. HostGator and Hostwinds, two of our favorite web hosts and both Editors' Choice award winners, offer far more comprehensive hosting packages.
If you're a web hosting novice, you may want to begin your journey with shared hosting. But what is shared hosting, exactly? Imagine a shared server as an apartment building, and your website is one of many tenants that literally share resources. It's an effective, low-cost hosting option if you don't expect much site traffic. Bear in mind that a resource-gobbling neighbor may impact your website's performance—and vice versa.
Ultahost has four tiers of shared hosting. The Shared Starter tier starts at $5.99 per month and comes with one domain, 30GB of NVMe SSD storage space, and, as with all other Ultahost tiers, unlimited monthly data transfers, free backups, and a free SSL certificate. In terms of traffic, a website built on this plan can have up to 10,000 monthly visitors. Next up the ladder is Shared Basic, which starts at $7.99 per month for four domains, 60GB of NVMe SSD storage space, and a 15,000-visitor-per-month traffic capacity. Shared Business is $14.80 per month, and ups the domains to unlimited, allows 25,000 visitors per month, and lets you fill 80GB of NVMe SSD storage space. Finally, the Shared Pro plan, the biggest room in the server apartment complex, costs $18.80 per month and comes with 110GB of NVMe SSD storage space. With it, your site can handle 49,000 monthly visitors.
As with many other web hosting services, Ultahost grants discounts if you sign up for annual or multi-year plans. On the email front, Ultahost lets you create as many accounts as your shared storage allows.
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Ultahost has a compelling advantage over HostGator, our Editors' Choice winner for shared hosting: Windows-based servers. That operating system comes in handy if you want to build your online destination using the ASP.NET framework. However, HostGator remains the shared hosting champ by besting Ultahost with its unlimited email and visitors. It also has unlimited domains with every plan, other than the entry-level shared package.
If you need a website that can better handle the internet's rigors, you should consider virtual private server (VPS) hosting. With it, your website lives on a server with far fewer tenants, giving it resource minimums that are much higher than what it could tap with shared hosting. With this tier, Ultahost removes the visitor limits.
VPS Basic, Ultahost's entry-level plan in the category, starts at $7.99 per month. It comes with one server CPU core, 1GB of DDR5 RAM, and 30GB of NVMe SSD storage space. Next up is the $13.99-per-month VPS Business, which includes two CPU cores, 2GB of DDR5 RAM, and 50GB of NVMe SSD storage. VPS Professional costs $22.80 per month, and bumps up the specs to three CPU cores, 4GB of DDR5 RAM, and 75GB of NVMe SSD storage. Finally, the $29.99-per-month VPS Enterprise lets your site leverage four CPU cores, 6GB of DDR5 RAM, and 100GB of NVMe SSD storage. Ultahost's VPS plans give you the choice of using either the linux or Windows operating systems.
These cloud-based VPS plans include unlimited monthly data transfers, a free SSL certificate, and free automated backups. As with Ultahost's shared packages, the VPS plans have discounts available when you sign up for at least an annual contract. Need email? You can create as many email accounts as your plan's storage allows.
Those are rock-solid VPS packages, but Hostwinds remains the category's Editors' Choice winner. Although Hostwinds is a more expensive web host, its VPS options scale much higher than Ultahost's. For example, Hostwinds' highest tier for linux-based hosting is $395.24 per month, but it gets you an incredible 16 CPU cores, 96GB of RAM, and 750GB of storage. That's enough power to handle nearly any resource-intensive hosting activity. If you're set on VPS hosting as your website's foundation, and have the money to scale upward, Hostwinds is your best bet.
Don't want your website to have server mates? Dedicated hosting lets your website leverage an entire server's power. These premium offerings are best suited for websites that receive a very large amount of traffic.
Ultahost has eight tiers of dedicated hosting. The plans start with the $93.50-per-month Ulta-X1 plan. The entry-level version comes with four CPU cores, 480GB of SSD storage space, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, and unlimited monthly data transfers. On the high end, the $1,599.99-per-month Ulta-X11 tier increases the CPU cores to a huge 64, storage space to two 3.84TB of NVMe RAID drives, and RAM to 1TB. In terms of email, Ultahost lets you create as many as your storage capacity allows.
Ultahost also offers plans for VDS, or Virtual Dedicated Servers. This unique option lives somewhere between dedicated and VPS hosting. With it, you receive some of the benefits of having your own server (dedicated RAM, for example), but at a more affordable price than traditional dedicated servers (the prices start at $54.98 per month). Ultahost has VDS plans for linux, Windows, and, surprisingly, macOS. The latter option is extremely rare and ideal for people who need to hook their sites or services into iCloud or FaceTime.
However, AccuWeb, our Editors' Choice winner for dedicated hosting, offers a staggering number of hosting options. AccuWeb also has powerful dedicated plans with impressive scaling, including several packages at $1,000-plus per month that have an incredible 8TB of storage, 512GB of RAM, and up to 50TB of monthly data transfers. It's a potent package for high-end hosting.
A private gaming server is a great way to play multiplayer games with friends without relying on a title's already crowded (or no longer active) online systems. Ultahost provides plans based on specific games, such as a Left 4 Dead 2 server that supports eight players starting at $4.80 per month. Or, you can jump into a Minecraft server with 10 players for a meager $5.50 per month. The other supported games include American Truck Simulator, F.E.A.R., and Neverwinter Nights. All private servers offer DDoS protection and auto-installs of all available mods.
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For more, check out How to Set Up a Minecraft Server in a Few Easy Steps and How to Set Up a Dedicated Palworld Server.
WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems on the planet, so it's unsurprising that Ultahost has hosting options for it. If you need a simple blog or don't expect high traffic totals, check out Ulta WordPress, the company's ground-level tier. For $4.80 per month, you can build one website that can handle roughly 1,000 monthly visits (though unlimited monthly data transfers). That's on the low side. The tier also includes 30GB of NVMe SSD storage space and an incredibly skimpy one email account. One!
VPS WordPress exists at Ultahost's high end. It costs $29.50 per month and comes with unlimited emails, the ability to create 300 websites, and 100GB of NVMe SSD storage space. The visitor total jumps to 300,000 people per month, which is far more useful. Unfortunately, Ultahost only offers linux-based servers.
Ultahost is an affordable WordPress hosting option compared with Bluehost, our Editors' Choice winner for the category. (Bluehost's subscriptions start at $15 per month.) However, Bluehost doesn't cap your visitors, comes with unlimited site hosting, and has many more e-commerce tools, an especially useful combo if you run a small business. And if you need enterprise-level WordPress hosting, check out WP Engine, another top pick.
Would you like to start your own web hosting business? Ultahost offers several linux-based options for digital entrepreneurs looking to enter the hosting world. The beginner Ulta 25 tier starts at $38.99 per month and gives you 20GB of NVMe SSD storage space, 25 cPanel accounts, and unlimited monthly data transfers.
While Ultahost’s reseller options are good, we recommend Hostwinds, our Editors' Choice for the category. Its prices start as low as $5.24 per month, and the plans come with a Windows server option and unlimited disk space at every tier. That additional flexibility gives your website more room to grow.
You begin by creating an Ultahost account, logging in, and visiting the back-end dashboard. Navigating the UI is easy enough using the toolbar on the left side of the screen. If you want to get a site up and running quickly, Ultahost lets you download add-ons like the free Weebly website builder. With it, you can quickly add text, images, or video to flesh out your pages.
Ultahost also has its own website builder, which lets you customize your site using a variety of flexible starter templates. The downside? It's really hard to find on the back end, being a few clicks deep into the menu options.
In addition, clicking "Edit Website" did absolutely nothing in testing. I had to consult a customer service rep to guide me through the somewhat convoluted process. So, you're better off with the Weebly website builder than Ultahost's own. On the upside, seasoned hosting veterans will appreciate that Ultahost lets you select a control panel at sign-up. (cPanel, Cyberpanel, Hestia, and Plesk are the options.)
All Ultahost plans come with free SSL certificates, which are critical for those who sell wares online, as they encrypt data between browsers and websites. DDoS protection is also included in every plan, even the starter options. For more expensive offerings like VPS or dedicated server plans, you get team-managed servers, BitNinja security, automated backups, and dedicated firewalls.
Ultahost has both phone and ticket support. Phone support is available for technical, sales, or account queries 24/7.
In a nice touch, I placed a call to the support team without having an account. Every test call I placed was answered in under two minutes, and the staff was helpful in its guidance. The same can be said for ticket and web chat support. However, it was disappointing to learn that the only way to delete your account is by submitting a support ticket. You should be able to delete your account or cancel your subscription without customer support intervention.
All Ultahost plans have a 30-day money-back guarantee. That said, Dreamhost has a much longer (97-day) money-back guarantee, which is even better.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Ultahost/PCMag)
Ultahost
- 5.0 - Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking
- 4.5 - Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors
- 4.0 - Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls
- 3.5 - Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors
- 3.0 - Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack
- 2.5 - Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution
- 2.0 - Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution
- 1.5 - Poor: Do not buy this product
- 1.0 - Dismal: Don't even think about buying this product
Read Our Editorial Mission Statement and Testing Methodologies.
Ultahost has many notable elements that make it stand out from many competing services, including reasonable prices, excellent customer support, and macOS and video game server options. That said, some frustrating email, traffic, and Windows limitations prevent it from competing with top-tier web hosting services, including HostGator and Hostwinds, PCMag Editors' Choice winners whose plans are far more well-rounded.
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