HostMantis hosting review – experience

Status: passive
I used this service from August 2019 – to July 2022

Update: in July 2022, HostMantis is getting taken over by Dynamic Hosting (I’ve got no feedback on this company at this moment). Will see how the service works after that and update the review.
Hence, in spite of years of great experience, and everything written in this article, I can’t recommend this hosting at the moment – not until at least 6 months have passed and I’ve confirmed the service quality.
At the time of writing, I’m hosting only one test-website with this provider.

In this article, I’ll provide my experience with HostMantis hosting provider (affiliate link). I’ve tried their “Entry,” and “Advanced” reseller hosting packages, with servers in Germany, UK, and USA. Affiliate links will be used in this post, that is I’ll get a few dollars if you buy something using this website. I’ll try to give as much as possible data and information, leaving it to the reader to decide whether that is good, mediocre, or bad.
I am now mainly using reseller hosting, so the “sequel” of this article is in my HostMantis Reseller Hosting review. 🙂

Update 4th January 2021: This is a very long, detailed “review”. If you plan on using this hosting, I suppose it can give you an idea of exactly what to expect (or as close as possible to that). I wrote about all the pros and cons, and provided all the available info and my experience, as objectively as I could. The bottom line is: out of all the options I’ve tried over the past 7 years, this is my hosting provider of choice, where I host a vast majority of my websites.

Update of August 2021: I’ve been using this hosting since 2019 and am very happy with the performance, stability and security – at a very low price (though, see chapters 10, and 14). However, this post is mostly full of boring stats and data, because I think it is more objective to provide measurable and comparable data so that everyone can decide for themselves whether that is good, or bad.
At the moment I’m using two HostMantis servers: one in the UK, and one in the USA.

Update: from September 2021, I no longer consider HostMantis Reseller hosting to be affordable (read: “cheap”). More on that in chapter 16.

Update, October 2021: I moved one of my accounts to HostMantis’s (cheaper) DirectAdmin Reseller hosting. I was assured that I’d be keeping my existing discount by doing so (because, thanks to cPanel price hikes, that ends up saving the provider a lot of money as well). Only to be surprised by the stated renewal price, which was higher than the cPanel account’s quoted renewal price!?! I asked them to check and sort it out… and they did – by raising my cPanel account’s renewal price by 50%!?! ?
On top of all that I can expect the announced 25% price hike from the New Year.
With HostMantis I never can tell even remotely what the service renewal prices will be, which makes any planning very difficult.
HostMantis service quality is top-class, but the prices are now premium (though I’d say the service is better than most premium providers I’ve been with). I wouldn’t be surprised if the prices go up even more after the NewYear – price hikes seem to be frequent, and drastic with this provider.

Update: November 24th, 2021 – from morning to evening, for about 12 hours, my WordPress websites were having problems. I opened a ticket, explained what I had done to test and explained why I think the problem is with the hosting server (websites worked fine when cloned or migrated to two other servers). Got an “all’s good on our end” reply (see Catch 22 problem) and nothing after that. Some 4 hours later I asked if they are working on it, will they be working on it, or should I start migrating websites. Some 4 more hours after that, getting no reply, I had started migrating websites. A bit more details are on LowEndSpirit forum.

Table Of Contents (T.O.C.):

1. HostMantis hosting company
2. How did I come to HostMantis?
3. Website migration to HostMantis
4. Available resources
   4.1. Server locations
5. Metrics – tests
6. Technical support
7. Uptime
8. Average page load time (speed)
9. Personal impression – subjective
10. Prices
11. IP Blacklist stats
12. ModSecurity problems
13. Conclusion
14. New price hike of 2021
15. New JetBackup backup job limits
16. Effective Reseller hosting price hike of September 2021

1. HostMantis hosting company

This is a relatively small company, with headquarters in Livonia (USA, Michigan).

As far as I know, they don’t own their servers but lease them. German data centre leases from Hetzner – a good provider of unmanaged dedicated servers and VPS-s). In Canada, USA (east coast), Singapore and the United Kingdom they use OVH servers.

Not all the (good) reseller hosting providers offer several server locations to choose from. This is a plus.

– T.O.C. –

2. How did I come to HostMantis?

They’ve been on “my radar” for some time, but I had opted for Veerotech and MDDhosting before HostMantis. Then, looking for some completely different information on LowEndTalk forum, I came across their advert which said “80% discount on all shared and reseller hosting”.

I’ve been looking for a good reseller hosting with a Europe based server for quite some time. I’ve also been looking for cheap reseller hosting for running tests and projects. Went to their website, calculated it – for 20 $ I could get 3 years of reseller hosting with decent resources. Not 20$ per month, 20$ per three years! Phone my partner and he replied: “I paid that much for a pair of sausages today”. 🙂

OK, regular prices are a lot higher, but they are still a lot cheaper than most. One of the reasons I’ve been avoiding them so far is that prices look “too good to be true” if you know what I mean.

All in all, I decided to give it a try. Each project could get a separate cPanel, so minimal chance of one messing up the others. Even if it turns out not good enough for hosting anything “serious”, it’s still worth it. On top of all that, there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee if not satisfied. Even if that wasn’t true, I had wasted 20$ on a lot more stupid things than hosting. 🙂

Expectations were anything but high. I definitely hope the discount doesn’t become regular, since at those prices it’s impossible to provide good quality hosting (my personal opinion).

Update 13th July 2019: because of a sudden cPanel price rise, HostMantis were practically forced to change their prices and resource limits even for the existing long term paid for hosting accounts. This affected my 3-year paid in advance deals. In my opinion, the price change is reasonable and necessary, unless one wants to see them going bankrupt – that is the only other alternative (if keeping the old prices). Some customers were outraged by this.

While reducing the maximum number of cPanel accounts for reseller hosting and changing any recurring discounts to 50 % at renewal (regardless of whether they have been 60, 70, or 80%), they increased CPU resources for reseller accounts to 100 % of a vCPU core (from 75 %). Since CPU is the bottleneck with most WordPress websites, I’m happy to see this.

– T.O.C. –

3. Website migration to HostMantis

8th of May 2019: Nothing much to say. I set up the main reseller account (mail, DNS-s, nameservers etc.). Afterwards, test website migration went smoothly. HostMantis provides Cloudflare integration, but no RailGun – so that has to be turned off if (already) using Cloudflare. Update 19th of May: HostMantis have enabled Railgun integration! Nice.
Update 17th of June 2020: Railgun is discontinued again (as tech. support replied on my asking after having noticed it being disabled: “Due to the ongoing issues we have had with Railgun and the complete lack of support from Cloudflare for their partners, we have chosen to discontinue the use of Railgun.”).

They have a knowledgebase where all the needed instructions/tutorials are provided.

10th May 2019: bikegremlin.com has been moved to HostMantis german server. The migration went smoothly, without a second of downtime. Will be monitoring uptime, average page load time, security…

I got two more accounts on US and UK servers. Will be testing those relatively soon.

13th may 2019, late evening: popular local motorcycling forum (motomanijaci.com) has been migrated to the UK server – with no problems. Importing the large database was not possible using phpMyAdmin and, since there’s no SSH connection allowed, HostMantis technical support did the import for me – quickly and with no problems. This forum has lots of visits, so it will be a good test of the hosting quality. Update 20th of May: HostMantis allows the use of Terminal, through the main reseller account’s cPanel when logged in from their website, which allows running mysql for database import and works fine. Didn’t know that could work until recently.

– T.O.C. –

4. Available resources

Total for the whole hosting account:

• Disk space: 50 GB
• cPanels (total reseller accounts): 25 (main +24)
• Bandwidth: “unlimited” – 1 TB per cPanel
• Free Blesta billing software licence for all the reseller hosting clients (from October 10th 2019)

Each cPanel, i.e. reseller (sub)account gets: – update: see chapter 16.

• CPU: 100 % of one core (virtual, of course)
• RAM: 3 GB
• I/O: 100 Mb/s
• IOPS: 5,024
• Entry Processes: 30
• iNodes: “unlimited“
• Bandwidth: 1 TB
• SSL / TLS: yes, by Let’s Encrypt
• SPAM filtering: yes, using Spam Assasin
• FTP and E-mail accounts: unlimited
• Domain, subdomains and parked domains: unlimited
• Databases: unlimited

Additional features:

• Backups: yes, daily, using JetBackup. Other cPanel backup tools are disabled, but it is allowed to make one-click backups using JetBackup “snapshot”.
• Cloudflare integration through cPanel, along with Railgun integration (discontinued Railgun integration from June 2020).
• Softaculous.
• SSD storage.
• LiteSpeed server.
• MariaDB database server.
• CloudLinux is installed and resources per cPanel are limited/guaranteed using that “tool”.
• Imunify360 protection – added in October 2020.

Main reseller account, with more advanced packages than the one I took, gets some extra resources (CPU, RAM, I/O, inodes…). This is given only for the main account, which is a potentially useful thing. It would be better and more practical though if the extra resources could be given to any one sub-account instead. Of course, a shared hosting environment is difficult enough to maintain even without such complications, while providing these services is based on large numbers and statistics – so providing this is probably more tricky than it sounds.

Details of what can and can’t be done are clearly defined in TOS. And there it says, what worries me:

“Any account should not use more than 25% CPU consistently for more than 5 minutes. If you are consistently using 25% or more CPU, you will need to upgrade to the next available hosting plan. If you are using the maximum hosting plan and are still using 25% or more CPU consistently, then you have most likely outgrown a shared hosting environment and should therefore obtain a VPS or dedicated server to better suit your needs.”

So I’m looking at resource usage stats regularly. CPU seems to be the bottleneck with this hosting (at least for WordPress sites) – it reaches around 20% usage at times, while other resources don’t go over 10% load. That’s why I placed one of my web sites, with a decent number of visits, on this hosting, to check whether it can serve a “serious” client’s website, without me getting “whacked” for using too many CPU resources.

Update 13th July 2019: I’ve had no problems with resource limits, including the CPU.

For those who need this: HostMantis allows SSH access with shared and reseller hosting accounts (you have to define what IP address you will use for this).

Cron job limit, for those who rely on this: one cron job per hour, details in HostMantis knowledgebase.

– T.O.C. –

4.1. Server locations

The good thing about not owning your own servers is you can rent them all over the world. So HostMantis offers the following server locations (all hosted by reputable server providers):

Canada, USA (east coast), Singapore, United Kingdom, France and Germany.

– T.O.C. –

5. Metrics – tests

I “tortured” a test site with LoadImpact tool, while simultaneously browsing it with a disabled browser cache – like a new visitor. It worked flawlessly, with no signs of slowing down.

So I decided to move the Serbocroatian version of my cycling website bikegremlin.com to HostMantis German server and see how it fares – with lots of “real visitors”, not simulated ones. Shown below are GTmetrix test results of a very poorly optimized page:

Compared to the English website version, hosted with Veerotech, this is slightly faster when tested from Europe (since the server is located there, while Veerotech’s is in the USA), while it’s the other way round when tested from the USA. Dotcom Tools tests, that check from 25 different locations from around the world, give average results for the same unoptimized page of around 3 seconds for both websites.
See my latest test of how the hosting server location affects website speed (and “SEO”).

13th May 2019: A forum with lots of visits was moved to the UK server. Old hosting (shared, around 85 $ per year). When I looked at the stats, I saw that I/O is the bottleneck, though the CPU got a decent load as well. Moving to HostMantis UK server made it run faster, with no errors (for now, will update the text if they arise). Below are the resource usage stats – on the “old hosting” and on the HostMantis server.

Simulation of 50 concurrent website visitors using OctoPerf:
(the simulation is run with Google AdSense blocked, so server performance can be compared)

For comparison, other tested providers results, using the same test and website:

• Veerotech: Avr. resp. time 0.78 s; Latency 1.039 s; Apdex 0.905 s.
• Gnu Host: Avr. resp. time 0.191 s; Latency 0.177 s; Apdex 0.995 s.

– T.O.C. –

6. Technical support

Up to the moment of writing this text, there were no issues, so I don’t know what technical support is like. If I find out, the review will be updated.

Update 12th of May 2019: Sunday. I asked for a change of two reseller account “main” domains. Tagged the support ticket and wrote in the text that it is not urgent. Expecting to have it sorted out within the following working week. In about two hour time I got a reply that it’s been sorted out. Excellent.

Following day evening I had a problem with uploading a large database (around 500 MB), of a relatively popular forum, in order to migrate it. HostMantis doesn’t allow SSH access for shared and reseller hosting accounts, so I asked about alternative ways of importing a large database and got some good advice on WebHostingTalk forum. Since it’s a forum with lots of visits and posts, export/import needed to be done quickly. Tech support offered to do it for me, right after I upload the database export. And it was done within minutes. Very good. I would still prefer SSH access, though, but that’s no fault of tech. support – it’s down to the provider’s policy (and clearly written on their website).
Update: now it can be done, either using Terminal or by requesting SSH access.

Update January 2021: Softaculous website import from other servers has stopped working. Technical support gave me the “Catch 22” response – along the lines of: It’s not their application, they haven’t tested it on their servers and suggesting I could disable mod security and give it a try.

Completely disabling mod security sounds like a very risky move. While the 3rd party software not being supported (and much cared about) is typical for all (in my experience) shared/reseller hosting providers.
Note to self: “Learn WP CLI you lazy bastard!”
Though, based on my experience, I would not be at all surprised if this suddenly started working again, just as it has stopped working.

Based on what’s been tried and tested so far, the problem could be caused by the way Softaculous operates when doing imports.

So, I’ve started using the free All in One WP Migration plugin for migrating WordPress websites with success.

– T.O.C. –

7. Uptime

For monitoring this I use Hetrix Tools (affiliate link).

Update 13th July 2019: I cancelled the German server account and upgraded the UK server one to “Starter” (from “Entry”). German server worked fine, but with new limits and pricing, the 10 cPanel account limit was too low for me, while the Starter plan offers 30 cPanel accounts and 50 GB storage.

Update 2nd May 2021: Starter plans have been discontinued. Entry plans now allow 25 cPanel accounts, and the next tier is “Advanced” with a 75 cPanel account limit (three times more accounts, only 2.5 times more storage space, at a three times higher price).

US server was changed for another one since the “old” one was having some problems. Will be monitoring the changes in uptime and speed.

– T.O.C. –

8. Average page load time (speed)

I use Google Analytics stats for tracking this.

Note: test website for UK server is generally faster than test sites placed on German and US servers, so its page load time doesn’t mean UK server is necessarily faster. In March and April, on Veerotech hosting, it had an average page load time of 1.6 seconds.

Update 13th July 2019: German server account has been cancelled, while the UK one has been upgraded. The “slower, more traffic” website used for testing the German server was migrated to the UK server, for more realistic results.

US server was changed for another one since the “old” one was having some problems. Will be monitoring the changes in uptime and speed.

Note: Google AdSense ads are introduced to websites, so page load times are affected by the ads load times, not representing true server performance. For future reviews, I’ll be including Octoperf and TTFB data.

– T.O.C. –

9. Personal impression – subjective

Comparison with Veerotech is inevitable. Website, user control panel – it all looks just slightly less professional, less “serious”. “It’s called HostMantis, what did you expect?!” 🙂 Not sure it’s just a matter of getting used to it, but it does seem a bit harder to navigate. It isn’t bad, it’s good, just not excellent.

As far as the technical aspect is concerned, it all looks surprisingly good for now – regardless of the price. Fast, stable. To the best of my knowledge, security looks good. I’ll update the review if I find any flaws.

Update 13th July 2019: European servers have performed better and been more stable than the US server I’ve tested. Can’t say whether that’s the case with every HostMantis US-based server, but it has been with “mine”. After asking technical support about this, they said it’s a problematic server and they are moving all the customers off of it (network connection problems from what I could understand). So they moved my account as well, on that very day. I’ll see how it performs on the new server now.

Update 4th August 2019: new US server is working very well, while the UK one has remained good.

Update September 2021: if you’re considering reseller hosting, see chapter 16.

– T.O.C. –

10. Prices

I think it is only fair to note this. Prices were increased in July 2019 (around 300%, on average). Then again in January 2021 by around 400% (the increase was on top of the prices from July 2019) – with storage space doubled for each package.
I assigned (and paid) for the hosting with a “lifetime, recurring” discount, while I got exactly 10 times higher price than the original one, in under 2 years time. I did get some resource increase per account, but not so that I’d pay remotely that much for that (marketing/bargain, more than a “fair trade”).

Prices now are closer to the other “premium” providers – they are still about half the price, but no longer dirt-cheap (I’d say that their reseller hosting prices are still very affordable). It is my personal impression that HostMantis prices vary a lot. I wouldn’t be surprised if they go up again – or go down if the number of customers gets reduced with the higher prices.

Prices are nicely “graded”, so one can choose a package that fits their resource needs. HostMantis got this right I’d say.

– T.O.C. –

11. IP Blacklist stats

If one of the host’s clients sends spam and gets reported, then the shared IP address of the server (that many clients share) often gets blacklisted as well. Which makes the successful sending of e-mail harder, if using the provider’s SMTP (and not a separate, paid for e-mail service). That is why good hosting providers have spam filters of outgoing e-mail, plus they suspend accounts of users who are caught spamming. Still, one spammer is often enough to get the IP blacklisted while removing the IP from a blacklist takes time and effort.

For monitoring this I use HetrixTools (affiliate link). You can read about problems with e-mails, delivery, spam filters and possible solutions in my Veerotech hosting review.

I’m monitoring and checking blacklist reports of HostMantis’s servers with 98 RBL-s (Real-time Black List). Current situation (will get updated, good providers work on removing IPs from blacklists and preventing their customers from spamming):

– T.O.C. –

12. ModSecurity prolems

Update 4th May 2019: I had started writing a post with a PHP code example within it. Like this, only containing PHP code:

An example of a code sample
   Nested in code sample

When I tried to save the changes, I got an error: the post can’t be updated/saved.

In an attempt to find the problem cause, I migrated the website to Veerotech (making a small change first, so that I would be certain that DNS propagation has been finished and I am in fact testing the website on Veerotech hosting). It worked fine on Veerotech. Migrated back to HostMantis – problems again.

I contacted tech support. In an attempt to send the “problematic” PHP code sample within the ticket, I got a 404 error when trying to send the ticket. So within the ticket, I included a link to wordpress.stackexchange.com where I had posted a question about the problem (along with the code).

I wrote in the ticket about the PHP code posting problem even within a support ticket. And explained how I tested and told them it works on Veerotech hosting. Saying it’s probably their security setup causing the problem.

They replied I could disable ModSecurity for the website (warning me that exposes it to attacks and viruses).

I explained this works on Veerotech without disabling ModSecurity and asked if it can be set up here to work properly, without disabling ModSecurity. They said they will look into it, try to fix it.

And they have. But the “repair” needs to be asked for each cPanel/website separately. Since I don’t put code samples on other websites, for now, it remains just on this website. The problem was solved within less than one hour after reporting it.

Of the hosting providers I’ve tested so far: Veerotech and JustHost allow this, while MDDhosting and HostMantis don’t. I suppose it’s a security measure meant to prevent the insertion of any unwanted (malicious) code. It is a bit of a hassle the way it is implemented, but apparently can be quickly resolved upon request.

– T.O.C. –

13. Conclusion

While I’m writing this, the website is hosted with HostMantis. This hosting is cheap and quite good. I would recommend it, especially to those on a budget. I’ll be updating this text in case of any changes, but for now, it’s all very good.

Update 1st of July, 2020: after more than a year with this hosting provider, I am very happy with the quality of service and technical support – at a very reasonable price. I can recommend this hosting provider.

I wrote a separate post explaining the pros and cons of using hosted email service – instead of using a hosting provider’s one. Yet, I must say that with HostMantis, so far I’ve had zero email problems (with websites that aren’t using MXroute).

Update 7th December 2020: read the 14th chapter about the new price and resource policy change(s).

Update September 2021: see chapter 16.

If you found this review useful and want to get this hosting, you can do it using my HostMantis affiliate link, hence supporting I/O Gremlin website. Promotion code for a 50% discount is still valid for all I know, so you could try TW50OFF. Update: 50% off promotion is discontinued for now. Since June 19th 2020 they gave a 25% discount on reseller hosting, with WHT25OFF promotion code.

– T.O.C. –

14. New price hike of 2021

I think this is important to note and document – and let everyone decide by themselves what to think of it. Bit of a timeline, that tells a story.

Briefly put:

• They backed down on the super cheap price of $50 per three years – that was sold as “lifetime, recurring.”
• They changed my “lifetime reccuring 80% discount” to 25% discount.
  Update September 2021 – for any service upgrades, I got 50% discount (still not the original 80%, but very good and fair considering the latest cPanel price hike).
• Hosting quality (speed, stability, uptime, security, technical support) has remained very good.

Longer explanation:

• In the spring of 2019, i pay three times 20$, for three years of reseller hosting with servers in Germany, UK, and USA. Each with 25 GB of storage, and 25 cPanel accounts allowed. It was sold as a “lifetime recurring discount, with the same renewal price (3 times 20$ after 3 years time, for the next 3 years)”.
• In July 2019, after the cPanel price hike and change of pricing policy (charging per cPanel account, no longer per server), I get a notification that the max. allowed number of cPanel accounts for my existing services is cut down to 10 from 25. And that the renewal price will be increased from 20$ to 50$ for each service (DE, UK, and the USA). My 80% discount is changed to a 50% discount (the one that was a “recurring, lifetime discount”).
  My personal opinion: OK, the deal is not being honoured, but with the new cPanel pricing, keeping the old renewal prices and account limits would have led HostMantis to bankrupcy. This is a forced move.
  At that time, I asked if DE service can be “moved” to the UK service – which was done, so my DE service was terminated, while the UK service was promoted from Entry to Starter – allowing for 50 GB of storage, and 30 cPanel accounts. And a renewal price of 100$ per three years.
• In August 2020, they offer a 50% hosting account fund matching. That is – if I pay 100$, I’ll end up with 150$ on my account, which can be used to pay for the services (and covers the service renewal costs with the new pricing). I decided to risk with that.
• At the begging of November 2020, cPanel announces a new, further price hike, starting on 1st January 2021.
• In late November 2020, for black Friday and cyber Monday, HostMantis makes and sells promotions for all packages, including the Starter package.
• A week later, on December 5th 2020, they make this announcement. Basically: prices are being doubled, and Starter packages are discontinued (you can switch to a larger one, or a smaller one, with fewer resources). This is HostMantis’s 2nd price and resource policy change within 2 years time.
• At the time of writing this text, I have no idea how many resources I’ll have at my disposal in the next month (with Starter packages being discontinued), nor how much the renewal price costs will be.
• Update January 2021: it turns out I got storage space doubled (to 50 GB), number of cPanel accounts up from 10 to 25, but the price went from the original 20 $ (80 % discount, per three years – yes, dirt cheap), to 50 in July 2019, and now it’s over 200 $ (with about 45 % discount from what I could calculate).

My personal opinion:

I understand the resource, and pricing policy changes. It’s either that or bankruptcy. I also understand the first price hike still not accounting for any further increases in software costs – they tried to offer low prices for as long as possible.

What I don’t approve of is the account funding sale – done when they must have known they won’t be honouring the current pricing. That was misleading (I risked with this, and it’s my fault – all the frauds are based on greed, and I was greedy to use the discount, but not all the people are as informed about hosting industry trends). The same goes for 2020 black Friday and cyber Monday sales – both recurring lifetime discounts, and selling of Starter packages that they decided to discontinue within a few days! I feel sorry for the people who paid for those.

The new pricing is now close to that of the “premium” shared/reseller hosting providers. Though it’s fair to say that the service quality is also close to those.

Stability of the prices and service packages? In today’s market, where the big keep eating (buying out) the small, and companies looking for larger profits – that’s impossible to predict. It’s capitalism. Boils down to earning more money yourself, so you can cover your own costs for as high as they turn out to be. “Everyone’s playing fair, and see who gets… you know.” Crisis, insecurity, instability – that’s what can be counted on. 🙂

For now, I don’t plan on changing HostMantis as my “primary” hosting provider. As long as service quality remains the same (and prices don’t go further up).

– T.O.C. –

15. New JetBackup backup job limits

May 2021.

For a long time, I’ve been backing up all my accounts using JetBackup automated backups – storing them on the cheap and reliable Backblaze B2 cloud storage. I had configured three separate backup jobs for my two HostMantis reseller hosting accounts:

• Daily – run once each day, keeping the last three backups.
• Weekly – run once a week, keeping the last three backups.
• Monthly – run once each month, keeping the last twelve backups.

One Saturday, I got an email from HostMantis, explaining that many reseller hosting account customers have configured too many JetBackup jobs, so the servers are getting overloaded, and the configured backup jobs can’t be done in time, before the new ones are queued (creating an endless, growing queue of backup jobs).

In the email, they asked all the customers to create no more than one backup jobs, that are run no more often than once per day.

Finally, they wrote that they had “removed all the excess backup jobs from my accounts.”

Immediately, I logged into my HostMantis US and UK servers to check it out. On the US server, two backup jobs had been deleted, only one was left. On the UK server, nothing was touched.

I disabled two less necessary backup jobs on the UK server, leaving only one running.

I didn’t like HostMantis deleting the configured backup jobs on the US server. I would have preferred if they had given me at least one day to choose which two jubs I wish to disable. Those backup jobs were configured and tested – having reliable, tested backups is very important. Testing takes time.

The request for limiting the number of backup jobs is reasonable. It is a shared hosting environment, at a budget price, and all the customers must act reasonably and responsibly. I believe that limiting the backup jobs count will improve server performance. So, the new policy is a good idea – I support that. I just don’t like the way this was communicated and executed (without any prior notice).

Over the past two years, most of the news from HostMantis boiled down to higher prices. Including going back on their promised “lifetime price & discounts for the existing services” (see chapter 14 for more details). But that’s still just money – while this latest “move” concerns backups!

Since I know that many folks on LowEndSpirit forum are using HostMantis, I relayed this new policy right after I found out about it (and saw the deleted backup jobs). You can see HostMantis reply 1, and reply 2.

After several price, and available resource changes over the past two years, this kind of policy (it is not official, but it might be, but we’ve deleted the extra backup jobs…) leads me to a conclusion that they still aren’t sure what kind of business they want to run, and how.

HostMantis hosting quality is still very high (uptime, speed, stability, security – all very good). Pricewise, even with their latest price hikes, I still can’t find similar quality hosting at remotely close prices to those HostMantis charges. I just don’t like these “convulsions,” especially when they don’t concern just money, but an important thing as backups.

I’d be fine with running only one weekly backup job, on a weekday, and at a time set by HostMantis – to reduce any needless server (over)load. But I wouldn’t like being notified that a backup job has been deleted while I’m on a vacation, for example.

In spite of everything I wrote in this article, when I compare my experience with other hosting providers, and include the experience of other people whose websites I had to “pull out of the drain,” HostMantis is among the better hosting providers – with rather affordable prices. Competition in the hosting market is fierce. HostMantis are trying to offer high-quality hosting at an affordable price. So far they are managing to do that. Yes, they are wandering a bit, finding their path, but I must say: every website I’ve placed on HostMantis’ servers has been running smoothly, stably and securely – and that’s what matters in my opinion.

If you decide to go with HostMantis, thanks to the info I’ve provided here (or in spite of it 🙂 ), you can use my HostMantis affiliate link to sign up – and by doing that you’d be supporting I/O Gremlin website as well. You can use promo code “WHT25OFF” to get a 25% discount. 🙂

– T.O.C. –

16. Effective Reseller hosting price hike of September 2021

In the middle of September 2021, HostMantis has drastically changed its reseller hosting account resource policy. To explain what I mean, I’ll use my Advanced Reseller hosting account:

I can create up to 75 cPanel accounts on my reseller hosting account.

With the previous policy, each created account would get one vCPU (virtual processor core).

CPU is the bottleneck with WordPress websites.

This is a shared hosting environment. Even if the server was reasonably powerful, with 8 physical CPU cores, if I created 75 accounts and they used “only” 1/2 vCPU each, at the same time, all the users on that server (including me) would have suffered really slow performance (websites “crashing”). That’s not a realistic scenario.

A realistic scenario would be to have 60 cPanel accounts, and to have 2 to 3 of them using 1/2 vCPU cores, perhaps with one more website using 1 whole vCPU core (temporarily) at that time. This amounts to a total usage (of all the cPanel accounts combined) of about 2 vCPU cores at a given moment.

The new HostMantis reseller resource policy gives me 1.5 vCPU cores to share for all the cPanel accounts I create!
This kind of reseller hosting resource policy is also used by KnownHost (affiliate link) – a highly reputable hosting provider (with higher prices compared to HostMantis). Many (most?) other providers don’t even disclose these limits – I could just measure lower performance during use, and testing.

If two of my websites use 1 vCPU each, at the same time, all of my websites will have hiccups!

This policy has advantages. 🙂

• It prevents reseller users with many resource-hungry websites to overload the whole server.
• It allows me to provision 1.5 vCPU cores for my websites with most visits.

WordPress websites with a well-configured caching policy take most CPU load when edits are being made (updating or adding an article), especially if category edits are being made. The rest of the time, even during load testing, I haven’t seen CPU load go over 25% (not with HostMantis at least).

Nonetheless, for people who use reseller hosting to re-sell hosting, or to host 20+ mid-sized websites, this is a huge blow. For such use, Veerotech, now even MDDhosting look more affordable, compared to HostMantis.

What about me? For a similar price I’m paying now (a bit lower in fact), HostMantis offers Enterprise Entry Reseller hosting. With 2.5 vCPU to share among all the accounts, and a limit of 50 cPanel accounts. I’m giving it a try (it literally costs me nothing extra, in fact, I’m saving a bit) to see how it performs. I’m not using more than 25 cPanel accounts now, and 90% of those host experimental and development websites.

In a couple of months, I’ll write about my experience.

All in all, in my opinion, HostMantis shared hosting offers are still among the best ones – when I consider the available resources and the service quality (along with the prices, of course).

HostMantis reseller hosting has just entered the premium class – not among the most expensive, but far from being “affordable” (read: “cheap”). If you have several websites that you don’t edit & update at the same time, it still looks like an excellent choice (though I’m yet to test and confirm this). But if you wish to re-sell hosting, I think there are better options (like the above noted Veerotech, or Gnu Host).

For more clarity, here are the stats for the total resource usage by my entire reseller hosting account, with Advanced Reseller hosting (left), and Enterprise Entry Reseller hosting (right):

That’s with just over 20 sites, out of which:

• One is a WooCommerce experimental site that kept hogging about 20% vCPU very often (I’ll probably have to kill that experiment and start over).
• One is a WordPress website that sees about 10-20 visitors at any given time (according to Google Analytics).
• Two are less busy WordPress websites, 3-8 visitors at a time, most of the time.
• One is a relatively busy forum.
• The rest are more-less idle (small WooCommerce shops with few visits, small WordPress blogs etc).

The next screenshot shows resource limits and resource usage for my WooCommerce webshop, as I was trying to see how much is “comfortable” for flawless functioning:

Based on this, I conclude that for WordPress, only Enterprise Reseller hosting offers make sense. Except for the people who have only 2-3 of their own websites (main, and a few staging ones, or very small visit counts). For them, even the cheapest reseller hosting offer is probably better than placing several websites on one shared hosting account.

If you decide to go with HostMantis, thanks to the info I’ve provided here (or in spite of it 🙂 ), you can use my HostMantis affiliate link to sign up – and by doing that you’d be supporting I/O Gremlin website as well. You can use promo code “WHT25OFF” to get a 25% discount. 🙂

– T.O.C. –