| 🏆Performance Grade | B+ |
| ⏱️Uptime Guarantee | Yes |
| 🔒Free SSL | No |
| 🔧Hosting Types | Shared, VPS |
| 💡Basic Plan Features |
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| 💲Starting Price | $5.07 |
While AwardSpace isn’t bad for a free hosting service, we recommend you don’t waste your time with free hosting, even if you’re just starting out. You’ll have to deal with slow loading speeds, lots of downtime, and no customer support, and migrating your site to a different host later can be a real pain. To compare the best web hosts, we hosted the same WordPress website on each one and tested performance, customer service, and value for money. Check out the results here.
AwardSpace has been in the web hosting industry since 2003. Since that time, they’ve built up a lot of expertise in the field and now provide web hosting to over 2,500,000 customers in the US, the UK, and parts of Europe. They’re particularly known for their free web hosting service that allows its users to create a 100% ad-free website with no time limit.
Features and Ease of Use
AwardSpace provides its users with a number of tools for building their website. Free users have access to a one-click app installer, which enables the easy installation of WordPress and Joomla!, two of the most popular content management systems in the industry today.
On top of that, free users get 1 GB of SSD storage, 5 GB monthly bandwidth, 1 MySQL database, and 99.9% average network uptime. The SSD storage was particularly noteworthy, since many free hosting providers would merely offer regular HDD storage in lieu of SSD.
However, as with every free hosting plan there are certain limits. Once users start getting a decent amount of traffic to their website or decide they want to upload more multimedia, the 1 GB storage and 5 GB monthly bandwidth may prove insufficient. Fortunately, AwardSpace also has an array of premium hosting plans available.
Let’s start with their shared hosting plans. These come with:
- Unlimited storage and bandwidth
- Email addresses
- Extra databases
- Better website loading times
- Improved server performance
Their entry-level Basic shared hosting plan is ideal for smaller websites, blogs, and portfolio websites: this highly affordable plan comes with a cap of two domains hosted per account, 24/7 support, and up to 15,000 visits monthly. It doesn’t come with a free domain registration, though — you’ll have to opt for at least their Web Pro Plus plan for that.
At the highest end of the spectrum you have the Max Pack Plus plan, which comes with an unlimited number of domains hosted per account, two free domain registrations for life, a guaranteed 1-hour max response time, and up to 150,000 visits monthly.
Businesses that require even greater performance from their servers can also opt for their inexpensively-priced VPS cloud hosting plans. The Starter VPS plan comes with 25GB storage, a whopping 2TB monthly traffic, 50Mbit/s port speed, and 1 IP address. Do note that these VPS plans are unmanaged, though, so you’ll need a fair bit of technical knowledge to fully utilize them.
Pricing and Support
Pricing is where AwardSpace stands out most. Their free plan is excellent for novices beginning their foray into website creation, but their premium paid plans are also highly affordable and user-friendly. They frequently offer discounts on their paid hosting plans, which drastically reduces their prices to beat any other plan in the market — which is likely why they’ve gained so much popularity in the industry.
Keep in mind that their promotional prices are only valid for a year. After that, the prices may increase significantly, reaching a ridiculous rate and making their plans comparable to the competition (and even slightly higher). However, it’s worth noting that their regular rates are still reasonable considering the contents of the packages.
AwardSpace also provides a 30-day money back guarantee on their shared hosting plans, so you can try out their services at no risk and see if the company is truly for you.
AwardSpace provides very thorough customer support. On the free plan, users have access to 24/7 support, though response times are generally slower than those of the paid plans, which is understandable. Customers on the paid plan, however, are guaranteed to get a response to their queries within an hour — and most of the time, their support team averages a response time of 15 minutes. AwardSpace also provides a FAQ and free video tutorials. Their main office is located in Germany, but rest assured that all customer support personnel speak English.
