Uptime & Reliability

Surprisingly reliable for the price

Despite the cut-rate prices, Colossal Host offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee for web hosting. Details regarding physical data center or business operations are not listed; based on their value statement it seems highly probably that all space is leased through a third party as is the case with many hosting sites.

Features

Good hosting but some options are missing

In order to streamline their business and focus on low prices, Colossal Host offers only Linux-based services.  By only offering the single platform, it is reasonable to presume that fewer staff, rack space, etc. are required.

This bare-bones approach is not without disadvantages; many popular menu items offered by many hosting organizations are missing: reseller programs, dedicated server operations and VPS is not available.  It is also worth noting that domain services, while often a “cash cow” for many hosting sites, is listed as a partnership with sslcatacombnetworking.com rather than run internally.  As you can infer from these statements, co-location services and the Windows platforms are unavailable.

While some may find the lack of features a concern, I do agree that in order to offer low prices and offer any kind of quality service, any company needs to carefully target their market and Colossal seems to have done an admirable job at not only identifying their line of business, but targeting customers that most likely have a pretty good idea of what they want as well as the technical resources to accomplish their goals, along with bloggers or personal site builders that want to explore development on their own or anticipate minimal need for in-depth customization.

All packages offer PHP/Perl compatibility, unlimited MySQL 5 databases and FTP as well as JavaScript support, multiple statistic & logging features, scripting tools, and many other features.

Support

Limited support options

Colossal offers the usual FAQ page, knowledgebase and online ticketing system, but the live chat feature was not available at 15:00 EST on a weekday.  The support notes state that the average response time for help desk requests is 12 minutes, 7 seconds.

Pricing

Excellent pricing

While Colossal Host takes every opportunity to state their low rates, they certainly offer what seems to be an almost unbelievable package: Unlimited disk space, data transfer and multiple domain hosting for only $0.95 per month when paying in advance for two years ($22.80). Furthermore, the pricing statements specifically states that “the price will be forever locked at $0.95 a month. I did see a bit of a red flag when I read that this particular promotion ends September 30, 2014.  For only $22.80 for two years, it took a considerable amount of restraint for me NOT to try to sign up!

Along with this low price, no set up fee is charged with the only exception being a $5.00 charge for DNS record modifications.

Summary

Good hosting at a great price

Colossal Host offers extremely cheap hosting services and keeps prices low by maintaining a narrow scope of operations.  I find this to be refreshing, as many hosting companies claim to “do it all”; Colossal Host makes it very clear as to what exactly is offered to customers.

While I found the dated offer of September 2014 to be a little concerning, I think I’d be comfortable trying Colossal Host out for personal or home-business use.  If I was looking at my site being “mission critical”, I would probably investigate, ask questions and look at references—as any company should do.

Pros:

• Very low prices
• Surprisingly high quality hardware

Cons:

• Outdated promotional information
• No information about their data center