Wix

Founded in 2006, Wix is now a web giant with over 68 million users in 190 countries and 3 offices across 4 countries. Focused on hosting and sitebuilding, Wix has an award winning website builder - how does its hosting service compare? In this review we’ll detail their 4 tiers of hosting packages, plus 3 tiers of eCommerce hosting.

• Google Analytics integrated
• Includes use of the #1 website builder on the market
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Guaranteed 99.9% uptime
• Secure, encrypted sites

• Not the most affordable option

• They don’t have a control panel

• No site migration - you can’t move your site to another host

Wix is a clear leader in user-friendly site building - and all sites come with hosting. You won’t need any experience in coding or web design to put together a beautiful site using their drag-and-drop editor. Choose a template and customize, add content, and you’ll be good to go with a designer-quality website. Wix allows you to design your own site, manage and market it in one centralized space. There’s even a free hosting package, with some great features.

They’ve made web hosting an integrated part of the package, which is great, but it also means that it isn’t their single most important service. Their control panel is not the standard cPanel or Plesk, but rather is the same panel that was designed for their website building services, and isn’t geared as much towards hosting or administrative needs. And you can’t migrate your site from another host to Wix, so you’ll have to build your site there to host it.

When it comes to support, Wix has a broad list of options. Start with their expansive library of how-to videos and Wix Answers to see if your issue is covered there. If it’s not, ask your question and someone from Wix’s tech team will respond there. All plans have access to support by email or phone, on weekdays from 6AM-5PM PST. However, the higher end plans have priority support - quicker response times, visitor analytics and the Site Booster app (a useful tool for running online stores).

Wix offers five different plans for their cloud hosting plus website builder, with varied sets of features to fit the needs of their diverse client base.

-Connect Domain Plan - For just $4.50/month, you’ll get 1GB of bandwidth and 500MB disk space, though you’ll have to buy a domain separately or use a free .wixsite.com extension. Also comes with “Powered by Wix” ads.

-Combo Plan - At $8.50/month, Wix doubles your bandwidth (to 2GB) and adds 3GB storage.

-Unlimited Plan - For $12.50/month, Wix offers unlimited bandwidth, 10GB disk space, plus $75 in ad vouchers, a form builder app and the Site Booster app.

-eCommerce Plan - For $16.50/month, you’ll get everything in the Unlimited plan plus 20GB disk space and an online store.

-VIP Plan - For $24.50/month, you’ll get all features of the eCommerce plan and also be able to run 10 email campaigns each month - and Wix throws in a professional site review as well.

The not-so-cheap prices that Wix charges reflect the accessibility of their service. It’s such a user-friendly platform that anyone can create a site. It’s still a good service for the price - you’re getting a lot of features through the website builder.

Wix offers a full refund if you cancel before 14 days.

All of Wix’s hosting plans are cloud-based - so no VPS, dedicated or shared plans. A perk of this is that you won’t be paying as much as for these more expensive kinds of hosting. Their plans include their highly-ranked website builder, with hundreds of customizable, mobile-responsive templates and uses a beginner-friendly drag-and-drop editor. Most of the plans include unlimited bandwidth (for the Unlimited plan and up), a free domain for a year (applicable to all plans except Connect Domain), no commission on eCommerce plans, Google Analytics (all plans), hours of video (unlimited for Business VP, 10 for Business Unlimited, 5 with Business Basic, 2 with VIP, 1 with Unlimited and 30 minutes with Combo).

Even the cheapest plan, Connect Domain, gets you 500MB of storage and 1GB bandwidth. You will have to provide your own domain or buy it separately.

Wix is a web powerhouse. Website building and hosting made truly easy, paving the way for anyone to create a website regardless of their budget, and even throwing in hosting in the cost of your site. If you need to build a website, this is a great option to do everything in one go. It’s not so cheap, but we think it’s a great value - with great uptimes, excellent customer service and everything covered on their powerful cloud servers, you won’t have to worry about the nitty gritty of building and hosting. They’ll take care of that for you.