A single tiny GIF, frequently used in chats by a site's community members, ended up adding 377GB to the website's backup quota, breaking its Linux filesystem and causing the backup process to fail. The Jennifer Aniston ‘happy dance’ reaction GIF weighs in at 1.6MB, and in the headlining case, it was duplicated 246,173 times in the backup, writes Discourse tech blogger Jake Goldsborough. This problem was precipitated by, dare we say, an overuse of the happy dance GIF, plus a file security policy implementation. Fixing it wasn’t entirely straightforward.

Discourse is a company and open‑source software project that builds one of the most widely used modern community‑discussion platforms, currently powering over 22,000 online communities. Its real-time chat platform allows users to insert emojis and GIFs in their discussions to liven up debates. But the platform’s ‘secure uploads’ feature means that “when a file moves between security contexts (say, from a private message to a public post), the system creates a new copy with a randomized SHA1,” explains Goldsborough. “The original content is identical, but Discourse treats it as a new file.” So, a popular image or reaction GIF will spread across posts, reposts, and PMs, and each context creates another file copy.

Discourse’s first attempt at a fix for the system being swamped by duplicates was to track original content by its hash. Then, during backup, group uploads by the hash and download only the first file in each group. Hardlinks were created for any duplicates.

No one told them life was gonna be this way

This seemed like an elegant solution until one of Discourse’s larger customers made everyone aware of the ext4 limit of roughly 65,000 hardlinks per inode. In the headlining case, the backup worked with this first fix, but “instead of one download for all 246,173 duplicates, we got one download plus ~181,000 fallback downloads after hitting the limit,” explains the firm’s blog. “Not the win I expected.”

The absurdly duplicated file that created 377GB of bloat was Rachel from Friends doing her happy dance. So, the problematic site was obviously quite a happy one, with the reaction GIF “used constantly in posts, PMs, everywhere,” noted Discourse.

Also happily, Discourse managed to fathom a fix for its earlier fix. In effect, this new fix begins like the old one, by creating hardlinks. But when the filesystem throws up an EMLINK error message (too many hardlinks), it will copy the file locally and treat the new file as ‘primary’ until it reaches the limit again. This new measure “works on any filesystem, no configuration needed,” says Discourse, with some satisfaction.

Discourse ends by highlighting the lessons learned from its confounding animated GIF duplication frenzy, wryly observing that “now I know Jennifer Aniston can stress-test infrastructure.”

Via Licensing Alliance (Via LA), the patent pool administrator for H.264/AVC, quietly restructured its streaming license fees recently, replacing a flat $100,000 annual cap with a tiered system that tops out at $4,500,000 per year for the largest platforms, according to a Streaming Media report published on March 17. The change applies only to previously unlicensed implementers seeking a new license in 2026 or later, with all companies that held an active AVC license as of the end of 2025 retaining their original terms. The new hike for H.264 comes in the wake of disastrous increases in HEVC/H.265 fees that led to widespread issues spanning the globe, including Asus and MSI laptops being banned in Germany.

Via LA told Streaming Media that it contacted unlicensed media companies during 2025 to give them “a window to secure a license” under the previous terms, but the company didn’t go to the trouble of issuing a press release or public announcement, opting instead for direct outreach. Any company that didn’t respond or wasn't contacted now faces the new rate structure as its starting point for negotiations.

H.264 is the most widely deployed video codec on the internet, used as a baseline or fallback by virtually every streaming platform, hardware encoder, and browser. Many of its patents have expired, but patent licensing attorney Jim Harlan told Streaming Media that the expiration of a large share of a portfolio doesn’t automatically eliminate licensing obligations. Courts evaluating fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) rates still consider the strength and remaining life of active patents, not just their quantity, Harlan said.

The new fee schedule divides the market by platform type and size. Tier 1 OTT services with 100 million or more subscribers pay the full $4.5 million annual fee. The same rate applies to Tier 1 FAST services (100 million-plus daily users), Tier 1 social media platforms (1 billion-plus monthly active users), and Tier 1 cloud gaming platforms (15 million-plus monthly active users). Tier 2 and Tier 3 fees are $3,375,000 and $2,250,000, respectively, and only platforms Via LA classifies as small or nascent retain the old $100,000 cap.

The Via LA fee restructuring adds to a broader escalation in codec licensing costs. Avanci's Video pool and Access Advance's Video Distribution Patent pool are both now seeking content royalties from streaming services for the use of HEVC, VVC, VP9, and AV1. Access Advance's rates are capped at roughly $63 million per year, and Avanci has published rates of 1.6% to 2.0% of revenue or $0.12 to $0.15 per user per month. Combined, these pools could push major streaming platforms toward nine-figure annual codec licensing costs.

We’ve already seen these patent escalations trickle down into consumer PCs and laptops. Nokia won a patent ruling in Germany that forced Acer and Asus to halt PC and laptop sales in the country, and Dell and HP disabled H.265 decoding in select PCs to dodge royalty costs. But H.264 has a much, much larger footprint across devices and services, meaning that the new Via LA fee structure, while currently limited to unlicensed implementers, could cause similar issues across the wider industry if Via LA chooses to extend its scope.

Starlink has posted an update on satellite 34343, which it lost communication with on Sunday. The SpaceX-owned global internet firm says that the satellite “experienced an anomaly” while it was in LEO at around 560 km above the Earth. It also used wording to play down any concerns about risk to the thousands of other man-made objects at a similar altitude. However, orbital intelligence agency LeoLabs is less coy and describes Sunday’s incident as a “fragment creation event.”

Rapid Unplanned Disassembly

Following the anomaly on Sunday, Starlink’s official line (as above) was to play down any risks to the International Space Station, Monday’s Transporter-16 mission, or the upcoming launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission. It doesn’t go as far as admitting there is any post-rapid unplanned disassembly debris, but does say that it will “continue to monitor the satellite along with any trackable debris and coordinate with NASA and the U.S. Space Force.”

Naturally, SpaceX and Starlink teams are working to determine the cause of the anomaly and implement any changes necessary to prevent this from happening again. Sadly, the analysis of whatever happened towards the end of last year, when another Starlink satellite tumbled from space after an “anomaly,” didn’t stop this latest debris‑generation incident.

LeoLabs provides some further analysis regarding the fate of satellite 34343. Its radar system “immediately detected tens of objects in the vicinity of the satellite after the event.” Moreover, the independent space‑situational‑awareness (SSA) data provider reckons that the not-an-explosion was “likely caused by an internal energetic source rather than a collision with space debris” or another satellite.

On potential risks to other satellites and missions from the now-ex-satellite, LeoLabs doesn’t highlight any specific dangers. It reckons the fragments from the anomaly will probably de-orbit within a few weeks.

This was indeed a similar Starlink satellite incident to that which occurred last December, think the independent analysts. It goes on to recommend greater clarity to ensure safety in the operating environment.

SpaceX IPO

SpaceX is warming up Wall Street for what could be the largest IPO of all time. It reportedly wants to raise around $75 billion in its offer, which equates to a $1.75 trillion valuation.

It would be better for Elon Musk’s firm if fewer rapid unplanned disassembly incidents happened between now and the IPO, tipped to be this summer.

However, with FCC approval and plans for thousands more Starlink LEO satellites and even talk of a 1 million satellite Orbital Data Center System from SpaceX coming to light, one might assume that any unsolved anomalies become more frequent.

Ireland's High Court on Wednesday, March 25, granted Sky a Norwich Pharmacal order compelling Revolut Bank UAB to hand over the names, addresses, and banking details of 304 subscribers and 10 resellers connected to the now-defunct pirate IPTV service "IPTV is Easy," as TorrentFreak reports.

The ruling marks the first time in Ireland that end users of illegal streaming services face potential legal action from rightsholders, with Sky's barrister telling the court the company expects to pursue the resellers and some of the subscribers.

The order stems from Sky's investigation into David Dunbar, a Wexford man who ran "IPTV is Easy" and sold subscriptions for €80 to €100 per year. Last August, Dunbar consented to a €480,000 damages judgment and was separately fined €30,000 for contempt of court after destroying evidence and refusing to allow investigators to search his home under an Anton Piller order.

Much of the service's customer data was lost or destroyed, but Dunbar's Revolut statements showed he received €118,992 from resellers and €72,414 plus £9,256 from end users over roughly three and a half years. Sky identified 12 resellers and 304 subscribers who transferred money via Revolut, but the bank said it could only disclose customer information under a court order.

Sky investigator Damien Gilmore said in an affidavit that at least five of Dunbar's resellers continue to sell pirate IPTV services. With the English Premier League football season nearing its end and major golf and Formula 1 events approaching, Gilmore told the court Sky is anxious to take "decisive action" while demand for premium sports content is at its peak.

Sky's barrister, Theo Donnelly, acknowledged it wouldn’t be possible to bring cases against all 304 subscribers, but legal action against even a subset of them would be unprecedented in Ireland. Judge Brian Cregan restricted the use of the disclosed information to initiating legal proceedings against the alleged infringers.

The Irish ruling fits a growing pattern in Europe of pursuing individual IPTV subscribers. On March 20, a French public prosecutor's office fined 19 IPTV subscribers between €300 and €400 after their identities were exposed through a reseller bust. Meanwhile, Italian authorities identified thousands of subscribers following the dismantling of a pirate network last year, and rightsholders sent civil damages demands on top of criminal fines.

Under Ireland's Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000, using illegal streaming services can carry fines of up to €127,000 and up to five years' imprisonment. No Irish court has yet applied those penalties to subscribers, but the coming cases will test whether enforcement extends beyond operators. Ireland is estimated to have around 400,000 pirate IPTV users.

Starlink’s official social media channels are boasting about an incredible performance update on the way to mobile customers. A Tweet on Sunday claimed that the next-gen V2 satellites being launched by SpaceX would deliver “100x the data density of the current V1 generation satellites.” That’s the kind of upgrade multiplier anyone can appreciate.

The announcement will affect the Starlink Mobile service, which was previously branded as ‘Direct to Cell’ until recently. Whatever the moniker, this service provides satellite-to-phone communications – data, voice, messaging – across 32 countries spanning six continents. When enough V2 satellites get into LEO position, we’d say these “cellphone towers in space” are going to boost the service quality significantly.

The Starlink Direct to Cell, now Starlink Mobile, service only began to roll out commercially last July. However, compared to traditional mobile service providers, its only real draw is the inherent ‘connectivity where you need it’ and emergency coverage where space-based comms beat those on Earth.

100x, 20x, what the x?

Starlink Mobile’s current service, using V1 satellites, is currently only good for ‘light data’ and texts, according to a number of mobile-centric sites. Thus, the upgrade to V2 is going to be significant.

Putting some numbers to the claims, we see that the V2 upgrade is touted to deliver ‘5G from space,’ which is also compatible with 100s of existing LTE phones. Don’t get the 100x and 20x claims seen across Starlink social media and web pages mixed up. The V2 satellites upgrade is said to provide “100x the data density” compared to the current V1 satellites, with “around 20x the throughput capability” per satellite.

Starlink also expects terrestrial operator partners, like T-Mobile in the U.S., to provide services which “seamlessly transition between satellite and terrestrial networks without interruption or degradation in service.” Previous Starlink announcements point to a goal of peak speeds of 150 Mbps per user becoming realistic with the rollout of the V2 satellites.

SpaceX is currently planning up to 15,000 new satellites to power its ‘5G from space’ goal. Starship’s progress at putting the larger, more capable V2 satellites into space will impact the availability window of the enhanced service, but some V2 Mini satellites are already being launched to help bridge the gap.

Thus, early 2027 looks most likely to be when the initial V2 service will be tested in the early rollout stage.

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have become an unfortunate routine part of the modern internet, with botnets of compromised devices spreading ever wider. Unfortunately, the scale and frequency of those attacks have also been rising. The Aisuru-Kimwolf botnet recently smashed its previous record, hitting 31.4 Tb/s in December. To put it into perspective, that's bandwidth enough to stream nearly 2.2 million Netflix 4K movies at once.

An attack of that dimension is enough to easily knock many internet service providers offline, if not entire countries. In a blog post (via BleepingComputer), Cloudflare calls it an "unprecedented bombardment" targeting its customers, dashboard, and infrastructure. The company notes that these attacks are performed in a "hit-and-run" fashion, with gigantic bursts of traffic hitting everywhere at once, lasting from a few seconds to minutes.

Cloudflare also notes that the potential attack size grew by 7x in a single year, thanks to the growth of the Aisuru and Kimwolf botnets. Aisuru is considered the "parent" botnet and comprises small, internet-connected devices such as IoT equipment, DVRs, and even virtual machines on hosting services. Aisuru's devices reportedly live primarily in the U.S. The botnet grows by gaining access to new devices via default credentials (e.g., username "admin", password "admin") and outdated firmware that contains known vulnerabilities.

As for Kimwolf, it can be regarded as a variant of Aisuru, but explicitly targeted at Android-based devices: mobile phones with outdated software or malicious apps, smart TVs, and set-top boxes, among others. Cloudflare says most of Kimwolf's two million minions live in Brazil, India, and Saudi Arabia.

The operators of the botnets have an interesting economy that they operate within. They sell access to the botnet to other cybercriminals, sometimes at surprisingly low prices, for tens of thousands of dollars. The renters then use the botnet to spread their malware, spam, or whatever nefarious activity has been scheduled for the day. The received funds help expand the botnet further.

Cloudflare does note that the Aisuru-Kimwolf network is "parasitic" and that its owners rent out "residential proxies", a term describing a set of devices in a residential setting, adding a layer of anonymity for attackers to hide behind.

On the technical side, UDP carpet-bombing is apparently the most commonly used technique, and the one employed for the 31.4 Tb last December. That entails spreading out the attack surface so wide that it makes it hard for the defenders to block it. Cloudflare adds that the combined botnet has also been targeting gaming services with hyper-volumetric HTTP attacks, sending gigantic amounts of legitimate-looking requests to online services that ultimately overwhelm the target's network or computing capacity.

Amid widespread anti-government protests, Iran has shut down all methods of internet access within its borders, reports IranWire. It has done the same previously, during earlier, milder episodes of revolt. However, this time the authorities seem to have also been successful in disrupting the tens of thousands of Starlink receivers thought to be inside the country. On Sunday, U.S. President Donald Trump said that he would speak to Elon Musk, the owner of SpaceX and Starlink, about restoring internet access to the Iranian public.

You're likely well aware of the severity of the clashes between protesters and the Iranian authorities. The general worldwide news media are filling the airwaves and front pages with reports about the uprising, and shocking numbers of casualties and arrests over the last four days.

During previous notable times of public unrest, Iran has cut public communications like internet services, mobile services, and even phone services. The commonly accepted reason for such blocks is to prevent easy communication and organizing by protesters. The same actions serve to limit the flow of images and videos to the outside world. Thus, the internet blockade helps the Iranian government shape the narrative, or at least gives it a better chance of doing so.

Starlink disruption likely relies on acquired Chinese or Russian tech

IW highlights something quite different during this latest spate of organized government dissent. On Friday, it noted that “even satellite internet services like Starlink sharply dropped.” Internet researcher Amir Rashidi told IranWire that, this time, “military-grade jamming signals were detected targeting Starlink satellites.” This directed action by the Iranian authorities meant that up to 80% of Starlink traffic was disrupted. Rashidi characterized this jamming effort as unprecedented yet highly sophisticated, and suspects Chinese or Russian tech has been acquired for this purpose, though doesn’t rule out something domestically developed.

Internal to Iran, government-aligned internet sites and channels reportedly started to come back online, thought to be through a progressive white-listing system. The first beneficiaries were “government-aligned Telegram channels, state media accounts, and some university networks,” notes IranWire. The last time there was a crackdown on the internet and digital communications it lasted 12 days. Perhaps this could be longer.

President Trump will talk to Elon Musk about Iran’s internet blockade

U.S. government officials have been quite vocal in condemning the reported killing of more than 500 protesters and the 10,000+ that have been imprisoned over the last four days.

On Sunday, U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters he has plans to talk with Elon Musk about restoring internet services in Iran. Trump was answering a question from a reporter about restoring internet services, like Starlink, for the Iranian public. “He's very good at that kind of thing, he's got a very good company,” the President assured concerned reporters.

In this how-to, I will show you how to create a Plex server on a spare computer running Debian Linux, in my case, a Raspberry Pi 4, but you could easily replace it with an old laptop, spare PC, or a dedicated mini PC.

There are a myriad of streaming services available, and all of them want your money. That’s not a bad thing. Some content is only available via streaming, or the best possible version is streaming. But I like physical media. I like knowing I have every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and The X-Files. Those were the shows that I watched as a teenager, and they bring me comfort.

I don’t want to buy my media again, heck, I’ve owned Deep Space Nine on VHS and DVD, and my copies of Star Wars stretch back to Betamax! I want my media ready to watch at a moment's notice, and this is where DIY services such as Plex and Jellyfin come into their own.

The best source of media for this project are DVDs and Blu-rays that you already own. Check your local laws before doing so, but you should be able to rip your discs using a tool such as Handbrake. We also have a full guide on how to rip your discs to digital files.

So let's build our own media server!

Setting Up Your Media Drive

For this, you will need a USB drive formatted as NTFS, along with your media sorted into folders. I tend to organize my media into the following:

• Movies
  • A-Z list of movies
• Series
  • Series name
    • Season

With the media already on the USB drive, let's get it connected to what will become our Plex server.

1. Insert the drive into a spare USB 3 port on the machine. The OS should auto-mount the drive.

2. Locate the drive’s name, label and UUID using blkid. In my case, the device name was /dev/sda1, its label was “Files,” and the UUID was “2EB36FFA4908D959.” Make a note of these details.

blkid

3. Navigate to the mounted drive and list the contents to prove that the system can see the files. On my Raspberry Pi the drive was /media/pi/Files.

cd /media/pi/Files

4. Set the permissions for the folder so that it is accessible to anyone. Yes, this is bad security practice for production servers, but for a small home media server, we can mitigate the risk. Remember to change the path to match the location of your media files.

sudo chmod 777 /media/pi/Files

5. Unmount the drive and then remount using NTFS to test that the process works. Remember to replace the device name and the mount point with values that match yours.

sudo umount /dev/sda1sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/pi/

6. To automatically mount the drive on boot, edit fstab and add this line to the end so that it detects the drive as the system boots. Remember to change the UUID and /media/pi/Files mount to match the results from Step 2.

UUID=2EB36FFA4908D959  /media/pi/Files  ntfs-3g  defaults,uid=pi,gid=pi,umask=002  0  0

7. Save by pressing CTRL + O, ENTER then CTRL + X.

8. Reboot the Raspberry Pi for the changes to take effect.

How to install Plex Server

1. On the Raspberry Pi, open a browser and visit the Plex Media Server download page.

2. Click on the dropdown and select the version you want to download, in this case, Linux. Click Choose Distribution, then select the correct version for your Linux distribution. I’m using the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS, so I chose the Armv8 download. If you are adapting this how-to to run on an Intel- or AMD-based machine, select the 32- or 64-bit version for your architecture.

3. Open a terminal and install the downloaded Plex package, which will be in your Downloads folder. Wait for the installation to complete.

sudo dpkg -i <>

4. Add the user plex to the Pi user group. This will give Plex access to drives and other devices.

sudo usermod -aG pi plex

5. Get the IP address of your Raspberry Pi via the terminal. The -I is a capital i.

hostname -I

6. On another device, on the same network, open a web browser and go to the IP address of your Plex server, followed by port 32400 and then /web. Here is what my URL looked like.

http://192.168.0.192:32400/web/

7. Start the Plex setup process and then name your server. I used PlexServer.

8. Create a library of movies, this will point to the location of the USB drive that has all of your media.

9. Click Done to finish the installation.

The Plex User Interface

Plex’s user interface is familiar to anyone who has used a streaming service. It is designed to get the media to us without any issues. In the free version that we are using, it also gets the advertisements right to your eyeballs. There are plenty of free streams to watch, but we’re really here for our content. Let's take a look around the user interface and get to know Plex.

1. Main menu: Here we can look through our watchlist, live TV shows, movies & shows. Just above is the “hamburger menu” to go in depth on your configuration.

2. Filters: Filter the content to show trending, what friends are watching, and activity.

3. Settings: Advanced settings for your Plex server. This includes user accounts, libraries, and we can even cast our Plex viewing to a compatible device.

4. Libraries: The mounted USB disk full of our movies is linked to from here. Clicking the link will open the drive and our content library.

5. Content: This section changes as the user navigates the content. Here we can see the advertised content.

If we click on the library (4), then the screen changes to show the content on the drive hosting the library. As you can see, my library is pretty light, as this is a test setup.

Wrapping Up

You’ve just made your own streaming service, one that will share your DVD and media library to devices across your home. You can use the web interface to watch your movies, or use one of the many Plex client apps for Smart TVs, phones, consoles, and Amazon’s Alexa.

Starlink satellite 35956 suffered from a serious anomaly on December 17. It is described as largely intact, but is currently “tumbling, and will reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and fully demise within weeks,” says the official Starlink X account. Geospatial intelligence partner Vantor shared what is likely the last clear image of the ill-fated satellite after SpaceX urgently requested visual intelligence.

Space anomaly damages satellite 35956

We don’t have a clear description of what exactly happened with satellite 35956. Starlink just describes the problem as an “anomaly” that occurred on December 17. Engineers working for Starlink are said to be “rapidly working to root cause and mitigate the source of the anomaly.” No insight into this investigation is ready yet, but apparently, some software changes are already being deployed that “increases protections against this type of event.”

It was observed that satellite 35956 lost communications at an altitude of 418km. “The anomaly led to venting of the propulsion tank, a rapid decay in semi-major axis by about 4 km, and the release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects,” says Starlink.

Currently, the “tumbling” satellite remains largely intact, according to the satellite communications firm. It is estimated that it will “reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and fully demise within weeks.” Importantly, neither the larger part of the satellite nor its “small number of trackable low relative velocity objects” are thought to pose any threat to humans on Earth. It is also noted that its trajectory will place it below the International Space Station, so those folks don’t need to worry either.

Partner SpaceX urgently requested visual intelligence, and Vantor quickly responded by capturing a “12 cm non-Earth image that provided visual intelligence about the condition of the spacecraft.”

Vantor explains that its WorldView-3 satellite was 241 km away from the Starlink satellite 35956 when it captured this image of the “tumbling” spacecraft. The image reproduced in the LinkedIn post isn’t the sharpest picture of a satellite we have seen, but it was enough to “provide confirmation that the satellite was mostly intact, enabling SpaceX to assess potential damage,” says Vantor.

Starlink is currently the largest satellite operator by quite some margin. There are approximately 12,000 active satellites now in LEO space, with over 8,000 operated by Starlink. Tens of thousands more are planned by Starlink and global rivals, and it isn’t surprising that there are issues, accidents, and near-misses from time to time.

Spotify, the largest music streaming platform in the world with hundreds of millions of active users, and an extensive library of music has allegedly been hacked by Anna's Archive. The shadow library, who labels itself as archivists, has apparently scraped nearly the entirety of the platform, downloading roughly 300 TB of music that is now being distributed illegally via torrents.

Spotify has already acknowledged and responded to this attack, issuing the following statement to Android Authority:

"An investigation into unauthorized access identified that a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM to access some of the platform’s audio files. We are actively investigating the incident."

That "some" in the above comment is key because the leaked collection consists of around 86 million files in particular, representing ~37% of all music available on the platform (but 99.9% of listens). Most of them are preserved in Spotify's original OGG Vorbis 160 kbps format, but if any song has a popularity rating of exactly 0, then they've been re-encoded to 75kpbs to save space.

With that, there's 256 million rows of metadata that accounts for 99.6% of all listens on Spotify and it has been complied into query-able SQL databases. The group has done a near-lossless JSON reconstruction of Spotify's API, including 186 million unique ISRCs. — identifiers for individual recordings worldwide; think of them as ISBNs for music. All the album info, artist info, cover art etc., is included.

The blog post released by Anna's Archive going over this leak is surprisingly informative, including a bunch of charts that break down how Spotify treats music in general. For instance, around 70% of all songs on the platform barely get any attention, while 0.1% of the tracks are the most popular of all time. Most songs are also singles, rather than part of an album, and 120 BPM is the most common tempo.

Anyhow, the reason for this large-scale hack, as described by Anna's Archive itself, is preservation of music. Since the group is notorious for open-sourcing books without consent, it's applying much of the same logic here, arguing that Spotify's collection is too overtly focused on popular artists and sound quality. There needs to be an "authoritative list of torrents aiming to represent all music ever produced."

The torrents are self-hosted, and the files are packaged using Anna’s Archive Containers (AAC), a custom format the group has used for years. The metadata has already been released while the rest of the data will follow a staggered release pattern in huge chunks, categorized by popularity. Therefore, the aftermath of this scrape will only truly show up down the line.

LG smart TV owners are reporting that a recent webOS software update has added Microsoft Copilot to their TVs, with no apparent way to remove it. Reports first surfaced over the weekend on Reddit, where a post showing a Copilot tile pinned to an LG TV home screen climbed to more than 35,000 upvotes on r/mildlyinfuriating, accompanied by hundreds of comments from users describing the same behavior.

According to affected users, Copilot appears automatically after installing the latest webOS update on certain LG TV models. The feature shows up on the home screen alongside streaming apps, but unlike Netflix or YouTube, it cannot be uninstalled.

My LG TV’s new software update installed Microsoft Copilot, which cannot be deleted. from r/mildlyinfuriating

LG has previously confirmed plans to integrate Microsoft Copilot into webOS as part of its broader “AI TV” strategy. At CES 2025, the company described Copilot as an extension of its AI Search experience, designed to answer questions and provide recommendations using Microsoft’s AI services. In practice, the iteration of Copilot currently seen on LG TVs appears to function as a shortcut to a web-based Copilot interface rather than a fully native application like the one described by LG.

The issue, for many, isn’t necessarily what Copilot does, but that it has been forced onto consumers with no option to remove it. LG’s own support documentation notes that certain preinstalled or system apps cannot be deleted, only hidden. Users who encounter Copilot after the update report that this limitation applies, leaving them with no way to fully remove the feature once it has been added. It's a similar story on rival models, for instance some Samsung TV's include Gemini.

The overwhelmingly negative reaction from users indicates a growing frustration with AI features being imposed on consumers in every way possible. Smart TVs have naturally become platforms for advertising, data collection, and now AI services, with updates adding new functionality that owners did not explicitly request and, in most cases, do not want. While LG allows users to disable some AI-related options, such as voice recognition and personalization features, those settings do not remove the Copilot app itself.

Ultimately, those wanting to minimize Copilot’s presence on their TVs are limited to keeping it disconnected from the Internet. That’s about the most that can be done at the moment, unless LG backtracks and either allows users to disable or completely uninstall the app in response to backlash, which seems unlikely.

There was a notably “dangerously close” approach between a newly launched Chinese satellite and Starlink-6079 a few days ago. VP of SpaceX’s Starlink Engineering, Michael Nicolls, disclosed that a Chinese satellite came within 200m (219 yards) of an orbiting Starlink device. That’s an extremely close call with catastrophe, with Starlink LEO satellites known to travel at speeds exceeding 17,400mph. Nicholls called for improved coordination between space agencies.

On December 9, a rocket launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center took nine satellites into orbit. One of the Long March 2D rocket payload satellites was then observed to pass within 200m of the Starlink-6079 satellite (NORAD ID 56120) in low-Earth orbit (LEO) at 560km (348 miles) altitude.

Nicolls emphasized that near-misses like this will continue to happen. “Most of the risk of operating in space comes from the lack of coordination between satellite operators,” claimed the Starlink VP. “This needs to change.” Indeed, change is required to prevent the near-miss news, bad as it is, from taking a tragic twist.

There are approximately 12,000 active satellites now in LEO space, with probably 8,000 operated by Starlink. Starlink satellites travel at incredible speeds, exceeding 17,400mph, so a collision could easily destroy anything involved.

Moreover, the resulting high-velocity debris fragments, in their thousands, could cause far more damage, with some commenters on Nicolls’ post raising the specter of the Kessler Syndrome. That would be a chain reaction of collisions, exponentially increasing debris, and potentially making LEO space unusable for generations to come.

Science can help prevent such an unfortunate outcome, but global coordination is lacking, so a policy push seems to be required. China doesn’t notify or share trajectories to voluntary platforms such as the U.S. Space-Track.org or the UN’s International Telecommunications Union. Hopefully, it won’t need to see a massive space incident to prompt it into some sensible preventative collaborative action.

If you think LEO space is crowded now...

Meanwhile, plans for greater numbers of LEO satellites are forging ahead, cranking up the chance/danger of a collision. Starlink plans to expand its constellation to around 42,000 for global internet coverage. Amazon Leo has plans for over 3,200 satellites. In China, Guowang talks about targeting 13,000 satellites, and Shanghai Spacecom has mentioned a target of 14,000. Over in Europe, the Eutelsat OneWeb constellation numbers 648 satellites, with Gen2 mega-scale rollout still in consultation. And there are more…

Ukraine’s Defence Express news has highlighted the continuing issue of Russian drones with access to Starlink satellite internet guidance. Despite assurances from U.S. Pentagon officials from over a year ago, drones from the Russian aggressors are still flying into Ukrainian airspace to strike their targets – with Starlink hardware clearly strapped to them, claims the source (machine translation).

The new report, on what seems to be an ongoing issue, has been sparked by one of the first sightings of a crashed/disabled ‘Molniya’ (Lightning) strike drone. This is shown in pictures originally shared by Serhiy ‘Flash’ Beskrestnov, a Ukrainian electronic warfare and communications expert, who is active on Telegram social media.

In the images, a Starlink Mini is clearly perched atop the grounded drone. ‘Flash’ doesn’t insist this drone actually came from Russia, but the overall design and internal components (like the battery) suggest it was very likely a Russian device.

Perhaps even more serious than this latest spotting is the Ukraine Defense Express assertion that Starlink usage by Russian drones hasn’t been totally stopped since it was first documented in 2024.

Later that same year, the US Defense Department’s assistant secretary for space policy, John Plumb, told Bloomberg that the Russian military’s unauthorized use of SpaceX’s Starlink internet had been blunted. An IMI report says that Plumb wasn’t specific about the measures put in place to deny Russian access, but that it was a “good solution” for Starlink and Ukraine.

Russian Shahed-136 drones have previously been seen kitted out with Starlink gear. The Ukraine Defense Express says that Russia’s recently unveiled RD-8 mother drone is Starlink controllable, too. Evidence of this wasn’t reproduced within the source story.

If the Ukraine Defense Express is correct, though, it is unsettling to know that the incessant Russian drone onslaught hitting Ukraine’s military, civilians, and key infrastructure could be weakened with just a little more political will.

Internet outages happen all the time. Just this week, the recent Cloudflare outage disrupted millions of users. The infrastructure on which our digital lives are built is precarious and often prone to errors. When those happened, they used to have a small impact. A website’s servers crashing would bring down only that website and anything that relied on it. But as the web has become more centralised in its infrastructure, with a handful of companies dominating the market, any individual issue has the potential to domino into a much more significant one.

We’ve seen two recent alarming examples of that happening in real life. On October 20, thousands of services around the world fell offline and ground to a halt after processes that are meant to keep the Domain Name System (DNS) routing and records that AWS controls went out of sync, triggering a “latent race condition”, a harmful bug that cascaded through almost all of AWS’s systems, including other routing services. That meant what was initially a single error in the U.S.-EAST-1 cluster of data centres in Northern Virginia became a problem affecting everyone, as far away as Australia and the UK.

Then, less than 10 days later, a similar issue struck Microsoft’s Azure cloud system. Xbox gamers, the Scottish parliament, and many other key bits of infrastructure fell offline, thanks to another DNS issue.

Both were quickly resolved, but the speed at which they caused chaos in the online-offline world in which we now live highlighted just how precarious our digital lives can be. And it began to get people thinking: does the web’s key infrastructure have a problem of over-concentration when it comes to power?

A concentration of power

The big three cloud infrastructure providers – AWS, Azure and Google Cloud – together hold more than two-thirds of the market. They’ve attained that level of power because of their remarkable uptime. The fact that things go wrong so rarely is a vindication of their ability and reliability. Yet it also means that more and more services are hosted on fewer and fewer servers controlled by fewer companies – so on the rare occasion that something does go wrong, it goes really wrong.

“When one of the major cloud providers experiences an issue, it doesn't just affect one company; it ripples across sectors, services, and even countries,” said Graeme Stewart, head of public sector at Check Point Software. Stewart pointed out that both the AWS and Azure outages looked more like cock-up than conspiracy – certainly the AWS issue was, while the Azure one is still being investigated. Yet “incidents like this highlight how fragile our online infrastructure really is,” he said. “We have become so dependent on a handful of global platforms that one glitch can disrupt everything from banking to travel.”

And those glitches can have meaningful impacts on us all, given that the infrastructure providers are used by companies that collectively have hundreds of millions of users, and span industries, meaning that banks are as likely to go down as video games or government voting systems.

Experts weigh in

“This was yet another big flashing warning light of the potential peril we face,” Stacy Mitchell, co-director at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a US advocacy group promoting local, accountable economies, said in an interview with Tom’s Hardware Premium. She points out that this was an innocuous set of errors that happened to have catastrophic consequences. But it could become a more cynical ploy by those who seek to control the media and their message if they wanted to. “Imagine, for example, how this concentrated control of critical infrastructure might be wielded by a would-be authoritarian and the tech CEOs eager to curry his favour,” said Mitchell.

How to fix it is another issue – and one that doesn’t have an easy answer. “Sadly, it’s inevitable that if you want to have truly scalable global content distribution, the infrastructure required is so large it will concentrate in those that can afford it,” said Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at the University of Surrey, in an interview with Tom’s Hardware Premium. “I’m not sure it will change as few can catch up.”

Even those that are catching up – running in fourth place – are big tech giants of another stripe. Alibaba Cloud remains more than 10 percentage points behind the third-place runner in terms of the cloud industry, but even then, if it could bridge that gap, it’s replacing an American big tech firm with a Chinese one.

Woodward is sanguine about what that means. “What we see happening is simply the shaky foundations of the internet and web making its presence felt, regardless of the sophistication of the applications running on top,” he said. Those shaky foundations are also a warning to any nefarious cybercriminals who might want to pull off the biggest ransomware heist. Knowing that there’s a vulnerability – not necessarily in the way the cloud infrastructure is set up, but in terms of the consequences of it going down at any point, and the pressure that would be felt to pay up to return to some sense of normality – is a tempting target.

What's the solution?

The solution that many came up with in the immediate aftermath of the AWS outage wasn’t a breakup of control, though there have been questions raised after the UK government admitted 60% of its government services rely on the big three cloud providers in order to run, but a suggestion of putting your eggs in multiple baskets.

The problem with that is that redundancy is useful, but costly – and cloud infrastructure doesn’t necessarily come cheap. Because of the impressive uptime of the hyperscaler providers, getting purse-string holders to sign off on budgets can be tricky. But if there was ever a time to try and reduce reliance on a concentrated handful of providers, then it’s now, in the immediate aftermath of their embarrassing outages.

More literacy about the issue is needed first in order to begin any process of change, reckoned Woodward. “It’s surprising that many don’t understand exactly who has the tier one networks and the backend capability for hosting or storage,” he said. And until that happens, change will be slow.

Cloudflare has confirmed that a bug in one of its core services caused a major outage on Tuesday, taking large portions of the internet offline and affecting traffic to services including X, ChatGPT, and, ironically, Downdetector. The company’s CTO, Dane Knecht, posted a public apology shortly after services were restored, calling the incident "unacceptable" and attributing the disruption to a routine configuration change that triggered a crash in its bot mitigation layer.

The incident began at approximately 11:48 UTC on November 18, with Cloudflare's official status site acknowledging “internal service degradation”. As the issue spread, users across several regions reported failures to access not only Cloudflare-backed websites but also its Access and WARP services. The company later identified a specific dependency in its bot defense tooling as the source of the problem.

"We failed our customers and the broader internet," Knecht wrote. "A latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack."

By 14:42 UTC, Cloudflare had deployed a fix and began restoring affected components. Dashboard functionality, including analytics and error logging, remained partially degraded into the afternoon as engineers monitored for residual faults. A temporary suspension of WARP access in London was also enacted as part of the mitigation process.

Cloudflare’s bot mitigation stack, which includes challenge flows such as Turnstile and JavaScript verification layers, sits inline with traffic to many high-profile websites and APIs. Because these systems are used not only to block malicious actors but also to gate access for legitimate users, faults in this layer can result in widespread service disruption even when core CDN or DNS infrastructure remains operational.

This is the third major outage to affect major sites in less than a month. In October, a large section of AWS’s US-East-1 region went offline for over two hours following what Amazon later attributed to a broken DNS configuration. Then, just days later, a huge Azure outage hit Microsoft.

These incidents raise broader questions about how widely used services and platforms handle internal service faults and dependency isolation at scale — roughly 19% of the Internet relies on Cloudflare, while Azure and AWS account for roughly 24% and 30% of the cloud computing market, respectively.

T-Mobile is making serious inroads in the home broadband market with its own-branded 5G Home Internet service and, more recently, the launch of Mint Mobile MINTernet. Now, the company is refreshing its 5G Home Internet service with new tiers and hardware upgrades for new customers.

• New 5G Home Internet tiers and Wi-Fi 7 at T-Mobile

Previously, T-Mobile offered a single tier of service, with unlimited 5G data at $50 per month with AutoPay. T-Mobile is now calling this plan Rely, and it comes with what T-Mobile calls a “high-performance gateway,” which we’re assuming is still the Sercomm TMO-G4AR or equivalent hardware. The company says this plan offers “fast speeds,” but it actually imposes artificial speed limits.

There are also two new tiers: Amplified and All-In. Amplified costs $60 per month and includes a new Wi-Fi 7 gateway (it’s not specified whether it’s a dual- or tri-band setup). T-Mobile says that this gateway gives you access to its fastest 5G internet speeds (30 percent faster median speeds versus Rely).

The All-In plan also includes the Wi-Fi 7 gateway and access to the fastest internet speeds, but it adds Hulu and Paramount Plus subscriptions for $70 per month. The All-In plan also has another added benefit: the TechEdge Suite. According to T-Mobile, this includes a Wi-Fi 7 mesh extender (to increase wireless coverage in your home), 24/7 tech support, an internet 5G gateway hardware upgrade after three years, and an “advanced cyber security” package.

T-Mobile says typical download speeds for the Amplified and All-In plans are 134 to 415 Mbps, while uploads average 12 to 55 Mbps.

All plans include a 5-year price lock guarantee, unlimited data, and no annual contracts. In addition, if you already have a T-Mobile voice line, you can knock $15 off the aforementioned monthly plans (meaning Rely would then cost $35/month).

Of course, you need to read the fine print when it comes to 5G-based services, and T-Mobile Home Internet is no exception. The wireless carrier notes that even though it’s selling “unlimited” 5G plans, you could be subject to data prioritization, particularly for “Internet Heavy Data Users” who exceed 1.2TB during a billing cycle.

Customers can access the new plans starting on November 13, and qualified new customers can get up to a $300 prepaid virtual debit card for making the switch.

The German Koblenz Regional Court has banned 1&1 from referring to its fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC) service as fiber-optic DSL, because it still uses copper cables for the final stage of its connections, sometimes for up to a mile. According to the Federation of German Consumer Organizations [machine translated], users who visited the ISP’s website and checked connection availability would get a ‘1&1 fiber optic DSL connection available’ check mark, even if the entire line isn’t composed entirely of fiber optic cables.

However, the reality is that the fiber optic cables end at the distribution box, which is usually installed in the street for residential neighborhoods or at the service room of a multi-unit structure building. From there, the company uses copper lines to run directly into the homes of its subscribers and pairs it with vectoring connection technology that reduces interference between multiple connections that terminate at the box. This boosts the DSL speed up to 100mbps, giving subscribers the impression that they’re paying for and getting fiber optic internet, which is not the case. "However, the plans listed directly below the check results with the label "1&1 Fiber Optic DSL" were not fiber optic plans. In fact, they offered conventional DSL plans," the body explains.

The monthly rates on these connections do reflect DSL pricing, not fiber optic connection costs. But the fact that its branding and presentation have ‘fiber optic’ all over, customers who aren’t familiar with terminology and pricing can be easily confused. Because of this, the German consumer group sued the company, with its chairperson, Ramona Pop, saying that “Anyone who apparently promises fiber optics but can only deliver DSL is deceiving customers.”

German courts have agreed with the consumer group, saying that the company’s use of ‘fiber optics’ was misleading. After all, when customers hear fiber optics, they often assume that they’re getting fiber optics all the way into their homes. And while the fine print reportedly contains information saying that part of the line uses a copper connection, the judiciary said that it wasn’t enough to avoid tricking customers into thinking that the offered connection is full fiber.

Unfortunately, while the consumer group may have won this round, the order isn’t enforceable yet. The company has appealed the ruling, so we will have to wait for the decision of a higher court before 1&1 will be forced to change its advertising.

An amateur satellite tracker accidentally discovered a subset of classified military SpaceX satellites that are transmitting data on the wrong radio frequency. According to NPR, Canadian Scott Tilley found the mysterious signal while working on his hobby of monitoring satellites at home, when he inadvertently set his system to scan for radio frequencies that usually didn’t have traffic. To his surprise, he saw a signal emanating from space in the 2025-2110 MHz band, which satellites use to receive data from ground stations.

It is somewhat unusual, as this should’ve been empty, so Tilley recorded the transmissions for a few minutes. “It was just a clumsy move at the keyboard. I was resetting some stuff and then all of a sudden I’m looking at the wrong antenna, the wrong band,” Tilley told NPR. “[It] should have nothing there. I got a hold of my mouse and hit the record button and let it record for a few minutes.” He then compared his data to a satellite tracking database maintained by other amateurs and enthusiasts, which allowed him to identify the offending satellites. “Bang, up came an unusual identification that I wasn’t expecting at all. Starshield.”

Starshield is SpaceX’s classified satellite constellation, used primarily by the U.S. military for Earth observation and communications. It currently has over 200 satellites as part of the network, operated by the National Reconnaissance Office. Tilley says that he’s detected the unusual signal from 170 Starshield satellites, all within the same frequency range.

The 2025 to 2110 MHz spectrum is typically quiet because it’s reserved by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for satellite uplinks, which are usually conducted in short bursts, rather than the reverse. Because of this, SpaceX’s use of this frequency for sending data back to Earth can potentially cause interference with other nearby satellites — whether commercial, scientific, or even military — causing them to become unresponsive to commands. “SpaceX is smart and savvy,” Tilley said to the publication, and it’s likely that the company just went to “do it and ask forgiveness later.”

It’s unlikely that SpaceX’s circumvention of global standards has caused a significant disruption, as no other satellite operator has complained so far. Still, Tilley said that he published his findings on the open-access research repository Zenodo.org so that different operators are aware of this potential interference.

Several cell providers have hopped on the 5G home internet service bandwagon, with T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon offering service in select areas across the United States. Now, a new player is entering the fray: Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile is a subsidiary of T-Mobile, which is a known quantity in this segment, and its new service is called MINTernet.

Unsurprisingly, MINTernet operates on T-Mobile's nationwide wireless network, offering unlimited 5G service. Now, whenever unlimited data is mentioned in the 5G realm, you should always look at the fine print. In this case, Mint Mobile says that once you consume over 1TB of data within your billing cycle, "network speeds vary and may be reduced." This is similar to the T-Mobile Home Internet policy, where the restriction is implemented after exceeding the 1.2TB threshold.

Regarding the speeds you can expect, the "Broadband Facts" label for MINTernet indicates that typical download speeds will range from 133 to 415 Mbps, while uploads should reach a maximum of around 55 Mbps. As for latency, expect to see 16 to 28 ms in most situations.

MINTernet costs $40 per month if you opt for the introductory 3-month offer, and this price is contingent upon paying the entire cost upfront ($120). However, if you already have a Mint phone plan (or intend to add one at the time of signup), your monthly cost drops to $30 ($90 upfront).

A 6-month plan is also offered at $45/month ($270 upfront) or $35/month ($210 upfront) with a phone plan. Finally, there's a 12-month plan that drops back down to $40/month ($480 upfront) or $30/month ($360) with a qualifying phone plan. All customers will get a free 5G gateway (modem/Wi-Fi router) with their order, along with a 14-day money-back guarantee.

Considering that MINTernet runs on T-Mobile's 5G network, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that my first run-in with its 5G home internet service ended in disaster in 2022. However, I revisited the service in 2024 with much better results, averaging over 600 Mbps for downloads and over 50 Mbps for uploads. T-Mobile Home Internet costs $50/month with autopay, so if you tick the right boxes, MINTernet will save you up to $20/month.

SpaceX revealed its new V3 Starlink satellites, which it says will provide gigabit connectivity to users and enable 60 Tera-bits-per-second downlink capacity on the Starlink network. The company says each launch will add 20 times the capacity of its current V2 mini offering.

The above animation was first shared by SpaceX on Monday, during a live stream of the 11^th flight test of SpaceX’s reusable Starship vehicle, notes PCMag. And now we can see why SpaceX has started to use its more powerful Starship vehicle, in preference over the existing Falcon 9 rocket, which was used for prior generation satellite deployments..

As well as their obviously significantly larger physical form, a V3 satellite is estimated to weigh in at as much as 2,000kg (4,409 pounds). Compare that to the existing V2 Mini satellites, which are less than 600kg, and the V1 satellites at around 300kg.

We’ve established that these V3 Starlink satellites are big and heavy, so what are the network performance gains? SpaceX’s latest social media bulletin regarding the performance of these units is quite brief. However, it highlights that V3 will “bring gigabit connectivity to users and are designed to add 60 Tera-bits-per-second of downlink capacity to the Starlink network.”

Thankfully, there were some prior news releases and filings, which flesh out V3 details. An important one, for example, is that for every upcoming Starship launch, it will be possible to put 60 V3 satellites into orbit. “That's more than 20 times the capacity added with every V2 Mini launch on Falcon 9,” says SpaceX. Moreover, each new V3 satellite boasts 1,000 Gbps of download and 200 Gbps of upload bandwidth, making them better than 10x faster than V2 models.

With the V3 satellites deploying, probably early next year, we might begin to see SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s original vision of a global broadband service materialize. The new satellites’ next-gen architecture should deliver the increased coverage and speed to iron out connectivity and capacity wrinkles some users are experiencing with the service, as it stands. However, it has previously been indicated that Starlink users will need new hardware to benefit from the best speeds V3 satellites will enable.

Hopefully, SpaceX is still designing even its latest, biggest, and heaviest satellites to completely burn up upon reentry, at the end of their working lives. With V3, there’s a lot more mass to be combusted on the way down to Earth, and as more satellites head into orbit, space debris — and that debris falling back to earth — remains a growing concern.

A few weeks ago, we warned that a ‘routine evaluation’ of its business had triggered AOL’s decision to discontinue its 34-years established dial-up internet service. The fateful day came and went this week. As we bid September farewell and moved into the 10^th month of 2025, AOL’s dial-up service stopped picking up the line for its last remaining screechy modem-toting customers.

Not only was AOL’s dial-up Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN)-based internet connectivity service shut down mid-week, the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser were also laid to rest.

Originally known as America Online, AOL became many a fresh World Wide Web surfer’s first home. It was the biggest internet service provider (ISP) in the US in the late 1990s to early 2000s. Stats show that, at its height, the service enjoyed over 35 million subscribers. Of course, we know it pivoted to providing broadband, along with all its rivals, as we progressed into the new information age. With the rapid pace of technological change, and thirst for greater bandwidth and always-on connectivity, by the time we entered the 2010s AOL’s dial-up offering had plummeted in popularity so far as to become a niche service.

It is worth repeating the officially stated reasons behind the closure of the service. Back in August, AOL said that it “routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet.” We don’t know how many customers were hanging onto this particular service for the internet needs. However, the latest U.S. census figures we could find indicate that about a quarter of a million users were dial-up hold-outs. Most of these folks may have limited choices due to their rural or remote homesteads.

Alternative ISPs and dial-up modem uses

Afghanistan’s fiber networks are being disconnected by the governing Taliban. The reason for the ban on fast internet connectivity is to “prevent immorality,” according to a Taliban spokesman, as quoted by Sky News. As many as 10 out of 34 provinces in the country have already been affected, according to sources.

Dial-up connectivity stalwart AOL has set a date for cutting off the remainder of its old-tech internet holdouts. AOL, now a Yahoo! property, will end its dial-up internet service, the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN)-based internet connectivity service, on September 30, 2025. Its dial-up service has been publicly available for 34 years, and has provided many an internet surfer's first taste of the WWW. AOL will also end its AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser. RIP slowband.

The notice was delivered with more of a whimper than a screech, unbefitting of the end of an era. AOL wrote an inauspicious 100-word article on its help portal to inform the masses about this schism in connectivity, framing the decision as the result of a routine evaluation.

“AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet,” wrote the iconic internet service provider (ISP). “This service will no longer be available in AOL plans.”

The help message then went on to explain that it won’t just be the dial-up modem service that will be terminated on Sept 30. Also being administered their last rights at the end of September are the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser. The former will be useless without the associated service, of course, but the latter was optimized for older OSes and slow connections, and could still be useful for some.

Who will miss the screeching modem?

In large countries, with regions where traditional PSTN phone lines are still available, but newer internet connectivity options may not be, some might argue that dial-up is still viable. Also, sometimes it is advertised as a backup connectivity option. In the U.S., for instance, the latest government census data indicates approximately a quarter of a million remaining dial-up holdouts.

One of the natural successors for internet connectivity in hard-to-reach places is satellite, with around eight million subscribers in the U.S. Meanwhile, ten times more people use the current favorite, and price/performance internet connectivity sweet spot, delivered by the DLS/cable/fiber optic trinity.

We know some countries/regions have quite a range of competitive 5G offerings for home internet access, but that isn’t the U.S. at this time.

Did you suffer with PSTN PTSD?

You’ve likely heard of T-Mobile Home Internet by now. We’ve discussed the ups and downs of the 5G-based cellular broadband service on these pages several times over the years. After some initial headaches during the rollout of the broadband service, T-Mobile Home Internet has, for the most part, become a viable alternative to traditional cable internet providers, with over 7 million customers. However, chances are that you haven’t heard of T-Mobile Fiber Home Internet. Until recently, the internet service was only available in a few dozen markets across the United States. T-Mobile is making some big moves today with the announcement that T-Mobile Fiber is moving past its trial phase to an official launch in the U.S.

So, what sparked the official rollout of T-Mobile Fiber? In April, T-Mobile announced that it had acquired Lumos, a fiber-to-the-home internet provider serving 475,000 households. That acquisition provided T-Mobile with the additional capacity to expand T-Mobile Fiber, which is now accessible to over 500,000 households in the U.S.

T-Mobile Fiber is available in three tiers, starting with Fiber 500. Fiber 500, as you would expect, provides symmetrical data speeds of up to 500 Mbps for $75/month with Autopay. Fiber 1 Gig boosts data speeds to 1 Gbps for $90/month, and Fiber 2 Gig gives you 2 Gbps speeds for $105/month. The Fiber 500 plan comes with a basic Wi-Fi 6 router, while the Fiber 1 Gig and 2 Gig plans come standard with “whole home” Wi-Fi 6 mesh hardware. T-Mobile customers who also have a qualifying voice line can get $15 off the above pricing each month with Autopay, and all plans come with a 5-year price guarantee.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy just confirmed that the company’s Project Kuiper has begun deploying satellites in low-earth orbit. “Important moment for @ProjectKuiper as we just confirmed our first 27 production satellites are operating as expected in low Earth orbit,” Jassy said on his status on X (formerly Twitter). “While this is the first step in a much longer journey to launch the rest of our low Earth orbit constellation, it represents an incredible amount of invention and hard work. Am really proud of the collective team.”

With many motherboard manufacturers sacrificing smaller PCIe x8, x4, and x1 slots on modern boards, the humble M.2 slot is finding new life beyond solid state drives (SSDs). Magewell, a company known for its video capture solutions, has created the Eco Capture Dual HDMI M.2 card, a compact M.2-based device that can be used for video capture. It supports dual 2K video inputs, as indicated by the name.

Superficially, the device resembles a typical M.2 2280 SSD, with a green PCB and a black heatsink on top. It also includes two SHD connectors and comes bundled with two SHD-to-HDMI Type-A cables. According to early testing by Interfacing Linux, the device does not come with any mounting hardware for the HDMI cable ends, but you can find cheap ones from Amazon or MODDYI.

Progress in developing the Broadcast Positioning System (BPS) was recently charted at the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show. CNX Software reports that BPS is being positioned as a backup, alternative, or confirmation data source for the Global Positioning System (GPS). However, BPS has its particular strengths and weaknesses.

GPS can be as vital to some portable smart device users as mobile and Wi-Fi network data. However, this satellite-based system, which provides precise location, velocity, and time information, is not always available and can be interfered with by bad actors. Recent reports of GPS interference over the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and the eastern Mediterranean make for worrying reading. On the other side of the conflict, Ukraine is known to have used GPS spoofing to repel Russian drone attacks.

GPS is under attack, and its reliability is easily put into question, so a backup positioning technology seems like a great idea. Being able to reuse existing infrastructure would be a bonus, and what is more widespread and suitable than TV broadcast antennae?

BPS uses TV signals for timing and positioning data, but the base stations must be broadcasting ATSC 3.0 'Next Gen TV' signals, specifically for this technology. The BPS tech works by adding an ATSC frame to the output, and this will usually provide timing accuracy to 100ns, which is good but not quite as good as GPS (~10ns). However, for BPS positioning, you will need to be in the signal range of four transmitters, and even then, accuracy will be in the order of a 100-meter radius...

According to the source report, BPS is currently being tested and is approaching the fourth (of six) development phases. At the latest, by 2027, we should see ATSC 3.0-based timing become available to the public. Then, by 2029, ATSC 3.0-based timing should be added to the mix. Of course, some kind of BPS receiver will be needed to use this positioning system, whether public or not.

While the BPS technology doesn't impress in its stats, compared to the dominant GPS (for example), it is hard to argue against its use for verifying GPS data. Also, it is always good to be able to reuse existing infrastructure to add value. Hopefully, the U.S. won't need this GPS backup in its home turf, where ATSC 3.0 digital TV signals are found. Currently, coverage is fair, with around 75% of U.S. households capable of receiving ATSC 3.0 signals, which can deliver 4K HDR visuals. We assume that percentage will improve over time.

Different digital TV standards exist in other regions, such as the popular DVB-T/T2. However, we don't know if positioning data can be added to those broadcast signals. The Russians might be interested in melding DVB-T with their Glonass satellite positioning system for backup/verification. Likewise, Europeans may find implementing some non-satellite backup/verification for their Galileo satellites worthwhile.

Elon Musk's Starlink is facing growing competition from China’s state-backed satellite internet initiatives and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, intensifying the race for dominance in space-based connectivity. As China rapidly develops its low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite network, concerns are emerging over potential data security risks.

Shanghai-based SpaceSail, one of China’s leading satellite internet companies, is aggressively expanding into international markets. According to a report by Reuters, the company has signed agreements to provide services in Brazil and Kazakhstan, with discussions underway in more than 30 other countries. SpaceSail aims to deploy 648 LEO satellites this year and expand to a total of 15,000 by 2030, potentially rivaling Starlink’s global reach. It is claimed that the company has state-backed funding from Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST).

Amazon's Project Kuiper, led by Jeff Bezos, is also entering the satellite broadband industry, with a projected investment of $16 billion. The project is expected to spend up to $3.5 billion on satellite launches by 2025, aiming to provide widespread internet access and integrate with Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, Project Kuiper faces an uphill battle against Starlink, which already has a strong market presence and brand recognition.

As of February 2025, Starlink, operated by SpaceX, has established a significant global presence. It offers satellite internet services in over 100 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and various nations across Europe, South America, and Asia.

In contrast, Amazon's Project Kuiper is still in the developmental phase. The initiative plans to deploy its first production satellites in early 2025, to commence broadband services later in the year. While specific service regions have not been officially announced, Amazon aims to deliver high-speed, low-latency broadband to unserved and underserved communities worldwide.

China’s rapid satellite expansion raises concerns about potential data security risks, echoing past controversies. Western governments previously flagged Huawei’s telecom infrastructure as a potential cybersecurity threat, leading to bans and restrictions in multiple countries. Similarly, TikTok has faced scrutiny over alleged data-sharing practices with the Chinese government.

Unlike commercial competitors, Chinese internet providers operate under strict government oversight, which could enable Beijing to exert control over global communications infrastructure. This also raises questions about whether data transmitted via Chinese satellites could be accessed or monitored by authorities, potentially compromising user privacy.

As competition in satellite internet heats up, data security and geopolitical risks will become central issues in the industry. The expansion of Chinese satellite services could lead to further scrutiny from Western governments, especially as more nations adopt LEO-based connectivity solutions.

If you’re serious about hosting a website for professional or business purposes, a Virtual Private Server (VPS) plan is what you need. Unlike the cheap shared plans that many hosting services offer for as little as $2 or $3 a month, a VPS gives you dedicated CPU, RAM and storage resources, along with root access to your server. And, unlike dedicated servers, which cost a lot more for a dedicated box, VPS is affordable, flexible and performant at the same time.

We’ve tested the leading companies and identified the best VPS hosting providers to help you choose.

Quick List

How to Choose a VPS Hosting Provider

When shopping for a VPS provider, decide:

• Managed or Unmanaged? You can save money by purchasing an unmanaged VPS where you have nothing but a terminal and must install all your own software and updates. We recommend against this (and only test managed VPS plans), because the possibility of running into problems without support is too much of a hassle.
• Linux or Windows OS: This is a no-brainer. Unless you have a Windows-specific application you already run, go with Linux for lower costs, stronger performance and better stability.
• Monthly or annual? Don’t pay by the month. Sign up for two, three or four years if possible as you’ll lock in much lower monthly rates, and renewal rates after the initial term tend to be much higher.
• cPanel or other control panel? cPanel is the most popular and easiest-to-use control panel software, but even many of the best VPS providers charge significant licensing fees it, while offering reasonably capable alternatives for free.
• How much RAM, storage and CPU cores? For mid-range performance, we recommend a minimum of 4GB of RAM, 2 to 4 vCPUs (or CPU cores) and at least 60GB of storage. For larger sites with more databases, go for over 100GB.
  

Best VPS Hosting Plans 2025

Best VPS Web Hosting

Founded in Lithuania in 2004, Hostinger has grown into one of the world’s largest and most potent hosting services overall. It’s also one of the cheapest VPS providers while not skimping on performance.

Hostinger’s VPS plans start at just $4.99 per month with a 24-month commitment, though we’d recommend going with at least the KVM 2 plan which has two CPU cores, 8GB of RAM and 100GB of storage allotted. There’s also a generous 8TB of bandwidth allowed — enough to serve a lot of traffic.

The one thing you don’t get for these low prices is cPanel, the easiest-to-use and most powerful control panel software around. If you want cPanel, you have to pay an astonishing $23 a month in licensing fees, although there are other control panel options that are cheap or free. We tested the KVM 2 plan with Webmin / Virtualmin, which costs nothing extra and provides a pretty straightforward interface. Virtualmin is the user-facing panel that controls each website you build while the Webmin admin interface controls the physical server and the software it runs.

Hostinger doesn’t provide a lot of documentation on how to use the Virtualmin / Webmin combo, however. My default account came with a disk quota that prevented me from uploading all of my test files, for example, and I had to do some Googling to figure out how to change the limit.

Once we had our server set up, it was very easy to manage, run tests and build our website. Connecting via SSH was a snap, particularly because our account did not force us to use an encryption key (though we could have). We ran a number of scripts, including our endless script, and the system never killed them.

Our plan came preloaded with the 10.3.39 version of MariaDB, a popular MySQL-compatible database server, and the performance was top-notch. First, we used MySQL to insert millions of rows of old Tom’s Hardware page-view data, and Hostinger outperformed almost all of its competitors with the exception of Liquid Web (more on that later).

The times for our other DB tests, including one where we replaced all the original numbers with random numbers and another where we do a massive table JOIN, were equally impressive.

Hostinger’s VPS plan scored a very solid 7.4 on the WordPress Benchmark (where 10 is best). It also took just 1.9 seconds to load our sample WordPress site, which is within range of its competitors.

We found support solid, but unexceptional. There’s a knowledge base with a lot of information, but not much on Webmin / Virtualmin, the only free server control software. You can eventually do a live chat with a human, but we wish you could file an email ticket.

Overall, you get a lot of performance and flexibility for your money with Hostinger. It’s a winning combination and a value, even at the renewal prices.

Read More: Hostinger Review

Best VPS Performance

If you’re looking for the fastest performance around and can spend a bit more money, Liquid Web is the best VPS hosting provider for you. Founded in 1997, the company has over 180,000 clients and hosts data centers in Michigan, Arizona and Amsterdam. It owns some other hosting companies including Nexcess and Servers.com, and it offers a variety of managed and unmanaged hosting services.

We concentrated our testing on the managed VPS plans; unmanaged plans may be cheaper but also leave you with a lot more work when it comes to installing software, updating software and making sure your server is still running. The managed VPS plans on Liquid Web don’t come cheap, and their promotional period is only three months, so in reality you should just count on paying the non-promotional price when you make your calculations.

The Liquid Web managed VPS plans start at a regular price of $59 a month for 2GB of RAM and $99 a month for the plan we tested with 4GB of RAM. For that price, you get 4 CPU cores, 100GB of storage and a whopping 10TB of bandwidth.

Like many of its competitors, including Hostinger, Liquid Web does not come standard with cPanel control panel software, which costs extra if you want it. Instead we used the free InterWorx software, which is divided into SiteWorx (for website management) and NodeWorx (for server management). We found the UI, particularly in SiteWorx, pretty easy to navigate.

Liquid Web has a variety of means of contacting support. You can use live chat, telephone or email. We got our quickest response when using email.

Overall, the most important and impressive thing about Liquid Web is its performance, which eclipsed all other sites we tested on most benchmarks. It dominated the competition on all three database tests, including the very time consuming SUM and JOIN test, which has been known to take some competitors more than 20 minutes. Liquid Web’s was done in 8:42.

Liquid Web also aced the WordPress Benchmark, scoring 8.4 where most competitors are in the 7s. It did particularly well on the CPU operations portion of the test, scoring 9.21 out of a possible 10.

Liquid Web was also pretty quick to load our sample site, taking just 1.6 seconds

With 10TB per month of bandwidth, high-speed loading and high-speed data processing, Liquid Web’s VPS hosting plans are great for those expecting a lot of traffic.

Read More: Liquid Web Review

Best Cheap Shared Web Hosting

For 25 years, Arizona’s Namecheap has offered inexpensive domain registration services, which is where its name comes from. But the company also offers inexpensive hosting, including some of the best VPS plans you can get.

As its name implies, the plans are cheap, particularly if you want to pay annually and then keep going for more than a year — which any serious website would. The plans start at just $6.88 per month and go up to a mere $24.88 a month for 8 CPU cores. You get just a little more for your money with Hostinger, but Hostinger’s rates go up after the initial period while Namecheap’s stay the same, making it a better value over 24 months or more.

If you’re building a larger site and expect a lot of traffic, note that the bandwidth limits are low on the first two plans.

As with many competitors, you have to pay extra for cPanel control software, to the tune of $10.88/month. There’s no completely free option so we went with Webuzo for just $2.88 a month. We found Webuzo’s UI easy to navigate and used it to enable SSL on our sample site and to turn on SSH remote access.

Performance-wise, Namecheap’s VPS places in the middle of the pack. It took a decent 11 minutes and 22 seconds, for example, to import our 4GB MySQL database file (filled with millions of Tom’s Hardware PV records), which is slower than Liquid Web and Hostinger but quicker than Bluehost or Dreamhost.

The load time test was less impressive, but still reasonable as Namecheap took an average of 2.4 seconds to load our sample site and a modest 1.6 seconds to network response.

Overall, you get a lot of value, good flexibility and solid performance from Namecheap’s VPS offerings. Best of all, the renewal price is the same as the starting price.

Read More: Namecheap Review

Best Cloud Hosting

In business since 2003, Bluehost is one of the largest hosting services around with more than 2 million customers. It’s owned by Newfold Digital, which also owns HostGator, another large hosting service that offers VPS.

Bluehost’s plans don’t come cheap, but they aren’t as pricey as Liquid Web’s offerings either. We definitely recommend going with a three-year contract, which means you have to pay all 36 months upfront but you get a significant discount. The plan we tested is one we signed up for a couple of years ago that supplies similar specs to Enhanced NVMe 8.

We’ve been with Bluehost for several years now, long before we started testing web hosts, and we’ve used a couple of their plans. What we’ve seen is that Bluehost just works and is easy-to-use, particularly because cPanel, the powerful and simple control software that comes included. But our experience transferring a site to a new account was not good (they couldn’t get it working completely at the new server after several weeks) so we would recommend doing your own file transfer if you’re migrating from another service.

Bluehost’s performance on our three MySQL database tests was solid, mid-tier. For example on our randomization test, in which we have MySQL randomize and update all the traffic numbers in our sample database, Bluehost VPS finished in just 3 minutes and 6 seconds, which was faster than every other competitor except Liquid Web.

On the other hand, on the more intensive SUM and JOIN test, Bluehost finished behind Hostinger and DreamHost.

On the website speed test, Bluehost’s load times were middle-of-the-pack, with the network taking 0.9 seconds to respond and 1.75 seconds to load the entire site.

What we really like about Bluehost is how everything just works. In the years we’ve had the service, everything from setting up SSL to enabling new subdomains has been a snap. And we’ve never experienced an outage.

Our main beefs with the service are its middling support and somewhat high pricing. We wish it were easier to file support tickets – you need to wait for a live agent and deal with them. And, in our case, the transfer process of moving a site from one server to another required us to do the work. However, if you want a service that just works and works well, Bluehost is one of the best VPS hosting providers.

Read More: Bluehost Review

Best Shared Hosting

GreenGeeks, as its name implies, stands out from the competition by focusing on renewable energy. The company, which launched in 2010, replaces the power it uses for your account each month with 300 percent more electricity in wind-power credits. The company also claims that it plants a tree for each new account.

Going green with GreenGeeks is not cheap: The lowest-end plan costs $69 a month, with no discounts for purchasing years in advance. However, you do get cPanel included — and pretty good performance to boot.

Like Bluehost, GreenGeeks comes with cPanel control panel (and WHM for controlling the server) as standard so there’s no fussing with less-than-intuitive software to set up your site.

Performance is pretty good. In our third MySQL database test, where we do a large table join and SUM, GreenGeeks VPS took only 14 minutes and 12 seconds. That’s faster than most competitors. It’s not the fastest when it came to importing the database, but operations on the database were pretty speedy.

GreenGeeks VPS was also among the fastest to load, loading the complete home page of our sample Wordpress website in just 1.5 seconds. That’s pretty quick.

Read More: GreenGeeks Review

VPS Frequently Asked Questions

VPS FAQs

• What is a VPS? A Virtual Private Server combines the flexibility and admin access of a dedicated server with the price savings of shared hosting. You get dedicated CPU, RAM and storage resources while being part of a shared physical box that other customers use. In control panels, the VPS appears to be a separate machine.
• What’s the difference between VPS and shared hosting? In shared hosting, typically the cheapest form of web hosting, you don’t have admin access to your account and you don’t have a guaranteed set of resources such as CPU cores and RAM.
• What’s the difference between VPS and dedicated hosting? Dedicated hosting means you have your very own physical computer in the hosting company’s datacenter. This is usually at least double the cost of VPS and you often don’t get as many cores or as much RAM for the money.
• What’s managed hosting vs unmanaged? Managed hosting means that the hosting provider installs the basic software you need (such as control panels and database software) and keeps the server’s security up-to-date. Unmanaged hosting usually means that you get a command prompt and have to do everything else yourself.
• Is VPS hosting secure? VPS hosting should be just as secure as having a dedicated box. Your section of the server is completely isolated from all the other accounts.

How We Test VPS Hosting Providers

How We Test VPS Hosting Providers

We test each VPS provider in a few ways:

• We set up a sample WordPress blog that we use to test load times and run the WordPress Benchmark plugin. We test the load times using a combination of Dotcom-Tools’ Website Speed Test and the Apache benchmark.
• We import a large MySQL database with millions of records (based on old Tom’s Hardware traffic data). We then randomize all those page view numbers in a second operation and, in a third, we use a giant table JOIN to generate a SUM of page views for each page in the database. We perform each database operation three times and take the average completion time.
• We run an endless script that logs the time every minute so we can see if the VPS provider has a time limit on script execution.

Other VPS Hosting Providers We Tested

Other VPS Hosting Providers We Tested

We also tested the following VPS hosts, but they didn’t make the cut necessary to be named among the best VPS providers.

• HostGator VPS: The company offers decent, cPanel-enabled plans but they’re expensive and didn’t perform extremely well on our benchmarks.
• ScalaHosting VPS: Decent prices and a helpful control panel make this a solid choice, but performance was a bit below the competition.
• InMotion VPS: The prices are ok, but we got mediocre support in our tests and benchmark scores were unimpressive.
• DreamHost VPS: Prices are decent but database performance was pretty weak and human support was slow for us.
• A2 Hosting: Prices are decent, but database performance was among the slowest we saw.

Every new website (and migration) starts with a simple question: shared hosting, or VPS? Shared hosting is cheaper, but it skimps on dedicated resources. VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting is more expensive, but you enjoy more control over the server and better performance.

There was a time when choosing a VPS basically meant “here is the server, set it up yourself.” Happily, things have progressed, and managed VPS servers are now available. This makes subscribing to a VPS simpler, but it can also make the choice between shared and VPS a little trickier to discern.

A2 Hosting offers a selection of different hosting types, and varied plans within each. So, as well as shared and VPS hosting, you could opt for WordPress hosting or dedicated hosting. The latter option is quite an expensive proposition in most cases, while the WordPress hosting option is really little more than a shared host with WordPress preinstalled. Once a plan is selected, you can sign up and set up or migrate your site.

The real difference to how users experience the site, however, is in performance. We’ve assessed one of A2’s shared hosting plans and one of its VPS plans, which didn't match up to the best VPS hosts. This evaluation – the results of which you can read below – covers everything from hardware spec and pricing and support to server, database, and benchmarking tests.

A2 Hosting VPS Plan

Available in A2 Hosting’s VPS selection are an incredible six managed VPS plans. We look at its basic Takeoff 4 option, available from $76.99 a month on a rolling contract, and for $35.99/month if you choose to pay for 12 months. The company’s more expensive plans offer increased performance, bandwidth, and storage.

The Takeoff 4 plan gives you a VPS with 2 CPU cores, 4GB of RAM, and 150GB of storage on an SSD. For most websites, this should be adequate, or at least be an enticing introduction to VPS hosting. 2TB of bandwidth (which A2 Hosting calls “transfer”) is available, and there is no limit on database size with the VPS plan. (This is, of course, restricted by the size of the plan’s storage – a database larger than the available storage would not be permitted.)

Hosting companies often apply limits to the size of databases. A2 Hosting’s VPS plan has no limits, however. They told us that “VPS has no limitations for the database size.” Of course, too many databases would be a different matter, as eventually this would breach the physical capacity of the plan’s storage.

The table below outlines the specification of the A2 Hosting managed VPS plans. Note that the Soar packages use NVMe SSD storage, which has superior bandwidth than standard SATA SSD interfaces.

Signing up to the A2 Hosting VPS plan gives you a CloudLinux server, with a free cPanel control panel and automated server backups. Daily system updates are also provided, applied without rebooting the server. The included cPanel is a really nice plus as many other companies charge extra for cPanel and its server-controlling sibling, WHM.

The plan we looked at, from the Takeoff group, comes with a free SSL certificate, Imunify360 security, and LiteSpeed website acceleration. For migrating from an existing web host, A2 Hosting offers free and easy site transfer. The Soar group of plans come with the same additional software and cPanel, but clearly have a higher general spec.

It is worth noting that A2 Hosting also offers a pair of unmanaged VPS hosting plan groups. Launch starts at $2.99/month, while Ascent starts at $29.99/month. These plans have a choice of Linux distro, and root-level command line access for direct server management. You also get manual security and backup options, and complete control over the operating system and its updates.

Control might seem good, but unless you have a preconfigured environment to clone across or know exactly what you’re doing, relying on A2 Hosting’s managed VPS seems far smarter.

A2 Shared Hosting Shared Plan

We tested the StartUp Shared plan which, at press time, was no longer available but which costed $10.99 a month or a ridiculous $35.88 per year when we signed up for it a few months ago. The least expensive shared plan right now is the Ignite plan, which should offer similar features and performance to those we tested. Ignite offers a single website, with 1GB of RAM, RAID-10 10GB SSD storage, and a “comprehensive” security suite provision. Automatic backups are supported, along with performance tools and LiteSpeed Cache, which can help with speed and has plugins for WordPress and other CMS tools.

Curiously, A2 Hosting lists PHP Workers as a feature, but this really just means that PHP is supported and resources are allocated for scripts and website software that relies on it. This doesn’t set the hosting apart from any comparable plans from other providers.

If your web project requires multiple databases, a limit is in place. We spoke to the A2 Hosting sales team, who informed us that “databases hosted as part of Shared Web Hosting are limited to five (5) gigabytes per database.” This, of course, is further limited by the storage available in the plan you choose.

Shared plans from A2 Hosting also include migration from an existing web host.

A free SSL certificate is included with shared plans, and your admin login can be protected with two-factor authentication. Once logged in, the website can be managed via cPanel, from where the software (either manually, or via the Softaculous script repository) you install can be overseen, along with integrations with things like Google Apps. There is support for QUIC.Cloud CDN and CloudFlare, but these are optional, third party extras. Statistics from AWStats, Webalizer, and others are also available, and the shared plans can run WordPress, WooCommerce, phpBB, and various other CMS, online shopping, and forum software.

Note that A2 Hosting has limits on inodes, or files. So, a limit of 300,000 exists on the Ignite plan, and 600,000 on the other plans. The impact of this is that your project will need to be – and remain – pretty compact if you have chosen the Ignite plan. In the case of WordPress sites, any plugins and themes that are not used will need to be deleted, and image optimizing plugins are best avoided. The sheer volume of files in a WordPress site will push the 300,000 very quickly. If you need something a little more elaborate, Accel or one of the Turbo plans would be more suitable.

In addition, A2 Hosting offers managed WordPress hosting plans, which are not reviewed here.

Database, WordPress and Scripting Performance

A2 Hosting’s range of shared and VPS hosting plans potentially offer everything you need to launch a website and ensure it grows as intended. But hardware specifications don’t always deliver on the expected performance. To find out if A2 Hosting is suitable for your project – whether VPS or shared hosting – we designed a series of tests to carry out on each plan.

The first of these required us to install a copy of WordPress and then upload dummy content. Once this was done, we attempted to insert 87 million rows of Tom’s Hardware page view data into the WordPress database. A successful result would be fast – the faster, the better.

As you can see, both A2 plans were markedly slower than the competition, both shared and VPS. Next, we pushed things further with the addition of 87 million random numerical values into each of the rows.

Again, A2 is much slower than competitors. However, interestingly, the shared plan was more than twice as fast as the VPS plan.

We follow with a more test that judges the database server’s ability to efficiently JOIN two tables as a MySQL query. Bringing the traffic and data tables together, a SQL SUM command is then executed, with the result hopefully delivering page views for each article on different dates.

Testing the WordPress software specifically provides information about the installation. Running this right after installing the CMS provides a good baseline for comparison should performance issues occur later. We used the WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool (WPB), a freely-available WordPress plugin. When run, it provides a score on key benchmarks, rated 0 to 10. The test we ran looked at network speed, database speed, and file system speed.

A VPS should perform well with WordPress benchmarking, with most of the competing hosts we’ve looked at scoring 7 and above. A2 Hosting has managed a pretty low 6.3 by comparison. The Shared hosting package, meanwhile, managed 3.5 – other shared hosting plans on the market have scored between 6.5 and 7.5 in the same test.

This is disappointing.

A2 Website Loading Speed, Script Timeout

A commitment is given on the A2 Hosting website for 99.9% uptime. This implies that spikes in traffic and cyberattacks on the web server can be handled with the minimum of downtime.

To see how quickly our sample WordPress site loaded, we used Dotcom-Tools’ Website Speed Test, which records the load time, time to first paint and time to network response.

Here, A2 performed reasonably well. The Shared and VPS sites loaded in 1.4 and 1.5 seconds with the time to network response being just 0.5 seconds.

It’s also important to know that if you need to run a script at the command prompt, both the shared and VPS plans do not have a script timeout. When we ran an endless script that logs the time for many hours, neither stopped it.

A2 Hosting Support

Pricing, features, and server performance are important, of course, but what about customer support? No one wants to sign up to what appears to be an excellent web host, only to find that when the worst happens, there is no one around to help you pick up the pieces.

A collection of support tools are available with A2 Hosting. The most prominent of these is its knowledge base. This is a searchable resource that includes explanations and solutions to everything from adjusting WordPress memory limits to managing secondary accounts on cPanel.

Beyond the knowledge base, A2 Hosting also publishes a regular blog. Here, you’ll find a combination of web hosting and web management articles and webinars. While these may not provide direct answers, the articles in particular can provide useful background information.

Direct support can be accessed via the support page. Here, you’ll find FAQs for shared hosting and VPS packages, as well as direct access to the support team. You can chat within a chat box, or call A2 Hosting. Support is stated as being available 24/7, 365 days a year. If you sign up and are unhappy within the first 30 days, you’re eligible for the money-back guarantee.

Our experience with the support team was good, and they quickly answered our questions about database limits.

Bottom Line

With such a wide selection of hosting options for both shared and VPS plans, A2 Hosting at first seems a great option. Surely, there is something for everyone here?

But poor benchmarking performance and inconsistent results in the other tests are something of a red flag. Low WordPress Benchmark scores and leave us thinking that A2 Hosting probably isn’t suitable for performance-sensitive websites.

While its support provision seems knowledgeable and reliable, this cannot outweigh those performance concerns.

Price-wise, A2 Hosting’s VPS plans are more expensive than better-performing competitors while its shared plans are not impressive either. Ultimately, better performing hosting options are available, both for shared and VPS plans, particularly if performance and reliability are top priorities.

U.S.-based InMotion launched back in 2001 and it provides web hosting solutions with data centers (servers) in the U.S. and Europe and support based in the U.S. The company offers a wide range of plans, from shared hosting to VPS (Virtual Private Server) and dedicated servers. Its prices are very competitive, with VPS starting at just $5.99 (with some added fees) a month for a one-year subscription that nabs you very strong specs (4 vCPU Cores, 8GB of RAM). Shared hosting goes for as little as $2.75 a month with 12-month commitment.

We tested both the basic VPS and Shared plans to see how InMotion compares to the competition and found that performance was noticeably worse than many competitors. We also had issues with slow, unhelpful support that couldn’t get us set up with an SSL connection on our VPS account. The shared plan, thanks to its included cPanel software, was much easier to set up, but neither of the plans we tested belongs on our list of the best web hosting services or best VPS hosts.

Inmotion Hosting Managed VPS

Four managed VPS plans are available from Inmotion, each offering a slightly different hardware spec and price to match.

The VPS 4 vCPU is the plan we chose for review. This has 4 virtual CPUs, 8GB of RAM, and 160GB SSD storage. Note that this doesn’t just provide storage for website files (content management systems, uploads, etc.) but also for databases. A conversation with the Inmotion sales team confirmed that “the only [database] limit will be the total storage if it's a VPS.” Keeping the web project within the storage capacity will ensure the website runs well.

Note that the VPS 16 vCPU plan offers NVMe SSD storage, which should result in a faster experience for visitors (and administrators). It is not clear what type of SSD storage is in use for the other plans.

Our selected VPS 4 vCPU plan also provides 5TB of bandwidth, that is, the data used by visitors to your website. This should suit most websites that have just switched to using a VPS, but the other plans have unlimited bandwidth.

We’ve listed the prices with a 12-month commitment and the renewal prices for months 13 and beyond. However, the best prices overall are if you pay for a three year plan up front. Our 4 vCPU plan is $9.99 a month if you pay for 36 months and then, in month 37, renews at $16.99 a month.

It’s important to note that there are a couple of additional fees you need to pay in addition to the advertised price. At checkout, you’ll be charged some hidden fees: $35.88 per year for Backup Manager (which backs up your stuff) and $60 per year for CWP (Control Web Panel), the default management software. You can pay a lot more for the superior cPanel software, which is $306 per year or you can choose no Control Panel, but then you get nothing but a command line for management. We went with CWP because it’s relatively cheap.

As Inmotion Hosting offers a managed VPS, various advantages are included in the price. This includes support for free website transfers from other hosts, SSH access, DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack protection, and easy management of resources from a dedicated monitoring dashboard. Inmotion Hosting offers 99.99% uptime, with triple storage redundancy and other features ensuring your site stays up 24/7, with minimal disruptions.

Inmotion Hosting’s servers run Linux, although no specific distro is listed. Our chat with the Inmotion sales support agent revealed that its VPS offerings use AlmaLinux 8.

VPS plans also get free SSL certificates and dedicated IP addresses. The VPS 8 vCPU plan and above includes the choice of a data center location, and the VPS 12 vCPU and VPS 16 vCPU plans both include 10GB of free backup storage.

We found the CWP interface usable but not nearly as intuitive as the combination of cPanel and WHM you get if you pay a lot more. CWP has both User Panel that, like cPanel, operates at the site level and Admin Panel, which controls the server itself. The Admin panel was pretty good, with a left nav that allowed us to easily get to everything from managing user accounts to setting up email.

However, enabling SSL – which is pretty much required for a modern website – which is a feature of CWP just didn’t work for us, no matter how many times we tried it. At first, we tried using the AutoSSL feature and got error messages saying it had failed.

Then we filed a support ticket and included a description and screen shots of the problem. It took InMotion’s support 11 days to get back to us, after which they claimed to have solved the problem. Indeed, we no longer got error messages when attempting to use the AutoSSL signing feature in CWP, but it only produced a self-signed certificate which web browsers don’t consider secure. So, even after all that, we were unable to get our site to load with the https:// prefix. Annoyed, with both the wait and lack of functionality, we finally gave up.

Considering how important it is to have https, the difficulty we had in setting it up is a major red flag. We have also never had to wait anywhere close to 11 days to have a support ticket answered. Most other sites would turn around support queries in less than a day.

Inmotion Hosting Shared

The key challenge for anyone considering a VPS hosting plan is budget. This is where shared hosting typically comes into play. Inmotion Hosting also offers four shared plans, all suitable for limited budgets. Aside from the basic Core plan (which has 12 and 36 month options), these are available with a rolling monthly contract, 1 year, or 3 years.

(The Core package works out at $2.75/month with a 1 year plan, or $3.19/month with the 3 year plan.)

As with the VPS plans, the Inmotion Hosting Shared plans have a 90-day money-back guarantee if you’re not satisfied.

We chose the Core plan to test the service, which offers quite a big chunk of storage for a basic plan. 100GB is more than most other shared hosting providers offer for the price, and is enough to store multiple backups. For database storage, the sales support agent told me “the site and database's storage will not be limited,” but this only applies to the plans with unlimited storage. For the Core package, the physical storage limits of the SSD’s capacity apply.

While shared hosting might seem like a good option for low budget projects, they do have shortcomings. As mentioned, sharing resources can prove a problem if another site (or your own) gets a spike in traffic, as this can affect other sites on the server.

Cheap, shared hosting is suitable for startup projects, WordPress blogs, and a few other content management systems (CMS). They can also be used with smaller online stores, if required.

The Core plan supports 2 websites, 1 parked domain, unlimited subdomains, and 10 email addresses (1GB limit per inbox), with the option of a dedicated IP address. A free SSL certificate is also included, along with a website building tool, BuildGrid. The Core plan also has a 40-SQL database limit.

With the more expensive plans, more options are included. Caching, improved UltraStack optimization, and phone support are available with the Power and Pro plans.

Inmotion Hosting’s shared plans also include one-click install for over 400 web apps, optional Google Workspace, SSH access, and hack and malware protection. With a 1 or 3 year package, the price includes a free domain. As with the VPS plan, you have at least one hidden fee: $35.88 per year for Backup Manager at checkout.

Perhaps more importantly, all of the shared plans use cPanel as their control panel and, by far, that’s the easiest and most powerful control panel software around. And, unlike with the VPS plans, you don’t have to pay extra for it.

Database, WordPress and Scripting Performance

In reviewing these hosting plans, we’ve undertaken some testing to ascertain how they suit the day to day running and use of a website. These tests have been designed to measure server performance and how long it takes to run bulk MySQL database queries.

We installed WordPress on each of the test sites (VPS 4 vCPU and Shared Core), and populated them with dummy data.

Our first test inserted 87 million rows of data into the WordPress databases (page view data from Tom’s Hardware). The test is looking for a fast response.

Here, InMotion’s VPS placed in the middle of the pack, but was still several minutes behind the leaders. Its shared plan was way behind.

Following this test, we dropped random numerical values into the 87 million rows, again looking for fast completion of this action.

Here, both InMotion plans trailed their competitors by significant margins. This is not the kind of performance we like to see.

WordPress plugins are known to occasionally add database rows and tables, or even return data from multiple tables. To test the server’s ability to handle such demands, we joined two tables of traffic and article data with the MySQL JOIN command, then queried the SUM of article page views for different dates.

If the server is as good as advertised, a fast response is expected.

Again, both of InMotion’s plans were well behind the competition. At least its shared plan completed the test as some competitors’ shared plans timed out.

Discovering how a WordPress site benchmarks is possible thanks to the WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool (WPB). Installed as a plugin, it works on any installation and provides benchmarking data for both the server and WordPress. Benchmarking data is scored 0 to 10, the higher the better. We’ve tested both of our selected Inmotion Hosting plans for database speed, file system speed, and network performance.

The overall score of 6.9 for the Shared hosting plan places InMotion Hosting in the upper half of all of the shared plans we’ve evaluated in this way. This affords a certain amount of confidence that the plan can handle most WordPress-based challenges. However, while the file system-based benchmarks score highly, Inmotion Hosting doesn’t seem optimized to deal with WPB’s math problems.

Meanwhile, the VPS hosting plan’s overall WordPress Benchmark score of 6.3 came as a surprise. The highest score in this is LiquidWeb with 8.4 – most VPS plans manage a score of around 7. As with the shared hosting plan, the VPS did well with file system challenges, but less well with math and importing data with WPB.

We also measure how long each hosting plan can run a basic shell script that logs the time every minute. The goal is to see whether the service places any time limits on scripts as some services have short limits that could kill an important process. Fortunately, the shared plan’s script lasted for 5 hours while the VPS plan’s script endured for 5 days before we terminated it.

Inmotion Hosting Traffic Handling

As Inmotion Hosting offers 99.9% uptime, it should be able to accommodate spikes in traffic without impacting performance. Similarly, it should handle attacks and outages without the site experiencing any serious offline time.

We conducted some Apache web server tests to see how Inmotion Hosting managed these performance demands. The first test sends 500 simultaneous requests to the server, via the WordPress site’s home page. With this test, the server’s response time, rather than the website’s load time, is the metric we’re looking at.

Inmotion Hosting’s shared plan did well here, responding with 77 requests per second. This is a little bit ahead of some competitors. The VPS plan was not quite as good.

We also hit each domain’s home page with Dotcom-Tools’ Website Speed Test to see how long it takes the page to load, to first paint and to issue a network response. Since we use the same default Wordpress template on each site, each one delivers the same amount of text and images.

InMotion’s Shared plan was middle-of-the-pack, which really is not bad at all. The VPS plan was just a little slower, but still acceptable.

Inmotion Hosting Support

Running a website comes with a number of challenges. Often, you’ll find it’s straightforward to uncover and apply solutions without referring to the experts. But when the issue is too complicated, speaking to the hosting company’s support team is a good idea.

Things like backups, managing WordPress, and other standard admin tasks should be self-explanatory. Where this is not the case, Inmotion Hosting has a good collection of documentation and guides to help you get to the bottom of your problem. On the other hand, if you want a human response, you can contact the support team over live chat or by opening a support ticket. (If you have one of the two more expensive VPS packages, telephone support is also available.)

We spoke to the Inmotion Hosting sales support team and were got a fast, knowledgeable response. The sales agent understood the question (concerning database size limits) perfectly, with a quick and informative reply. They also let us know about the imminent end of a discount.

On the other hand, when we had a serious problem enabling SSL on our VPS account, we weren’t so lucky. We filed a ticket which, at first, went to someone in sales who wrote us back within a day to say our query had been escalated to the tech team. We then waited 11 days for a response, which didn’t really fix the problem. We stopped getting error messages when we tried to enable SSL on the site, but SSL still wasn’t working and we finally just gave up trying to get our site working with https://. If we were running a real site, we’d engage in more back and forth to try to get it working, but after 11 days and non-working response, we were done with our testing. We didn’t have this kind of slow response or lack of problem solving with any other hosting service we tested.

Bottom Line

If you try InMotion hosting, your mileage may vary. The company offers a wide variety of plans at competitive prices, though their renewal fees are pretty high so we would recommend going with a three year commitment if you choose them.

However, based on our experience, we cannot recommend InMotion’s VPS hosting. Our support experience and inability to enable SSL were frustrating, performance on database tests often lagged the competition and you still end up paying extra for control panel software and backup. The shared hosting plans are a better value, but their performance on database tests also was lacking, making them a less-than-stellar choice. If you’re looking for a high-performing VPS, LiquidWeb is a much better choice and, for value, Hostinger VPS takes the crown. HostGator and Namecheap are both solid options for shared hosting.

Most hosting services offer two or three types of plan: shared hosting (few or no dedicated resources), Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting where you have dedicated CPU and RAM resources and dedicated hosting where you pay a lot for your own physical box.

Founded in 1997, Liquid Web is taking a slightly different approach, with a collection of hosting solutions that go beyond the basic website. Its roster includes cloud hosting, along with bare metal hosting and GPU server hosting, premium options that have an interesting effect on its basic package – a Virtual Private Server option.

Here, four options are available, ranging quite broadly in price. Does Liquid Web’s VPS provide the reliable, efficient hosting you need for your web project? We’ve tested one of Liquid Web’s Managed VPS plans to find out, evaluating it on a range of factors. These include pricing, support, and available features, and we’ve also evaluated the performance of the hosting package, running server, database, and WordPress benchmarking tests. What we found is performance that rivals the best web hosting plans around and puts Liquid Web on our list of best VPS hosting providers.

Liquid Web Managed VPS

The company has a lot of configure-to-order options, but if you’re just looking for a simple managed VPS plan, a total of four VPS Managed VPS plans are availabl. The most basic option is $59/month, while the one we looked at was $99/month, though the prices on these are much lower if you pay for 24 months up front ($14.75 and $24.75 a month in those cases). Note that Liquid Web also offers unmanaged VPS plans, starting from just $5. These are useful if you’re fully equipped to configure your chosen server with your own selection of software, but this is an option that is time-consuming. It’s rare for a vanilla VPS to be selected for a standard website in a market full of managed hosting solutions.

Unsurprisingly, each of the Liquid Web Managed VPS plans increases the basic specification, adding more RAM, storage, and CPU cores as the cost goes up. Our selection, the 4 GB RAM plan (until recently labeled “Advanced”), features 4 virtual CPU cores, 4GB of RAM, and 100GB of SSD storage. A bandwidth limit of 10TB is in place for this plan.

Most hosting companies apply limits to database sizes on VPS plans. Liquid Web has no limits on databases, specifying “The database services do have configuration files that place limits, though these can be freely adjusted.” Beyond this, the only restrictions are physical; as Liquid Web’s support technician put it: “if you have a 32GB VPS, MySQL cannot allocate more resources than what is available.”

The Managed VPS plans are hosted on AMD EPYC-based physical servers. The most interesting thing to note about these packages is that when taken at face value, the only differences are the hardware. No increased features are available for paying more, just additional RAM, storage, and vCPU cores.

Unusually, Windows and Linux server operating systems are available from Liquid Web. We’ve reviewed a Linux-based server, configured with Alma Linux and InterWorx control panel. You can pay extra for more popular control panels such as cPanel.

A dedicated IP address for the VPS is also provided, along with advanced security software and configuration. This includes an integrated firewall and standard DdoS attack prevention. Liquid Web offers a “100% guaranteed power and network uptime” service level agreement (SLA) for routing devices within its network.

For better reliability, signing up to a Liquid Web Managed VPS plan gives you access to Cloudflare CDN, which can improve your website’s speed and reduce the load on your host. When the time comes to upgrade your site’s hardware requirement, Liquid Web offers a scalable upgrade solution, with some downtime.

Data on the server is backed up with Acronis, up to 50GB of storage (which is ideal for the smallest plan, but not so great for the larger ones). The InterWorx centralized hosting management software is also installed, which is useful for managing multiple websites on the same host. Root access is also provided for complete control and management of the server, within reasonable usage limits.

While it’s not as intuitive as the popular cPanel, the InterWorx hosting panel, has all the major services at the top level of the navigation and it’s divided into SiteWorx (website control panel) and NodeWorx (server control panel). SiteWorx puts all the major features you’d want front and center, including domain management, database management, FTP setup, Cron jobs, Email and File Management.

NodeWorx allows you to check on and configure the various servers your system is running, including Apache (for web serving), your SMTP server and your MySQL server.

Database, WordPress and Scripting Performance

We’ve seen that Liquid Web offers a collection of high specification server hardware, but how does this translate into performance? To help you decide whether Liquid Web’s Managed VPS hosting is suitable for you, we’ve designed a series of tests.

This started with installing a copy of WordPress and uploading dummy content. Then, we tested how fast it could insert 87 million rows of data from Tom’s Hardware’s own page view data. The faster the test is completed, the better.

As you can see, these are impressive results, with Liquid Web delivering better performance in this test than any other web host we’ve looked at.

To push the test further, random numerical values were added into each of the 87 million rows. This is another speed test.

Testing the database more directly, the next test focuses on its ability to handle data tasks, with a JOIN command. This is used to bring two tables into the same query – in this case, traffic and data. A query using the SQL SUM command is then run to find page views for each article on different dates.

Here, a faster server response is required.

We employed the popular WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool (WPB) to benchmark the WordPress installation’s performance. This is installed like a standard plugin, and provides 0 to 10 scoring on key benchmarks. Our testing looked at database speed, file system speed, and network performance.

Liquid Web delivered an impressive score of 8.4 for this test, making it the fastest VPS plan we’ve ever tested by a wide margin. This is top-notch performance.

Liquid Web Managed VPS Traffic and Uptime

As per the Liquid Web features, “100% guaranteed power and network uptime” is promised. Making a claim like that leads a customer to expect the host to handle both spikes in traffic and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. To test Liquid Web’s Managed VPS hosting and gauge its ability to handle high traffic, we used an Apache benchmarking test that hits the server with 500 simultaneous requests.

Many web hosting services can’t handle 500 concurrent requests at all and timeout or block them (perhaps due to security software mis-identifying our test as an attack). However, Liquie Web did really well here, falling short of DreamHost VPS but only a few requests per second, which is basically within the margin or error.

We also test our sample site’s load time using Dotcom-Tools’ Website Speed Test, which hits the site (from New York) and gives us the number of seconds it look our sample Wordpress site to load fully, how long it took to first paint and how long it took for a network response.

Here you can see that Liquid Web’s page loaded 0.3 seconds slower than our leader, Hostinger. However, it fared better on time to first paint and network response which are, in some ways, better indicators of overall performance.

One other test was performed. The script timeout challenge is designed to see how long a script can be left running on the server, without any restarts. Based on the results collected from Liquid Web’s Managed VPS plan, unlimited script timeout is in place. Although some competitors time out after a specific period, these are mostly shared hosting plans. Most VPS plans we’ve looked at have unlimited timeout in place

Liquid Web Managed VPS Support

Liquid Web offers a wide selection of support resources. Primarily, a support portal provides a collection of docs covering general help, as well as things like WordPress hosting and using cPanel. Customers get access to dedicated support, with various support packages also available, but prices are available only on request. Telephone and live chat are available, as well as email.

When attempting to find out the database size limit for Liquid Web’s hosting, I attempted to contact their sales team via the “live chat” tool on the website. However, although I was informed that “An agent is on the way,” none arrived.

The quickest response, surprisingly, was via the email support. This was prompt, professional, and knowledgeable.

Bottom Line

Two things are most striking about Liquid Web’s Managed VPS plans: the price, and the performance. By some distance, this is the most expensive mid-range plan we’ve looked at (Hostinger’s VPS is $15.99/month, Hostgator’s $71.99/month, Dreamhost’s $60/month). Though if you are purchasing it, we recommend paying for two years at once which would get you down to a reasonable $24.75 /month for what is normally $99/month.

Liquid Web aces all of our tests and performs, outperforming every other VPS we’ve tested. This includes good results with the WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool, delivering the type of result we’ve come to expect from cloud and shared hosting, where WordPress installation is expected.

While this is a pricey option, everything you need is included in Liquid Web’s price. Unlike a provider like Namecheap, which cuts back the price and the features, you don’t need any enhancements to make the Liquid Web Managed VPS usable – it’s ready to use from the off.

Concerns about communication from the sales team aside, Liquid Web looks like a really strong web host, and its Managed VPS plans should be at the top of your list when planning a new live web project.

Starlink just launched an AU$15 (about US$9) monthly plan in Australia for existing users. This is a massive discount from the AU$139 (about US$86) monthly fee that users from the Land Down Under pay, but it comes with a stingy 5GB data cap. If you need more data, you could purchase Roam data at AU$3 (about US$1.86) per GB, which allows you to use your Starlink practically anywhere. According to PCMag, this news comes just days after the company started offering a US$50 monthly plan that comes with 50GB of Roam data.

Unfortunately, this plan isn’t available to new users, so you either must have an existing account or have previously subscribed to Starlink to take advantage. Starlink’s email to its customers requires you to log into your Starlink account and choose the “Backup” plan option under “Activate Service” for a preexisting Starlink dish. So, you won’t see this option listed under Starlink’s Service Plans when you’re applying for a new line.

Although affordable, many commenters have criticized the 5GB limit as too low, with some saying that almost all phone plans come with that amount of data, or more. Furthermore, the add-on rate for Roam data is just as expensive compared to other data plans. The average person might use, say, 30GB a month, which means if you’re a family of four, you’ll pay AU$360 (about US$225) for 120GB of data. But if you use a lot of data (like streaming a lot of 4K videos), then you’ll spend a lot more.

However, others say that this isn’t for the average user — instead, it’s only supposed to serve as a backup for areas that only have one or two wired service providers and no phone service at all. So, in case you lose internet connection for a short while, you could remain online. And if the outage lasts longer than expected, you could purchase additional data as needed.

Given that Starlink plans aren’t under contract, users could just purchase the needed hardware and then sign up for the service when they need to. This means there are potentially thousands (if not millions) of Starlink hardware in the wild gathering dust and not giving the company cash flow. By enticing users who do not have reliable backup internet to purchase a cheap monthly subscription, the company could earn money from these Starlink dishes that are otherwise unused.

Whether you're trying to run a Bash script, have a look at what processes are running or just move files around, you need to get to the terminal / command prompt on your web hosting plan. Most of the best web hosting plans and best VPS providers give you access to the Linux terminal, but require you to use an SSH (Secure Shell) connection to log into it from your PC.

In order to connect from your computer via SSH, you need to first create a public / private key combination and download the private key file. Then you can use both the private key file and a passkey (aka password) in an SSH client such as Putty to establish the connection. Below, we'll show you how it's done.

How to SSH to your web hosting server

Note that these instructions assume that your web hosting plan uses cPanel as its control panel. Some plans use other control panels which will have similar, but not identical interfaces.

1. Navigate to your control panel and log in. Usually, the control panel type is cPanel and the login is at https://www.yoursite.com/cpanel.

2. Click SSH Access.

3. Click Manage SSH Keys.

4. Click Generate a New Key.

5. Give the key a name ("id_rsa" is usually the default) and enter a password. Then click Generate key.

6. Click Go Back.

7. Click Manage next to the Public key.

8. Click Authorize and then Go Back.

9. Click View/Download next to the private key.

10. Click Convert under Convert to PPK format. If it's not automatically filled in, you will need to enter the password you used to create the key.

11. Click Download Key.

A PPK file downloads to your computer. Store it somewhere where you won't lose it.

12. Launch Putty. Download and install it if you don't already have it installed.

13. Enter the hostname and SSH port number. You'll get these from your provider. If you have your own domain the hostname would be your domain name.

14. Under Connection->SSH->Credentials, click the Browse button under Private Key file and select the PPK file you downloaded.

15. Optional: save your hostname. Under the Session tab, give your session a session name (ex: "mysite") and hit Save. This will allow you to load the hostname and path to the PPK file. So next time you open Putty, you can hit the sitename and hit load.

16. Click Open.

17. Click Accept if prompted. This happens the first time you log in to a new site.

18. Enter your username and passphrase. The username is the same one you used to log into cPanel, but the passphrase / password should be the one that you used to create the public / private key.

You should then get the terminal prompt. Save the PPK file because, if you have it, you don't need to recreate it, each time you want to connect, just the first time.

According to the Swedish paper Expressen (machine translated), two fiber optic cables operated by Global Connect between Sweden and Finland were damaged Monday morning. The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS) said that the cable breaks occurred on land in Finland. The damage affected about a hundred businesses and six thousand homes.

Swedish authorities initially suspected foul play, with the Minister of Civil Defense saying sabotage was suspected. However, Finnish police denied this, saying there was no ongoing criminal investigation regarding the cable break.

Telecom operator Elisa later announced that one of the cables was accidentally by an excavator at a construction site, with Global Connect confirming it. However, the other damaged cable is still being investigated at the time of writing, and we don’t have any news yet on what caused its disruption.

Damage to internet cables isn’t usually big news, especially if it didn’t have a significant global impact. However, two fiber optic lines were disrupted between Sweden and Finland just weeks after two undersea internet cables had been cut in the Baltic Sea. A Chinese ship is suspected of deliberately dragging its anchor while traversing the area, thus cutting the BCS East-West Interlink Cable connecting Sweden and Lithuania and the C-Lion1 traveling between Finland and Germany. NATO authorities are still investigating the previous event. Still, this news highlighted the vulnerability of communications cables and how simultaneous damage to multiple cables, deliberate or otherwise, could throw the global internet into chaos.

The Baltic Sea incident has prompted many to focus on undersea cables, like the US FCC, updating its undersea cable regulations, and Meta, planning to build its undersea cable network. However, cables are much easier to damage on land, by accident or otherwise, as they’re much more accessible. For example, in 2011, a 75-year-old Georgian woman once knocked out the internet for Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia after she cut a fiber optic cable while scavenging for copper. Another recent incident was when saboteurs knocked out several fiber optic cables in France, affecting over 10,000 subscribers over six departments (the French equivalent of counties).

The internet cables between Sweden and Finland were cut by accident. Although it is still inconvenient to the affected subscribers and would have to be repaired by their owners, it's not another suspected escalation of the ongoing tensions between Russia and NATO.

Finding hosting for your website should be straightforward, whatever the size and scale of the project. Typically, you’ll be looking for VPS or shared hosting – both are suitable for all manner of web applications, from WordPress blogs to online stores and beyond.

But a cursory glance at a list of available web hosts offering both VPS and shared hosting plans reveals around 10 providers. Wherever you look, the names are the same, although the order might be a little different.

Companies like DreamHost have built their reputations on providing good hosting, competitive pricing, and reliable customer service. They make it easy to run WordPress sites, static websites, custom-built websites, e-shops, and pretty much any web project you can think of.

DreamHost, which began its hosting service in 1997, operates worldwide out of an HQ in California. Among other hosting options, DreamHost offers shared and VPS hosting plans. We were interested to find out if and how these stand out from other providers.

The shared hosting plan from DreamHost is typical, giving some disk space on a server for a small monthly subscription. Sharing that server with other low-budget websites comes with some caveats – the RAM and CPU resources are divided among the sites. This may seem like a good deal, and for smaller projects, it often works well. But when traffic spikes slow down the whole server (affecting the other sites) it’s a good time to move on. Upgraded shared servers are an option, as are VPS plans.

A VPS (Virtual Private Server) offers greater control over resources. The virtual hardware is dedicated to your project, rather than shared with others. It’s an advantageous arrangement, one that gives you better control of the server, and ultimately your website.

We tested DreamHost's $30/month VPS Professional plan and $4.95/month Shared starter plan, both of which are cheaper ($20/month or $2.59/month) if you pay for 36 months in advance. We found database and WordPress performance mediocre on both plans, though they were capable of handling a fair amount of traffic.

Most disappointing, however, was the unadvertised database size limit on the shared plan of 3GB, which caused DreamHost to start charging us an extra $15 a month for MySQL hosting. Whether judging via performance or price, DreamHost's plans don’t earn a spot on our list of best web hosting services or best VPS hosting providers.

DreamHost VPS

An impressive collection of four VPS plans are available from DreamHost, each offering greater RAM and storage, and all with unlimited bandwidth.

We selected the VPS Professional plan for review. This virtual server hosting has 4GB of RAM, 120GB SSD storage, and unlimited bandwidth. CPU details are not shared on DreamHost's website, so I contacted the support team for further details on this matter:

“We don't place explicit limits on CPU, as individual VPS have higher and more focused memory requirements than CPU requirements,” a DreamHost rep told Tom's Hardware.

Other providers offer a specific vCPU (virtual CPU) speed, and that's often an attractive option. It’s useful for working out exactly what you’re getting, and what to expect. However, the response from DreamHost support makes sense.

Some hosting providers impose limits on the number of databases that can be created and accessed on a server. Shared hosting plans typically leave this as unlimited, or high enough that you wouldn’t reach it – remember the physical storage space is a limit – but VPS plans tend to be clearer. Again referring to the DreamHost support team, I learned “You can create as many databases as you would like with VPS Hosting.”

It’s good to see unlimited bandwidth being offered by DreamHost. Some competing providers charge for breaking the bandwidth limit, which often seems a bit mean.

DreamHost’s VPS plans also include access to its ChatGPT-4o-powered AI Business Advisor. This is integrated into the server’s control panel, which can assist with SEO challenges and generating content for your site’s social media presence. DreamHost emphasizes that the AI Business Advisor does not use your personal data to generate responses.

The four VPS plans from DreamHost can be signed up to a monthly rolling contract (prices as seen in the table) or with a yearly or 3-year contract, paid up front. These long-term options result in discounts ranging from 51% to 74%, so are worth considering if such an arrangement is part of your strategy. Note that when the term ends, the non-discounted renewal rate is applied, so you'llpay full price from that point onward.

DreamHost VPS plans offer various advantages over some competitors. These are managed servers, so the operating system (Ubuntu) is preinstalled and updates for the OS, PHP (support for PHP8), and WordPress are automatically installed.

These systems are configured to run scripts in Perl, Python, Node.js, and Ruby. You get access to Crontab, SSH access, and SFTP (unlimited user accounts). DreamHost VPS plans also get a choice of Apache or Nginx server software and a unique IPv4 address, plus unlimited IPv6 addresses.

DreamHost offers its own control panel software, DreamHost panel. This is intended to replace the common cPanel solution, and supports the importing of cPanel backups (although this is a time-consuming, manual process).

Overall, DreamHost Panel was relatively easy to navigate, though its dual system of tabs is a bit strange. There are some aspects of your account(s), such as email management, that you must navigate to through the left panel. For others, you must click Websites under Manage Websites on the left side, then select the site and navigate to the appropriate tab in the center window pane.

Still, with a little hunting around, we found all the important controls, including those for managing files, managing databases, and installing/uninstalling WordPress. The performance of the VPS plan was a mixed bag, as it was slower than the competition on two out of three MySQL database tests and on the WordPress Benchmark. However, it managed to handle 500 concurrent users with aplomb and hit middle-of-the-pack on the Website Speed Test.

DreamHost Shared

If your budget doesn’t stretch to subscribing to a VPS and you need something simpler, the shared hosting plans from DreamHost are an option. Two of these are available, Starter and Unlimited, with a low monthly subscription cost and unmetered monthly traffic (see below).

As a shared hosting plan doesn’t have RAM or CPU requirements, the only hardware specification you’re going to need to be aware of is storage. DreamHost’s Shared Starter plan has a 50GB limit, while the Shared Unlimited plan has “unlimited” storage. Meanwhile, both also offer unlimited storage, and unlimited databases, but choosing the Shared Unlimited plan gets you the option to create unlimited websites and email accounts.

The prices in the table are for the basic monthly rolling arrangement, which is advertised as “no commitments or contracts” and is ideal if you’re just dipping your toe into the world of running a website. However, if you want a longer deal, annual and tri-annual arrangements are available. These give you a hefty discount on the price, potentially saving between 63% and 72% on the basic monthly price. Note that once the chosen arrangement ends, the price goes up.

There are some really big gotchas here that you may not notice right away. First of all, the Starter plan does not come with email, something almost every plan on earth has included. For that, you have to pay an extra $1.67 a month.

But we found out about an even bigger surprise charge that we really did not like. In the spec sheet you see before you buy it, the DreamHost shared plan says 50GB of storage, but it neglects to mention that you can only have 3GB of database storage, the main kind of storage many people need. Just to run our database tests, we exceeded that 3GB limit, and rather than preventing us from uploading the larger amount, DreamHost (with some warning) created a new, $15/month MySQL VPS plan just to host our database. So all of a sudden, our $4.95 a month plan ended up costing $19.95 a month!

Apparently, DreamHost has a variety of these MySQL VPS plans which are designed just to host databases and none of them seems to be worth the money. These plans range from $15 for just 10GB of database storage to $100 for 120GB. You can get an entire VPS with the webserver and more database storage at many competitors – including Hostinger – for less than this. To be fair to DreamHost, the company did send us a warning email and gave us a few weeks to remove our data if we didn’t want to be automatically subscribed to the MySQL hosting on top of our shared plan. But this whole thing still smells very bad to us, particularly when other services don’t do this.

Shared hosting does give you free WordPress migrations using DreamHost’s own plugin, a free SSL certificate for your website, and automatic WordPress updates covering core functionality and security. Daily backups are included, and you can also access the server over FTP or SFTP. Some differences between the Shared Starter and Shared Unlimited are noticeable – for example, you get up to six FTP accounts with Starter, as opposed to Unlimited’s unlimited option. Similarly, Starter is limited to five subdomains and six MySQL databases.

As with the VPS plan we tested, the shared plan uses DreamHost’s own proprietary control panel. While not as intuitive or powerful as cPanel, the company’s solution gives you easy access to basic functionality such as setting up FTP or creating MySQL databases.

Database, WordPress and Scripting Performance

Features and price are just one aspect of assessing whether a web host and its most appropriate plan is the right fit for your project. How fast the server is, its ability to handle requests for HTML files, whether it can cope with a sudden uptick in visitors, and other performance factors are also important considerations.

But as you don’t get an idea of performance until you sign up and start using a host, we’ve done that bit for you. We’ve set up several tests on our chosen shared and VPS plans, using large sample databases and a fresh copy of WordPress with some dummy article content.

We start by running three database tests, using a MySQL database to see how quickly the plans process our queries. At test time, both DreamHost’s shared and VPS plans were running MySQL version 8.0, a fairly recent version of the popular DB software.

The first test inserts 87 million rows of data into the MySQL database. This is data taken from Tom’s Hardware’s own page view record. Performance is assessed on speed – the faster, the better.

Both the VPS and Shared plans were significantly slower than any of the competition. The process took a whopping 23 minutes and 12 seconds on VPS and a nearly identical 23:17 on shared. Either way, they are way behind both the shared and VPS plans from Namecheap and Bluehost. Hostinger’s VPS plan leads the pack and is almost 300% faster.

Pushing the test parameters, we added random numerical values into the data, again hoping for a fast conclusion to the test.

Here, DreamHosts’s plans were also way behind all of their competitors, and again performed similarly to each other.

Finally, we moved onto testing the server’s ability to efficiently combine two tables using the MySQL JOIN command. One table consisted of traffic data, the other of article titles. After combining, the SUM command was used to query page views for each article across different dates.

This is a very demanding test, but interestingly DreamHost was not in last place here, and its VPS plan actually came in second. Its shared plan even did better than the VPS and shared plans from Namecheap.

Among the various WordPress benchmarking tools currently available, WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool (WPB) is perhaps the best regarded. It is installed on WordPress as a standard plugin and provides benchmark scores from 0 to 10. We’re looking for a high score in our test of database speed, file system speed, and network performance.

DreamHost’s shared plan managed a score of 6.4 here, having struggled with the math elements of the testing. It also came close to failing WPB’s data import test, scoring just 0.95 out of 10. By contrast, Hostinger’s Shared plan scored 8.06.

The VPS plan from DreamHost did not fare better. Its overall WPB score was 6.3, with even poorer math calculation scores. The data import test was 0.91 – to maintain the same line of comparison, Hostinger managed a score of 1.57 on that test for its VPS (the best result in our tests has been Hostgator’s VPS, with 7.87).

Both the Shared and VPS plans from DreamHost also fell short with the simple and complex query testing, scoring around half as well as Hostinger and Hostgator. Overall WordPress benchmarking scores put DreamHost ahead of Scalahosting, but that’s as good as it gets.

DreamHost Traffic and Uptime

A key element of a web server’s performance is whether it can handle traffic spikes. Similarly, it should be able to defend against attacks (such as DDOS). We ran some Apache benchmark tests designed to judge how the hosting packages handled challenging scenarios.

First, we sent 500 requests to each server, all at the same time. To create a realistic environment, these requests were sent to the homepage of the WordPress dummy site we set up. Our results are based on the speed of each server’s response and are a total of requests per second.

Here, DreamHost excelled, with the VPS returning 75.08 requests per second and Shared delivering 45.58 requests per second. Many plans we’ve tested fail or block the 500 concurrent requests, so its deft handling of this traffic is a mark in DreamHost’s favor.

We also ran the home page of the sample WordPress site we set up through Dotcom Tools’ Website Speed Test. This test hits the site from a particular location – we chose New York – and records the amount of time it takes to download the entire page, the amount it takes for the page to start drawing, and the amount it takes for the server to first respond. These are all measured in seconds or fractions of a second.

Both of DreamHost’s plans did reasonably well, with load times of under 2 seconds and first network responses of 1.3 and 1 seconds. Hostinger’s VPS and Shared plans were faster, as was Bluehost’s VPS.

DreamHost Support

Whether you’re new to finding a web host or you’ve signed up with hosting services many times in the past, you expect 24/7 support, 365 days of a year. Web hosts tend to make this available with live chat, email, and telephone options – sometimes, all three.

They also offer online resources, such as FAQs and knowledge bases, to help you find troubleshooting guides to fix problems yourself, thereby avoiding the inevitable wait for support.

DreamHost offers a 24/7 support service, with initial contact via an AI-controlled chatbot. My experience with this was fine, but the resulting response (concerning the database limits and virtual CPU specification) was surprisingly late, arriving several hours after the AI had told me it couldn’t deal with the question and to complete a web form. This is far longer than I had to wait for a human response with other web hosts.

However, the knowledge base is comprehensive, and DreamHost also provides a very detailed status page. This lists the current status of servers and services and can be subscribed to via RSS if you want immediate updates.

Bottom Line

DreamHost is a hard service to recommend. It’s not expensive, but competitors offer more for your money, including better performance, faster support, and a gotchas. The VPS plan is competent and handles traffic pretty well, but its low database and WordPress performance just don’t match up well with the rest of the market. If you want a VPS plan, we recommend you check out Hostinger’s plans, which start as low as $4.99.

For shared hosting, DreamHost is particularly uncompetitive, because not only is its shared plan a poor performer on our database and WordPress tests, but it lacks email, a feature even the cheapest plans usually have. Worse still, the company hopes to catch you sleeping by not listing a database size limit on its spec sheet. Then, after you’ve signed up and started using the service, it tells you that you need to pay at least $15 a month extra to exceed the (very low) 3GB cap. If you don’t pay attention to the warning emails and remove your data after a couple of weeks, the company will sign you up for the extra plan and your bill will quadruple overnight. We recommend going with HostGator or NameCheap for shared plans instead and avoiding the hassle.

6G is shaping up to be one of the largest jumps in network bandwidth in mobile service providers' history. Interesting Engineering reports that researchers have successfully created a 6G network that achieved a 938 Gbps transmission data rate.

For perspective, 938 Gbps is almost 5000 times faster than a good to excellent 5G connection on your typical 5G smartphone, which can operate at roughly 200 Mbps. It's even faster when you consider real-world 5G connections that don't have the best signal, which will generally provide well below 100 Mbps.

This impressive feat was accomplished by Zhixin Liu and his team at University College London (UCL). The team purportedly used a combination of radio waves and light-based communication across the broadest spectrum of frequencies ever recorded, ranging from 5 GHz to 150 GHz.

The researchers used a 145 GHz bandwidth wireless transmission using orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) for the test. This setup takes advantage of different transmission operations for various frequency ranges. The high-frequency mm-wave bands, including the 75 - 150 GHz bands, were generated by "mixing optically modulated signals with frequency-locked lasers on high-speed photodiodes."

"By frequency-locking two pairs of narrow linewidth lasers and referring to a common quartz oscillator, the researchers generated W-band and D-band signals with stable carrier frequency and reduced phase noise compared to free-running lasers, maximizing the use of spectrum.

By using OFDM format and bit loading, the researchers achieved a 938 Gbps transmission data rate with less than a 300 MHz gap between different RF and mm-wave bands."

Liu and his team purportedly talk with smartphone manufacturers and network providers about the technology they are developing. Specifically, the team's development aims to solve the 100 Gbps requirement of next-generation 6G base stations for communication between access points and hubs.

Founded in 2000 by CEO Richard Kirkendall, Arizona-based Namecheap is best known as a dirt-cheap domain registrar where you can get domain names for as little as $0.98 for the first year ($8.98 for .com TLDs). However, the inexpensive service also offers hosting for highly competitive prices, with shared hosting starting at $1.48 per month and VPS (Virtual Private Server) plans as low as $6.88 per month. You can even purchase dedicated hosting for as little as $35.88 a month.

We usually recommend that users don’t purchase their hosting and their domain name registration from the same company, because if you choose to change hosting plans, you can get stuck paying exorbitant fees to a company you no longer want to work with. However, Namecheap is first and foremost a registrar (like GoDaddy or Network Solutions), and the hosting plans, while available from the same account dashboard, are not packaged with the domains. 

To determine whether Namecheap’s affordable packages are competitive with the best web hosting plans, we signed up for accounts on one shared hosting plan, the $1.48 Stellar plan, and one VPS, the $12.88 Quasar plan.  When we ran both plans through our bevy of usability and performance tests, we found really strong performance for the money, though a couple of gotchas require you to pay a little bit extra. Overall, it's one of the best VPS hosts around.

Namecheap VPS

Virtual Private Server plans are our favorite type of hosting overall because they provide admin access and the ability to install software and yet they cost a lot less than paying for your own physical server. At Namecheap, you can choose from three VPS plans, with increasingly greater specifications. 

Each plan has a more potent virtual CPU, more RAM, and more storage than the one before, with the price increasing to match. We looked at the Quasar plan, with a 4-core virtual CPU, 6GB of RAM, and a 120GB SSD in RAID 10 configuration. (This provides a resilient storage environment to cope with SSD failures without data loss.) Not many hosts highlight this as a feature (GreenGeeks is one that does) and it is definitely a selling point. 

The Quasar plan also has 3000GB/3TB of bandwidth, which seems noticeably less than some competing providers. For example, Hostinger’s KVM 2 plan, which is currently our favorite overall, costs $6.99 a month and gives you 8TB of bandwidth. So, if you expect a ton of traffic, this plan might not be for you.

To find out what limitations are in place for databases on the VPS plans, I chatted with the Namecheap support team. Their response was quick, and they informed me that there are “no limits to creating databases or database size in [...] VPS hosting plans.” So, unless your database(s) hit the storage limit of your chosen VPS plan’s SSD, there should be no problems.

Namecheap’s VPS plans are available with annual, quarterly, and monthly payment options (the prices in the table above are for the basic monthly option). Annual and quarterly options require up-front payment, but each has an enticing discount that you keep with each renewal.

So, not only is Namecheap affordable with the initial sign-up, but it stays that way with each quarterly or annual renewal. Most web hosts revert the renewal price to the non-discounted price, again seemingly making Namecheap stand out on price.

Acquiring a Namecheap VPS plan lets you select a Linux operating system and configure some other options. The VPS has various add-ons that you might be interested in including, such as a choice of server management. However, this is where things get a bit complicated – and more expensive.

The basic Quasar plan – as with the Pulsar and Magneter options – is a stripped-down VPS. Without paying for an interface like cPanel or Webuzo, you’ll be stuck spending a lot of time on configuration. Even if your organization has a dedicated web admin, they’ll probably want server panel software. 

While other hosts include cPanel free on their VPS packages, Namecheap has slapped a $10.88/month charge on the software. Alternatively, Webuzo is just $2.88/month, but isn’t quite as easy-to-use or powerful as cPanel. You can also add WHMCS (starting at $8/month extra) and Softaculous ($1.50/month) if required. 

We went with Webuzo for our test plan and found it more than adequate for the tasks we wanted. The UI was actually pretty easy to navigate, giving us easy access to everything from our databases to our subdomains, SSL configuration, email and SSH remote access. There’s even a web-based terminal window that allows us to control the server as root from a command prompt within the browser.

A server management plan can also be selected. Even with the free option, you have to pay an hourly rate for help reinstalling the OS, and fixing failures ($15/hour). However, you can reinstall the OS yourself from Namecheap’s own VPS control panel (which is easy).

Or you can add the Basic management plan, which bolts an extra $10/month, bringing security enhancements and a lower $10/hour rate for maintenance. For $25/month extra, the Complete option accommodates all maintenance requirements and tightens security. This is the best option, but is yet another factor to consider with a Namecheap VPS. 

Further, extra RAM, storage, backup storage, bandwidth, and IP addresses can be added to your Namecheap VPS. By this time, however, it costs a lot more than $12.88/month.

Other things are included in the price for the Quasar plan. It has a 100GB offsite backup, two dedicated IP addresses, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. There is a choice of AlmaLinux, Ubuntu, and Debian OSs, and 24/7 live chat support is available. 

Namecheap’s VPS provided solid performance on our database performance tests where it was always in the middle of the pack, slightly below some competitors and above others. On the WordPress Hosting Benchmark, it provided a very reasonable mark of 7.2. However, it dominated other shared and VPS plans on the Apache benchmark, where we hit the server with 500 concurrent requests.

Namecheap Shared

If your hosting requirements are more modest, Namecheap’s shared plans might be more to your liking. Three are on offer: Stellar, Stellar Plus, and Stellar Business. They all offer low prices and unmetered monthly traffic. The Stellar plan, which we reviewed, has 20GB SSD storage. The Stellar Plus has unmetered SSD use, while the more expensive Stellar Business plan has a 50GB limit.

Monthly, annual, and two-year pricing options are available, with discounts ranging from 47% to 65% if you want a long-term relationship. However, the rolling monthly price is pretty low if you don’t want to be tied down.

These three packages are suitable for starting a new project or migrating a relatively compact website. The only stumbling block you may encounter is with the basic Stellar plan, where the 20GB SSD could prove challenging, especially with a project with a lot of media, or one or more large databases. The standard Stellar plan has a limit of 50 databases, which would take some doing to breach. Stellar only supports MySQL, whereas PostgreSQL and MySQL databases can be used with the Stellar Plus and Stellar Business plans. Details on database limits can be found on a dedicated Namecheap knowledgebase page. 

However, there’s one huge catch that we discovered with the plan: SSL isn’t readily available for free. Consider that you need an SSL certificate for your site to use the https protocol and, without https, your site registers as insecure in a web browser, meaning that readers won’t trust it. SSL is essentially a requirement for running even the smallest website.

Most web hosts we’ve tested make it very easy to obtain SSL for your domain automatically and many times you can just use an AutoSSL feature in cPanel to get and renew free certificates without spending a dime. However, Namecheap just gives you a free, one-year certificate when you sign up for a new plan and then wants you to pay for it after the year is over. There are ways of getting free SSL certificates elsewhere online and importing them into your account, but Namecheap seems to be deliberately making it difficult to get a free certificate so you’ll buy one from them. 

Unmetered traffic is advantageous in case your site suddenly becomes popular. You’re not going to be penalized unless some form of cyberattack is taking place, and even then you’re looking at a temporary block on your site for the security of the other sites on the server and the host itself. In any event, the shared plans have various security countermeasures in place, from two-factor authentication controlling cPanel access to keeping the OS and software patched, strict firewalls, and the ClamAV virus scanner. Shared plans also get a guaranteed 100% uptime.

A shared server can be chosen in the US, UK, or EU. If it’s in the latter, selecting an eco-friendly datacenter in the Netherlands is possible. This is powered by 100% renewable resources, so while it’s not quite planting trees (in the manner of GreenGeeks), it’s a responsible option.

The Namecheap Stellar plan also offers three domains (Stellar Plus and Stellar Business will host unlimited domains), unlimited parked domains, 30 subdomains, and twice-weekly backups.

Though we don’t expect the best performance from a shared hosting plan, the Stellar plan did pretty well on our database tests and handled 500 concurrent requests with aplomb. However, its WordPress Hosting Benchmark score was a bit low. 

Database, WordPress and Scripting Performance

The trade-off between price and features you get bundled into the plan from other providers is just one aspect of whether Namecheap is the right web host. We've conceived and run a series of tests to assess whether its servers and database support are up to the task.

On our VPS and shared hosting plans, we installed a copy of WordPress and populated it with dummy content. We also do a series of MySQL database tests that perform large queries and time them. At the time of our test, both Namecheap accounts were running on MariaDB 10.6.19, which is a common MySQL-compatible DB server that many hosting services use instead of Oracle’s official MySQL software.

The first test was set up to insert 87 million rows of data (taken from Tom’s Hardware’s page view data) into a MySQL database. Typically, this test takes between 10 and 15 minutes or so. Both Namecheap services were faster than Bluehost’s competitors and ScalaHosting VPS. Hostinger’s VPS was a little quicker, though.

We swap out the default values for random numbers and update each of those 87 million rows, again looking for a fast result. Here both Namecheap plans were a little slower than competitors and surprisingly, the shared plan actually was much faster than the VPS.

Our third database test used the JOIN command to bring together two tables, one of traffic and another of data and the SUM command to return page views for each article across a range of dates. This test is the most intensive and, on some hosting services, can take more than 20 minutes. Namecheap’s shared plan again beat out the VPS plan, but both were behind much of the competition.

Several benchmarking tools for WordPress are available, but one of the most popular is the WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool (WPB). It can be installed on WordPress installations like a standard plugin and provides benchmarks on a scoring system of 0 to 10, where 10 is the best. 

We used WPB to test database speed, file system speed, and network performance. 

Namecheap’s shared hosting plan achieved a score of 6.7 for this test, which places it roughly in the middle of all the hosting plans we’ve tested. Unfortunately, the WPB tests revealed that the shared hosting was unsuitable for file system writing and copy and access tasks.

The VPS plan, meanwhile, returned a WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool score of 7.2. Compared with other VPS plans from competing web hosts, it is roughly in the same ballpark as Hostgator and Scalahosting, but didn’t excel in any one area.

Namecheap Traffic Handling

One of the key selling points of a web host is its ability to handle traffic spikes and intentional attempts to knock the server offline. To see how well the Namecheap servers can handle traffic, we run the Apache benchmark, set it to hit our test WordPress sites with 500 concurrent requests and report how long it took to process those requests.

Namecheap beat out its competitors on this very important test, and the VPS server came out on top, delivering 44.57 requests per second. That’s an even better result than what we achieved from Hostinger’s VPS plan. 

Running a dynamic website may require you to run shell scripts that perform background tasks such as sending email newsletters or grabbing data from APIs and storing it in a database. For those occasions, it’s important to know that, if you run a script at the Linux command line, your server won’t kill it after a few minutes. 

Unfortunately, many hosting services have a script timeout so, if your task takes longer than the limit, the server will just terminate it. Granted, this won’t be a problem if all you’re doing is running Wordpress, but for some of us, it can be a showstopper. To see how long a script can run on Namecheap, we run our endless script, which uses Bash to write a log with the time elapsed every single minute. 

We’re happy to report that both the VPS and the shared plan could run for multiple days – basically forever – without being terminated. Typically, shared plans cut off your script in short order, but ours ran for five days and three hours. We forgot to check on our VPS script for two months and it was still running when we turned it off!

Namecheap Support

Almost all web hosts offer 24/7 support, based on live chat responses or form/email contact. Namecheap proved their speed by providing a fast initial reply to my question about database limits. Of course, more complex queries will take longer to resolve, which is why web hosts provide troubleshooting guides and knowledge bases.

The Namecheap “Help Center” is the home of the knowledgebase, blog, and how-to videos to help you make the most of your hosting package. Questions on logging into cPanel, how to edit a DNS zone, and accessing the files via FTP are among the most common, each with clear answers. There is also a dedicated section for WordPress queries.

Namecheap also provides “Guru guides” sharing in-depth expertise. However, if you just want to check on the server status or confirm upcoming downtime, a service status page is provided.

Overall, we were impressed by the depth and speed of Namecheap’s support.

Bottom Line

Namecheap certainly lives up to its name and offers a bargain-basement collection of plans in the VPS and shared categories. You must be aware of the extra costs before signing up. Add at least a couple of dollars a month to the VPS plan’s price for a control panel, more if you want cPanel (we found the $2.88 Webuzo panel to be more than adequate). With the shared plan, you will either have to buy an SSL certificate after 12 months or find a way to generate a free one and import it. 

Hostinger’s VPS is slightly cheaper, but Namecheap still has a very affordable plan. You really can’t beat the price of Namecheap’s shared plan, which is one of the cheapest around at less than $2 a month. 

Namecheap lands squarely in the middle regarding database performance, but it does well on traffic handling. The shared plan also gets a lot of credit for not having a real-time limit on script execution. If you’re expecting a lot of traffic, the VPS plan’s very limited bandwidth limit could be a drawback

Overall, both the VPS and shared plans are really competitive, both on price and performance/functionality. And the shared plan is a particularly good bargain.

According to NATO intelligence officials, some of the services we take for granted in our daily lives could be easily disrupted if Russia chose to do so. Analysts believe Russia already has plans in place and is developing further strategies to disrupt Internet and Global Positioning System (GPS) networks worldwide.

Analysts believe Russia is mapping the undersea fiber optic cables that transfer data between continents. Officials speculate that the nation may have already carried out attacks on telecommunications and GPS networks on a smaller scale. NATO thinks Russia may have plans in place to target those networks in retribution for the West’s support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.

The deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, laid bare the warning in June. Following an attack on Nord Stream 2, a gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, Medvedev issued a warning to NATO and other Western countries. Believing the West was behind the attack that blew up the pipeline, Medvedev said nothing was holding Russia back from “destroying the ocean floor cable communications of our enemies.”

In 2023, damage to a cable running under the Baltic Sea disrupted telecommunications between Sweden and Estonia. Russia strongly denied any involvement, but Sweden’s civil defense minister said the damage resulted from “external force or tampering.”

More recently, Russia was accused of an attack on GPS navigation systems that grounded flights from Helsinki, Finland, to Tartu, Estonia, for a month in April. Melanie Garson, an international security expert at University College London, told Business Insider that Russia has been developing this “cheap and effective way of malicious gray-zone interference” without resulting in open warfare for quite some time.

In a world increasingly dependent on the internet, data flows between continents are reliant on undersea telecommunications cables. A network of fiber optic cables spanning around 745,000 miles transmits 95% of international data. These cables have been viewed as potential military targets for decades, and both the U.S. and the former USSR kept watch over them during the Cold War.

Since Russia has land-based internet connectivity to Europe and Central Asia, it is much less reliant on undersea cables than the rest of the world. It makes recent Russian naval and intelligence activities worrisome. According to a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report, Russia’s spy ships and submarines have been loitering near the undersea cable routes.

In response, NATO countries are stepping up their surveillance and patrols in vulnerable areas. NATO itself stepped up aircraft patrols off the coast of Ireland amid concerns about Russian submarine activity there. The organization is also establishing a system to automatically warn of attempted interference with oceanic fiber optic cables and reroute communications via satellite.

Unfortunately, the West doesn’t have any backup systems for the undersea fiber optic cable network, or the GPS systems aviation relies upon. The CSIS has called on the U.S. to increase its international cooperation to better coordinate a response to potential attacks on these key areas of infrastructure and for the rest of the world to work on developing robust alternatives for international communications systems.

Most web hosting companies have similar background stories, but GreenGeeks offers a somewhat unique twist: being environmentally friendly. The company, which offers shared and VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting, makes an effort to live up to its name by claiming to use energy-efficient hardware and replacing the power it uses each month with 300 percent more in wind power credits. The company also plants a tree for each account.

These environmentally-conscious actions may make you feel good about using GreenGeeks, which launched in 2010 and has data centers in Chicago, Montreal, Amsterdam, and Singapore. But are any of its packages among the best web hosting plans? To find out, we’ve tested two plans: the $59.95 4GB Managed VPS plan and the “Lite” Shared hosting plan that goes for just $2.95 a month. Overall, we found the performance for the VPS plans strong, and their price, though expensive, does not require any long-term commitment. This puts GreenGeeks on our list of best VPS hosting providers. The performance on the shared plan we tried was so-so, but its price and functionality is hard to beat.

Plans We Tested

GreenGeeks Managed VPS

A trio of options are available for selection in GreenGeeks Managed VPS range. These offer differing virtual CPUs, RAM, and storage, but all offer 10TB of bandwidth/traffic, and the physical servers run Intel Xeon processors.

The 4GB plan has 4 vCPUs (virtual CPUs) and (as the name suggests) 4GB of RAM. Storage is limited to 75GB, with your website’s data stored on a solid-state drive (SSD). This is intended to cover all storage requirements, including web data, traffic logs, any stores or forums, uploads, and databases. Physical storage is RAID-10 SSD arrays, which not only provide fast data storage, but resilience to handle failures without data loss.

Some hosting providers don’t provide specifics on storage, so this is useful to know.

We checked with GreenGeeks’ sales support team, who informed us that there were no limits on the size or number of databases. As long as your project keeps within the capacity of the storage device (with enough space for running your web application or CMS), everything should be fine.

Managed VPS Plans

Our selected test plan was the 4GB package, which is priced at $59.95 per month, with a 30-day money-back guarantee. You can sign up either with a rolling monthly contract or pay for 12 months up front. However, unlike its competitors, GreenGeeks does not offer discounts for signing up to long-term deals on VPS (with shared hosting, you do pay less for an annual plan). This makes GreenGeeks one of the more expensive VPS hosting solutions around. While it is a managed solution, this shouldn’t be a reason for the high price – unmanaged VPS hosting is very rare these days. Managed means the VPS is proactively monitored, 24/7. GreenGeeks promises 99.9% service uptime and advanced security and protection against DDoS attacks.

GreenGeeks’ Managed VPS hosting comes standard with cPanel / WHM, the most powerful and functional control panel software. WHM is for control of the server (rebooting, upgrading the database server, etc) while cPanel is for each site you have on it and controls things like email, subdomains, SSL, and terminal access.

Many of GreenGreeks’ competitors charge extra for a cPanel license. For example, Hostinger charges an extra $23 a month for cPanel. When you add that to Hostinger’s $6.99 KVM VPS plan, which is similarly specced to the plan we tested on GreenGeeks, the total price is closer $30 a month, though on Hostinger and other services that don’t make cPanel standard, there are other (not-as-user-friendly) control panels provided for free.

GreenGeeks’ cPanel implementation has the Softaculous scripts you need to install software (over 150 apps and CMS tools are included) and provides an overview of traffic. Servers have a dedicated IP address. Also available with GreenGeeks’ Managed VPS hosting is a free SSL certificate, and free website transfer if you’re migrating an existing website.

Employing PHP 8.1.29 and MariaDB 10.6, the VPS plan aced our MySQL database tests, placing higher than most of its competitors. Our shell script also ran for an unlimited time; on some plans we’ve tested, the system kills scripts after a few minutes.

However, the GreenGeeks VPS plan failed our concurrent traffic tests, likely due to a security block. When we tried to hit the server with 500 concurrent users or even 100 concurrent users, we got back an SSL handshake error. This sometimes happens when hosting services use security software that prevents our test from working.

GreenGeeks Shared Hosting

Smaller hosting packages for limited budgets are available with GreenGeeks shared hosting plans. The smallest of these, Lite, is the only one with a storage limit, and is the plan we opted to assess.

At the time of writing, the standard $11.95 was discounted to $2.95. Discounts were in place for all three plans, which like the Managed VPS plans, don’t differ based on how long you sign up for. You can pay for one month, one year, two years, or three. Only the one-year option is subject to the discount we saw, and like the VPS plan, there is no discount for a long-term contract. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee in place.

GreekGeek’s Lite plan has 50GB of SSD storage, which is more than some comparable packages with other providers. It’s enough to migrate an established site to, or else grow into with a new project. As the SSD needs to be big enough to store all of the hosting files and the database, we checked with GreenGeeks sales support. They confirmed that there is no limit on the size of the database with its shared hosting plans. With the Lite plan, however, there would be a physical limit due to the capacity of the SSD.

Along with the Pro plan, which has no limit on storage, GreenGeeks offers a Premium Shared Hosting option. This is aimed at small businesses and is ideal for hosting online stores.

Shared Hosting Plans

The type of cheap hosting you get with shared plans is suitable for a wide range of projects, especially WordPress blogs. GreenGeeks also sells WordPress hosting packages, which are shared packages with the popular CMS tool preloaded.

Described by GreenGeeks as “fast and affordable,” the shared plans have unmetered bandwidth (or “transfer” in GreenGeeks parlance). This means they should be able to handle any unforeseen spikes in demand (i.e. increased visitor numbers). Multi-user access is supported, which is useful if you need someone to help run your hosting account.

The Lite plan accommodates a single website and, if you need it, a free domain name for the first year. It also gives you 50 email accounts for the domain and includes a free SSL certificate. Free nightly backups are conducted, and the hosting has a free CDN to help improve load times, along with built-in caching.

By comparison, the Pro and Premium options have superior performance, on-demand backups, and a WordPress repair tool. The Premium plan also has object caching, along with a dedicated IP address and a free AlphaSSL certificate.

The Lite plan we tested actually was faster than most plans we’ve ever benchmarked, including VPS and Cloud plans, when we hit it with 500 concurrent connections. It wasn’t fast on database and Wordpress benchmarks, but it allowed our shell script to run for at least 15 hours.

Database, WordPress and Scripting Performance

To get the best idea of how fast GreenGeeks’ hosting services are, we ran a series of tests. These measure server performance and the success of bulk MySQL database queries. On each test site (the 4GB Managed VPS option and the Lite Shared Hosting) we installed WordPress, with dummy data, and set up an additional database for MySQL query testing.

The first database test inserts 87 million rows of data (this is pulled from Tom’s Hardware’s own page view data). Here, we’re looking for a fast response – the quicker, the better.

The VPS plan finished in the middle of the pack, slightly outpacing Bluehost’s VPS offering, but falling behind Hostinger and Namecheap. However, the GreenGeeks Shared plan trailed the field by a wide margin.

The second test builds on this, dropping random numerical values into each of the 87 million rows.

Here GreenGeeks VPS came out on top but Shared was a lot slower.

The third test combines two tables of data (traffic and articles) with the MySQL JOIN command, then queries the SUM of those page views for different dates on each article. This is an intensive task, so it takes the longest.

GreenGeeks’ VPS plan did really well on this test, coming in second. But the shared plan was again at the bottom.

The WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool (WPB) can be installed on any WordPress installation. It is designed to provide benchmarking data for both your WordPress setup and the host server, and produces a score, from 0 to 10. The overall score is based on a variety of factors including network strength, computing power, and file system.

The score of 5.3 (for the Lite Shared Hosting) is the lowest score we’ve seen. While not a huge surprise given the low specification of that hosting package and its price, it is still disappointing. One reason for the low score was, according to the benchmark, slow file system performance.

Conversely, the Managed VPS attained a score of 7.8, which is one of the highest of the services we’ve tested. It scored highly throughout to reach that overall figure, and was particularly impressive with the WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool’s query and file management tests.

GreenGeeks Traffic and Uptime 

Uptime guarantees and the ability to handle traffic spikes are key features that attract new web hosting sign-ups. If a VPS or shared hosting package can reliably handle traffic and not experience any performance issues, then you’re going to be happy with the subscription.

To assess how adept GreenGeeks hosting offerings are to such performance demands, we ran some Apache benchmark tests. The first sends 500 simultaneous requests to the server, via the site’s home page, to get a realistic result. Results, displayed as total requests per second, are based on the server response, rather than the time taken for the home page to load.

GreenGeeks’ cheapest product, the Lite Shared Hosting plan, managed an amazing 763 simultaneous requests per second. This is greater than any of the other shared hosting plans we’ve looked at, and is beaten only by Bluehost’s Cloud Hosting.

However, GreenGeeks’ Managed VPS plan did not manage to complete the test, having failed the SSL handshake. This is likely due to security software on the server end, but it’s odd that this block only exists on the VPS plans and not the shared plans.

A script timeout test was also run on both packages. The Managed VPS handled the script for 24 hours, while the Shared Hosting went for at least 15 hours (after which we stopped it). Most VPS hosts we tested offer unlimited script time, but shared hosting and cloud hosting plans usually kill your script after an hour or less.

GreenGeeks Support

If you have run a WordPress or any kind of site previously, you’ll know that it comes with a few challenges. Aside from WordPress itself, you’ll need to ensure backups are working, that the PHP version matches what WordPress (or your chosen CMS) uses and that it is responsive enough to visitors.

Where the answers to your problems demand attention from specialists, you can contact the GreenGeeks support team. A live chat tool is available on the website, and they respond to questions on sales, billing, and support. I posed a question about the speed of the migration service, and received a reply within a minute: “Most migrations are done in 1-2 days as long as we don't have any issues accessing the data on the source server.”

Naturally, while responses are quick, complicated issues will take longer to resolve.

Users of the GreenGeeks Managed VPS get managed support to help with issues. This is highlighted as 24/7/365 from “best-in-class support staff.”

Beyond live chat, GreenGeeks has a collection of resources that you can rely on for all hosting types. Various resources are available, such as tutorials, a blog, a glossary, and webinars. Having said that, most answers can be found in the GreenGeeks knowledgebase.

Bottom Line

Unlimited databases, unlimited storage, and unlimited traffic make GreenGeeks’ shared and VPS plans worth checking out. The VPS plans are a bit more expensive than some competitors, but they come with cPanel and there’s no need to agree to a one, two, or three-year commitment to get them at the best available price. The shared plans have a similar pricing structure, but the Lite plan is a fantastic bargain at $2.95 a month for the first year, considering what you get.

On the performance side, the VPS plans do well on database and Wordpress benchmarks, though we can’t tell how many connections it can handle. The shared plan we tested had mediocre performance on database and WordPress tests, but its server could handle a lot of connections.

GreenGeeks’ environmental credentials are intriguing, such as its commitment to plant a tree with each plan, and purchase wind carbon credits. You’re unlikely to experience any tangible benefits from these actions, but they may at least help you stop being distracted by the potential energy footprint of your website.

In business since 2007, ScalaHosting is not the most famous name in web hosting, but it provides excellent customer service, along with a variety of shared and managed VPS plans. The company’s offerings include shared hosting, WordPress Hosting and Managed VPS plans. 

Starting at $2.95 a month (with 12-month commitment), the Shared and WordPress plans (both are basically the same, just that WordPress plans have WordPress preloaded), offer solid performance for the money. In fact, in our tests, ScalaHosting’s WordPress Mini plan was one of the only shared plans that could handle 500 concurrent requests.

The Managed VPS plans start at $29.95 a month with 12-month commitment and can also handle 500 concurrent requests, though at great speed. Most hosting providers charge extra for cPanel, the most popular control panel, if you want it with your VPS Plan. ScalaHosting provides its own software called SPanel that is just as powerful and easy to use as cPanel, though the latter is still available as an upgrade.

To find out how ScalaHosting stacks up to the best web hosting plans, we built websites and benchmarked two different plans, the Mini WordPress hosting ($2.95) and the Build #1 Managed VPS Plan ($29.95).  Both were easy to set up and, whether we were using cPanel or SPanel, a joy to manage. Support, via the company’s ticketing system, was also a pleasure to deal with. Database processing and site serving on both plans was on the slow side, though, making for a mixed experience that keeps Scala just off our list of best VPS hosts.

Plans We Tested

ScalaHosting Managed Cloud VPS

A good range of options are available with the ScalaHosting Managed VPS hosting. Four options (known as “Builds”) are available, covering a range of hardware specifications and pricing tiers.

We tested the Build #1 plan, priced at $29.95 with a 12-month contract (paid up-front). This virtual server has 2 CPU cores, 4GB of storage, and a 50GB NVMe SSD for storage. The bandwidth is unlimited, and there’s no database size limit beyond its contribution to your overall storage limit. That’s important to note, because some competitors do limit your database size, making it impossible to run a site with lots of data.

One issue with the prices is that, for Builds 2, 3 and 4, the price actually goes up if you commit to a 36-month instead of a 12-month contract. Build #1 is the same price at both 12 and 36 months. This is an odd choice since most hosting companies want to lock you in for longer by getting you signed up for 2, 3 or 4 years. Here, for example, Build #2 is $44.95 per month with a 12-month plan but $61.95 a month for a 36-month plan. Generally speaking, it’s better to commit to longer plans so you can lock in a decent price and not have to think about changing hosts for a while. 

Note that “Managed” VPS hosting, the most common kind, involves the hosting service taking on some of the work of maintaining the server, including installing security patches. There’s also slightly-cheaper “Unmanaged” VPS plans that start at $19.95 and leave the user with more responsibility and a lot less support. You can also custom configure your own self-managed plan, picking the exact amount of CPU cores, RAM and SSD space you want.

Managed Cloud VPS Plans

Two control panel options are available with ScalaHosting, cPanel and SPanel. 

SPanel VPS is the default option, and lets you host unlimited accounts and sites, with 400 scripts available in its 1-click installer. It also includes malware protections, blacklist monitoring, OpenLiteSpeed caching, spam protection, and instant support.

We have to note that, on most hosting services, if you don’t pay extra for cPanel / WHM (WHM controls the server while cPanel controls the site), you have to settle for an annoying control panel like Virtualmin / Webmin on Hostinger. But ScalaHosting’s SPanel is actually a pleasure to use and while not as familiar as cPanel, it’s very easy to navigate 

There are different SPanel interfaces for the server side, where you can set up accounts and can reboot the server or check its health, and the user / site side where you can set up email accounts, control your databases or even manage subdomains. The user-side SPanel looks a lot like cPanel but with different icons.

We really liked the dashboard on the server-side SPanel. It shows memory and disk usage right on its home page.

 If you prefer cPanel VPS, beware, as this has an additional premium. This starts at $26.95 for five accounts, increasing as you add websites. Notably, this option does not include malware protection or any of the other benefits included with SPanel VPS. Something else to consider is that cPanel is considered resource-heavy, in contrast to the lighter SPanel. 

More advanced features are largely the same and available on both control panel options. You’ll find the usual things here, like SSH access, the latest PHP versions, Python support, server information and status, and the ability to restart the VPS.

One key feature that cPanel VPS does not include with ScalaHosting’s Cloud VPS offering is a WordPress cloning and staging system. While both are suitable for installing a WordPress site, only the SPanel can be used to clone an existing site and provide a staging environment. It’s a strange omission, and one that is likely to persuade most potential users to stick to the SPanel.

The ScalaHosting Cloud VPS plans all have 24/7 support and there is the option of free migration if you already run a website. There is also a flexible resources provision, enabling you to scale up your server as required. Increased CPU, RAM, and storage can be allocated beyond the limits of the chosen plan, and removed when demand drops. While this costs extra, you don’t pay for unused resources.

In terms of performance, the ScalaHosting Managed VPS plan handled everything we threw at it, but not necessarily in industry-leading form. It completed all three database tests, but at slower speeds than most competitors. And it handled 500 concurrent requests, but at a relatively slow, for a VPS, rate. The plan also allowed our test shell script to run for an unlimited time, which is important because some hosting companies will kill a bash script after a few minutes, even if it hasn’t completed its work.

ScalaHosting Shared WordPress

For WordPress hosting on a smaller scale, the ScalaHosting shared plans have unlimited traffic and no limit on database size. 

To assess the shared option, we signed up to the basic WP Mini plan, available for as little as $2.95 a month on a 36-month term. This gives you a single website, free SSL certificates, and unlimited email accounts and databases. There are also no hidden limits on the maximum traffic.

The WP Mini plan has 10GB of SSD storage. That level of storage is not enough for an established site, but should suit a small project or launch site and you can always go with slightly more expensive plans that get you up to 100GB. 

ScalaHosting also has a plan called Entry Cloud, which isn’t shared, and comes instead with fixed CPU and RAM, and some premium features. We mention this as it is sold alongside the Shared WordPress plans, but is a sort of bridge between Shared and VPS. If you think VPS is the right option but don’t have the budget, the Entry Cloud option might suit you.

Shared WordPress Plans

Management of a Shared WordPress plan server is via cPanel (the Entry Cloud uses SPanel), from where you can manage the single hosted domain (other plans support unlimited websites). This includes free migration, free SSL, unlimited emails, and unlimited databases.

We checked with ScalaHosting support concerning any database limits: ”We generally don't limit the size of your databases. If a database ends up being bigger, it may also require a more powerful server.”

This level of hosting includes a 1-click WordPress installer, with multiple PHP versions and Python support. WordPress cloning and staging is also possible for careful management of upgrades, new plugins, new themes, etc. 

You also get free content delivery from Cloudflare, an uptime guarantee, and 24/7 live chat and email support.

Amazingly, ScalaHosting’s $2.95 plan here was able to handle all of our tests, even when many competitors timed out, either because they couldn’t handle up to 500 concurrent requests on our traffic test or they couldn’t deal with the massive table join and sum in our third MySQL test. ScalaHosting’s plan completed both of these and everything else we tried with it. Just don’t expect speed records.  

By default, shell access is disabled on ScalaHosting’s shared plans, but after we filed a ticket with support, they turned it on for us. However, the system terminated our shell script after just 5 minutes so don’t expect to perform any time-consuming tasks from the command line.

Database, Wordpress and Scripting Performance

Our review of these hosting plans is based around a series of tests that measure server performance.  The first group of tests determine its ability to handle MySQL database queries since MySQL databases are at the heart of most websites, including those run with WordPress. Note that both ScalaHosting plans we tested used MariaDB 10.6.18, a MySQL-compatible server that many hosting services are using in lieu of Oracle MySQL these days. 

Our first creates several tables, including 87 million rows of data (pulled from Tom’s Hardware page view information) into the database. The quicker the process completes, the better. Here, ScalaHostping’s VPS was quite competitive, beating out VPS offerings from Bluehost and HostGator., but still several minutes behind Hostinger’s plan. ScalaHosting’s WordPress plan took a long time to complete this task, but given its price, we can’t complain too much.

The second test replaces the original traffic data in 87 million rows with randomly generated numbers in lieu of the original page view and user counts. Here, both ScalaHosting plans trailed their competitors.

Our third and most intensive MySQL database test measures the server’s ability to handle the combination of two tables (traffic and articles) using the JOIN command. It then queries the SUM of the page views in the database across different dates for each article. Here ScalaHosting’s VPS plan took more than twice as long as some competitors. Oddly, on just this test, HostGator’s shared plan actually performed better than VPS plans, including its own.

We also used the WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool to test the ScalaHosting Shared WordPress and the Managed Cloud VPS hosted sites. This is a plugin that can be installed within WordPress and provides benchmarking information for your installation and host server. The benchmark measures database speed, filesystem, network and CPU performance and spits out a number from 1 to 10; a higher score is better.

The overall score of 5.5 for the ScalaHosting Shared WordPress plan was relatively poor, and one of the lowest we’ve seen. ScalaHosting’s Managed Cloud VPS, meanwhile, produced a score of 7.1. While not the best result, it is respectable enough. Interestingly, the two plans produced similar scores (all above 9) for file system based tests but diverge when the hardware is tested.

ScalaHosting Traffic and Uptime

All web hosts offer uptime guarantees, and both of ScalaHosting’s range of plans boast unlimited bandwidth and visitors. Naturally these are attractive features, so the servers should be able to handle traffic without running into any performance issues.

The Apache benchmark test fires 500 simultaneous requests at the server, measuring performance. To replicate a real-world scenario as closely as possible, the requests are for the test site’s home page. Results are displayed as total requests per second, with the average of milliseconds per response. The response is specifically the server’s, rather than the time taken for the home page to load.

ScalaHosting’s plans both completed the 500-request test, a feat that Bluehost and HostGator’s Shared and VPS plans could not, albeit with poor scores. The Shared WordPress plan managed 13.4 concurrent requests per second, compared with 13.96 for the Managed Cloud VPS. However, Hostinger was a bit faster here.

ScalaHosting Support

Running a website comes with a number of challenges. PHP versions, backup issues, and a lack of visitors are some of the most common, but where possible you can contact ScalaHosting’s support. They’re available 24/7, via an email ticketing system or a text chat box.

Many competitors just offer chat, which can be annoying, because you have to sit at your computer and wait for an agent to come on and respond to you and often you have to wait again while they direct you to the right person. But the email ticketing system is great. You just fill in a form, state the nature of your issue and wait for a response back.

If it’s not a major emergency and you can wait a few minutes or an hour, you can walk away from your PC and check your mail later. This is exactly what happened when we asked for SSH shell access to be turned on on our WordPress account. We asked, came back later and had an email waiting saying that they’d turned the feature on for us.

Significantly, this support team is staffed by humans, and there is no customer-facing AI element. There isn’t even a selection of boxes to tick or options to select to help direct your query. You simply input your name and email address, and state the nature of the query to commence the chat.

We chatted with ScalaHosting support concerning both the Managed Cloud VPS and the Shared WordPress plans, taking care to initiate conversations from the corresponding pages. In both cases, we found they provide a fast initial response, but complex issues may take longer to resolve.

Although there is a telephone line for sales, no tech support is available on the phone.

Bottom Line

ScalaHosting offers a wide variety of VPS and shared / WordPress plans that provide a lot of functionality at very reasonable prices. The tech support is excellent and the control panel software, whether it’s cPanel (as on the WordPress plans) or SPanel (as on the VPS plans), is as good as it gets.

The plans we tested were capable of completing every difficult task we tried with them, whether that was doing a massive table join and sum on our giant MySQL database or deftly serving 500 concurrent server requests.

What holds ScalaHosting back slightly is that its performance numbers aren’t as high as many of its competitors’. They are probably more than adequate for most people, especially those not working with giant databases or expecting a slew of traffic. Others may want to consider a higher performer such as Hostinger or spend a little more for a pricier ScalaHosting plan with more CPU cores and RAM.

One of the most popular web hosting services, Bluehost, has been in business since 2003 and boasts more than 2 million users. It is currently owned by Newfold Digital, which also owns competitor HostGator, which offers a lot of the same services but with slightly different prices and configurations.

Bluehost offers a wide range of plans, from shared hosting (with WordPress preloaded) to VPS hosting to Cloud hosting and dedicated hosting. We had a chance to test a mid-range VPS plan, the Basic WordPress hosting shared plan and the Cloud 1 cloud plan, which is one of the best web hosting plans around. I have also been using Bluehost for a number of years, experiencing other levels of VPS and shared plans and relying on the company’s support to handle issues such as a migration and canceling a no-longer-needed plan. Overall, it's one of the best VPS hosting providers and excellent for Cloud as well.

Plans We Tested

Overall, I find that Bluehost is one of the easiest-to-use, most reliable and most flexible services around. Its VPS plan allowed me to do a ton of development work and configure everything to my liking, while its Cloud plan blew away the competition in terms of serving capacity and speed. 

However, Bluehost is not without some frustrating flaws. Two out of three plans we tested couldn’t handle a large surge of traffic, and two out of three also couldn’t complete our very demanding database calculation test. The support I have received over the years from Bluehost has been both slow and poor, particularly when I had to migrate from a lesser VPS plan to a higher-end one. 

Overall, it’s a reliable, high-capacity service that’s good for many people, but not everyone.

Bluehost VPS Plan

I have been using a Bluehost VPS “Ultimate” plan for a year and deployed it for our testing purposes. My plan has 4 vCPU cores, 240GB of storage, and 16GB of RAM, and costs $72 a month. Prior to that, I had a lesser plan with 2 vCPU cores and 120GB of storage for a couple of years.

Plans change often and, as of this publication date, Bluehost no longer offers this exact plan but has very similar ones, most closely the $65.99 a month Enhanced NVMe 8 Plan which has 4 vCPU cores, 200GB of SSD storage, and 8GB of RAM (so basically the same but a little less RAM). There’s also a $94.99 a month Ultimate NVME 16 plan that has 8 vCPU cores, 16GB of RAM and 450GB of storage. That’s a nice chunk of storage and great if you maintain large databases.

My experience with Bluehost VPS’s performance and configurability has been excellent throughout the years, because setup and maintenance are such a breeze. It comes standard with cPanel / WHM, the leading and most powerful combination of control panels (WHM is for the server while cPanel is for each site you create on it). These make it a breeze to do things like installing updates on the server, enabling SSL for your domains, creating user accounts, managing databases, and gaining access to the command prompt.

There’s no database size limit on the VPS plans, apart from your overall disk capacity, which is good for me, because I’ve easily used more than 100GB on some projects. The MySQL 8.0 database server performed really well on all three of our database benchmarks, coming in either first or second place next to Hostinger. The plan also allowed my endless shell script to run without timing out (some plans kill a script after a few minutes or an hour). 

The only real fly in the ointment – and it’s a buzzer – is that, in our tests, the VPS server could not handle 500 concurrent users. When I ran our Apache test, which simulates a traffic surge by throwing 500 requests at once against the server, I got a “fail ssl handshake error.” However, it’s always possible that Bluehost sees this kind of traffic spike, all coming from one place, as a security threat and cuts it off for that reason. Whatever the case, the VPS would only run at the lower 100 concurrent request level, at which it performed modestly.

Bluehost Cloud Plan

Bluehost’s Cloud Plans are the best choice for running a high-traffic, content-oriented site such as one that runs on WordPress. We went with $29.99 / month Cloud 1 plan that promises 2 vCPUs and 10GB of storage. That’s not a lot of storage, but if you scale up to one of the higher-level plans you can have as much as 225GB of storage and the equivalent of 150 vCPUs of computer power if you’re willing to spend up to $110 a month.

The Cloud plans allow you SSH shell access and database access, but they are definitely more limited in flexibility than a VPS. You don’t get control cPanel or WHM control panels – but you can access features like your database or Wordpress admin area through Bluehost’s own interface. Our shell script ran for a full 3.5 hours. However, you can’t do something like reboot your server.

Bluehost’s Cloud Hosting was absolutely blazing fast, getting a very high Wordpress Hosting Benchmark score and serving an amazing 1,578 requests per second when hit with 500 concurrent requests, the most of any plan we tested by far. It also got solid scores on our MySQL Database import test and Random Insert test, but it timed out and could not complete our Database PV Calc test (more on that later). 

Overall, if you don’t need a ton of storage or do a lot of database work, Cloud Hosting gives you a ton of high-speed capacity.

Bluehost Shared Plan

Shared hosting is always the cheapest option at any provider, and Bluehost has some really inexpensive choices here. You can get either regular shared hosting or “WordPress hosting,” which is the same thing, but with WordPress pre-installed. Note that, if you don’t choose WordPress hosting, you could always install WordPress on your own in a couple of clicks.

So we went with the $2.95 Basic WordPress plan, which comes with up to 10GB of storage and the ability to handle up to 100 concurrent visitors (so they say; it failed out 100 concurrent user test). You can spend up to $13.95 a month to get more storage and bandwidth, but if you’re just putting up a small site to showcase your portfolio or resume and to provide you with a custom email account, the cheaper plan is fine.

Setting up a site is easy thanks to the included cPanel control panel, which makes it a snap to enable SSL on your account, create MySQL databases or even add SSH shell access. If you decide you don’t like WordPress, you can use cPanel to install Joomla, phpBB or other apps.  You can also perform a lot of these functions directly from Bluehost’s own account management panel.

Performance for the shared plan was a mixed bag. It got a very mediocre WordPress Hosting Benchmark score, but decent marks on our first two MySQL database tests. However, it timed out and couldn’t complete our third database test, which involves a large table join and calculation (more on that later). A shell script lasted for two hours, which is pretty good for a shared plan.

Database, Wordpress and Scripting Performance

When we test hosting plans, we perform three database performance tests to see how the server handles complex MySQL queries. On the accounts we tested, Bluehost had a variety of different database software versions, but they are all cross-compatible with WordPress and MySQL query language. The Cloud plan used MariaDB 10.6.15, a drop-in replacement for MySQL, while the shared plan used MySQL 5.7.23 and the VPS plan used MySL 8.0.39.

Our first MySQL test inserts 87 million rows, which consist of historical page view data for our site, including millions of dates and pages. It’s a huge data dump and requires at least 4.5GB of space. Bluehost VPS was second-fastest, next to Hostinger VPS, but Bluehost Cloud and Shared took quite a bit longer.

For our next database test, we run a MySQL command that changes the traffic columns in all 87 million rows into random numbers using a massive UPDATE command. Bluehost ruled the roost here with both its Shared and VPS plans. Cloud trailed the field, though.

For our final MySQL database benchmark, which stresses the server most, we join the traffic table and the articles table and get the server to provide the sum of all page views, entrances and other traffic status across a combination of millions of dates + articles. The test uses both a table JOIN and a SUM so it’s the most intense and not every service can complete it.

In fact, two of the three Bluehost plans – the Cloud and Shared plans – could not complete this test; they timed out. The VPS plan did decently well.

We also run the WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool, a plugin within WordPress that provides a score in the 0 to 10 range with 10 being the best. That number is based on 12 criteria, including filesystem speed, database speed, network performance, and mathematical calculations.

Here Bluehost Cloud came out ahead, securing its position as a great platform for WordPress hosting, provided you don’t need to do complex database stuff. Bluehost VPS looks good here too but the basic Bluehost Shared plan did not score very well.

Bluehost Traffic and Uptime

Server performance on database-related tests is meaningless if you can’t serve the audience that comes to your site and serve them quickly. To measure responsiveness, we use the Apache benchmark, which lets us throw hundreds of concurrent requests at the server simultaneously and then see whether or not and how quickly it responds. 

Our starting point is 500 concurrent connections sent 10 times, a total of 5,000 connections. However, not every plan can handle this amount of traffic and many will timeout or refuse the connection. The reasons for failing this test aren’t always clear; it could be that the server doesn’t have enough resources to serve this many users at once or it could be that, seeing a sudden surge of traffic coming from one IP, the system blocks our test for security reasons.

In the case of Bluehost, we saw that the Cloud Hosting plan was able to complete the Apache test with 500 concurrent requests, delivering a stunning 1,577.55 requests per second which is at least four times higher than any other service we’ve tested. However, both the VPS and Shared plans timed out. With the VPS plan, our test actually gave the error “failed SSL handshake,” which implies a security issue.

So then we tested with 100 concurrent requests and the VPS plan did complete our test, delivering 16.12 requests per second, which is actually pretty decent and only a little behind the Hostinger VPS plan’s 21.53 requests per second. The Cloud Plan, at 100 concurrent requests, still dominates by delivering 1,220.45 requests per second.

How about the Bluehost shared plan? It could only handle 10 concurrent requests and delivered those at just 13.46 per second. I guess you shouldn’t expect a lot of bandwidth for $2.95. HostGator’s shared plan was even worse, delivering 6.11 per second.

Bluehost Support

BlueHost has a wide variety of ways to get help, but they could be a lot faster and easier to access. There’s a Knowledge Base that has articles on how to perform important tasks such as enabling SSL on a VPS plan. There’s also a phone number to call, a ticket system, and a live chat. 

Having had several different accounts there over the years, before even doing this review, I can say that while I rarely needed help from a human, I was less-than-pleased with some of the responses I got. 

One thing I learned the hard way is that, if you have a VPS account and you want to upgrade to a better VPS account, you have to migrate the site to a new server and, if you want Bluehost’s help, you have to pay a small fee to have them move your content and you shouldn’t bother, because there’s a decent chance they will not move your content correctly. I have no idea why they can’t just turn on more CPU cores and disk space for your current account. 

Last year, I needed to upgrade my VPS plan and the move-over experience was an absolute disaster. After a several-week odyssey of backs and forths and days of waiting, I had to do the entire migration myself. I worked with a salesperson there and, after days, they sent me a link to where they had moved my site. But since my site required a Google login to view all of its content, Bluehost’s migrators couldn’t complete the migration unless I gave them my credentials for the site. Everything was a mess, so I said “no thanks. I’ll just do this myself.” 

Then I noticed that Bluehost had set up my new account on the wrong box – I paid for a 240GB plan and the available storage on my account was 120GB. I complained and they set me up a new account again, meaning I had to move the site there. In short, I wouldn’t trust them to touch my code or my database again. The only good news about the migration is that Bluehost was willing to let me cancel my existing 3-year VPS contract when I upgraded to a new, more expensive 3-year VPS contract, rather than making me pay for both. 

Another problem I had was when Bluehost mysteriously disabled a shared hosting account I had. It was an account I was just using for experimentation, so I didn’t visit the site often. But one day, after months of not looking at it, I noticed it had an error message and I could not log into the cPanel for the site or do anything with it. After 45 minutes of back and forth with someone on online chat, I was informed that my account had been suspended because they suspected I had set up a “phishing site” there months ago and the Bluehost security team had disabled all access to it. 

I never got any such notice nor was I told why they believed I was using the site for phishing. Perhaps it was because I had, at one time, set up a private page there which I used for an article I was doing on AI prompt injection (just for myself to use one time and not a danger to anyone). Maybe they detected that. Who knows? Anyway, after I was on chat for 45 minutes, the support agent said “ok, we’ve turned your account back on” and logged off. I found out then that I had access to cPanel, but the site was still down. I was never able to get it back online again and gave up. 

Canceling a Bluehost account is a hassle, too. I went to cancel the shared hosting account that I had been locked out of for months and it took me about half an hour with a sales rep to get them to close the account. They kept asking me why I wanted to close it over and over again and I told them that it was because I now was using a VPS account from them instead and yet they kept asking me over and over again why I was canceling. To their credit, they did actually close the account, though. 

In short, I found that interacting with Bluehost’s support and sales was extremely frustrating. However, if you buy the right plan from them, you probably won’t need to chat with a support agent. With the knowledge base and outside resources like the /r/Bluehost on Reddit, there are other ways to get help.

Bottom Line

In many ways, Bluehost is the McDonald’s of hosting. It’s easy to use; some plans are quite affordable, and a lot of people use it. But don’t expect top-flight service. 

If you’re looking for the fastest serving on the market for a content site, Bluehost’s Cloud plans fit the bill very nicely. If you want a ton of flexibility and very powerful control panels, the VPS plans are a strong choice. The Shared plans are cheap and simple to get started with – they even give you shell access – but if you get any kind of traffic – you’ll need to upgrade.

However, for VPS in particular, Hostinger is a much cheaper option that’s competitive if not better on many performance measures. The price difference narrows if you go with Hostinger and have to pay extra for cPanel / WHM control panels, which are great to have, but you can live without.

Saboteurs damaged the fiber optic networks of several French telecommunications providers during the night from July 28 to July 29. The damage caused telephone and internet service disruptions for fixed and mobile customers in several regions of France. The malicious acts did not affect Paris, home to the Olympic Games.

According to sources from the French police, the nighttime sabotage affected several telecommunications operators, including Free and SFR. The impact covered six departments, the French equivalent of counties in the U.S. and U.K. Customers in Bouches-du-Rhône, Aude, Oise, Hérault, Meuse, and Drôme. Free management also reported incidents in Marne and Vaucluse. Thankfully, the vandalism did not impact Paris or the ongoing Olympic Games.

SFR reported minimal impact. Representatives for the provider said the sabotage only affected its long-distance network, which consists of large loops that automatically reroute themselves when a line is cut. SFR said around 10,000 fixed-line customers remained impacted. 

The group explained that large sections of fiber optic cables were cut. It said the damage would have required using an axe or an angle grinder. Reports indicated that cables in electrical cabinets in southern France were cut. Additionally, cable installations in the Meuse region near Luxembourg and the Oise area near Paris were vandalized.

Junior Minister for Digital Affairs Marina Ferrari condemned the action in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter.) She said she condemned “in the strongest terms these cowardly and irresponsible acts.” Ferrari thanked the teams mobilized during the early morning hours to repair the damage.

Nobody has claimed responsibility for the sabotage as of this writing. It’s the second large-scale vandalism France has experienced in the past few days. Just before the Olympic Games opening ceremonies, deliberate fires in several railway signal boxes disrupted passenger train service throughout France for most of the weekend.

One of the most popular names in web hosting, HostGator has been operating since it was started in 2002 in Founder Brent Oxley’s dorm room. The company has since expanded greatly, opening localized versions for China, Russia and Brazil. It’s now owned by Newfold Digital, which also operates Bluehost, one of HostGator’s main competitors.

To compete with the best web hosting plans on the market, HostGator offers a mix of packages for different needs and budgets. On the low-end, shared hosting plans start at just $2.75 a month. Then there are VPS (Virtual Private Server) plans that go for $36.99 and up while the company also offers dedicated hosting ($91+), and ecommerce hosting plans. These aren’t the cheapest prices on the market, but you do get cPanel, the easiest and best control panel software, included with your VPS and shared plans, while competitors such as Hostinger charge extra for it. 

We tested a pair of plans from HostGator: the Baby Plan in the shared hosting category, and the Snappy 4000 VPS plan and found easy setup, but middling performance and sharp limits on concurrent traffic. 

HostGator VPS Plans

Selecting a VPS plan on HostGator offers a good balance of hardware, storage, and bandwidth. VPS plans from HostGator are more expensive than those of some competitors, however. 

Designed to compete with the best VPS hosts, our test VPS package was the HostGator Snappy 4000, available for $53.99 a month with a 12-month term. This is for a virtual server with a dual-core CPU, 4GB of RAM, and 165 GB of storage, with unmetered bandwidth. There is no database size limit and we were able to upload a 4GB database without a hassle.

As with other hosting services, HostGator’s VPS plans feature an introductory offer. Consequently, renewals will be more expensive – specifics can be found in the cPanel after signing up.

(More detailed options for monthly, quarterly, six-monthly, bi-annually, and tri-annually, each with their own discount, are also available.)

By comparison, Bluehost currently charges $46.99 a month for 2 vCPU Cores, 4GB of RAM and 100GB of storage or $65.99 for 4 cores, 8GB and 200GB. Hostinger, which charges $6.99 a month for 2 vCPU mores, 8GB of RAM and 100GB of disk space or $10.49 a month for 4 vCPU cores, 16GB of RAM and 200GB of disk space. However, with Hostinger, you need to pay about $22 a month extra for cPanel (which you could live without) and those prices are for a 24-month term.

Each of HostGator’s packages include the option of free migration, and unmetered bandwidth. (This is dependent on adherence to the HostGator ToS. Your site should not require “25% or more of system resources for longer than 90 seconds.”)

All three VPS plans include root access, MySQL, and Let’s Encrypt SSL, which made it easy for us to enable https on our sites. The Softaculous script installer streamlines the installation of web applications and CMS tools, and you get unlimited email accounts. Unsurprisingly, the mailboxes are limited by the capacity of the SSD. 

HostGator’s VPS plans feature a network uptime guarantee, US-based data centers, and a full network redundancy. Where there is a point of failure, multiple routes should provide a path for data to circumvent this. Multiple providers supply bandwidth to HostGator. Meanwhile, the VPS package has centralized protection against DDoS attacks, and backups can be scheduled or made manually.

Most importantly, the plans come with the combination of cPanel and WHM control panels at no extra cost. WHM is the panel you use when you want to exert control over the server itself – reboot it, create user accounts, etc. cPanel is what you use for most site-related functions, including managing databases, setting up scheduled tasks (Cron jobs), checking email, installing WordPress or browsing the file directories. While other hosting services have cPanel / WHM alternatives such as Virtualmin, these are the gold standard for ease-of-use and features.

In our experience, working with HostGator’s online tools was really simple and straightforward. If you don’t go directly to WHM or cPanel, you can see the settings for all of your purchased plans by logging into HostGator.com directly and then navigating to My Account -> Hosting.

Setup was very straightforward, except for one issue. We registered all of our test domains with Namecheap under the *.sbs top-level domain (ex: tomshosting1.sbs). However, HostGator would not allow us to add our existing .sbs domains and, to do our testing, we had to register two new domains with different TLDs (ex: tomshosting1.site) to connect them to our plans. HostGator certainly allows you to use externally-registered domains, but when tried to add it, the “add as external domain” feature just kept loading and never stopped.

Overall, performance of the VPS plan was a very mixed bag, with the shared plan actually achieving faster numbers on many of our benchmarks, including two out of three database tests and the WordPress Hosting Benchmark test. The plan also failed to handle our 500-concurrent requests test. On the bright side, our endless shell script never timed out on the VPS plan.

HostGator Shared Hosting

If your online project is more modest, the shared plans from HostGator might be a better fit. Again offering a good balance, these options also have unmetered monthly traffic. Should a blog post or item in your online store suddenly become popular, HostGator will not punish you with additional fees or force you onto a higher plan. However, its support team will issue automated emails encouraging upgrades to other plans should your site look as though it is getting too big.

We chose the HostGator Baby Plan to assess what its shared hosting offerings. This is $4.50 a month on a 36-month plan, and has 20GB of SSD storage. As with the VPS, the database size is limited only by the plan’s storage. This will, of course, be reduced by the amount of space your CMS (WordPress is available as an easy install) or static HTML pages take up on the server.

Another factor that is similar to the VPS plans is the renewal price. While the listed price might seem attractive, it may be higher at the end of the term. As with the VPS, other prices are available. HostGator’s shared plans are all introductory offers, and have 1 month and 12 month options with discounts.

Unlike the VPS plans, HostGator’s shared plans are among some of the cheapest available. This makes all three of them a great choice for small projects, start-ups and even just playing around with web design and staging.

Signing up and logging into the HostGator back-end presents you with the cPanel hosting control panel. A collection of installer tools are also available, with a range of blogs, forums, shopping carts, and other web applications on offer. WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are included, along with the Magento e-commerce platform. Most of these feature “one-click” installation. Various statistical tools are also included, including AWStats and error logs.

HostGator’s shared plans include unlimited email addresses (POP3 and IMAP) with webmail, SpamAssassin, and various forwarding and responder tools. For file management, unlimited FTP plans are supported, but you may prefer to use the cPanel browser-based file manager.

Cloudflare CDN is available on the Baby and Business plans, and HostGator’s shared plans (except monthly) have the option to buy a free domain name. A 30-day money-back plan is in operation, and payment is by PayPal or credit card. Various additions can be added at the checkout, including a premium SSL certificate and Yoast SEO Premium subscription.

In our tests, the HostGator shared plan was easy to set up and enabling SSL using cPanel’s built-in AutoSSL integration was a snap. Performance was actually better than the VPS plan on two out of three database tests and slightly better on the WordPress Hosting Benchmark. It did, however, have a 9 minute limit on shell script execution and , like the VPS, failed to handle our 500-concurrent connections test.

Database, WordPress, and Scripting Performance

Each hosting plan under review is subjected to three performance tests that measure the server’s ability to handle complex MySQL queries.

The first MySQL test inserts 87 million rows of data. These have been compiled from historical page view data from the Tom’s Hardware site. Both hosting plans rely on MySQL, rather than MariaDB. The latter is generally faster than Oracle’s MySQL, and many hosts have switched to MariaDB.

HostGator is yet to make the switch, and perhaps because of that,, with both shared and VPS hosting delivered acceptable, but unimpressive times. Surprisingly, the shared plan was actually faster.

The next stage of the test is to introduce ransom numbers into the database, across all 87 million rows. Once again, the results of this test for HostGator’s shared and VPS plans are pretty unimpressive.

A further test of the database uses the JOIN command to combine two tables (traffic and articles) and queries the SUM of page views and other traffic across several dates for each article. This is a time-consuming task for the servers to handle.

Once again, HostGator doesn’t deliver anything particularly quickly here. However, the shared hosting performs this task far more efficiently (around 50% faster) than the VPS.

The test was run three times, and the chart displays the average, so this is not a fluke. Bluehost Shared could not complete the test so is not on this chart.

Further testing was performed, subjecting our chosen HostGator VPS and shared hosting plans to the WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool. This can be installed within the CMS and benchmarks your installation and server, issuing a score from 0 to 10, the higher the better.

A number of calculations are performed here, such as filesystem speed, database speed, and network performance.

The overall scores for VPS (7.1) and shared (7.3) hosting were similar. More surprisingly, shared hosting outdid VPS in several key areas, including complex database queries on multiple tables. CPU operations with large amounts of text data also scored higher for the shared hosting plan, as did a couple of the filesystem writing tests.

Given the difference in price between shared and VPS hosting, not to mention the stated hardware configuration, this is surprising.

HostGator Traffic and Uptime

Most websites exist to attract visitors. As HostGator offers unlimited bandwidth and unmetered visitors, its hosting plans should be able to deal with a lot of traffic without performance issues affecting the server.

To test this, we use the Apache benchmark, which hits the server with 500 simultaneous requests and measures performance. For the closest real-world, production experience, we used a WordPress site, targeting its home page with the Apache benchmark test.

The test results in a report displaying the total requests per second that the server was able to deliver, and the average of milliseconds per response. For clarity, this is the time taken for the server to respond, rather than the home page to load.

Unlike some other hosts, which handled the test relatively well, HostGator’s shared plan appeared to have a 149 request limit. Meanwhile, the VPS plan returned a “SSL handshake failed” error.

What do these results mean?

Two possibilities seem likely. Either HostGator employs protection against concurrent requests to handle spam traffic or rudimentary DDoS attacks, or the server simply fails with too much traffic. The “SSL handshake failed” error certainly indicates some sort of issue with communication of the site’s SSL certificate, perhaps impeded by the Apache benchmark test.

HostGator’s VPS plan was able to handle 5.16 requests per second when hit with 100 concurrent requests. That’s significantly less than the 21.53 requests per second Hostinger’s VPS handled or the 16.12 that the Bluehost VPS managed, both at the same 100 concurrents.

The shared plan couldn’t handle even 100 concurrent requests, only working when we changed it to 10 concurrent requests, at which point, it delivered 6.11 requests per second. That’s less than half of the 13.46 requests that Bluehost’s shared plan delivered at 10 concurrents.

HostGator Support

Running a website is tough enough without issues arising from the hosting. In most cases, things should run well, but in the event of disaster, what does HostGator’s support resource offer?

HostGator provides “AI-driven support resources” available via HostGator.com/help. This is a collection of tools and guides to assist in getting started, including material for VPS hosting.

Should you run into any issues, HostGator’s support channels can be accessed via an initially-automated chat bot. After the filtering process has determined which type of agent to send your query to, you get to chat with an operator. This is 24/7 access, with response times usually quick but subject to other customers. Issues that require escalation to a technician will have their own time scale for resolution.

HostGator also provides telephone support, with an international number provided beyond the USA.

Our chat with the HostGator support agent resulted in a fast response and comprehensive answers. While the chat box initially commences with an automated response to determine the nature of the query, it soon puts you in touch with an agent. In reviewing HostGator’s shared and VPS plans, I had conversations with several support agents, and all provided comprehensive, prompt, and (most importantly) accurate answers.

Bottom Line

HostGator’s hosting offers a curious mix of ease-of-use with mediocre performance and mediocre pricing. Its VPS plans are more expensive than some competitors, but you do get built-in cPanel for that price. While the VPS is usable, its performance is disappointing, both in terms of database processing and traffic handling.

By comparison, HostGator’s shared hosting plans are affordable and offer reasonably good performance compared with other providers. If you’re looking for a shared plan, HostGator is a compelling choice. The lack of database size limit on both VPS and Shared plans is an advantage as many competitors cut you off after your database exceeds 4 or 5GB.

If you’re looking for a VPS with better performance and a better price, Hostinger is a far better choice, though it charges extra for cPanel and it has bandwidth limits. Bluehost, while a bit pricey, also offers superior performance and has no bandwidth metering.

However, if you’re looking for shared hosting that performs really well and is easy to use, HostGator is hard to beat.

One of the larger and more popular web hosting services, Hostinger was founded in 2004 in Lithuania where it started out offering a free service called 000webhost, which still exists today. The company offers a wide variety of hosting packages that compete with the best web hosting plans, including shared hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), cloud hosting and managed WordPress plans. 

Hostinger is also one of the most affordable web hosting services around, provided that you’re willing to commit to 12 or 24 months in advance. But there are also some gotchas: the VPS Hosting, our preferred option for most services, starts at a mere $4.99 a month, but you’ll need to pay at least $23 per month if you want to use the popular cPanel control panel software (other control panels are cheaper or free). Also, the cloud and shared hosting plans severely limit how much database storage you have, making them a poor choice for anyone working with large mySQL DBs. 

We had a chance to test three different Hostinger Plans: a VPS plan, a shared hosting plan, and a cloud hosting plan. Overall, we found the performance strong, with good DB query and WordPress benchmark numbers on both the VPS and cloud plans. The VPS plan earned Hostinger a place on our list of the best VPS hosting providers. The cloud plan also did an extraordinary job of handling traffic spikes, though its database storage and script execution limits are downsides.

Hostinger VPS Plan

On Hostinger, as with most hosting services, the VPS plan provides the best balance between performance, flexibility and price. Hostinger has some of the cheapest VPS plans on the market, with the base KVM 1 plan (1 vCPU core, 4GB of RAM, 50GB storage) going for just $4.99 a month with a 24-month commitment (after that, the price goes up to $7.99 a month). 

We tested the KVM 2 plan, which provides 2 vCPU cores, 8GB of RAM, 100GB of disk space and 8TB of bandwidth for $6.99 a month, but if you have greater needs,  you can get a plan with up to 8 vCPU cores, 32GB of RAM and 400GB of disk space for just $19.99 a month.

That said, there’s a huge catch to these prices that Hostinger doesn’t make clear until you’ve already paid for and signed up for your plan. cPanel / WHM, the most popular and easy-to-use control panel software, is not included, even though many other companies include it.

When you first set up your VPS server (or if you choose to reformat it later), you’re given a choice of OS and control panel to format with. You can go with AlmaLinux 8 or 9, Ubuntu, Debian, or other Linux flavors. And you can have the system install cPanel, cloudPanel, Cyberpanel, Webuzo, or any of several other control panels. However, most of these – including cPanel – require a monthly licensing fee on top of your hosting plan, and it can be extremely costly, with cPanel’s single-user license going for $22.99 a month, more than three times the cost of our hosting plan. 

But, if you’re willing to deal with a less-intuitive control panel, you can do what we did: choose AlmaLinux 8 with Webmin / Virtualmin. Webmin is a control panel software that has absolutely no licensing fee and, if you dig into its somewhat annoying menu structure, you can perform all the basic tasks from setting up user accounts to installing vital software such as phpMyAdmin, updating the system files or setting up cron jobs.

You navigate to Webmin by adding :10000 to the end of your URL and then logging in. Once loaded, the control panel is divided into two tabs: Webmin and Virtualmin, each of which has its own set of apps for doing things like managing disk quotas or logging into the file system. Virtualmin seems more like the cPanel (user side) and Webmin seems more like WHM (administrator side), but it’s not always clear which tab you need to find the function you’re looking for.

We found the documentation about Virtualmin on Hostinger’s own site lacking and had to Google some issues. For example, my default user account had a disk quota that limited my ability to upload files and I had to do a lot of searching on Virtualmin's forums (not Hostinger) to find out how to change it. However, once we figured out how to perform the basic tasks, we were glad to have avoided paying $23 a month extra for a version of the same thing – even if cPanel is much nicer.

One thing we didn’t figure out how to do via Webmin was updating the version of PHP that came with the VPS plan, as it was PHP 7.2 when the world is now up to 8.3. And, for some reason, we had trouble configuring the system to use WWW as the default web address, with it instead removing the WWW when we’d go to our sample site. We’re sure if we spent a few more hours experimenting we could have resolved both issues, but it should have been easier and probably would have been with cPanel.

Once we had our server set up, we were impressed with the level of performance and flexibility the VPS plan provides. Connecting via SSH is easy, particularly because an encryption key is not required. Once we had logged into the terminal, we were able to run our sample bash scripts and, even after hours of execution, they never timed out; many hosting plans impose a one-hour (or slightly longer) limit before shutting your scripts down.

Performance on our DB selection and insertion tests was among the strongest we’ve seen (more on that in the performance section below), with the giant database import taking several minutes less than the VPSes we tested from Bluehost and Scala Hosting. The WordPress Benchmark score was strong, but perhaps because of the outdated version of PHP, trailed some other plans, including Hostinger’s own cloud and shared hosting. The VPS plan also managed to hold its own on the Apache server capacity test, where we hit it with 500 concurrent requests, but it didn’t have the most bandwidth we’ve seen.

Hostinger Cloud Hosting Plan

If you want speedy serving and high capacity and are willing to pay for it, Hostinger’s cloud Hosting plans might be your best bet. Cloud hosting, like VPS, uses shared virtual resources, but it spreads the load across multiple physical servers to get you more bandwidth and processing power for the money. You do give up some control, though.

Available starting at rates of $7.99, the cloud hosting plans promise more storage, more bandwidth, and more RAM and CPU cores for your money than VPS. But there’s a huge catch that’s not visible on the sign up page: Even if you get the cloud Professional Plan with 250GB of storage and 4 CPU cores like we did, you are limited to just 6GB of database storage.

What does 6GB get you? If you’re running a WordPress site, that might be a decent amount as you’re just storing the text from your blog posts in the database so you’d need a lot of articles to fill it up. And remember, images in your blog post are not part of the database so wouldn’t count against that cap. If, like me, you run a site that stores a ton of actual data you wish to analyze – this is an untenable limit.

Unlike with VPS, where you have to choose a control panel software such as cPanel, which costs at least $23 a month (or Virtualmin which is free), Hostinger’s cloud Hosting relies on the company’s own hPanel software for all of its controls. For VPS, hPanel is on the top level, but  you still need to dig into the server control panels – in our case, Virtualmin – to get major things done like setting up databases or installing software. 

But for cloud hosting, hPanel is a very helpful one-stop shop that allows you to create a database, install WordPress (it links directly to your WordPress Admin login), access the file system, enable SSH access, configure PHP, and manage subdomains.

Having every setting and WordPress just a click away in the hPanel is a really nice touch, making this one of the easiest hosting plans to set up and manage. It is a joy to work with.

The performance of Hostinger’s cloud hosting is also a joy, the best we’ve tested so far. It scored 8.6 on the Wordpress Benchmark, the highest mark of any service. It also aced our database import test, inserting 87 million rows of data in an average of 5 minutes and 29 seconds, and it delivered a blazing 261.4 requests per second on our Apache test where most other services were in 13 to 25 range. More on those numbers later.

The trade-off of the cloud hosting plan is that it’s not for people handling large amounts of data or running long-lasting scripts. In the case of the latter, we ran our shell script test, which writes a log every minute to see if it’s still alive and, after an hour, it died. If you were doing a massive operation on your database that lasted for longer than an hour – not likely if you are just using WordPress – it would stop in the middle.

Hostinger Shared Hosting Plan

Shared hosting is always the most affordable option at any hosting provider, but usually the least flexible and always the least performant. You can get a shared plan at Hostinger for as little as $2.99 a month, but we stepped up to the $3.99-per-month “Business” plan which boasts 200GB of storage and support for up to 100,000 visits monthly.

As with the cloud Hosting plan, the shared plans use Hostinger’s proprietary hPanel to control everything from your email accounts to subdomains, WordPress install, databases, and even SSH access. The interface is easy-to-use, as all of the options appear in a menu on the left side of the screen and you can open up one of the headers (ex: WordPress) by clicking on it.

If you want to go into your WordPress Admin panel, there’s also a button for it here. So setting up a WordPress site is quick and easy.

So what do and don’t you get for $3.99 a month? There’s a database limit of 3GB, so it was impossible for us to run any of our database performance tests, which require about 5GB, on this account. Shell scripts also time out after just an hour.

On the bright side, performance on the Wordpress Benchmark was very strong, hitting 8.5, one of our higher scores. It also managed to deliver 21.1 requests per second on the Apache test, which is about on par with Hostinger’s VPS plan and other shared hosting plans we tested.

Database, WordPress and Scripting Performance

For every hosting plan, we conduct three database performance tests, designed to see how quickly the server can handle complex MySQL queries. Like many hosting services, Hostinger uses MariaDB, a drop-in replacement for Oracle MySQL, which is supposed to be faster and more cost-effective.

Our first MySQL workload inserts 87 million rows of data, which is drawn from historical page view data for our site, across millions of dates and pages. This is a huge data dump and you can see that Hostinger’s cloud service leads the pack with its VPS service not far behind. Its shared hosting couldn’t perform the test because of a database size limit of 3GB.

Then we run a MySQL command that changes the six traffic columns in all 87 million traffic rows into random numbers. This process can take longer than the original insert.

In our most demanding MySQL database test, we join two tables, the traffic table and the articles table, and then instruct the server to return the sum total of all page views, entrances and other traffic numbers across multiple dates per article. This test involves a table JOIN and a huge number of uses of the SUM function, so it’s very time-consuming.

Surprisingly, Hostinger Cloud was almost unbelievably fast to complete this task, finishing it one minute and 30 seconds. We ran the test three times and this is the average, which shows just how quick this plan can be. It’s very odd because, on the randomization test, it did poorly.

The Hostinger VPS plan had a strong, but down-to-earth time of 12 minutes and 47 seconds while Bluehost’s VPS plan took 16:38. Scalahosting VPS trailed the pack by a wide margin, but it actually completed the test. Bluehost’s cloud and shared hosting plans both timed out and refused to complete this task at all.

We also run the WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool, a test that runs as a plugin within the popular CMS and spits out a score in the 0 to 10 range with 10 being the best. It evaluates the server based on 12 criteria, including filesystem speed, database speed, network performance, and mathematical calculations.

Here Hostinger’s cloud and shared plans happened to outpace its VPS plan, perhaps because the VPS was running a slightly older version of PHP. Bluehost cloud plan also did really well on this test.

Of course, if you’re running big database queries or other time-consuming tasks such as crawling a series of web pages or JSON feeds, you might want to run a shell script that could go for hours. Many hosting plans limit the amount of time a shell script can run before the operating system forces them to stop. To find out what happens, we run a script that writes a log file every minute and we then come back and check on it after several hours.

Both the Hostinger cloud and shared plans terminated the script after an hour. However, the VPS hosting plan had no timeout at all.

Hostinger Traffic and Uptime

If you’re running your website for the purpose of attracting a lot of visitors – and not everyone is – its ability to handle many requests at once matters. That’s why we use the Apache benchmark, which allows us to throw 500 concurrent requests at the server at the same time and then see how it performs. Each hosting service is running a Wordpress site and we are pointing the Apache benchmark at its home page.

After running the test, we get a report showing the amount of requests per second that the server was able to deliver and how many milliseconds each response takes on average. This is not the load time of the home page, but the time it takes for the server to respond.

Many of the hosting services simply could not handle the test as they would fail after 149 requests or fewer. This might be a form of protection the services have against spam traffic, or it could be that they simply can’t take that much traffic at once. While all three of Hostinger’s services completed the test, Bluehost Shared failed after a 149 request limit and Bluehost VPS returned a “failed ssl handshake” error.

As we saw elsewhere, cloud hosting allows your server to respond to traffic most quickly. Bluehost cloud returned 1,577.5 requests per second and took an average of just 0.6 ms to respond to a request. Hostinger’s cloud service was also really strong with 261.4 requests per second and a 3.6 ms response time. Consider that the VPS and shared hosting services were in the low 20s of requests per second and about 40ms per response.

Most hosting services offer really good uptime that’s well over 99 percent, but just to keep an eye on things, we use Pingdom to monitor our sample sites for at least a few days. Across several weeks, we saw absolutely no downtime on any of our Hostinger plans.

Pingdom also tracks median load times for our sites’ home pages and, with these three we saw median load times of 727 and 722 ms on the cloud and VPS plans and, strangely, a slightly-faster 447 ms on the shared plan. Scala VPS was 746 ms, so that seems to be reasonable for the default Wordpress content we were serving.

Hostinger Support

When it comes to support, Hostinger tries to steer you toward its knowledge base of tutorials, which covers a lot of topics, but has very little information on Webmin / Virtualmin. There was an article on getting started with Virtualmin and one on setting up SSL, but considering how much you have to do through this control panel software, I had to do some Googling to find what I was looking for.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for in the knowledge base, you can eventually (after you’ve opened an article) find a link to launch a live chat with a human.

I really wish there was a ticketing option instead, which is something a few competitors like Scalahosting have. That way, if you’re having an issue and you don’t need an immediate resolution, you don’t have to have a long back and forth with a person. You can just make a request and wait to get an email back. As far as I can tell there is also no phone support, but most hosting services don’t have that.

An AI assistant is also on offer via the Hostinger website. This can be used to get quick answers, and requesting “I would like to speak to someone” prompts a series of questions to connect you with an appropriate specialist.

Bottom Line

Across its major services – shared, cloud and VPS – Hostinger offers great value and strong performance. But beware database size limitations on the cloud and shared plans and the exorbitant cost of adding cPanel software to your VPS plan, an option you can avoid by using the poorly documented and sometimes confusing Webmin / Virtualmin panel instead.

If you’re running a Wordpress content site and want to accommodate the most traffic at the highest speed, a cloud plan is your best choice. If you just want a plan that’s cheap but reliable for hosting a personal or very small business site with few visitors, the shared plans can fit that bill.

However, Hostinger’s VPS plans offers the most flexibility and value for your money. For $4.99 to $19.99 a month, depending on the amount of RAM, CPU cores and storage space, you get the ability to work with large databases, install your own software, and choose among various Linux OSes and control panel applications.

While the overall performance of VPS is not equal to that of cloud, it’s still better than most VPS plans we tested, and the added level of control makes it a better choice for professional website builders who don’t want to encounter any limits. Just make sure you’re either willing to learn to use Virtualmin, or budget in another $23 a month to your cost so you can have cPanel.

Rode is no stranger to streaming and podcasting, with its high-quality microphones, mixers, and boom arms appearing in videos and VoDs all across the internet. But the Rode Streamer X is the first dedicated piece of equipment aimed at — and named for — the streaming market. The Streamer X combines Rode's audio mixing with a video capture card for the ultimate all-in-one streaming solution.

Design

The Streamer X's design is compact, cute, and rich with color when powered on. Shine-through rubberized buttons let programmable colors illuminate the Streamer X as well as indicate a range of functions. The chassis is constructed of a thick black plastic that feels very sturdy and reassuringly well put together with a surprisingly heavy (0.83 lbs/380 grams) weight for such a small object.

Measuring 122mm (4.8 inches) wide,  144 mm (5.6 inches) long, and 51mm (2 inches) tall, the Streamer X doesn’t take up much space on your desk and is easily transportable if you want to take this audio-video platform on the move. The Streamer X won’t slide about either because of having 4 grippy rubber feet, plus if you want to take the Streamer X off of your desk, you can, thanks to a mountable (¼” 20) screw on the underside of the Streamer X chassis that can conveniently connect to a monitor arm or mic stand.

The face and controls of the Streamer X consist of 2 control knobs and 8 large rubber buttons, with circular LED rings around the control knobs that indicate volume levels. There are also some tiny LED lights for indicating the connection of mic, headphone, wireless connection, and phantom power giving a surprising amount of information for having no display.

Specs

Features and Software

The primary purpose of the Streamer X is to combine a high-quality audio solution — with macro pad functionality — with an external video capture card. The Streamer X's video capture card can capture video at 4K/30fps, 1440p/60fps, 1080p/120fps, and 1080p/60fps with HDR enabled. It can also capture video at 4K/60fps, 1440p/144fps, 1080p/240fps with HDR passthrough. This is more than enough to connect the latest PCs, laptops, and gaming consoles, plus older retro consoles if you have a suitable adapter and converter. 

A 4-button macro pad with multiple pages (2 pages as default) for adding sound/voice effects, or Midi functions adds to the Streamer X and lets you assign up to 64 different commands. To assign the commands to the smart pads you will need to use either Rodes Unify or Central software and a 3rd party Midi software to integrate the smart pads with a broadcasting application like OBS/Streamlabs or similar. 

For the audio side of the Streamer X, you have plenty of connectivity with 1 x XLR combo jack, 1 x 1/4-inch headphone output, 1 x 3.5 TRRS headset jack, 2 x USB-C ports, 2 x HDMI 2.0 (Input & Passthrough)ports, and a 48 volt phantom power button for condenser mics. Inside the unit is Rode’s ultra-low-noise, high-gain Revolution Preamp tech, and their Aphex digital processing effects, the same tech used in the Rodecaster Pro 2 and Duo and other Rode products - so there’s no skimping on audio quality for this device. 

With no screen, the Streamer X is predominantly controlled by the Rode Central and Rode Unify software on a PC or Mac. It’s beneficial to have a secondary monitor or more to get the most out of the Streamer X unless you want to do a lot of Alt-tabbing. I found this to be the biggest downside of the experience because if you’re using a passthrough screen to play the game live, you'll need (or, at least, want) another screen to check your streaming software/chat and sound level settings on the Rode software. 

The Rode Central and Rode Unify software offer very similar user experiences and features, with Rode’s Unify software being encouraged as the software of choice for the Streamer X. You’re able to tweak the DSP audio, assign functions to the smart pads, control volumes, and route audio from the Streamer X itself, plus the USB-C connected device.

Bottom Line

At $399/£299 the Streamer X is a decent investment. But you're getting a premium audio experience and a highly portable external video capture card, plus a macro/smart pad for that money, and it's likely cheaper than buying all of those things separately. Also, having everything on one device is much more convenient for setup (and for saving desk space). For the best experience, I found it was nice to connect the second USB-C to the PC and set a separate audio channel for extra mixing — unfortunately, the Streamer X lacks a second USB-C cable in the box which is a little disappointing but not too difficult to remedy. 

The Streamer X does what it sets out to do very well, and I can’t fault its performance while streaming console play and routing a separate microphone and Discord audio into a Twitch stream. I would have liked to see a small display that showed more information about the macro pad assignments, as you'll need to memorize the colors you've assigned to macro pad functions — and with 64 possible functions, that's just too much to commit to memory. A screen would also be helpful for audio mixing — right now you can only see the headphone and mic levels clearly, and any other audio sources are visible only via the Rode software.

While adding a screen would certainly change the price and scope of the Streamer X, bringing it closer to the level of the pricier Rodecaster Duo, perhaps there's room for a combination of the two. The Rodecaster Duo is for audio mixing and doesn't have a built-in video capture card, so it's not aimed at streamers the way the Streamer X is.  

It’s been nearly two years since I wrote a three-part series on my experiences with T-Mobile Home Internet. My first encounter with the service was pleasant enough, as I experienced download speeds of 472 Mbps and upload speeds of 71.9 Mbps. While the downloads were comparable to what I saw with my Spectrum 400/20 cable internet plan, the upload speeds were roughly three times as fast. Better yet, the cost of admission was just $50 per month compared to the $65 per month I was paying for Spectrum internet.

However, things quickly went south two weeks after I initially activated my T-Mobile Home Internet service. I started receiving connection errors, which resulted in losing complete internet connectivity. After two days of no internet and no help from T-Mobile customer service, I crawled back to Spectrum internet, and have been with the service ever since. However, my brief encounter with T-Mobile Home Internet unearthed serious problems with the wireless service, T-Mobile's inability to deal with capacity issues, and customer service representatives that would lie to customers to get them off the phone or kick the can down the road regarding connectivity woes.

Considering significant time has passed since I said goodbye to T-Mobile Home Internet, I decided that now was a good time to revisit the service and see if things have improved.

Returning to T-Mobile Home Internet

Prior to and after my two-week stint with T-Mobile Home Internet, I’ve been using Spectrum’s 400/20 internet plan. The service works fine, and outages are minimal. I can probably count on a single hand how many times I’ve had a significant outage in the past five years. But in the back of my mind, I still couldn’t get past paying $65 a month for 20 Mbps upload speeds.

Last month, I saw a banner ad for T-Mobile Home Internet, which offered a $200 prepaid Mastercard promotion when signing up for its service. Being the cheapskate that I am, the $200 bonus coupled with the still low price of $50 per month with autopay made me decide to give the service another chance… for science. Sidenote: The $50 price is only achieved when you use autopay with a bank draft; otherwise, you pay $55 per month with autopay and a credit card.

Like before, signing up for the service was as easy as logging into my existing T-Mobile account, verifying that I could receive 5G coverage at home, entering my social security number (for a credit check), and confirming my payment details. I placed the order for the service on a Wednesday afternoon, and the welcome package with a 5G gateway arrived on Friday afternoon.

Setting up T-Mobile Home Internet

The old circular 5G gateway that I received in July 2022 is no longer in use. In its place, I received a Sercomm TMO-G4AR that T-Mobile now sends to new customers. The modem/router is a rectangular tower finished in flat white plastic. It has internal antennas for connecting to T-Mobile's 5G/LTE network. However, there are also connectors for attaching an external antenna if you have poor reception.

There are also two USB-C ports (one of which powers the unit), a SIM card slot, and two GbE ports. I wish there were at least four GbE ports, but I can live with just two.

Getting on the T-Mobile network is as simple as installing the T-Mobile Home Internet (or T-Life) app, scanning the QR code on the back of the device, and following the on-screen prompts. Even though the app told me to set the 5G gateway near a window, I placed it on my desk (where my old Motorola cable modem and Wi-Fi router were positioned) and received four signal bars (out of five).

To expedite the setup process for my plethora of wireless devices (I have over three dozen Wi-Fi devices in my home), I just reused the SSID from my existing wireless router and I was up and running.

The TMO-G4AR functions as a basic Wi-Fi 6 router, which had no trouble covering my two-story home and even outside. However, the big downside to using T-Mobile’s router is that it requires the use of an app to configure the router, and the options available are slim to none. You can change the SSID, network password, and specify frequency bands, but that’s about it. This is geared more toward people who want to set up the router and forget about it, so the in-depth customization that we see with the best Wi-Fi routers is not applicable.

T-Mobile Home Internet Performance

I’ve been using T-Mobile Home Internet with the TMO-G4AR for over a month now. During that billing cycle (March 22 through April 21), I’ve maintained a consistent four bars for signal strength and haven’t experienced any service dropouts. I also haven’t needed to reboot the device for any reason during that time.

Although T-Mobile bills its service as offering “unlimited” internet, the company says that your service may be subject to lower speeds due to data prioritization routines currently in place:

As of January 18, 2024, new T-Mobile Home Internet customers using more than 1.2TB of data in a billing cycle are also considered Heavy Data Users. The threshold number is periodically evaluated across our rate plans and brands to manage network traffic and deliver a good experience to all customers while offering a range of customer choices. You can always check the threshold amount for a rate plan by speaking with a representative, review our rate cards or T-Mobile.com, or by logging in to my.t-mobile.com, or the T-Mobile app.

Even though I used over 1.5TB of data during my first billing cycle, I never noticed any drops in download speeds while using the service. However, I do notice that my upload speeds vary widely depending on the time of the day. As you can see from these SpeedTest results using the app on my Mac, I’m getting downloads in the mid-600 Mbps range—and this is any time during the day. Uploads, however, range from 40 to 60 Mbps.

I haven’t changed my internet usage habits since switching from Spectrum back to T-Mobile Home Internet. That means multiple personal smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops are connected. That’s not to mention several test rigs that are always running and TVs that are streaming everything from Sling TV to Disney Plus to Amazon Video. In other words, I just use the service, and it works without issue, which is something I couldn’t truly say after my first two-week stint nearly two years ago.

Final Thoughts

After my nightmare of trying the T-Mobile Home Internet service in 2022, I had no intention of going back to the service. On a whim, I decided to give it another shot and I’ve been impressed by the promise of 5G home internet service. For an entire month, it has been rock solid day in and day out, and just as reliable as my Spectrum internet service. And the cost savings do add up, compared to what I was paying with Spectrum. A $15 savings per month translates into an extra $180 in my bank account. Throw in the $200 prepaid Mastercard that I’ll receive from T-Mobile, and I’d chalk this up as a win, so far.

However, my new “winning” streak with T-Mobile doesn’t discount the troubles I had in the past or troubles that other people had (or continue to have) with the service. Perhaps T-Mobile has upped its capacity to deal with an influx of customers. Maybe its customer support team has improved how it handles customers who call in with problems. 

It’s also likely the current generation of 5G gateways is more reliable, thus ensuring that customers have a better internet experience. Or maybe, I just got lucky this time? Who knows for sure, but I’ll just ride this 5G home internet train as long as I can and hope that the experience stays enjoyable.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today announced that it has updated what it considers to be the benchmark for broadband speeds. The update sees 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload as the new standard. This is a four-fold increase compared to a 2015, which set the benchmark to 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload. As our Internet dependence increases, changing the bare minimum speed to be called broadband needs to evolve. The FCC explains how it determines the speeds to qualify as a broadband connection

"The increase in the Commission’s fixed speed benchmark for advanced telecommunications capability is based on the standards now used in multiple federal and state programs (such as NTIA’s BEAD Program and multiple USF programs), consumer usage patterns, and what is actually available from and marketed by internet service providers." 

The report also indicates that in the long term, it aims to set a long term goal of 1 Gbps/ 500 Mbps speeds for American consumers, but no date is given in the release. 

Updating the benchmark standard is a given. We all need faster Internet connections for home working, streaming and gaming. Nvidia GeForce Now requires at least 35Mbps for 1080p at 240 FPS. Higher speeds will be required for lag-free multiplayer gaming. For movie streaming, Netflix needs 15 Mbps or higher for 4K streaming but it also has aspirations to expand into cloud gaming. 

Other Evaluations by the FCC

This report also analyzes its deployment and other factors such as affordability, adoption, availability, and equal access. Last year, the White House announced plans to invest $42 Billion for universal internet access by 2030. Based on the data it collected as of December 2022, the report highlights the following:

• Fixed terrestrial broadband service (excluding satellite) has not been physically deployed to approximately 24 million Americans, including almost 28% of Americans in rural areas, and more than 23% of people living on Tribal lands;
• Mobile 5G-NR coverage has not been physically deployed at minimum speeds of 35/3 Mbps to roughly 9% of all Americans, to almost 36% of Americans in rural areas, and to more than 20% of people living on Tribal lands;
• 45 million Americans lack access to both 100/20 Mbps fixed service and 35/3 Mbps mobile 5G-NR service; and
• Based on the new 1 Gbps per 1,000 students and staff short-term benchmark for schools and classrooms, 74% of school districts meet this goal

Is 100 Mbps "fast"?

For many casual users, 100 Mbps should be plenty. While cities and most towns would have easy access to more than 100 Mbps speeds, this might not be the situation in remote locations. So getting such speeds in certain locations would come at a premium. The FCC said, In addition to deployment, the report considers broadband affordability, adoption, availability, and equitable access when determining whether broadband is being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion to all Americans.”

With the help of such reports, government bodies including local councils could assess the situation and make provisions to have a wide deployment, including fiber. As reliance on telephonic communications is decreasing, having the best possible internet speeds and accessibility grows for home, commercial, and educational purposes.

Popular TechTuber Jeff Geerling has delivered an updated take on the old chestnut about the relative merits of pigeon-based vs internet data transfers. With the proliferation of super-fast home connectivity like gigabit fiber, one might expect the carrier pigeon to be blown away in 2023. Spoiler alert: the pigeon with its high-capacity microSD cards won Geerling’s data transfer race by a significant margin. However, as you will learn later, the pigeon gets outpaced at distances over about 600 miles.

Famously, in 2009, a South African company compared the transfer speed of a pigeon carrying a 4 GB memory stick vs local ISP Telkom’s ADSL service. The pigeon delivered its data payload in one hour and eight minutes. An hour was added to physically transfer the 4 GB of data to the computer. Meanwhile, the ADSL service had only managed to send 4% of the same data over a distance of 60 miles.

In Geerling’s 2023 re-race, over a decade later, pigeon evolution hasn’t significantly changed the birds, but data density was significantly higher. The YouTuber managed to kit out the bird with a trio of stripped-down 1TB SanDisk Extreme PRO flash drives (5g each) without overburdening it.

The bird flew for a mile, and it only took about a minute to reach its destination. From this data point and adding the SanDisk flash drive transfer times, Geerling plotted a baseline 3TB transfer graph for the pigeon. It looked like carrier pigeon transfer might be a winning strategy over shorter distances, up to around 600 miles, but the internet connection will triumph at any greater distances.

Geerling wanted to throw another challenger into the mix to spice up the race. So, he donned a pigeon mask and jumped on a plane to carry 3 TB of files from his home in the US to the Canadian data center, which the internet transfer also targeted. In the graphs, you see that PiJeff (jet-assisted Pigeon Jeff) does a little better over longer distances, but will still ultimately be beaten by internet transfers after around the 5,000-mile mark.

To conclude, Geerling says he could have easily done better as PiJeff, stuffing his luggage with very high capacity drives, but wanted to stick to the common 3 TB across all alternatives.

Geering notes in his video that his Gigabit connection doesn’t really live up to its billing, with a best sustained transport speed of about 75 MB/s. Hopefully, another decade later, we will all have broadband measured in petabits, and pigeons won’t have to endure having flash NAND devices strapped to their legs for our amusement (research).