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JustHost Review: Is it Really ‘Just’ what I need? (2024)

Ever heard of JustHost?

If you’re like me, it “sounds familiar” but you can’t remember much else about it. Well, once I began looking into JustHost, I found it was a fairly sizeable hosting company.

And it turns out, JustHost is owned by Endurance International Group and thus a sister company to Bluehost and HostGator (among others).

Although it’s not as popular as its sister companies, JustHost handles a large amount of sites:

justhost site count

So because of this, and the fact that I was tired of hearing about JustHost and not knowing anything about it, I decided to check it out.

I tested JustHost thoroughly and after some time, I think I have a solid understanding of it.

So without further ado, let’s take a look at JustHost!

Starting us off:

JustHost: Uptime

Uptime is one of the biggest components of evaluating a hosting service.

The point of a hosting company is to keep your site up—if it’s down all the time, then the company is not doing a good job at its main goal.

Now, we know JustHost is owned by EIG, which also owns HostGator and Bluehost.

Although there are problems with consolidation in hosting (I’ll talk about that more in the security section), it’s also reasonable to think JustHost would have a bare minimum of solid uptime, close to its sister companies.

JustHost tells you this:

justhost uptime

But honestly?

JustHost’s uptime is just above average.

My experience with JustHost has even been a little better ON AVERAGE than with HostGator or Bluehost—the more popular and reputable sister companies.

But here’s the thing:

The uptime fluctuates. For a few weeks, the uptime will be below average (ballpark, less than 99.95%), but a few weeks later, it’ll be SUPERB (100% or close).

And a couple of months have also experienced REALLY low scores (close to 99%)—to be honest, the average uptime is okay, but the INCONSISTENCY is really the issue here.

The same thing applies to site speed. Lately, it’s been pretty fast, but months ago it was much slower than average.

So in summary? The average uptime and speeds make JustHost look okay, but the bigger issue is that sometimes it’s really good, sometimes it’s really poor, and sometimes it’s average.

Overall, I’d have to say that the lack of consistency makes JustHost’s performance unimpressive and on the worse side of the hosting market.

Don’t worry, though! There’s more to JustHost than performance:

JustHost: Ease of Use

Unlike uptime and performance, ease of use isn’t such an essential building block of hosting.

BUT, it’s still very important, and the proof of that is most hosting companies try to be relatively easy to use.

So is JustHost easy to use?

The short answer is…YES!

You’ll see what I’m talking about in the next section, but this is partly because JustHost doesn’t have a ton of hosting services available and not a lot of configuration options.

So the result is that JustHost is overall a simple host that focuses on a few, straightforward products.

That makes it pretty easy to purchase and set up an account, but even beyond that, JustHost does some other basics right:

justhost cpanel

JustHost uses cPanel instead of a native control panel, so you’d basically be managing your hosting account using the same interface as most other hosts.

So that’s not only user-friendly, it’s also easier to get help in using cPanel because it’s so common.

Aside from that, JustHost’s features and optional integrations are pretty easy to set up (again, through cPanel).

I would note here that JustHost isn’t standout in user-friendliness, it just isn’t hard.

One area that I think is a neat bonus is the website builder, included for free in all plans, which makes it very easy to set up a site.

That said, a lot of people don’t like using native website building software from their web hosts, so I don’t want to overhype it.

So overall, there isn’t much to comment on when it comes to JustHost’s user-friendliness.

That’s not a bad thing! It just means there isn’t a lot going wrong. JustHost isn’t so user-friendly that it’s worth commenting upon, but it’s no more difficult than a standard host.

So: overall JustHost hits the mark in ease of use!

Let’s talk some more about where JustHost is simple and complex:

Pricing and Features

Pricing and features are a particularly interesting point for JustHost:

When you first start looking into JustHost, you’ll usually find that features and freebies are one of the highlights.

But of course, it’s important to take a closer look at such things to see if they’re really such great deals.

Let’s start with JustHost’s shared web hosting prices:

justhost shared prices

As you can see, it’s a pretty simple three-tiered format.

These prices are fairly close to average and are also close to JustHost’s sister companies.

The first tier is maybe a little higher than average, but still pretty normal. The second tier is average, and the third tier has the biggest discount!

Of course, these are just introductory prices. After the first year of service, they’ll renew at higher rates…which are also pretty average.

The summary of the shared web hosting prices is that they’re FIRMLY within the normal range. In fact, they’re pretty close to Bluehost’s pricing, but the point is, nothing really notable to see here.

What matters more now is what you get for those prices. So let’s take a look at the feature list:

justhost shared features

The first tier is, again, pretty standard: one site and one domain, 50GB of space, unmetered bandwidth, SSL included, and limited email storage.

The second tier bumps you to 10 sites and 150GB of storage, plus more email accounts/storage, and the third tier makes all those things unlimited.

Here’s the common theme: pretty normal, almost to the point that there’s nothing noteworthy.

The entry-level features are not very advanced but are decent enough. 50GB of storage is a pretty sizeable limit at that price, but otherwise, it’s neither under-equipped nor loaded.

The same thing goes for the next two tiers. What is interesting is the latter two tiers get spam experts, and extras, and marketing offer included.

In fairness, those are just the basic features that are pretty unexceptional. There are some other perks:

Every plan gets a website builder (as I mentioned), free domains for a year, and a choice of 3 different webmail solutions (which is nice, compared to hosts that choice for you).

The website builder side of things also has e-commerce and blog features, plus an impressive amount of templates.

The marketing tools are also solid—some site analytics software is included, as well as Google Ads and Bing Ads credits.

But though these things are pretty nice additions, they’re not that rare. So overall, I’d have to say the shared web hosting with JustHost is pretty standard: not much of note, but it’s still a healthy set of features for the price.

Now, JustHost also offers more advanced hosting—which is good, because historically, they’ve had periods of only offering shared plans.

Here’s what the VPS plans look like:

justhost vps plans

The VPS plans also have a simple tiered pricing structure. There’s not much to note here.

The prices are low, but that’s also because the resources aren’t super high. Here’s what I mean:

The highest level of RAM you can get is 8GB, and the highest amount of storage you can get is 120GB.

That’s pretty low compared to VPS packages from other companies that can go as high as 64GB of RAM. But if you just want more affordable and less intense VPS hosting plans, these aren’t bad.

The other set of higher-end packages are JustHost’s dedicated hosting plans:

justhost dedicated plans

The summary for these is basically the same as the VPS hosting:

The prices are on the lower end, but that’s also because the resources are on the lower end.

With a max of 4 cores, 16GB of RAM, and 1000GB of RAID 1 storage, people looking for super intense dedicated plans may not find a good solution in JustHost.

Then again, if you don’t need a super intense dedicated server, these will do just fine.

Now, that’s essentially it for JustHost’s prices and features. The common theme here is: simple and standard.

The pricing for all the plans is standard. The features are standard. With shared web hosting, the features are a little better than normal, but not that much.

For the most part, JustHost is up to date. An exception would be with dedicated servers: they have RAID 1 storage instead of RAID 10, which is more of a standard these days. And, dedicated servers don’t have SSD storage.

Nonetheless, it’s overall a decent set of plans. If you need a simpler and less intensive hosting solution, JustHost’s options are fairly-priced and fairly-featured.

Don’t be bored!

Simple and standard can be good things. And in any case, we’re about to get into one of the more contentious parts of JustHost:

Customer Support

Believe it or not, one of the more noteworthy things about JustHost is its customer support.

Wait, don’t get excited—it’s noteworthy in a bad way. When you start doing basic research about JustHost, one of the most common comments is about bad customer service.

When I started testing JustHost, I got a chance to see for myself if this was all talk or if JustHost’s customer support really was that poor.

Here’s a live chat screenshot from earlier on:

livechat

As you can see, the rep responded within a minute and answered my question right away.

livechat

Unfortunately, JustHost does this really annoying thing:

But hey, it’s only a minor inconvenience.

Anyway, this chat is just one example but it’s pretty representative of my overall experience. I’ve found JustHost to be reliable in its customer support.

Of course, smaller issues that you’d talk about in the live chat are easier to handle. But even when interacting with reps via tickets/email, I’ve found the support to be overall fine.

The same goes for phone support—in total, the support hasn’t been stellar, but it’s been fine.

So in total, the customer representatives are helpful and responsive enough.

But that’s not all the customer support available! There’s also some on-site resources and information, in the form of a help center.

It’s not very good looking:

help center

But it’s functional.

Each main section has a few articles…but that’s about it.

And the articles are frequently lackluster and short:

help center

They’re not useless, but sub-par.

The result is that the onsite resources and information are significantly worse than most other hosting company knowledge bases and help centers.

Again, they’re not useless—core information is all there—but they’re not really up to speed with the standard support center.

The rest is very basic, and you’ll be forced to contact representatives for quite a few issues.

Overall, the customer support isn’t as bad as I had heard about: at least for me, the reps were fine. But online information is poor.

Hey…that’s not so bad! Let’s look at one last factor:

JustHost: Security

Security is a big deal for hosting. Sure, not everyone cares equally, but you’re still trusting a company with your data and the data of your site’s visitors.

Even if security isn’t really a priority for you, it should still be something you care about. So how is JustHost?

JustHost gives you this guarantee:

security

24/7 networking monitoring is to be expected, but as I already told you, the uptime is pretty inconsistent, so I have my doubts about how stringent their protections and monitoring are.

Now, I had tried to find more information about JustHost’s security measures, because all I could find on their site was that guarantee I just showed you.

I barely found anything.

Seriously, here’s what their knowledge base showed:

justhost security

It was all about the typical stuff you’re supposed to do to protect your security—nothing from JustHost about what their security protocols are, etc.

I’m not surprised. As I’ve said, JustHost is owned by Endurance International Group, also known as EIG.

To give you a sense of EIG, it’s probably the biggest hosting conglomerate around. EIG owns a lot more than JustHost, Bluehost, and HostGator…

In fact, at the moment EIG has about 83 subsidiaries.

Some people wary of hosting companies owned by larger companies: that’s because a conglomerate may neglect security practices to cut costs.

Or cram a bunch of servers from different web hosts together in a small number of facilities.

Sorry, I should clarify: it’s not a distant possibility. It’s actually happened:

justhost security issue

In 2013, a switch failure in a data center in Provo resulted in severe downtimes for FOUR major hosting firms: Bluehost, HostGator, HostMonster, and JUSTHOST.

I talked about it in my Bluehost review, but this incident definitely occurred because EIG consolidated multiple companies’ servers into a smaller number of data centers.

I know, I know—that’s 6 years ago. Have things changed?

To be honest, I’m not sure. EIG certainly got a lot of flak for this screw-up, and made some improvements.

But how big are those improvements? To be frank, only time will tell. The jury is still out on this one.

That said, I can’t say I’m impressed with JustHost, and security isn’t one of those things I want to give the benefit of the doubt to.

Because JustHost barely has anything to say about its security practices, and because it’s owned by EIG, I’d say at best you can’t trust it too much.

Okay, let’s try to get more positive:

Pros

  • Above average uptime…on average. Note that it’s inconsistent.
  • Overall, pretty easy to use.
  • Overall, decent pricing.
  • Shared hosting features are a bit better than usual. Some of the extras, like the design and marketing tools, are pretty cool additions.
  • Representatives are overall good, at least in my experience.

Cons

Nothing’s perfect…here are the downsides.

  • The uptime can be good, but it can also be bad. Most of the time it’s okay, but it’s not as consistent as some other platforms, which is very frustrating.
  • Limited range of hosting options: only shared, VPS, and dedicated. The latter two don’t have very advanced specs or resources.
  • On that note: dedicated servers don’t use SSD storage and use RAID-1 not RAID-10.
  • The onsite information is not very good. There’s a small number of articles and the ones that are there are often short and blocks of text.
  • There is almost no information about JustHost’s security practices. The lack of transparency and the fact that it’s owned by EIG makes me hesitant about JustHost’s security.

Do I Recommend JustHost?

So, let’s settle this: do I recommend JustHost?

Um…to be honest, I’m not so sure I do.

Let me make something clear though first: for some people, JustHost will be a fine choice.

The main issue is even if you’re the type of person to be totally satisfied with JustHost, there isn’t much reason to choose it over some other hosts.

When you look at what JustHost does right—user-friendly, straightforward products and pricing, overall okay hosting for decent features at affordable prices—is that combination UNIQUE to JustHost?

No, it’s not.

And on top of that, there are some things JustHost does poorly: the uptime is inconsistent and has had very poor moments, the onsite information is weak, and we don’t know much about security.

And while the prices are low, they’re not really lower than the standard “affordable” hosting prices.

At the end of the day, JustHost isn’t a bad host…it’s just not really good enough overall or in a particular area to warrant a recommendation.

But, hey—you don’t need to leave this to my word at all. JustHost could be the company you’ve been waiting for, so the best way to be sure is to just TRY IT!

And you can do that risk-free for up to thirty days:

moneyback

Whatever you choose to do…happy hosting!

Justhost FAQ


If The Uptime Has Been Poor, Is It Even Worth Considering?

The answer to this is “sometimes,” but it’s not an easy or wide-applying “sometimes.” First off, if you’re running a store or if traffic is important for business, then NO. If your site is part of the business for you, then you need to have a reliable bare minimum uptime.

Now, even if your site isn’t strictly connected to your business, you should still aim for consistently high uptime. There are some people who won’t really need to care as much about uptime, though: these people are typically hobbyists or bloggers who are just running a site for fun.

You can check out what a given uptime percentage will mean in terms of actual downtime using our free uptime calculator!

Do JustHost’s Shared Plans Come With A Free Domain?

Yes, they do!

Just note that JustHost, like many other hosting companies, only has that domain free for the first year. Meaning once your term is up, you’ll be paying to renew your domain.

Is JustHost Good For WordPress?

While I wouldn’t say JustHost is the “best” host for WordPress, it’s no worse than most other mainstream hosts for integrating and setting up an account.

Like many hosts, JustHost has a bunch of scripts that let you easily install WordPress for free. If you really want to make sure, you can check out WordPress.org’s list of hosting requirements and recommendations!

If WordPress is a big priority for you, and you want to get the best WordPress hosting you can, check out my list of 2021’s best WordPress hosting options and my easy list of steps for getting started with a WordPress blog!

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