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The story of Mochahost began in 2002, when its future founders recognized a profound need for high-quality web hosting companies and decided to launch one of their own. Founded in San Jose, Mochahost’s key objective was to strike a balance between “top-of-the-line” services and a pocket-friendly price, and, at the same time, cover everything from personal blogs to large businesses.

Today, their main office is in New York, and they seem to have expanded beyond a US-centric strategy. In the past, their only data centers were in Texas and Illinois. Now they offer a choice of eight locations covering Texas, Canada, the UK, India, Singapore, Germany, Mexico, and Australia.

We first reviewed Mochahost in 2021, and a lot has changed since then. Where a visit to their site then was like a blast to the past (as in, the early 2000s), it's now caught up with the times and sports a simpler look in trendy colors.

• Want to try Mochahost? Check out the website here
• Also check out our roundup of the best WordPress hosting

Plans and pricing

Like most other hosting companies, Mochahost offers potential customers a range of plans to choose from. Unfortunately, while its website may be more up to date, its hosting plans seem to lag a bit further behind.

Mochahost's primary offerings are shared and VPS hosting, with a couple of WordPress-specific plans thrown in. There are no Cloud hosting plans nor dedicated servers available here.

Yet being somewhat entrenched in the past isn't always a bad thing, since it means Mochahost is also one of the few remaining service providers that still offers Windows web hosting in both the shared and VPS space. Because of this, Mochahost can offer relatively niche hosting solutions, such as Java Tomcat hosting.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting at Mochahost isn't cheap but comes with ample resources and cPanel access. (Image credit: Future)

Shared hosting plans at Mochahost start with the Soho plan at $3.99/mo on a 1-year term, with renewal prices on that plan hiking up to $12.99/mo. At the high end of that spectrum is Mocha, costing $9.99/mo and $20.99/mo on renewal. These prices aren't exactly low, but Mochahost is relatively generous with resources and provides cPanel access, Imunify 360 security, free SSL, free weekly backups, and free site migrations.

The problem is that several competitors are offering similar freebies and resource levels at much lower prices. For example, with just a bit less storage space, HostPapa comes at a much better price point. Personally, unless Mochahost offers stunning performance figures for its hosting plans, these prices seem a bit too high to be excellent value for money.

WordPress hosting

(Image credit: Future)

As if in retrospective shame of its high shared hosting prices, Mochahost throws $1/mo WordPress hosting plans in your face. The problem is that the dollar deal is only valid for the first month and renews at $14.99/mo (Lite) to $99.99/mo (Business).

Most of the freebies on Mochahost's WordPress plans are similar to those on its shared hosting plans. The only advantage beyond those is that if you sign up for the Starter or higher plans, you get WP Rocket included. That's about $59/year in value, which isn't enough to offset the monthly hosting charges here.

To put things in perspective, Cloudways hosting plans start at around $14/mo for cloud hosting ($11/mo if you're willing to forego their premium servers), with a custom server management dashboard. It also doesn't restrict you to a specific number of WordPress sites. At Mochahost, you'll need to be on their Pro plan or above to run more than a single site.

Windows shared hosting

(Image credit: Future)

Windows shared hosting plans at Mochahost range from $4.45/mo to $8.45/mo. We won't debate this pricing, since, as we all know, a considerable portion will go to Microsoft for its operating system license.

Resource allocation is similar to the Linux shared hosting plans we discussed earlier. You also get the comparable Windows hosting tech stack, meaning Plesk instead of cPanel, plus MS SQL/MariaDB, and all the .NETs you could want. The one point you'll want to be aware of is the relatively low memory allocation. On the cheapest Soho ASP.NET plan, all you get is 300MB.

Plus, since these are relatively niche plans (yes, it sounds a little weird to consider Windows hosting as niche, even today), you also have a narrower range of data center locations to choose from: either in Europe or the US.

VPS hosting

(Image credit: Future)

As with its shared hosting plans, VPS at Mochahost comes in both Linux and Windows variants. The same price adjustments apply, with Linux VPS plans slightly cheaper. The lowest-tier Linux VPS costs a mere $24.38/mo for a 1-year term, renewing at $48.75/mo thereafter. For that, you get 2 CPU cores, 4 GB of RAM, 80GB NVMe, and unlimited bandwidth/mo.

Impressively for the price, Mochahost also throws in cPanel (most hosting companies today charge separately for this on a VPS). For specs, the VPS plans at Mochahost seem like a relatively good deal, especially for managed plans.

There's also a lot of leeway for scalability since their top-of-the-line VPS comes with a whopping 64 CPU cores, 128GB of RAM, and 960GB NVMe storage.

Ease of use

Mochahost offers its users either Plesk of cPanel to help manage their hosting plans (Image credit: cPanel)

When creating an account with Mochahost, the first step is to select a hosting type, operating system, and a plan, and there are a whole lot of them. The next step is choosing a billing cycle, and this is where you’ll see details on the price and the plan’s key features. There, you can choose whether you want to be billed monthly, annually, biannually, or triannually.

To finalize the creation of your account (and your order), you’ll be required to provide Mochahost with some standard personal information. Then you’ll set a password, choose a preferred payment method, and complete your purchase.

The best part about Mochahost plans is that they all come with recognizable control panels, either cPanel or Plesk. These are industry-standard and help you manage your hosting server easily and quickly.

Speed and Reliability

For testing, we put the spotlight on Mochahost's Soho plan, which is the entry-level tier on its shared hosting list. We then uploaded a standard test WordPress website and ran WordPress core benchmarks and a load test to see if it holds up well under stress.

Aside from speed, it's notable that Mochahost offers separate uptime guarantees of 99.9% and 99.95% for its shared and VPS hosting services, respectively—nothing super-impressive, but just about meeting industry norms.

WordPress benchmark test (Soho)

CPU & Memory

Operations with large text data

6.82

Random binary data operations

8.38

Recursive mathematical calculations

4.71

Iterative mathematical calculations

7.18

Floating point operations

7.11

Filesystem

Filesystem write ability

3.55

Local file copy and access speed

4.79

Small file IO test

8.4

Database

Importing large amount of data to database

6.52

Simple queries on single table

8.79

Complex database queries on multiple tables

7.2

Object Cache

Persistent object cache enabled

0

Wordpress core

Shortcode processing

6.33

WordPress Hooks

8.45

WordPress option manipulation

9.06

REGEX string processing

7.95

Taxonomy benchmark

7.69

Object capability benchmark

7.89

Content filtering

3.47

JSON manipulations

7.85

Network

Network download speed test

10

Overall

Your server score

6.8

On WordPress core tests, Mochahost shared hosting did reasonably well with an overall score of 6.8 (out of ten). The scores were not dragged down in any specific area, meaning it offers a relatively well-rounded experience across CPU and memory, the filesystem, the database, and other elements.

The key takeaway here is that while these are relatively strong results, they aren't the best we've seen by far. As an example, SiteGround is a host with comparable shared hosting prices to Mochahost and scores much better in core WordPress benchmarks.

Siege test (Soho)

Concurrent users

5

9

15

Transactions

2253

3524

5503

Availability

100

100

100

Elapsed time

299.1

299.48

299.23

Data transactions

66.29

102.44

147.04

Response time

0.66

0.76

0.81

Transaction rate

7.53

11.77

18.39

Throughput

0.22

0.34

0.49

Concurrency

4.99

8.98

14.95

Successful transactions

2253

3525

5503

Failed transactions

0

0

0

Longest transaction

2.67

11.22

12.21

Shortest transaction

0.07

0.07

0.07

Mochahost also performed well under Siege, a tool we use to send an increasing user load to hosting servers. At 5, 9, and 15 concurrent users, Mochahost held its own and achieved a 100% success rate on every transaction attempted. This is pretty impressive, since most of the hosts we test start indicating some degree of failed transactions even at the 9-user mark.

One notable point, however, is that despite a 100% success rate, the longest transaction time increased from an initial 2.67 seconds at the 5-user load to 12.21 seconds at the 15-user load. This means that while all requests were processed, users on a real-world site would likely experience longer wait times as load increases.

Still, it's a fair cop overall and one that somewhat justifies Mochahost's steeper-than-typical price tags on its shared hosting plans.

Customer Support

Mochahost offers several support channels including a phone support line (Image credit: Future)

Like most web hosting companies today, Mochahost uses a chatbot as its first line of defense in customer support. From what we've seen, the chatbot scans a knowledge base and, if an answer isn't found, hands you over to a customer support representative.

We tested the process and were impressed that the handover from the chatbot to a real-live agent took just a minute. This stands in stark contrast to some hosts, where it took hours for a real human to respond to queries.

Aside from live chat, you can also get assistance by submitting a support ticket (for existing customers), or calling a phone support line.

Mochahost's knowledgebase is presented as a wiki-style site (Image credit: Future)

Aside from the support channels that allow you to talk to them, Mochohost also offers a relatively decent knowledge base. It's wiki-style and easy to navigate, but primarily covers how-to documentation. That means you can easily find out how to get things done, but you'll likely need to contact their support team if you're facing an actual problem.

The competition

HostGator is Mochahost’s fellow US-based rival, with data centers within the USA. With a full range of hosting options and features, competent support, and pricing, both can offer a bit of something to suit everyone’s needs. However, HostGator's pricing is lower even on renewal.

Bluehost and Mochahost are both suitable for newcomers and veterans alike, although neither host is without its flaws. With Mochahost’s cheapest plan, you won't get as many valuable features as with Bluehost.

Final verdict

Mochahost isn't one to promise you the moon and stars, and its plans are certainly not in the cheapest tier. However, its hosting servers perform well even under load, assuring potential customers of a firm, but a steady-performing website, so long as you don't create problems with your own designs and code.

There is a shortcoming in the lack of cloud and dedicated server plans. Yet Mochahost more than makes up for this with robust VPS offerings that go beyond the dedicated server plans offered by some hosts.

Finally, if you need Windows hosting for some reason, then Mochahost is one of the few places where you can still find these plans.

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In recent years, we've seen several hosting brands attempt to expand their services and challenge the envelope of the best web hosting services. Spaceship is the result of one such effort, with the parent company being Namecheap.

Granted, Spaceship offers a slightly more futuristic site design and interesting product names (e.g., Starlight, Hyperlift). However, even this is subjective, since one man's meat can be another's poison. Additionally, the superficial design differences don't affect the performance of the core products themselves.

In some instances, the product offerings are also identical in many ways. For example, the cloud WordPress hosting offered by Spaceship is EasyWP, which is another product that Namecheap has tried to spin off as a standalone offering.

(Image credit: Future)

• Want to try Spaceship? Check out the website here

What types of hosting does Spaceship offer? 

Spaceship offers an extensive product range that includes domain name services, web hosting, and associated services like a CDN, VPN, and domain name-based communication services. And because it's stripped out some essential services from hosting, these can also be considered other services, such as email hosting and auto backups.

Spaceship shared hosting

(Image credit: Future)

Spaceship's shared hosting plans start at $1.21/mo and top off at $2.87/mo on two-year cycles. They all begin with a 30-day free trial before any charges are due. The lowest-tier (Essential plan) comes with 20GB NVMe storage, free SSL, SiteJet AI website builder, and security services from Imunify360.

As you move up the plan tiers, storage space increases, and you also get the inclusion of AI tools that can help you write content for your site.

The kicker is that email services are free for only 30 days or one year, depending on the email plan you choose during sign-up. You'll also have to decide if you want auto-backups, which start at $11.76 for 5GB on the two-year plan. Added together, that initially low hosting price doesn't feel so low anymore.

Spaceship Cloud WordPress hosting

(Image credit: Future)

With WordPress sites driving much of the internet today, it's unsurprising that Spaceship also offers cloud-based WordPress hosting. These plans include the same 30-day free trial option as Spaceship's shared hosting plans. Thereafter, prices range from $28.88/year to $48.88/year, depending on which plan you choose.

Likewise, email services on these plans are free for a year, after which you'll have to pay separately for them, outside your hosting fees. At least you get HackGuardian for free, along with MalwareGuardian Autoclean protection on the two higher-tier WordPress plans.

Spaceship VPS hosting and App hosting

(Image credit: Future)

Spaceship offers a range of Virtual Private Server (VPS) plans called Starlight Virtual Machines. These come in three flavors: standard, CPU-optimized, and memory-optimized. The prices are also similar to Spaceship's cloud plans and are available on a monthly, quarterly, yearly, or pay-as-you-go basis.

For example, the standard VPS offers 1 CPU core, 2GB of RAM, 25GB of NVMe storage, and 1 TB of bandwidth. This is priced at either $4.90/mo, $13.88/3 months, $42.44/yr, or $0.007/hr.

You can also add on block storage of between 50GB and 500GB to these plans, of course, for an additional fee. Block storage plans cost between $30.44/year and $302.44/year, and you can attach up to 3 blocks to each virtual machine.

(Image credit: Future)

App hosting comes in the form of Starlight Hyperlift plans, which are essentially micro VMs. These allow you to connect to GitHub, then pull and build your code for deployment. It's a convenient and super-cheap way of deploying apps quickly. Hyperlift plans cost between $30.88/year and $453.88/year.

Can I build a web store with Spaceship?

Since Spaceship comes with the SiteJet AI website builder and supports WordPress, you can technically build an online store. That means you either create one from scratch or run WooCommerce.

There are no ecommerce specific features at Spaceship, so you'll have to find all your ecommerce needs elsewhere, such as payment gateways, specialized plugins, and so on. However, most of what you'll need is available with the Softaculous app installer (free at Spaceship).

If you want a dedicated ecommerce or online store, consider a service dedicated to this, such as Shopify or Squarespace. Or if you're planning to build for extreme traffic, a more scalable option like Cloudways or ScalaHosting.

How fast is Namecheap?

To measure Spaceships' performance, we uploaded our standard WordPress test site. This site sports a relatively simple design with online store functionality and a handful of products.

We then run two key tests: One to assess how well the hosting server handles WordPress in general, and the other to see whether it can withstand increasing user traffic over set periods.

WordPress benchmark test (Essential plan)

CPU & Memory

Operations with large text data

9.57

Random binary data operations

7.64

Recursive mathematical calculations

5.82

Iterative mathematical calculations

9.1

Floating point operations

6.05

Filesystem

Filesystem write ability

3.6

Local file copy and access speed

4.86

Small file IO test

8.59

Database

Importing large amount of data to database

4.03

Simple queries on single table

7.44

Complex database queries on multiple tables

5.38

Object Cache

Persistent object cache enabled

0

WordPress core

Shortcode processing

5.79

WordPress Hooks

8.29

WordPress option manipulation

8.94

REGEX string processing

0

Taxonomy benchmark

8.17

Object capability benchmark

7.63

Content filtering

3.38

JSON manipulations

7.1

Network

Network download speed test

8.72

Overall

Your server score

6.4

It's interesting (and yet unsurprising) to see that Spaceship shared hosting servers offer nearly identical performance characteristics to Namecheap servers. In core WordPress performance areas, Spaceship servers held up well under scrutiny, with results slightly above average.

Siege test (Essential plan)

Concurrent users

5

9

15

Transactions

10483

11535

12814

Availability

100

100

100

Elapsed time

299.83

299.8

299.68

Data transactions

53.43

58.8

65.34

Response time

0.14

0.23

0.35

Transaction rate

34.96

38.48

42.76

Throughput

0.18

0.2

0.22

Concurrency

4.95

8.99

14.96

Successful transactions

10484

11539

12815

Failed transactions

0

0

0

Longest transaction

5.08

5.11

5.16

Shortest transaction

0.02

0.02

0.02

The siege load testing tool we use is the more critical of the two since it best reflects how well a site hosted on Spaceship will perform in real-world scenarios. Unsurprisingly, performance here was also similar to Namecheap, with Spaceship successfully processing all transactions even at 15 concurrent users.

Even better, the longest transaction times were consistent, meaning your website users won't have to deal with overly long wait times, even when many users are on your website. While it may sound like something all web hosts should be capable of, this delicate load-balancing act isn't always present among hosting brands.

How easy is Spaceship to use?

The Hosting Manager at Spaceship allows you easy control over your web hosting plan. (Image credit: Future)

Right on its About Us page, Spaceship states that its "primary mission is to redefine speed and simplicity." This is about half right since we've already seen that Spaceship offers above-par performance. However, the usability factor is a separate ballgame altogether here.

After you've signed up for a Spaceship plan, the site attempts to take you through what it calls an "unboxing process," which initially worked well for us. However, after completing the final step, we were unceremoniously booted to the website's main page with no explanation. After that, we were on our own and had to follow the standard experimentation process. Not an altogether smooth transition.

User dashboard at Spaceship (Image credit: Future)

The user dashboard at Spaceship is also a little hard to use, especially for those new to web hosting. Sure, it looks cool (subjective), but it doesn't offer much of a different experience from cPanel. You'll still have to plod through the options one by one and figure them out on your own.

The bigger problem is that our default WordPress installation didn't work. This ended up in a chat with support, which took around 30 minutes to resolve. The strange thing was that the issue was caused by a misconfiguration in the .htaccess file, which the system itself created. Not an entirely great experience nor first impression if you're a new Spaceship user.

What is Spaceship's support like?

You can find some how-to guides in Spaceship's knowledge base. (Image credit: Future)

Spaceship offers 24/7 support via a knowledge base, live chat, and email (there's no telephone support).

The web knowledgebase is a modest collection of how-to articles organized into several categories. Sometimes, even the categories don't make much sense. For example, although Spaceship offers the SiteJet AI website builder, there is a knowledge base category that covers the Alf website builder instead. At the same time, Alf is what Spaceship calls its automated support chatbot, so you can understand our confusion.

Aside from the knowledge base, you can also choose to chat with their AI agent (and get transferred to a human) or email them for support. The process of getting in touch with them is smooth. We tried the process, and it took us just a few seconds to connect to a real support agent.

Final verdict

Spaceshop hosting plans start at pretty unbelievable prices, but you'll quickly realize that if you need all the regular features a hosting plan comes with, those low prices will soon balloon. At the same time, stripping them out offers a good deal if you don't want email or backups with your plan.

While their server performance is decent, we're concerned about the failure of their automated WordPress installation system. For new users, this can be a breaking point and lead to a disastrous first impression.

Spaceship web hosting FAQsDoes Spaceship provide free SSL?

Yes, Spaceship does offer free SSL certificates for most of its hosting products. Spaceship also protects custom-redirects with SSL for better data integrity. These features are part of an all-round security suite that helps keep you safer at Spaceship.

How secure is Spaceship?

Aside from SSL, Spaceship comes with many security features that protect everything from their servers to your apps. This includes suspicious login monitoring, passkey logins, virus and malware monitoring, strict firewall rules, and robust encryption on its email services.

Does Spaceship support ecommerce sites?

You can build an ecommerce site on Spaceship using the provided tools, such as the Softaculous app installer. However, Spaceship doesn't offer some features you'll need, such as payment processing. For that, you'll have to source a third-party provider from elsewhere.

Is Spaceship hosting reliable?

Spaceship hosting offers an impressive 99.99% uptime guarantee across all its web hosting plans. The industry standard is around 99.9% for shared hosting and 99.99% for VPS and cloud plans. However, Spaceship does not explicitly state what happens if it fails to deliver on that uptime guarantee, unlike some other providers that specify compensation tiers in the event of a breach of the service level agreement.

Spaceship hosting offers low prices and decent performance, though it has a few quirks.

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