ImHosted claims to offer superb quality web hosting with a very high uptime guarantee and excellent customer support, all at an extremely affordable price. We, however, found that to not be the case. Read on to learn the issues we took with the subpar web host and who we would recommend instead.

Surprisingly, ImHosted has actually received a few awards, which along with its very attractive pricing was what initially drew us in to them. The company doesn’t hesitate to plaster its web site with the badges for the awards, though they are so small that it is virtually impossible to read what they are for. However, at a deeper glance, many of the ImHosted awards were given on the basis of popularity, not necessarily quality. Further, the company is lacking some of the more prestigious awards and accreditation that many other web hosts have, including acknowledgment from the Better Business Bureau (BBB).

In addition to its few (and surprising) awards, ImHosted boasts of phenomenal uptime statistics and excellent customer support, neither of which accurately describe the company’s services at all. In our experience with multiple ImHosted servers (as we requested to be moved more than once), the uptime provided was much lower than their 99.5% guarantee. And, even if the server itself was up, one or more of its features or services (e.g. PHP or MySQL) were down quite frequently.

Consequently, we spent a lot of time interacting with the ImHosted support team, which, as you might have guessed, was not impressive either. As we learned, they spend most of their time telling customers like us that that problems we were experiencing were not really happening, were our fault, or had been resolved, advising us most commonly to clear our browser cache and that everything was now fine (or always was). Of course, often the problems they told us they had fixed (or never existed) were still around, or broke again so quickly we couldn’t have told the difference.

In conclusion, we would have to agree with much of the online buzz about ImHosted. The consensus seems to be that ImHosted farms out their servers far too much for them to operate in a stable or reliable fashion, and we would have to agree with that theory. Web Hosting Jury gives the company an overall 1.7 / 5 rating, but we felt that even that was too high. We award the company a mere 1/5 rating, and only because it did have occasional (but rare) moments where everything worked as it should. Further, we highly recommend against using ImHosted web hosting or any other services the company provides.

If you are looking for a web host, we highly recommend that you consider HostGator, as we have found both their services as well as their customer support to be top-notch.