HostPapa Review Canada
HostPapa is a Canadian web hosting provider that stepped into the web hosting market back in 2006. With its affordable services and prompt customer support, the provider quickly became successful. Over the last two decades, HostPapa has established itself among the top hosting companies regarding reliability, technical expertise, data security, and customer service.
Within this HostPapa CA review, we’ll give you a rundown of our results after testing the most important hosting features to help you decide if their services fit your needs.
HostPapa Canada Highlights
We picked HostPapa because it has a complete catalogue of hosting services to meet the needs of both individuals and small businesses. HostPapa is well-known for its shared and WordPress hosting solutions, available at fairly competitive pricing. They also include Managed WordPress and a Do-It-For-Me website plan that will make the lives of website owners easier. For those less experienced in the world of web hosting, there is an extensive Knowledge Base and 24/7 customer support, which we found to be among the best in the hosting industry.
As for bigger businesses with higher traffic and greater resource needs, their VPS servers have amazing performance and security results. HostPapa offers many add-on features, so you have the flexibility to choose only the ones that meet your needs. As your site grows, there are lots of upgrade options available.
Their simpler plans offer a wide array of features, including a free domain name (on select shared hosting plans), a free SSL certificate, and even plans for unlimited disk space and a Wildcard SSL certificate in some higher-tier solutions. HostPapa CA also offers local domains specifically tailored for the domain market, like .ca, allowing your business to establish a strong local presence. All shared plans include free site migration and email addresses (starting at 10 with the lowest plan).
HostPapa is a top option for businesses of any size, whether it’s a starter blog or a high-traffic and global website. If you’re not keen on using WordPress, the website builder included with shared plans can be a useful starting point, as it provides more than enough tools to get you going. But even though we liked some of the features this company offers, in this HostPapa CA review, you will find some downsides to consider.
Pros
- Canadian web hosting company
- Services for small businesses at lower prices with no hidden fees
- All plans include hosting for 2 or more domains
- Free site migration and domain name with select shared hosting plans
- Purchase .com and .ca domains for your Canadian website
- 24/7 expert customer support in multiple languages
- Easy-to-use HostPapa Dashboard and cPanel
Cons
- Bigger discounts on longer-term plans
- Free automatic backups available on select plans
Quick Info
Money Back Guarantee | Yes, 30 days |
Uptime | Guaranteed, 99.9% |
Free SSL Domain | Yes |
Free Site Migration | Yes |
Free Business Emails | Yes |
Ready to try HostPapa?
HostPapa has been our top host in Canada for more than 8 years, and with good reason! They offer many great services at a low cost, providing the best value for money we found amongst our best hosting reviews.
Starting from CAD $1.95/mo
HostPapa Canada's Overall Performance
96%
HostPapa truly impressed us during our testing with the disk storage and server performance. Their servers consistently delivered outstanding results, and their highly regarded uptime proved to be reliable.
What we found particularly appealing about HostPapa was their affordability without compromising quality. As your site grows, you can increase the servers’ resources to get better load times and more disk space.
HostPapa Canada’s Uptime Report
4.8/5
HostPapa’s proactive approach to minimizing any potential downtime is commendable. They support the Cloudflare content delivery network (CDN), which means that even if there is a brief moment of downtime, your website remains accessible to users. This feature ensures your online presence remains strong, especially for eCommerce businesses.
Our opinion here is that HostPapa is backed by great infrastructure, a fantastic time-to-first-byte of under 500ms, and favourable first contentful paint. It’s a top selection for small businesses and their online ventures.
HostPapa Canada's Support Service
5.0/5
HostPapa customer service is known for the many awards they’ve claimed. Their customer service is accessible via:
- Phone
- Live chat
They also have a Knowledge Base with helpful tutorials and blogs where customers can find interesting topics that answer most questions. However, we suggest just reaching out to support if you’re unsure, and also, they offer the possibility to assist you in different languages, including English, Spanish, German, and French.
We tested their support, and they were able to solve most of our inquiries in minutes. For more complex issues around website building and email setup, assistance is provided via a support ticket (which you can review via HostPapa Dashboard). In that case, your issue will be resolved in a matter of hours.
These were the average support wait/response times encountered during our testing:
Live Chat | 0m 32s |
Phone | 0m 17s |
19m |
If you’re looking for premium support, HostPapa offers PapaCare plans for an additional monthly cost. This service provides priority support and assistance when installing popular software like WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal. After installing, the team helps maintain those plugins, reducing potential downtime by actively monitoring your site. PapaCare+ will feel like having your own IT person who’s just a chat (or call) away.
HostPapa Canada's Ease of Use
4.6/5
On shared web hosting plans, you still have plenty of options to configure your account however you like, but it might feel overwhelming if you’re a beginner. You’ll also get a one-click installer courtesy of Softaculous, which makes it incredibly easy to install applications such as WordPress and 400 other scripts.
HostPapa Canada's Pricing
4.5/5
In this HostPapa review for Canada, we noticed they offer four affordable options for web hosting plans, each tailored to accommodate your specific requirements. In our opinion, the low-cost Essentials plan is the ideal choice for most users. Their next best deal is the Premium plan, which is currently on sale and comes with more features than Essentials.
These are the shared hosting prices HostPapa offers to their Canadian clients:
- Essentials: Designed for small sites or blogs, this plan cost currently has a new customer promotional offer of $1.95/mo CAD and includes hosting for up to two websites, NVMe storage, and 10 email addresses.
- Growth: For new customers the current promotional pricing is $3.95/mo CAD, this plan offers everything in Essentials, plus free domain registration (first-year), hosting for up to 10 websites, 100 business email addresses, website staging support, and additional advanced features.
- Premium: Offering enhanced speed, security, and performance, Premium is on sale for $3.95/mo CAD, and in addition to everything that comes in Growth, it also has unlimited websites, a Wildcard SSL certificate, and Website Builder (Business edition).
- Elite: A powerful plan with even more server resources. For $10.95/mo CAD, Eliteprovides everything in Premium, automated backups of 10GB, and a fully managed web application firewall, among plenty of other features.
Ready to try HostPapa?
HostPapa has been our top host for more than 8 years, and with good reason! They offer many great services at a low cost, providing the best value for money we found amongst our best hosting reviews.
Starting from CAD $1.95/mo
Our Verdict
In our opinion, while these hosting plans are popular choices, we were happy to discover that HostPapa CA goes the extra mile by offering solutions for more demanding use cases, and it’s even tailored for the Canadian market.
We tested several of their hosting services and enjoyed the additional features, such as malware scanning and extra disk space. It’s worth mentioning that these advanced features do come at a higher price compared some of the basic hosting plans, making it a product targeted at specific needs like high-traffic website owners.
The VPS hosting solutions and the additional email plans (HostPapa Business Email, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365) make a complete package for professionals who need more control and resources for their websites.
Whatever the requirement, if you’re looking to build and maintain a website, we greatly recommend HostPapa for Canadian users. A stable and robust platform paired with great (and knowledgeable) customer support, all bundled for a reasonable price – it just ticks all the boxes. Our experience with this HostPapa review for Canada showed that it delivers an outstanding value/price ratio. They offer a hosting experience packed with features at a competitive price point, making them an optimal choice for Canadian website owners.
Scoring
When determining the best web hosting providers, we take into account multiple factors like user reviews, the web host’s performance, value for money, and customer support.