Summary: Overall, thumbs up for excellent value. I would choose HostMantis again. Not perfect, but at the low price I was not expecting perfection.
Six months ago – at the start of July 2020 – I switched my reseller account from MDD Hosting to HostManitis. MDD is awesome but their price increase on my reseller account was a bit much for me. I use my reseller account for my own personal sites. If I had a business site that makes me money, I would not hesitate to put it on MDD, nor would I hesitate to recommend MDD to others. HostMantis does not achieve MDD-level awesomeness, but it meets my needs at a much lower price.
My six months with HostMantis have not been glitch-free:
- My preferred contact form plugin, Jeff Starr’s excellent Contact Form X, does not live happily on HostMantis – at least not for me. But my second-favorite, WPForms-lite works fine. I just have to remember to turn off WPForms’ obnoxious marketing spam and change the hideously ugly lime green background on the confirmation message (see https://wppov.com/plugins/contact-form-conundrums/).
- I have not been able to get Let’s Encrypt to work reliably. Fortunately self-signed certificates work just as well for my use-case (Cloudflare provides the trusted SSL cert).
- Uptime was very inconsistent till I switched from Let’s Encrypt to self-signed SSL certs. Since then uptime has been solid.
- If I log directly into DirectAdmin, I get repeatedly logged off at random, usually inopportune, times. If I login through my HostMantis account DA works fine, but login inconveniently requires a few more clicks.
To be fair, I have not given HostMantis support a chance to resolve any of the above. I just found work-arounds on my own.
Beyond those worked-around glitches – which I can live with – HostMantis works well. Speed is good. Uptime – when using self-signed SSL certs – is good. LiteSpeed server with the superb LiteSpeed cache; not associated with EIG; no obnoxious upselling; monthly billing so no long-term commitment unless I want one; SSD; PHP version selector; Softaculous Autoinstaller. Security seems fine – although I would never rely solely on my host for security – gotta take on that responsibility myself.
Most important – and the reason I am using HostMantis – price for my reseller account is a fraction of what I would pay elsewhere for the same features.
HM threw me a bit of a curve on pricing – but it worked out OK. In December HM announced restructured plans and pricing. My DirectAdmin Reseller Starter plan, at $7/month, was discontinued, and I was to be automatically changed to the Advanced plan at $19/month. Yikes, a 270% increase! Fortunately the Entry plan is still offered, at $6/month. The Entry, Starter, and Advanced plans are identical except for the amount of SSD storage and number of accounts permitted – Entry has plenty of both for me. So, I downgraded to the Entry plan and my cost went down $1/month.
