Jimmy ParkerTable of Contents
About Crucial Hosting
Crucial Hosting is a web hosting provider that burst onto the scene in 2003 with its cost-effective, no-nonsense shared server offerings. Today, the company hosts some of the world’s most recognizable commercial websites like CORT Events, one of Warren Buffett’s companies, Walmart Liquidations, and Ellusionist.
Crucial Hosting is one of the only handful of providers to offer Magento-optimized hosting, which should tell you about the proficiency level it expects from its users. Crucial is not a good hosting server for beginners.
Crucial offers three hosting plans: the Personal, Professional, and Business
Crucial’s basic plan gives you access to unmetered bandwidth, a large amount of RAM, and 10 GB of SSD storage. It frequently offers 50% discount coupons, which should take the edge off from paying $10 a month for such a bare-bones offering.
Storage for the Pro and Business plans are 75 GB and 100 GB, respectively, and memory for the three plans starts with 256 MB on the low end, to 1024 MB for Pro and 2048 MB for Business. The two upper tiers provide unlimited domains and subdomains as well as dedicated IP, as opposed to only one domain and no IP for the Personal plan.
For advanced users, Crucial provides many developmental tools, such as:
- DNS zone editing
- A software firewall
- Support for cron jobs
- Automatic backups daily (maintained for a month)
- LiteSpeed Web Server (increases server performance)
- CloudLinux (allows you to isolate resources for each client)
- Support for Python, Perl 5.8, PHP 5.2 through 7
Pricing
Crucial Hosting is a managed web hosting service, which means the company will charge a higher asking price for optimizing your websites and domains for your visitors. You can leave your website alone, and the Crucial technicians will reduce loading times and improve reliability over time.
Crucial has three types of hosting plans: Split-Shared, Split-Dedicated, and Dedicated hosting plans. All of them give you access to the CloudLinux operating system, cPanel controls, and LiteSpeed servers. Split-Shared plans have three price tiers, and Split-Dedicated and fully Dedicated hosting have four.
Many new entrepreneurs and professional bloggers love the Professional Split-Shared plan, making it the most popular of the Crucial offerings across all the company’s hosting types. Compared to the Starter plan, the Professional Split-Shared plan offers nearly four times the memory and eight times the SSD space, all for only $25.
Support
Customer support from Crucial Hosting is a mixed bag. In 2019, Host Advice gave the company an award for having the best customer service among the hundreds of web host providers it covered. Overall, Crucial has an 8.6 out of 10 stars on its website, and customer support has a 9 out of 10 score.
However, in 2021, Crucial Hosting only offers customers a knowledge base and a number on a ticketing system. The company’s knowledge base, while extensive, cannot answer website-specific questions, and it might take a while for the reps who work the ticketing system to get back to you to answer your concern.
Pros
All Crucial hosting plans come with:
- SSD storage from Intel
- unlimited bandwidth
- unlimited email accounts
- unlimited MySQL databases
- a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate
Even though it’s a managed web host, Crucial Hosting seems to be going the route of a shared provider by cramming in as many unlimited features to a low-priced offering as it can.
Cons
The company’s headquarters is in Arizona, and its only server location is in Phoenix. It operates around 7,000 virtual private servers and transfers over 8.8 terabytes of data per day. U.S.-based customers will find Crucial’s offerings irresistible, but businesses looking for a quality web host for Canada for example might want something with a bit more speed.