Exclusive Hosting Review 2024: With Real Test

Exclusive Hosting, although not as widely recognized as some industry giants, has quietly maintained a presence in the web hosting landscape since its inception in 2004. In this article, we delve into a comprehensive review of Exclusive Hosting, shedding light on this long-standing yet lesser-known hosting provider.

Our mission is to provide you with an unbiased assessment of Exclusive Hosting’s services. To ensure accuracy, we’ve gone the extra mile by creating a website on their platform, rigorously testing its hosting performance.

Everything that we’ll cover in our Exclusive Hosting Review:

• Key Features
• Performance Test
• User Experience
• Customer Support
• Pros and Cons
• Pricing
• Exclusive Hosting Free Trial
• Exclusive Hosting Alternatives
• Conclusion

How Did We Test Exclusive Hosting

To test Exclusive Hosting, I signed up on their platform and built a WordPress website. I used OceanWP as the theme and added several web pages, article posts, and some images. I created a fully functioning website within their hosting plan and assessed its performance.

Furthermore, I changed the theme to GeneratePress and conducted another test. GeneratePress is widely recognized as the fastest WordPress theme available today. This test aimed to evaluate how the theme would perform on Exclusive Hosting for those who are curious.

Exclusive Hosting Key Features

Before we proceed to its performance let me first introduce you to its key features:

Free Domain Name

Exclusive Hosting offers free domain names to all of its plans, whether it is a web hosting plan, WordPress hosting, Cloud hosting, Semi-dedicated Hosting, or even Dedicated Hosting. This feature is good if you are just starting to build your own website or creating something new to add to your portfolio.

Registering a new domain name in Exclusive Hosting is easy. However, I still prefer to host my domain name on Namecheap since it is much easier to do some stuff on Namecheap since they have more user-friendly controls and tons of tutorials on YouTube; it’s almost impossible not to get any tutorials on Namecheap since lots of content creators promote Namecheap for its features and its easier to use.

Exclusive Hosting domains, on the other hand, are also easy. Still, if you are a complete beginner, there might be some difficulty since you need to ask for their support when you try to find tutorials on YouTube about Exclusive Hosting domains. You will not find any since they are not that popular, and finding Video Tutorials on them is pretty tough.

Control Panel

For the control panel, they didn’t offer a traditional cPanel, but instead, they have their own control panel, which, for me, is actually good; it was clean, easy to use, and features a rich control panel that can rival the likes of cPanel.

The exclusive Hosting control panel gives you everything that you need, like account usage for easy monitoring of your CPU usage, Backup usage, FTP, MySQL DB, and more. It will show your domain names and controls for it, emails including the mailboxes, and controls for your email, files, databases, and installers (website installer, application installer including WordPress, Joomla, and more).

There is also an advanced option where you can freely configure advanced features like Memcached, Varnish, Redis, Cloudflare, and more. This feature is only for those who know what they are doing and is not recommended for beginners, but you’ll be free to try, of course.

If I gonna compare the Exclusive Hosting Control Panel to Cloudways, the control panel of Exclusive Hosting has more controls and more features than Cloudways. Still, the Cloudways control panel is much easier to use for beginners.

Site Builder

If you prefer to use something other than Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla, etc., they also offer a site builder.

You can build your own website without coding by using their own free template and customize it based on your liking by using its drag-and-drop features.
Site builders are good for creating websites without the need for coding knowledge. Still, in my own opinion, if you are not a coder, it is much better to use WordPress since it is easier to mention, has more features, and has lots of tutorials if you need some help on your website.

Installer

Installer is one of their features that lets their users easily install a website of their choice. You can install your own website after choosing your own themes like e-commerce, blogs, forums, and more.
The installer also lets you install your favorite CMS like WordPress with just one click; you just need to place the necessary information, click install, and your new website is ready and waiting for your own customization.

Free WordPress Themes

There are a lot of free WordPress themes in the WordPress repository, but Exclusive Hosting offers some premium themes for free. Don’t get me wrong, the free premium themes that Exclusive hosting offers are different from the popular ones like Astra Pro or Generatepress premium. It’s a premium theme that they build on their own.

There are a lot of free premium themes that Exclusive Hosting offers with prebuild designs that are good for start-up, but here is the thing: I’ve tried free premium themes; the design is good, but the downside was its speed, for me, it not well optimized for speed that it failed on PageSpeed insight.

If you want a faster website, I recommend avoiding its free premium themes and choosing lighter and faster WordPress themes from third-party developers. However, if you still want the design of Exclusive hosting with free premium themes, it’s up to you.

Related Content: Also check our article about How to get free Astra Pro License

Free Migration

If you already have a website and you want to transfer it to Exclusive hosting, you have two choices: you can do it manually if you have the skill and knowledge. But if you want to save time, you can use their free site migration.

The free migration will be handed by the technical team; their experts will do all the migrating process, and you can focus your time on some other things; you can have a break, sip some coffee or tea, or write another article from scratch, and you will just get some notification when they’re did migrating your site on their hosting platform.

Exclusive Hosting Email

Exclusive hosting also offers free email; you can create your own professional-looking email and host it inside your hosting plan. It also has a free SMTP, free anti-virus protection, and an email forwarder, which is great for getting it all for free, while other hosting providers have an extra charge for this extra service.

30 Days Money Back Guarantee

Exclusive hosting is so generous to their customers that they even provide a 30-day money-back guarantee. You can host your website on their platform, and If you are not satisfied with their service after 30 days, you can request a refund.

30 Days Free Trial

Exclusive Hosting is also one of the few hosting providers that offers a free trial without the need for credit cards.

Like Cloudways, which provides a 7-day free trial without credit cards, Exclusive Hosting offers better; you can check their Hosting, build a website, check its performance, and many more. 30 days is more than enough to fully test their Hosting before deciding on purchasing their great hosting plan.

Hosting Performance

After mentioning its key features let us now proceed on how Exclusive hosting performs, below are the details of the test that I performed:

CMS	Plugin Use	Themes Use	Test	Hosting Plan
WordPress	zero plugins	OceanWP	PageSpeed Insight	Exclusive Cloud Hosting
		Generatepress	GTmetrix
			Pingdom Speed Test
			KeyCDN Test

PageSpeed Insight Test

The initial test I conduct is with PageSpeed Insight, as it holds the utmost significance among all the tests. PageSpeed Insight scores directly influence Google’s ranking, making it a pivotal metric. For this test, I began with the OceanWP theme, known for its lightweight and fast performance.

Upon reviewing the results, the theme achieved a respectable performance score of 88 on mobile but fell short with a score of 74 on desktop.

I must admit that I was not particularly impressed with OceanWP’s performance with Exclusive Hosting, considering that the website I built is relatively light in terms of content—featuring only a handful of images, a few articles, and a limited number of pages.

I had anticipated a more substantial score, aiming for at least 92 in both mobile and desktop performance

Pingdom & GTmetrix

I also conducted a website performance test using the Pingdom speed test, which yielded a performance grade of 81 (B). Notably, the page size measured at 684.7 KB, demonstrating a commendable level of performance. In GTmetrix, the website excelled with an impressive grade of A (99), which is a also good speed score.

Multiple Location Test

Exclusive hosting offers an advanced option that allows you to integrate Cloudflare directly into your control panel. However, for the purpose of this review, I chose not to enable any caching or optimization tools, nor did I utilize a Content Delivery Network (CDN), in order to assess the hosting’s raw performance.

The server I utilized was located in Chicago, and the results of multiple location tests are presented in the accompanying screenshots. These images reveal that the hosting performed admirably in the United States, which aligns with the server’s Chicago location. Impressively, it also delivered a satisfactory performance in London and Amsterdam.

However, it fell short in terms of performance in Frankfurt, Singapore, Sydney, and Bangalore. It’s worth noting that these results can be further improved when optimization tools and a CDN are utilized

PageSpeed Insight Using Generatepress

I also decided to switch the WordPress theme to GeneratePress to gauge Exclusive Hosting’s performance with one of the fastest WordPress themes available in the market.

The results were nothing short of remarkable, with a remarkable achievement of 99 in mobile performance and an impressive 95 in desktop performance. It’s worth emphasizing that, once again, I refrained from making any adjustments or utilizing a CDN during this test. The sole modification I made was installing the GeneratePress theme, and the results speak for themselves.

Based on the comprehensive testing we conducted, it’s safe to conclude that Exclusive Hosting offers exceptional speed. However, it’s important to note that the speed of your WordPress website may also depend on the theme you choose to use.

Uptime

In terms of uptime, the plan that I’ve chosen is cloud hosting. As you may already be aware, cloud hosting is renowned for its exceptional reliability in the web hosting industry. This is because it comprises multiple servers working together to create a virtual cloud server. If one server experiences downtime, the others seamlessly shoulder the load, ensuring your website remains consistently online.

Additionally, Exclusive Hosting pledges a remarkable 99% uptime guarantee across all of its hosting plans, including options beyond its cloud hosting services.

Pricing

Exclusive Hosting offers affordable pricing, it offers different hosting plans that you can choose, it’s Cloud hosting and WordPress hosting start at $2.95/mo with unlimited disk space and unlimited traffic.

It also offers VPS hosting that has different pricing that you can configure, its plans start at $5/mo, Exclusive hosting also offers semi-dedicated hosting and dedicated hosting for sites with bigger traffic.

How To Install WordPress on Exclusive Hosting

It is hard to find a tutorial on how to install WordPress in Exclusive hosting even on YouTube so I decided to include this tutorial for those in need, just follow these simple steps and you will have WordPress hosting in just a few minutes.

Connect Domain To Exclusive Hosting

The first thing to do is to connect your domain name to Exclusive hosting, If you already buy a domain name inside the exclusive hosting platform you dont need to do this, these parts are only for those who want to use a domain name from another domain registrar, you will need first to connect it to exclusive hosting.

For this tutorial I will use Namecheap if you use another registrar dont worry since the process was just the same only the UI and options might be different, if you cant find it ask for support in your domain registrar.

Now the very first thing to do is head to your domain name and click manage, you can see a nameserver option and start placing the nameserver of Exclusive hosting on it, these name servers can be found in the domain options of your dashboard inside the Exclusive Hosting, it is a 4 nameserver place each name server like in the screenshot below.

If you using Namecheap make sure that you choose custom DNS for the nameserver option to appear.

After successfully placing your nameserver in your domain, click save, and it’s ready to propagate and proceed to our next step to install WordPress.

Step 1: Hosting Your Domain

After placing the nameserver on your domain registrar you need to host the domain in Exclusive hosting, dont worry since it will just host your domain and will not transfer it to Exclusive hosting, just make sure that you dont click the transfer button.

To host your domain, in your control panel head over to my domain >> Hosted Domain>> then click Host Domain.

After that you can enter your domain name on a box>> also tick the “do not manage DNS” >> and click add host.

Step 2: Click The Web Application Installer

After placing the nameservers and hosting the domain name, the next step is to start the WordPress installation, in your dashboard find the web application installer and click it like the screenshot below.

After clicking the web application installer you will see different applications like Joomla, OpenCart, and more, since we will install WordPress click the WordPress then click install.

After clicking the install button you will be presented with an option similar to the screenshot below>> Just choose the domain name >> Create an admin username and password >> Click to install WordPress and wait a few minutes to complete, after that you can log in into your WordPress account and start customizing your WordPress website.

Here are the Pros and Cons of Exclusive Hosting To Help You Decide:

Pros:

• Customizable
• Affordable
• Lots of Advance Controls

Cons:

• Unpopular company
• Not a beginner-friendly

Exclusive Hosting Data Center Location

• Colohouse Data Center in Chicago United States
• UK servers data center in Coventry, United Kingdom
• Amaze Data Center in Sydney, Australia
• Ficolo Data Center in Pori, Finland
• S3C Data Center in Sofia, Bulgaria

Exclusive Hosting Alternatives

Not impress with Exclusive Hosting? Here are the best alternatives that we can recommend:

Conclusion

After thoroughly using and testing Exclusive Hosting, I can confidently say that it’s worth considering. While it may not match the speed of Cloudways, its affordability sets it apart.

Exclusive Hosting offers a wide array of features, particularly its control panel, which allows users to fine-tune every setting to enhance their website’s performance. One potential drawback of this hosting platform is that it may not be the most beginner-friendly option.

In contrast to other hosting platforms that manage everything, including settings, Exclusive Hosting provides advanced features like Memcached, Varnish, and Redis. However, users are required to configure these themselves, which can be challenging for beginners. This setup is ideal for advanced users but might pose a learning curve for those new to hosting.

In conclusion, I find Exclusive Hosting to be a worthwhile choice for several reasons, including its affordability, impressive hosting performance, and a plethora of useful features. Although it may not be the most beginner-friendly option, it’s still manageable for those willing to learn.