Shared Hosting – Caribbean or South African?
Curaçao has two categories of shared hosting based on server location: Curaçao-based and South Africa-based. Curaçao-based plans are much more expensive due to the cost of bandwidth in the Caribbean, but they will serve you better if you’re catering mostly to visitors from the North and South American regions.
Meanwhile, the South Africa-based hosting plans are much cheaper, and they fill an important niche: if you’re serving mostly African visitors, you’ll get much better performance and latency rates here compared to other providers, whose server locations tend to focus more on Europe and Asia.
7th Place8 out of 10Disappointing Resource Caps
Both types of hosting, however, come with some significant resource caps that might make you think twice. The company gives you very limited storage space and bandwidth, especially if you opt for Curaçao-based plans. This is fine if you’re not expecting heavy traffic or complex site activity, but otherwise, this is close to a deal-breaker.
On the other hand, you’ll get the latest version of cPanel and the utmost privacy, especially from potential snooping by American and EU authorities. Each plan also comes with free WordPress or Joomla installation, plus support for custom scripts written in PHP, CGI, Perl, SSI, and Javascript.
However, it’s worth noting that other providers offer similar (or even more) amenities alongside unmetered bandwidth and/or storage. You can request for discounted bandwidth contracts, but even then, you’ll pay higher prices for the same resources you can get from other companies.
Here’s an overview to give you a better idea:
Curaçao-Based Plans
| Feature | Entry | Professional | Business | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price (EUR/USD) | 29 / $31.65 | 39 / $42.57 | 49 / $53.48 | 59 / $64.40 |
| Storage | 5 GB | 10 GB | 15 GB | 20 GB |
| Bandwidth | 5 GB | 10 GB | 15 GB | 20 GB |
| Websites | 10 | 20 | 40 | 80 |
| 5 | 10 | 20 | 40 | |
| Databases | 5 | 10 | 20 | 40 |
| Parked Domains | 10 | 20 | 40 | 80 |
| Subdomains | 10 | 20 | 40 | 80 |
South Africa-Based Plans:
| Feature | Entry | Professional | Business | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price (EUR/USD) | 5 / $5.46 | 10 / $10.91 | 15 / $16.37 | 20 / $21.83 |
| Storage | 5 GB | 10 GB | 15 GB | 20 GB |
| Bandwidth | 20 GB | 25 GB | 50 GB | 100 GB |
| 100 | 200 | 500 | 1000 |
Plans are billed monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, or annually.
VPS Hosting – The Costs of Privacy?
For greater resource needs, you can opt for Curaçao’s VPS hosting instead. Unlike other providers, the company gives you a completely configurable setup instead of pre-built plans. You start from scratch, tweaking specifications like RAM and storage space as you go. Each feature has a corresponding price, and Curaçao adds that up to get your monthly rate.
Here are the features you can configure:
- Operating System: You can choose from different versions of Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, CentOS) and Windows, which also determines the minimum amount of storage that you start with
- Storage: You start with 20 GB for Linux and 50 GB for Windows, with additional space available for 1 EUR / $1.09 per GB
- CPU: You can purchase 1 processor core per1 EUR/$1.09
- Bandwidth: Prices start at an incredibly high 90 EUR / $98.23 for 512k connections, and go all the way up to 5100 EUR / $5566.65 for 30 Mbps
- IP address: Each one costs 5 EUR / $5.46
- CDN: Starts at 5 EUR / $5.46 for 50 GB
You can also pay extra monthly fees if you want the following premium features:
- SSL certificate: 2 EUR / $2.18
- Software management: 25 EUR / $27.29
- Load balancing: 2 EUR / $2.18
- Remote hands and custom backups: 2 EUR / $2.18
As you can see, Curaçao’s VPS hosting can get very expensive, very quickly, especially if you need lots of bandwidth. You should also note that won’t get the usual suite of software, like cPanel or Softaculous, so you’ll have to spend more for those.
Curaçao’s VPS hosting plans are billed monthly or quarterly, so you won’t have to worry about getting locked into restrictive long-term contracts. However, unless you have very good – or unavoidable – reasons for going with Curaçao, you’re better off with other VPS hosting providers.
Guarantees
Curaçao has an impressive 99.99% uptime guarantee for its shared hosting plans. However, the company doesn’t have a refund policy.
Customer Support
Curaçao can be reached for technical assistance and customer support through their online contact form or their email-based ticketing system. Unfortunately, the lack of other channels like phone or live chat means you won’t have more immediate means of getting assistance. The company also has a knowledgebase, but there are very few articles available.
What's the Verdict on Curaçao?
Curaçao Review 2020 – Conclusion
Ultimately, Curaçao is strongest as an option for users who want to venture into e-gaming or who require hosting based in the Caribbean and/or South Africa. The extensive resource caps and prohibitive cost of bandwidth mean that you’ll have limited opportunity to build a high-traffic website, and it will probably cost you tons of money to secure the additional resources necessary to support one. You get good uptime guarantees, but the limited support channels and lack of refund policies mean you don’t have much of a safety net. Overall, Curaçao is good for certain very specific circumstances. Otherwise, there are better options.
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