MochaHost review

The story of Mochahost began in 2002, when its future founders recognized a profound need for high-quality web hosting companies and decided to launch one of their own. Founded in San Jose, Mochahost’s key objective was to strike a balance between “top-of-the-line” services and a pocket-friendly price, and, at the same time, cover everything from personal blogs to large businesses.

Today, their main office is in New York, and they seem to have expanded beyond a US-centric strategy. In the past, their only data centers were in Texas and Illinois. Now they offer a choice of eight locations covering Texas, Canada, the UK, India, Singapore, Germany, Mexico, and Australia.

We first reviewed Mochahost in 2021, and a lot has changed since then. Where a visit to their site then was like a blast to the past (as in, the early 2000s), it's now caught up with the times and sports a simpler look in trendy colors.

• Want to try Mochahost? Check out the website here
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Plans and pricing

Like most other hosting companies, Mochahost offers potential customers a range of plans to choose from. Unfortunately, while its website may be more up to date, its hosting plans seem to lag a bit further behind.

Mochahost's primary offerings are shared and VPS hosting, with a couple of WordPress-specific plans thrown in. There are no Cloud hosting plans nor dedicated servers available here.

Yet being somewhat entrenched in the past isn't always a bad thing, since it means Mochahost is also one of the few remaining service providers that still offers Windows web hosting in both the shared and VPS space. Because of this, Mochahost can offer relatively niche hosting solutions, such as Java Tomcat hosting.

Shared hosting plans at Mochahost start with the Soho plan at $3.99/mo on a 1-year term, with renewal prices on that plan hiking up to $12.99/mo. At the high end of that spectrum is Mocha, costing $9.99/mo and $20.99/mo on renewal. These prices aren't exactly low, but Mochahost is relatively generous with resources and provides cPanel access, Imunify 360 security, free SSL, free weekly backups, and free site migrations.

The problem is that several competitors are offering similar freebies and resource levels at much lower prices. For example, with just a bit less storage space, HostPapa comes at a much better price point. Personally, unless Mochahost offers stunning performance figures for its hosting plans, these prices seem a bit too high to be excellent value for money.

WordPress hosting

As if in retrospective shame of its high shared hosting prices, Mochahost throws $1/mo WordPress hosting plans in your face. The problem is that the dollar deal is only valid for the first month and renews at $14.99/mo (Lite) to $99.99/mo (Business).

Most of the freebies on Mochahost's WordPress plans are similar to those on its shared hosting plans. The only advantage beyond those is that if you sign up for the Starter or higher plans, you get WP Rocket included. That's about $59/year in value, which isn't enough to offset the monthly hosting charges here.

To put things in perspective, Cloudways hosting plans start at around $14/mo for cloud hosting ($11/mo if you're willing to forego their premium servers), with a custom server management dashboard. It also doesn't restrict you to a specific number of WordPress sites. At Mochahost, you'll need to be on their Pro plan or above to run more than a single site.

Windows shared hosting plans at Mochahost range from $4.45/mo to $8.45/mo. We won't debate this pricing, since, as we all know, a considerable portion will go to Microsoft for its operating system license.

Resource allocation is similar to the Linux shared hosting plans we discussed earlier. You also get the comparable Windows hosting tech stack, meaning Plesk instead of cPanel, plus MS SQL/MariaDB, and all the .NETs you could want. The one point you'll want to be aware of is the relatively low memory allocation. On the cheapest Soho ASP.NET plan, all you get is 300MB.

Plus, since these are relatively niche plans (yes, it sounds a little weird to consider Windows hosting as niche, even today), you also have a narrower range of data center locations to choose from: either in Europe or the US.

VPS hosting

As with its shared hosting plans, VPS at Mochahost comes in both Linux and Windows variants. The same price adjustments apply, with Linux VPS plans slightly cheaper. The lowest-tier Linux VPS costs a mere $24.38/mo for a 1-year term, renewing at $48.75/mo thereafter. For that, you get 2 CPU cores, 4 GB of RAM, 80GB NVMe, and unlimited bandwidth/mo.

Impressively for the price, Mochahost also throws in cPanel (most hosting companies today charge separately for this on a VPS). For specs, the VPS plans at Mochahost seem like a relatively good deal, especially for managed plans.

There's also a lot of leeway for scalability since their top-of-the-line VPS comes with a whopping 64 CPU cores, 128GB of RAM, and 960GB NVMe storage.

Ease of use

When creating an account with Mochahost, the first step is to select a hosting type, operating system, and a plan, and there are a whole lot of them. The next step is choosing a billing cycle, and this is where you’ll see details on the price and the plan’s key features. There, you can choose whether you want to be billed monthly, annually, biannually, or triannually.

To finalize the creation of your account (and your order), you’ll be required to provide Mochahost with some standard personal information. Then you’ll set a password, choose a preferred payment method, and complete your purchase.

The best part about Mochahost plans is that they all come with recognizable control panels, either cPanel or Plesk. These are industry-standard and help you manage your hosting server easily and quickly.

Speed and Reliability

For testing, we put the spotlight on Mochahost's Soho plan, which is the entry-level tier on its shared hosting list. We then uploaded a standard test WordPress website and ran WordPress core benchmarks and a load test to see if it holds up well under stress.

Aside from speed, it's notable that Mochahost offers separate uptime guarantees of 99.9% and 99.95% for its shared and VPS hosting services, respectively—nothing super-impressive, but just about meeting industry norms.

On WordPress core tests, Mochahost shared hosting did reasonably well with an overall score of 6.8 (out of ten). The scores were not dragged down in any specific area, meaning it offers a relatively well-rounded experience across CPU and memory, the filesystem, the database, and other elements.

The key takeaway here is that while these are relatively strong results, they aren't the best we've seen by far. As an example, SiteGround is a host with comparable shared hosting prices to Mochahost and scores much better in core WordPress benchmarks.

Mochahost also performed well under Siege, a tool we use to send an increasing user load to hosting servers. At 5, 9, and 15 concurrent users, Mochahost held its own and achieved a 100% success rate on every transaction attempted. This is pretty impressive, since most of the hosts we test start indicating some degree of failed transactions even at the 9-user mark.

One notable point, however, is that despite a 100% success rate, the longest transaction time increased from an initial 2.67 seconds at the 5-user load to 12.21 seconds at the 15-user load. This means that while all requests were processed, users on a real-world site would likely experience longer wait times as load increases.

Still, it's a fair cop overall and one that somewhat justifies Mochahost's steeper-than-typical price tags on its shared hosting plans.

Customer Support

Like most web hosting companies today, Mochahost uses a chatbot as its first line of defense in customer support. From what we've seen, the chatbot scans a knowledge base and, if an answer isn't found, hands you over to a customer support representative.

We tested the process and were impressed that the handover from the chatbot to a real-live agent took just a minute. This stands in stark contrast to some hosts, where it took hours for a real human to respond to queries.

Aside from live chat, you can also get assistance by submitting a support ticket (for existing customers), or calling a phone support line.

Aside from the support channels that allow you to talk to them, Mochohost also offers a relatively decent knowledge base. It's wiki-style and easy to navigate, but primarily covers how-to documentation. That means you can easily find out how to get things done, but you'll likely need to contact their support team if you're facing an actual problem.

The competition

HostGator is Mochahost’s fellow US-based rival, with data centers within the USA. With a full range of hosting options and features, competent support, and pricing, both can offer a bit of something to suit everyone’s needs. However, HostGator's pricing is lower even on renewal.

Bluehost and Mochahost are both suitable for newcomers and veterans alike, although neither host is without its flaws. With Mochahost’s cheapest plan, you won't get as many valuable features as with Bluehost.

Final verdict

Mochahost isn't one to promise you the moon and stars, and its plans are certainly not in the cheapest tier. However, its hosting servers perform well even under load, assuring potential customers of a firm, but a steady-performing website, so long as you don't create problems with your own designs and code.

There is a shortcoming in the lack of cloud and dedicated server plans. Yet Mochahost more than makes up for this with robust VPS offerings that go beyond the dedicated server plans offered by some hosts.

Finally, if you need Windows hosting for some reason, then Mochahost is one of the few places where you can still find these plans.

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