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TE: This review was last updated in 2024 and may no longer be accurate. Not recommended for use full reference in your decision making.

WarnaHost or Warna Hosting has the aim of providing Penasihat Hosting web hosting services for personal and corporate needs at competitive prices.

Founded in 2010, they are headquartered in Mamboro, North Palu, Palu City, Central Sulawesi.

Now WarnaHost has served more than 10,000+ customers. A good achievement in 10 years of existence, right?

And to find out how WarnaHost's quality is, I have purchased cheap hosting package which is equipped with cPanel control panel. I used this as a sample in my research, so that the results can provide an idea and answer about whether WarnaHost is the right choice for your next website home.

Summary of Research Data

OUR RATING	3.5/5
SAMPLE	“Cloud Saving” Package
AVERAGE UPTIME (%)	🔴 99.381%
AVG. RESPONSE TIMES (Load Test)	🔴 Slow
PRICE (Cloud Savings)	🟢 Starting from IDR 15,000/month
REFUND GUARANTEE	🟢 45 Days

Advantages of Using WarnaHost

WarnaHost is a transparent hosting provider.

On their cheap hosting plan page, you will find complete hosting specification details, including specifications of the hardware used. They list the use of an Intel E5-V4 processor and NVMe SSD Gen 4, although they don't appear to list RAM specifications. It's rare to find information about processor specifications on another provider's hosting plan page.

Although these technical specifications do not always correlate directly with the quality of the hosting service, this kind of transparency should be appreciated. Many other hosting providers are even reluctant to provide detailed information about their server specifications to customers.

So, what are the other advantages of WarnaHost?

1. Testing of Warna

Host Support 2024: Better, but still room for improvement

Just like testing support at other providers, I carried out several tests to find out the quality of the support service from WarnaHost.

And so that this WarnaHost review is more up-to-date, I will do the test again or the sixth time in July 2024. Because the content is quite long, I have divided it into six parts in the accordion below:

First Test

I tested the WarnaHost support service via live chat. Please note that support via live chat is not available 24 hours, only available from 9 am to 10 pm. So, Kang Ivan responded to my message. After asking several technical questions, I considered the support to be very good, my questions were also answered quickly and very clearly.

This is different from most support at other hosting providers where when you ask technical questions, they will only send you a guide link and you need to solve the problem yourself. But at WarnaHost, you will get support that is not like a 'robot', but more service.

Second testing - December 2020

In fact, support is a very difficult factor to test, because consumer cases or problems vary. The test that I did was only a simple test. This is different from uptime and speed testing where the numbers are certain. But testing support is different. So, I cannot fully guarantee that the support you will receive will be as good and fast as the test results I conducted. In the first test, the test I did was very simple, just asking a few basic questions. However, in this second test, I tried to carry out a rather technical test. How to? I deliberately made an error on the WarnaHost test website, namely an error establishing a database connection. An error that is in fact easy to overcome even by new or junior technical staff. I believe this error can be resolved in less than 10 minutes. I submitted a ticket complaining that my website displayed an error on September 28, 2020 at 12:19 pm.

Then 6 minutes later I got a reply to confirm whether the database user and password were correct. Here's the conversation via the ticket:They provided a solution to the error that I deliberately made before. I have to admit, the solution is correct, but I want them to fix it themselves, because not everyone understands technical things, right? So when they asked for permission to access the control panel for further checks, I said yes.

And 5 minutes after that, the error on my WarnaHost test website was successfully resolved. The total time required is 11 minutes. The plus point is that they ask for permission to access the cPanel page and I found they are one of two providers that ask for permission first to access the client's cPanel. I think privacy is very guarded at WarnaHost.

Third testing - September 2021

To make this review more accurate, in the last update in September 2021, I re-tested WarnaHost support. This is important to do in order to obtain information regarding the development of WarnaHost from time to time. No one knows, maybe they are currently experiencing problems with their support service, right? So it is important to update. This time the test is a little more difficult although it is still a common error on WordPress websites. I deliberately made a critical error of 5

Then sent a ticket to help fix the error that occurred.

Just like in the second test, they request permission for access to the client's cPanel to view the error log. It didn't take long for them to find the error and fix it. The total time it took from when I first sent the ticket until the error was fixed was 18 minutes. Including fast, although not the fastest. I think that until I updated this review, their support service was still good and reliable.

Fourth Testing - November 2022

We at AdvisorHosting retest once a year. The goal is to find out if there is an increase in quality or a decrease. After the third test was carried out, we carried out the test again. It's still the same, namely technical testing and still relatively easy to fix even though it's a bit tricky. This test relates to broken images in WordPress. I sent a ticket asking for help on November 9, 2022, at 15:50 and complained about the broken image problem. Then, the ticket received a reply as well as news of fixing the problem at 16:

1. The total time required is 1 hour and 9 minutes.

From my testing, I can see a decrease in response speed on WarnaHost. Their explanation was because there were a lot of queues for tickets. It's true that the reasons are acceptable, but we are comparing and reviewing their services, so I think it's fair to say that their support has experienced a decrease in response speed compared to previous years of testing. Considering the number of customers has increased from year to year, I think maybe they should add new ammunition to their customer service ranks. The owner of WarnaHost, Kang Ivan, once said that it was difficult to find human resources in Palu, Central Sulawesi and had plans to move to Jogja... Maybe this is the reason behind it.

Fifth Testing - 2023

We are committed to presenting test results that truly reflect the experience received by all customers. However, if the hosting provider knows we are testing their service, they may pay special attention to our case, which could change the test results. Therefore, we have decided to postpone retesting until 2024, when we will conduct the research privately, rather than publicly as at present.

Sixth Testing - July 2024 (latest)

After being absent in 2023, I finally returned to testing support services from various hosting providers, including WarnaHost. This test took place in July 2024, and as usual, I focused on the technical aspects. This time, I repeated the "error establishing data connection" scenario that I used in testing 2020. How? Simple, I "damaged" the wp-config.php file so that the database connection was lost and the website became inaccessible. Classic, but effective for testing support response. Here's the testing timeline:

15:05 - Tickets sent 15:23 (18 minutes later) - Support responds, saying they will check 15:38 (15 minutes after first response) - Website is back to normal Total time from ticket submission to issue resolved: 33 minutes. The question is: Is 33 minutes fast? Well, when compared to testing 4 years ago where they could solve the problem in 11 minutes, the answer is clearly no. But there is good news: Compared to the last test in 2022, their performance this time is much better. There are quite significant improvements. So, even though it hasn't returned to its best performance, I think this improvement is worthy of being included in WarnaHost's superior points in this review update. At least, they show a positive trend.

2. Cheap Hosting Prices + Offers Adequate Number of Resources

WarnaHost offers cheap hosting packages starting from IDR 198,000/year (up from the previous year's IDR 180,000/year, but still cheap, although not the cheapest).

I'm sure you won't find anything cheaper and with more resources than the cheap WarnaHost hosting package wherever you look.

Wait a minute... at the time I updated this review, there were actually three other providers that I also reviewed on Hosting Advisor, which could compete with them in terms of price, namely:

Domai

Nesia Starter: IDR 168,000/year

Cloud

Host Starter Pro: IDR 180,000/year

L Hosting Champion: IDR 180,000/year

Unfortunately, the DomaiNesia Starter package does not use LiteSpeed Enterprise, but Nginx. The IdCloudHost starter package is currently 'sold out'.

With the WarnaHost Cloud Savings package for IDR 15,000/month, you will get:

1 GB Cloud NVMe
2 Total Domains
Unlimited Bandwidth
0.5 CPU Cores
512 MB RAM
Free Domain
5 Email Accounts
5 Mysql Databases
cPanel Control Panel
45 day money back guarantee

Amazing, right? In fact, they claim to be using NVMe, no longer SSD, let alone HDD.

3. Already using JetBackup for daily automatic website backups

Not many cheap hosting packages provide the JetBackup feature or daily automatic backup for your website. After reviewing several providers, I found that Jagoan Hosting and IdCloudHost are the best hosting in this case, and after that WarnaHost.

By using this service, your website will be automatically backed up every day with a storage period of 2 days. Apart from that, weekly and monthly backups from the previous month are also available.

4. 45 Day Hosting Guarantee

Previously, WarnaHost only provided a 30 day guarantee for new customers, however, as of the updated review last August 2023, I found that there was a very positive change from WarnaHost, where the guarantee period was extended to 45 days.

And after I read the guarantee conditions again, there are no rules or guarantee conditions that will be difficult, only this guarantee is valid for a minimum of 3 months hosting rental and for the first account or new accounts only.

I give WarnaHost two thumbs up.

5. Free Domain and Free Hosting Migration

For those of you who are not 'technical' people, you don't need to worry when you want to move your website files from your old hosting to WarnaHost, because they will help move them for you for free, aka no charge.

Additionally, they also offer free domain on whatever hosting plan you take. The conditions are as follows:

If you rent a cheap "Frugal" hosting package:

And if you rent at least the “Starter” package:

6. There have been many improvements made by WarnaHost since the previous update review

I noted that there are six improvements that WarnaHost has made to improve the quality of its services. Anything?

All hosting packages use cPanel
The web server in the cPanel package uses LiteSpeed Enterprise. There is indeed a price increase, but I'm sure their prices are still among the cheapest.
Already using the JetBackup feature
There are 3 backup files available, namely backups every 2 days and once every 1 month. Previously only once a month.
There is a monthly hosting subscription option, although the price is unfair, where the monthly price is 2x the annual price
The client area I think is faster than the previous test, which is a good improvement in terms of user experience.

The six points above in the previous review are in the disadvantages section of WarnaHost, but I am very happy that Kang Ivan as the founder is very positive in responding to the shortcomings that I wrote about previously.

Founders like Kang Ivan are very rare.

Disadvantages of using WarnaHost

There are at least 4 shortcomings of WarnaHost in my notes.

1. Average slow server response time in testing *load testing

What is load testing?

Imagine you own a restaurant. Load testing is like suddenly bringing 50 people into your restaurant at once and seeing if the chefs and waiters can handle it without making customers wait too long. In the world of hosting, these “chefs and servers” are their servers.

A common problem that often occurs is that the hosting server often experiences overload or even downtime when receiving many visitors simultaneously.

To overcome this problem, Load Testing is very important to do. This can also prove the quality of the server used by the hosting provider.

So, to find out, I did a test by sending 10 virtual users simultaneously to navigate the WarnaHost test website. The aim is to see whether the WarnaHost shared hosting server is able to handle all requests and whether the response time remains stable or slows down.

The tool I used in this test was Locust.io (open source).

Oh yes, in my testing I did not apply cache to the website/server and also PHP extensions such as opcache and Redis to purely test server performance.

The load testing results can be seen in the image below: In the test results graph, there are four lines that we need to pay attention to:

Green: Server response time
Red: Number of requests per second
Blue: Number of virtual visitors
Yellow: Indicates errors (if any) during testing

Ideally, the green line (response time) should remain stable even as the blue line (number of visitors) increases. However, in the WarnaHost test results, we see the green line increases as the number of virtual visitors increases. This is not a good sign.

What does it mean? It's simple: the more people accessing your website at the same time, the slower it will run.

During 2.5 minutes of testing, the average WarnaHost response time was 3703.52 ms. Compared to the six other providers I tested in 2024, this figure is among the slowest.

2. Poor Uptime Stability Rate (99.381%)

Overall, from monitoring results since January 2021, I can say that WarnaHost's average uptime is actually quite good. More stable than not.

But, it's not enough just to be more stable than not, right?

Take a look at the average data for Warna

Host in the range October 2021 - May 2023 below:

And compare it with the latest data for the year 20 February 2024 - 30 June 2024:As I said before, it's not enough to just have more stable uptime.

If your hosting experiences downtime frequently and for a long time in a month, it will certainly cause big losses for you. That's why, uptime is always the first factor you need to consider when choosing hosting.

3. As cheap as IDR 16,500/month (1 year) or IDR 30,000 (per month)

You will get a cheaper price only if you immediately subscribe for 1 year or 2 years. This kind of strategy is actually common in the web hosting industry, not only in the Indonesian market, but internationally. As a user who is used to paying for everything monthly, I don't like it. I just think it's unfair and seems to force consumers to pay more (from the consumer side), even though I can quite understand the reasons behind it.

However, there are several providers whose monthly hosting prices are as cheap as annual prices, such as IdCloudHost, Kenceng Solusindo, Jagoan Hosting and Dracoola Multimedia.

4. The backup still has limitationsIt's true that Warna

Host already uses JetBackup for backup and restore backup activities, don't forget that you can also use backup, restore and staging on Softaculous, however, for automatic backup via JetBackup, there are only 3 files available:

Backup every 2 or 3 days with two backup files
Backup once every 1 month, 1 backup file

Summary of WarnaHost Hosting Packages and Other Information

Summary of hosting package offers at Warna

Host:

WarnaHost offers a complete range of hosting products, ranging from cheap hosting, WordPress hosting, unlimited hosting, Cloud VPS unmanaged and managed VPS to dedicated server. The following are details of the prices for WarnaHost's cheap hosting packages.

Other Information You Need to Know

WarnaHost offers 9 hosting package options ranging from cheap hosting packages, business hosting, special WordPress hosting to Dedicated Servers.

Server selection: Jakarta (IIX) and Singapore (SG). Can be selected according to needs when ordering hosting.
Account activation: instant activation
Control Panel used: cPanel with LiteSpeed Enterprise
Free domain: Whatever plan you choose. Especially the .com extension, only free for certain packages
Application installation (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.): Can be installed very easily with the Softaculous tool found in all control panels.

WarnaHost could be one of the hosting options that you consider, especially with some of the improvements they have made, such as:

Their cheap hosting package already uses cPanel + LiteSpeed Enterprise
The support service shows a positive trend
Daily, weekly and monthly automatic backup feature
Longer warranty than the industry average of 45 days

However, they still have two important shortcomings: slow average response time and low server uptime stability.

With such poor uptime, it is very difficult to recommend this provider.

Rating:3.5/5

Visit WarnaHost

WarnaHost Review

Summary of Research Data