Beget

Beget is one of the top ten Russian web hosting providers. It seems unassuming at first, but offers a smoother, more robust package of services than you might expect from their imperfectly translated website. While you won’t be getting all the bells and whistles, everything you do get works exactly as promised, and the pricing is both very transparent and a bargain.

Want to try Beget? Check out the website here

Beget’s headquarters are in St. Petersburg, Russia, but they also have representatives in Kiev, Ukraine, and Berlin, Germany. Finding information about the company is notoriously difficult, meaning that a social media post about them celebrating their 11th anniversary led to the conclusion that they got into the business back in 2009. Information about their data centers seems impossible to find - even in their Terms of Service - meaning they probably don’t place the same importance on that type of information as other providers do.

Their VK About section claims that they serve more than 160,000 clients who have more than half a million websites on their servers. The company also has their GitHub linked on their website, showing their commitment to transparency -- just not in the way some clients might expect.

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Pricing

When it comes to web hosting, Beget’s prices start at $3 a month with its Blog plan- and they mean a month, as that is how much you’ll be charged if you want to pay monthly. If you go for an annual billing cycle, you’ll be charged only $28 for the cheapest plan.

Web hosting offers four different plans and premium hosting another three more expensive ones. They all come with a 30-day “evaluation period,” meaning you get to test their services for a full month before you’re charged at all. It's important to note that Beget only accepts credit card payments.

Ease of use

Creating an account with Beget is surprisingly quick and simple: you choose the plan you’re interested in, enter your details (including phone number) and you get both an email and an SMS with your login data. Beget has its own control panel instead of the more common cPanel, but it’s pretty easy to use. Their dual-pane file manager also looks great, but if you prefer, you can use FTP as well.

Control Panel — While it's not cPanel, Beget's control panel provides you with all the tools you'll need to manage your website (Image credit: Beget)

No matter which plan you’ve selected, you automatically get a free domain (in the form of YourUsername.beget.tech), but you can also register a new domain through Beget’s control panel, where you can see the price of each.

Their CMS also lets you choose from a list of web apps, both free ones and those you need to pay extra for. The installation is also incredibly simple, although apps run in Russian by default, so you’ll need to switch to English manually. Using these options, you can create a (very basic) website, but for a more complex one, you’re best off building it separately and uploading, or even transferring it from another hosting provider. This option is available for free: all you have to do is enter the domain (or several), FTP server, username, and password. The whole process takes around three business days.

A number of Beget’s features aren’t completely translated to English. In the bottom of your File Manager, you can see how much space you have left -- but in Russian. In some instances it’s just a minor inconvenience, but in others it can seriously slow you down.

Performance — We used GTmetrix to measure the performance of our Beget site (Image credit: GTmetrix)

Speed and experience

Beget’s main website did decently on a speed test by GTmetrix. The time it took to fully load it was 3.9 seconds and 83 requests (compared to the average 8 seconds and 88 requests).

Beget does not state its guaranteed uptime anywhere on their website so there’s no telling whether they hold their promises. Our uptime test of their main website, which lasted two weeks, recorded a significant amount of downtime: a whole hour and one minute, with the longest outage lasting 44 minutes. This means that the website had an uptime of 99.677% over this period. This would qualify it, just barely, for a Tier I data center, which needs to have an uptime of at least 99.671% annually.

Support

Beget has an extensive user manual in both Russian and English on their website. Users who understand Russian have a significant advantage, as there are more materials in this language. There is no forum, but the Russian version of the website encourages users to follow them on social media (also in Russian) and interact with them through various forms, offering an array of phone numbers and even an address where customers can come and discuss issues in person. Most of these options are not even shown once you switch to English. However, non-Russian users can still fill out a contact form or send the provider an email with any questions they might have.

The competition

Both Beget and Bluehost have competitive prices, great features on offer, and thorough customer support. The only major difference between the two is that Beget is definitely geared towards Russian clients, while Bluehost offers all its services in English, making it more attractive to international customers.

Beget and Aruba share incomplete translations from Russian and Italian, respectively, but Beget has a significantly better customer support section with dedicated manuals and a FAQ section. For users looking for a European solution, Beget might turn out to be the better choice.

Arsys is another example of translation issues, this time from Spanish - but as with Aruba, Beget takes the cake in terms of customer support here too. In the end, location preferences might be the tipping point for those on the fence.

Data shows that Hostgator is an immensely more popular option for people looking for hosting providers - outside of Russia. Once again, location becomes the most important factor in choosing between two very similar providers, both with great quality features.

Final verdict

If you’re Russian or you speak Russian, Beget is one of the best options on the market for you. But even failing that, if you can live with some wonky translations, they offer great services. For those that can’t look past it, Bluehost and Hostgator may be better options.

via Tech Trade

Tech Trade

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