Exabytes Hosting review (The worst web host I’ve ever used!)

Using Exabytes hosting in Malaysia is like pulling my own teeth out. Every single interaction leaves me dumbfounded that this company exists, still makes money and still has customers.

I feel sorry for the Malaysians, Singaporeans and anyone else who wants to get a website, goes to Exabytes, and is dismayed at how bad the experience of having a website is.

I feel sorry for the businesses that Exabytes are holding back by offering a poor product. The product is poor I presume because of overloaded servers, under powered servers, and simply bad service.

Who are Exabytes?

According to TechCrunch “Exabytes Group is a leading web and eCommerce hosting provider that was founded on the principle of providing the best hosting solutions.”

They are based in Penang Malaysia, but have offices in Singapore and Indonesia.

Here is why Exabytes is the worst web host I have found in Malaysia:

Exabytes offer unreliable hosting.

The hosting by Exabytes is so flakey. Do you want your website to have downtime? You got it!

We use Uptime Robot to monitor our website uptime, and Exabytes is never 99.9% or 100% uptime. For a website host this is terrible.

From their website:

Exabytes agrees to use its best endeavors to ensure a 99.9% Network Uptime and 99.5% Server Uptime to the customers.

99.8% uptime and this is during a good phase. I have seen it as low as 96%.

Real data from Uptime Robot showing downtime on Exabytes:

As you can see, there are daily / multiple instances of downtime. From 4-9 minutes each time.

There is regularity and a pattern to the downtime. So obviously some process is taking down their servers everyday. I told them this 2 years ago. Nothing happened.

The downtime used to be worse. In 2019, 20-30 minutes down every single day.

Exabytes hosting is extremely slow

Time to First Byte and server response time are critical for a fast website and well performing website.

Exabytes servers are extremely slow.

Response time by a server should 25-500ms. As you can see the AVERAGE is 3017ms. This is so ridiculously slow.

Page performance is vital for good SEO scores. But related to this slow server performance, here you can also see Google Lighthouse picking up on two key metrics:

1. Reduce initial server response time – the server took 2.35s just to respond to the HTTP request! Most websites are supposed to load within 2 seconds, but the slow Exabytes server does not even start in that time
2. Use HTTP/2 is a protocol which hosts should be using now for some years, but the company still do not support it. Wow.

What does this mean? This means your website hosted with Exabytes will be SLOOOOOOOOOW.

Exabytes hosting is under powered.

Do you want your website to crash every time you update WordPress or update a WordPress plugin?

Exabytes hosting is so under powered and poorly configured that even basic updates like updating WordPress core or updating WordPress plugins crashes your website.

I’ve talked to their support, upgraded PHP, increased memory, updated config. but it still happens every time. I can take a copy of the site and launch it on another host without issues. The issues only exist on Exabytes.

Exabytes support is useless

You ask a question, the ignore it.

Live chat – if it works – takes forever to get anywhere.

And even then – they say “we have referred to another support agent”

Exabytes do not respect your time.

Time is cheap in Asia, and they will make you waste your time.

Today I was 21 minutes in to a live chat before they even began to address my problem. 21 minutes.

This was actually what spurred me to write this article.

Almost 10 minutes pass – from “I am looking in to this” to “I don’t even know what I am looking at”.

How can any company that doesn’t respect its customers still expect to operate?

If you are a web developer, and maybe you earn RM300 per hour as a professional freelancer, then this live chat call just cost you RM100! And you did not even get the issue fixed.

Unfortunately for me, I charge more than this, so for me to have my time wasted in such a frivolous manner really does make me frustrated.

Are there other signs that Exabytes is a terrible company?

Yes there are plenty of signs that Exabytes is a terrible company.

Exabytes offer no Facebook reviews.

Exabytes have turned off Facebook reviews, so customers cannot leave reviews on their page.

All the comments made are moderated and often removed so other users cannot see them. For instance, who is the page replying to here? No-one! The page cannot hide their own comments, so this is why they still show.

Which hosting company do I recommend for hosting in Malaysia?

I 100% do not recommend Exabytes.

Currently I have had good experience with Server Freak. The support is knowledgeable, and performance and uptime is so far excellent.