ExonHost Review – LiteSpeed Hosting with Ryzen 9950X (My Experience Since 2017)

I've been a paying customer of ExonHost since 2017. Since the beginning, I've been using their 'Turbo Plus' plan, which was earlier called 'Turbo Diesel+'.

It's what's known as semi-dedicated hosting: it's still technically a shared hosting environment but with enhanced limits (like a VPS / dedicated server).

Additionally, since the past 4-5 years, I've been using their 'Advanced' plan (their standard shared hosting with slightly higher resources).

My first invoice

In the age of a Google HCU classifier that doesn't believe anything at face value, this is my first ExonHost invoice:

1. Why I prefer 'semi-dedicated hosting'

For their 'Turbo' plans (semi-dedicated), there are usually fewer accounts per server, and you can expect way better performance and reliability compared to traditional shared hosting, while still being cheaper and simpler to operate than a VPS.

One anecdote would be living inside a gated apartment complex (semi-dedicated) vs. in a stand-alone villa (VPS). You get better facilities in the former for the price, such as a swimming pool, outdoor/indoor games, 24x7 security, etc. This is possible because a large number of apartment owners are contributing to a common maintenance fund.

The equivalent of such facilities in the hosting space would be things like a LiteSpeed web server, cPanel, various (paid) backup solutions like JetBackup, object caching solutions like Redis/Memcached (hosts like Kinsta do charge a crazy $100/mo for such open-source offerings), security solutions like Imunify360, etc.

If you had to get individual licenses of such offerings, the cost would probably exceed the cost of your VPS itself. However, because the enterprise license costs are split amongst many users (hosted on the same server, albeit largely containerized by CloudLinux & CageFS), you get to enjoy all those at a much more accessible price point.

There's another less talked about benefit of semi-dedicated hosting over VPS hosting with similar resource limits (CPU cores and RAM). In a VPS, the web server itself, whatever control panel you install, and all such components consume resources which count against your allocated resources.

This is not the case for shared hosting environment (semi-dedicated is still technically shared hosting). So, your actual websites get to use the resources allocated to your account and you don't have to worry about things like whether cPanel is a resource hog.

A real incident

I once migrated someone's mission-critical website from a 4GB RAM + 4 Cores VPS to a semi-dedicated hosting of the same host (half the cost). Same CPU and memory limits. The VPS had Apache while the semi-dedicated plan had LiteSpeed Enterprise.

At first, he was super skeptical because this was a serious site getting nearly 80K monthly visitors and generating a high four-figure monthly revenue at the time. After the switch, his site became insanely fast. Especially the WP backend, which lagged like crazy earlier (think 2-3 seconds between each page load). Ultimately, he couldn't be happier!

2. Literally the fastest CPU (Ryzen 9950X)

When I first started using ExonHost in 2017, they were using era-appropriate Intel Xeon servers along with regular (SATA) SSDs. Later, when AMD EPYC and Ryzen processors, along with NVMe SSDs became more popular owing to significant performance benefits, ExonHost was quick to upgrade their infrastructure. 

If I remember correctly, they upgraded their semi-dedicated servers first, followed by their regular shared servers. I could instantly see a radical improvement in performance (both front-end and even more noticeably in the back-end).

I got in touch with Saleh Ahmed, the CEO, and he confirmed that they're currently using AMD's Ryzen 9950X (the fastest single-thread performance you can get on a server, verify on PassMark) for semi-dedicated servers.

For 99.99% websites (and nearly 100% of WordPress sites), only the single-thread performance matters. And in that aspect, even the Ryzen 5950X (used in their standard shared hosting) is way ahead of what most other 'semi-dedicated' hosting providers are using currently (AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon Gold).

This is exactly why I'm paying for an additional account with ExonHost on their standard shared hosting platform, because the real-world speed (especially for my use case, which is mostly static WordPress sites) is as good as their semi-dedicated hosting (which I'm still also using).

Well, just to remain technically correct, AMD's EPYC 4565P is as fast the Ryzen 9950X in terms of single-thread performance, but I'm yet to come across any web host running 4565Ps on their shared/semi-dedicated offerings.

These are my three tips related to web hosting & CPU: 

1. If you consider the CPU core limit of a hosting plan, it's worth researching the exact CPU model they are using. Otherwise, if host A is offering 4 cores of a CPU with a 4000 PassMark single-thread rating, while host B is offering 6 cores of a CPU with a 2000 PassMark single-thread rating, not only would your sites perform much much better on host A, but you're also getting LESS raw computational power on host B despite the allure of the two extra cores!
2. Similarly, don't consider the max. frequency of a CPU. It means very little. Because each year, the actual performance per unit of frequency (MHz or GHz) increases, so a current gen. CPU's 4 GHz isn't the same as a 5 year old CPU's 4 GHz. This is why you should rely on a frequency-agnostic metric like PassMark's single-thread rating (which actually matters for web hosting!).
3. And similarly, don't consider the multi-threading performance of a CPU when evaluating it for anything other than a true dedicated server (i.e. the whole server along with all of its resources is reserved just for you). Because even an older CPU with more cores can beat newer ones with fewer, faster cores. But on a shared/semi-dedicated/VPS plan, you're allocated a fixed amount of CPU cores, so the multi-threaded performance of the CPU is irrelevant.
   
   

Remember, most common website platforms (including WordPress) are only as fast as the underlying server's single-threaded CPU performance allows them to be.

Here's a summary from Google AI on how WordPress, specifically, uses CPU:

3. And terrible marketing...

You'd imagine putting together such cutting-edge hosting platforms must have cost them a lot of money, so they must surely be promoting it aggressively on their website?

Wrong.

I don't know when was the last time they updated their website, but I couldn't find any mention of the CPU models anywhere. In most prominent places across their website, only 'SSD storage' is mentioned, along with older tech like HTTP/2 and PHP 7: 

And you'll only find the mention of 'Enterprise-grade NVMe SSD' way down their homepage:

4. Have realistic expectations about uptime

Yes the '99.9% uptime guarantee' is a standard across most hosts, but realistically, you need to be prepared to face occasional downtimes, especially ones that are beyond the scope of ExonHost.

I monitor all my sites using UptimeRobot in 5-minute intervals. Most months pass by without a single incident, but occasionally there are months when my sites remain offline for brief periods (usually between 10 to 90 minutes).

Here's a real example (screenshot taken from my UptimeRobot dashboard).

The 99.971% figure above applies to the entire length of the monitoring (which is close to 5 yrs for this particular website). However, in ExonHost's defence, most short 'incidents' (around 5 minutes) tend to be false positives and something to do with UptimeRobot and Cloudflare.

Still, there have been numerous instances over the years that I can recall (and verify from my support tickets with them):

• Downtime due to hitting resource limits owing to a temporary surge in bot visits. Resolved on their end by applying new mod_security rules.
• Downtime due to issues at their datacenter(s). I think once it was a networking issue like a switch failure or similar and another time there was a temporary power disruption to the server.
• When they first brought in the Ryzen 5900X servers, I was facing intermittent reliability issues like occasional 503 errors. They had to migrate my account back to their older Xeon server for some time while they sorted out the issues in the newer servers.
• Once I was unable to login through wp-admin because their newly introduced security feature (CPGuard) was resulting in a ReCaptcha loop. Although it was very swiftly fixed after I brought it up.

I've been hosting my sites with them since 2017, and there were hardly any issues until mid-2023. The majority of the incidents I referred to above happened between 2023 and mid-2025. Since then, stability has been much better. But I still dug deep into my tickets history to paint a clear picture about the kind of uptime you can expect realistically.

In reality, far worse downtimes tend to be common with plenty of web hosts that otherwise provide a great service. Such as MDDHosting's infamous 2018 incident which led to several days of downtime (I only had a few non-serious sites hosted with them at the time).

ExonHost has recently introduced this new 'service status' page, which shows the status of all their servers, along with uptime stats, recent downtime incidents for each server along with the cause behind those.

5. Support is decent (Saleh Ahmed himself is amazing)

Towards the beginning, during the 2017 to 2021 period, I saw most of my technical support requirements getting fulfilled by Saleh Ahmed (co-owner of ExonHost) himself.

As the company (and number of clients) grew, they had to understandably hire more support staff, most of whom were decent to interact with.

However, to be honest, none of them came close to Saleh himself. He is a veteran in the hosting space. He could understand my (relatively complex) issues, diagnose the root cause and resolve it very very fast.

While he still chips in for critical issues (see below), minor issues often take some more explaining from my side before their other technical support staff can clearly grasp them and offer any meaningful resolution.

Unfortunately, I can't share screenshots of older (pre-2023) support tickets where he (very quickly) helped me resolve a myriad of issues, most of which were beyond the scope of their hosting service itself. This is due to the fact that they switched to a newer client support platform a couple of years ago which isn't displaying the older support tickets.

Still, a few examples of things he helped me with over the years:

• Way back in 2017, the onboarding process was extremely smooth. They swiftly migrated around 8GB of my data from the previous host, for free. Lots of big names in hosting charge you for migration beyond a couple of GBs.
• One of my sites was experiencing a (HTTP <-> HTTPS) redirect loop, and I couldn't figure out what was causing it. After I opened a support ticket, it was promptly fixed within minutes by Saleh.
• I received lots of help from Saleh in setting up email security records like SPF and DKIM properly. Their outbound email limits are also very very lenient compared to most other shared hosts that I've used.
• He diagnosed bot attacks (including hacking attempts) many times and advised me on ways to prevent them at a layer above (Cloudflare in my case). This eliminated unnecessary burden on the server itself and helped keep resource usage in check (currently the average CPU usage is less than 5% across both my accounts).

I also have to mention Masumul Haque (co-owner), who always promptly responded to my billing-related tickets, which never required any back-and-forth.

Coming back to the present times, sometimes relatively complex (but non-critical) requests take some time before I get a response. My guess would be their level 1 and 2 support techs are incapable of assisting with those, and it often takes an hour or two before I get a response.

This is an area where MDDHosting (I've been using them since 2011) easily outperforms ExonHost. With MDD, you get a useful response for even the most complex of queries within minutes. They even display the actual time taken to reply to a technical support ticket (average of last 7 days):

6. Resource & infrastructure-wise, more bang for your buck than any other host

Let's take their Turbo Plus plan, costing around $18.86/month.

You get 4 CPU cores (Ryzen 9950X) and 4GB of RAM, along with 50GB of NVMe storage (that too, PCIe 5.0), with the ability to host up to 30 websites.

There's no hidden limit in their TOS on how much resource you can use for how long, unlike many other web hosts offering similar specs (albeit at a higher price). Case in point: MechanicWeb ("You may not use 60% or more system resources for longer than 60 seconds." - their ToS).

For around $23-24 a month, you get between 3 to 6 cores and 3 to 6 GBs of RAM with providers like MonsterMegs, ChemiCloud, HostArmada and MechanicWeb. However, apart from MW, all others use CPUs that fall behind in single-thread performance. See the comparison below (click for full view) to get an idea.

SharedGrid offers Ryzen 9950X shared hosting at almost half the price (around $11/month), but you'll have to settle for Enhance as the control panel instead of the widely popular cPanel. You'll also have per-website limits of 2 cores and 2GB RAM, as opposed to twice that for the whole account (and available across all your websites) with ExonHost.

You also get MariaDB, an optimized, faster version of MySQL, across all of their shared and turbo plans. "Modern MariaDB is 13% to 36% faster than modern MySQL" - see here.

PHP 8.x is supported and enabled by default. You can enable and disable individual PHP modules and set php.ini values (like max memory) right within cPanel.

Not only did they not discontinue using cPanel throughout its regular, steep price increases over the years, they kept adding new security and customer-focused features. You get both cPGuard and Imunify360 / ImunifyAV to take care of security. 

Both allow you to scan your entire account for malware and potentially compromised files. You can even fix and quarantine affected files without the host forcing you to pay extra for malware removal (hosts like SiteGround do this).

cPGuard comes with a WAF (web application firewall) which blocks bad bots and saves precious server resources. This is especially useful if you're not a fan of solutions like Cloudflare and prefer to use the host's own DNS.

7. Easy scalability up to 8 Cores & 8 GB RAM

Within their shared/turbo platform, you can scale all the way from their most basic 'Starter' plan to the most premium 'Turbo Prestige' plan depending on your requirements. I'm attaching the resource limits of each of their Turbo (semi-dedicated) plans below:

The 'Turbo Prestige' plan comes at only $34.90/mo (on a monthly billing cycle) and the allocated resources (8 cores & 8GB RAM) should be enough to handle even the most demanding dynamic WordPress sites (including WooCommerce sites).

This allows you to avoid the hassles of a more complex product like a VPS or a dedicated server where you also need to pay for licenses for individual features.

The plan-switching is hassle-free and instant, as I've experienced a couple of times. You can upgrade/downgrade your current plan anytime on their customer panel.

8. Standard shared hosting plans offer good value for money

In the era of server-level caching solutions like LiteSpeed and full-page caching possibilities using the App for Cloudflare plugin, most small WordPress sites (which tend to be mostly static) hardly need much server resources.

Unless yours is a critical site already receiving thousands of visitors per day, I'll recommend you to start with the 'Standard' plan, costing $7.54/month (on a monthly billing cycle, or $66.03/year on an annual cycle).

With that plan, you'll have the option to host up to 5 websites, and have 10GB of storage (still the fastest NVMe kind) and 500GB of monthly bandwidth. Other plan-specific resource limits below:

As I mentioned above, these standard shared hosting plans are hosted on Ryzen 5950X servers (as opposed to the even faster Ryzen 9950X powered 'Turbo' platform). But honestly, at this level, you'll likely never notice the difference — especially if you're using caching and CDN in a proper way (I've outlined that in a dedicated section below).

9. High-frequency VPS option for those prefering complete control

Last year, they launched high-frequency VPS for users who won't settle for anything but the absolute best performance.

Check out their VPS section for pricing.

Of course, you get full server-management along with root-access and everything else you tend to expect from a managed VPS provider.

Just note that they don't offer any money-back guarantee for their VPS offerings.

10. Ideal caching & CDN setup for WordPress sites

ExonHost pays for the LiteSpeed Enterprise license for their shared & semi-dedicated servers, which means you'll be able to take full advantage of the LiteSpeed caching plugin as well as their CDN (QUIC.cloud).

Here's a benchmark showing the power of LiteSpeed web server along with the LiteSpeed WordPress caching plugin (which offers server-level caching):

The advantage of the 'LiteSpeed Enterprise' license used by ExonHost is that you get roughly 10GB of monthly bandwidth for free when using QUIC.cloud's 'standard' plan. This is different from their free plan offering only 6 POPs (CDN nodes).

For higher-traffic websites such as mine, I prefer to still rely on Cloudflare for CDN.

There's a very good workaround for Cloudflare not caching HTML content by default: the App for Cloudflare WordPress plugin. This allows your entire page (HTML) to be served from Cloudflare's entire range of global CDN nodes, without paying for Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) which costs $5 per month per domain.

It's relatively easy to configure (requires you to just paste your Cloudflare API key). This is especially useful if your target audience is spread out across more than a single region.

Check out the global TTFB of one of my sites below, hosted on ExonHost and using the AppForCF plugin to take advantage of Cloudflare full-page caching. Tested using the free FlyingTTFB tool.

The 'cloud HIT' icon indicates that the page HTML was directly served by a nearby Cloudflare node, bypassing the origin server entirely.

I rely on the LiteSpeed Cache plugin to optimize the front-end, like minifying and combining CSS, minifying and delaying JS, and various other optimizations.

To improve WordPress backend performance (for mostly static sites) and overall performance (for dynamic sites), you should enable Redis object caching via the LiteSpeed Cache plugin. This will also significantly reduce CPU and memory usage. Here's the exact settings I use:

If you see "connection test: failed", just ask their support to take a look at the server config to make sure Redis is enabled and properly configured. It might just be the case that Redis was somehow disabled on your specific server.

Note: you'll find a setting on the same page called "Redis Database ID", where 0 is the default value. You can use 0-100, just make sure you use a unique number for each site of yours hosted on the same server, to prevent objecting caching conflicts.

11. 4.9/5 TrustPilot rating & ICANN-accredition

As of writing this review, ExonHost has an almost perfect 4.9 rating on TrustPilot.

Most of the (few) 1-star reviews are a result of around 15 hours of downtime in 2021 across a few of their shared hosting servers hosted in the WebNX datacenter in Los Angeles. It occurred due to a fire incident provoking an emergency power cut-off.

A few of you might be skeptical about choosing ExonHost for your US/UK targeted sites, because of their Bangladeshi origin. Let me try to alleviate some of that fear. They're not only the #1 provider based in Bangladesh by size, they're also the first (and so far, only) ICANN-accredited domain registrar based in Bangladesh.

I've been using them exclusively for my US datacenter-hosted websites (Utah, Tampa and Dallas), and faced no issues specifically due to their Bangladeshi origin.

My Verdict

By now you've probably understood that I've had a mostly great experience with ExonHost so far. But that doesn't mean they're ideal for everyone.

Website: ExonHost.com

Have you tried ExonHost? Let me know about your experience by leaving a comment below.