Founded in 2007, The email shop speaking web hosting and domain name registration company. Their head office is in Quebec and they have 4 datacenters on 2 continents: in France in Paris, and in Canada in Montreal. They have built a solid reputation over the years for the quality of their services.

Tese two hosts enjoy an excellent reputation from their customers and their shared hosting offer has many similarities. In order to find out which one stands out from the other, let’s take a deep look at their respective offerings.

Datacenters

The data center is the physical location of your website. This is a more important characteristic than it seems because you are leaving your site in an “unknown” place, moreover you have to trust them completely. Data loss is not uncommon and it is better to deal with professionals!

In addition, a data center close to your target audience is very important, in order to reduce the latency times between your website and the computer of your visitors. If your audience is French, you’d better not host their website in Australia! Otherwise you will have a latency of about half a second for each page visited.

O2Switch has a datacenter in Clermont-Ferrand in France . Their location is therefore very central in France, and it is therefore very good for your French audience.

PlanetHoster can boast of having several Datacenters in two strategic geographic locations: in France, they have a data center in Paris, and on the American continent, they have another in Montreal, Quebec .

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PlanetHoster therefore not only has a location in the most populous metropolis in France, and can also serve projects of international scope on the American continent. And best of all, you can “split” your accommodation in both Paris and Montreal for the same price !!! Yes!

O2Switch with its “unique offer”, like PlanetHoster with its “The World” formula, offer unlimited unlimited in their basic formula.

The good news is that both of them offer you to migrate your site for free from your old host! No problem if the technique doesn’t tell you too much!

Below is a summary table of their offers.

O2Switch             PlanetHoster

Number of sites Unlimited            Unlimited

Disk space           Unlimited            Unlimited

Database             Unlimited            Unlimited

Email     Unlimited            Unlimited

Disc type             NVMe SSD          SSD

Bandwidth          Unlimited            Unlimited

Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificates       Unlimited            Unlimited

Backups               2x / day 2x / day

Supported languages     PHP, Perl , Ruby, NodeJS, Python              PHP, Ruby, NodeJS, Python

SSH        Yes, but on request         Yes, directly

1 domain included           Yes         Yes

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Customer support

Even if it is not directly related to the performance of the server that hosts your sites, customer support is a very important criterion to take into account. Poor tech support not only creates a lot of frustration, it can cost you money if your site has a problem and no one can fix it quickly!

On this aspect, rest assured the two companies have arguments, but one has a slight advantage over the other.

O2Switch customer support

Let’s start with the French O2Switch. They offer different ways to contact their support: Phone, Online Chat, Email or Support Ticket.

By phone and chat , it is possible to join the Monday to Friday from 9am to 12pm and from 14h to 19h .

The rest of the time, you can contact their technical support 24/7 by email or support ticket from the customer interface

PlanetHoster also offers 24/7 technical support, which is a very good point.

Several ways are possible to contact them: Phone, Online Chat, or Support ticket.

Their telephone line has a very beautiful open beach and is free. The Paris telephone support meets the Monday to Thursday 24/24, Friday from 0:00 to 17h, and 14h 9h weekend .

Regarding the support ticket system, they are very responsive and respond at any time of the day and night every day of the year (they guarantee a response in less than 15 minutes). For having tested it, I can guarantee its effectiveness. I had a response in 7 minutes and I could only be satisfied when I think back to OVHcloud which leaves you at least 20 minutes on hold before taking your call! This saves precious time!

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The control panel

For all the management of your site, the two hosts offer a cPanel control panel. We no longer present him, he is the industry leader.

cPanel is therefore a very complete tool for managing your site but can sometimes be a bit “complex” for novices. To overcome this, PlanetHoster offers, in parallel with cPanel, its own control panel under the name of “World Panel”.

This control panel is intended to display and manage the main elements of your site for users who are a little less technical. It allows you to create email addresses, manage domain names, install “applications” like WordPress in a few clicks, browse your files, your databases, or even manage your Cron jobs.

Personally, I find that accessing cPanel and managing sites is a bit more “complicated” to tackle on O2Switch. The user experience offered by PlanetHoster is aimed at both beginners and experts.

SSH access

Personally considering myself as a “power user” it is very important for me to have SSH access for website management.

In particular, this allows a website to be transferred from one server to another very quickly and very efficiently without using FTP software.

On this point, I have a small complaint to address to O2Switch. You should know that SSH access is offered in their unique offer, HOWEVER, SSH access is not enabled by default on O2Switch . Below, the explanations taken from the O2Switch documentation:

To unblock SSH access for you, we need to whitelist you. Most of the time this is done by providing us with your IP address. You can find your IP address on a site like  mon-ip.io  for example. […] Multiple  IP addresses

can be  whitelisted if necessary. It suffices to give us the list of IPs, however the number of IPs provided must be reasonable, we cannot whitelist an entire range. If you do not have a fixed IP address  , you can give us a dyndns type  address  for whitelisting. If you don’t have a dyndns address you can sign up for a free service like

I therefore find it unfortunate that accessing SSH is so “complicated”. When I take out a hosting contract, I want to be able to take advantage of all the potential offered right away and as a customer I find it painful to have to contact support for so little.

Their whitelisting system can quickly become annoying if you travel or if you don’t have a fixed IP.

For their part, PlanetHoster provides SSH / sFTP access directly, when you create your space. The identifiers are accessible from the customer interface and it’s quite nice.

The price

Regarding the price, it is difficult to decide between them, because their price is identical! So beware, O2Switch is highlighting its offer at € 5 excl.tax / month while PlanetHoster plays carte blanche and posts € 6 incl.tax / month straight away.

Did you see the subtlety? Yes! the difference lies in the Excluding Taxes vs All Taxes Included. So, as a private individual, the O2Switch offer will cost you exactly € 6 including tax / month!

On this point, it’s a tie.

Possibilities for development

PlanetHoster offers an option to adjust the pool of resources allocated to its account. Basically, we have 8 CPU 16 GB RAM 16MB / s I / O that we can distribute as we want on several accommodation sub-accounts.

For example if you have two websites, you can choose to put everything on the same account OR to create two sub accounts, with for example 6 CPU 12 GB of RAM on one and 2 CPU 4 GB of RAM on the other .

If this configuration will be suitable for WordPress type sites, you can still increase your performance for a small price increase by adjusting these 3 parameters.

Regarding O2Switch, they only offer one offer but the initial resources should be sufficient for 90% of users.

They put 12 CPU and 48 GB of usable RAM per account. Which is more than enough to run a few WordPress sites.

Advantages and disadvantages

O2Switch: pros and cons

12 CPU 48 GB of usable RAM

Possibility to choose the IP of your site

Free domain

Optimized for WordPress

Less accessible to novices

Complicated SSH access

GET STARTED WITH O2SWITCH

PlanetHoster: pros and cons

Datacenters in Paris & Montreal

Possibility to choose the IP of your site via IPextension in cPanel

Really efficient 24/7 support

Domain offered for life

Optimized for WordPress

Possibility to switch to a LiteSpeed ​​VPN server for 2 € / month

The resources are divided if we create several isolated, but adjustable sub-accounts.

GET STARTED WITH PLANETHOSTER

PlanetHoster vs O2Switch: which one to choose?

The fight is very close between these two hosts as they are qualitative on many levels. They both have servers in France and offer unlimited at all.

For my part I chose one, it gets my preference but it does not matter much!

Click on the button below to discover the best web host between O2Switch and PlanetHoster