BigScoots

BigScoots, founded in 2010 and based in Chicago, is a managed hosting provider built for performance and personalized support. It powers over 17,000 websites worldwide, with services including shared, VPS, hybrid, and dedicated hosting. Its infrastructure is anchored in a Chicago data center, partially backed by renewable energy, and optimized for speed and reliability, especially for WordPress users and small businesses.

Hosting plans start at $6.95/month for shared and $34.95/month for managed WordPress, including free migrations, a 99.99% uptime guarantee, and 24/7 support with an average ~90-second response time. While the single data center may limit global reach, BigScoots excels at hands-on support and consistent performance, making it a strong fit for Hostalog readers who value quality over gimmicks.

BigScoots offers transparent, performance-focused pricing across its hosting plans:

• Shared Hosting: Starts at $6.95/month (billed annually) for 5 GB SSD storage, supporting up to 5 domains. Higher tiers provide 10–20 GB storage with unlimited domains, mailboxes, and SSL certificates.

• Managed WordPress Hosting: Begins at $34.95/month for the Starter plan, which includes 10 GB storage, 1 site, and 1 TB bandwidth. Annual billing offers a discount, reducing the monthly cost to $31.46.

All shared, reseller, and managed WordPress hosting plans come with a 45-day money-back guarantee, allowing users to try the service risk-free. Payments can be made via credit/debit cards and PayPal, with options for monthly or annual billing.

Note: Shared hosting plans are subject to "fair use" CPU and memory limits to prevent resource overuse. Users with resource-intensive sites may experience throttling and might consider upgrading to higher-tier plans for dedicated resources.

Uptime

We perform thousands of uptime checks each day to ensure our reviews are accurate and reliable. The statistics below are based on the uptime checks we have performed in the last 30 days.

BigScoots guarantees 99.99% uptime, backed by SSD storage and a Cloudflare Enterprise partnership for optimized global routing. While scheduled maintenance (up to 24 hours annually) is excluded, actual downtime is rare - Hostalog's monitoring hasn't recorded a single outage in recent months.

If downtime occurs, BigScoots offers service credits based on duration:

• No credits for the first 59 minutes
• 5% of your monthly fee for each additional full hour of downtime
  So, 2 hours of downtime earns 10% credit, calculated using BigScoots' internal monitoring.

Data Center Locations

BigScoots operates from a single data center in Chicago, Illinois, housed in a facility that is now managed by ColoHouse following their acquisition of Steadfast Networks in 2021. This data center is eqiped with N+1 redundancy for power, cooling, and network connectivity.

For users outside the US, Cloudflare's CDN (included free) helps reduce latency, though speed may still vary for Asia or Europe. The green energy partnerships also appeal to eco-conscious users. Overall, this setup works well for US-based sites, with Cloudflare enhancing global content delivery.

BigScoots has data centers in the following countries:

Storage

BigScoots' shared hosting includes 5–20 GB of SSD storage. Managed WordPress hosting starts at 10 GB, scaling up to 250 GB or unlimited, depending on the tier. VPS plans range from 25–100 GB, while dedicated servers offer customizable storage options. All plans use RAID10 storage with caching, which improves speed and redundancy.

While these storage limits are modest compared to some competitors, BigScoots prioritizes performance stability and consistent availability over overselling. Shared hosting users are subject to fair use policies - sites that consume excessive CPU or memory may face resource throttling. However, WordPress, VPS, and dedicated plans come with dedicated resources, making them better suited for heavier traffic and more demanding workloads.

BigScoots offers 24/7 support through live chat, email, phone, and tickets, with an average response time of under 90 seconds. The US-based team is known for being proactive, resolving issues like Cloudflare misconfigurations without user input. Customers on Trustpilot frequently praise the support for its responsiveness, technical expertise, and personal touch. Some even mention staff members by name for going above and beyond.

Support focuses on site-specific issues, with more hands-on help available for users on managed WordPress, VPS, or dedicated plans. Shared hosting users may face some limits for high-resource fixes, but the knowledge base offers clear guidance for common tasks like DNS, backups, and performance tuning.

BigScoots' shared hosting includes cPanel, making it easy to manage sites, emails, and databases. Managed WordPress plans come with a custom dashboard tailored for updates, backups, and security. Though BigScoots doesn't offer a site builder like ProSite, it provides one-click installs for 300+ apps, helping beginners get started quickly.