What problem brings people to IHC
International Hosting Company (IHC, ihc.ru) is a Russian provider that has spent decades playing in the “as cheap as possible” niche. People come to it with a specific task: launch a site without spending noticeable money. A business card, a landing page, a small blog, a forum, a test project — anything you don’t want to pay corporate-infrastructure prices for.
And on that field IHC is genuinely strong. Shared plans start at the price of a cup of coffee, and annual billing drops the price further. For a start, that solves the core problem — “I have no budget, but I need a site tomorrow.”
Where cheap hosting starts to break
The problem with budget plans is universal, and IHC is no exception. Limits show up on three fronts:
1. Resources. CPU, memory, and process limits on cheap plans are tight. A light site on clean WordPress runs fine. But add a heavy theme, a dozen plugins, or a CRM — and you hit the ceiling while the site lags or times out.
2. Neighbor performance. On shared hosting you share a server with others. If someone’s project goes wild, everyone feels it. IHC mostly handles this, but you can’t cheat the nature of shared hosting.
3. Support. On cheap plans, support is ticket-based and doesn’t promise instant answers. For an urgent outage at peak hours, that can hurt.
What about VPS and servers
When a site outgrows shared hosting, IHC offers KVM-based VPS. Here you get root access, isolated resources, and SSD/NVMe drives — at mid-market prices. There are also dedicated servers for heavy workloads.
The logic is simple: shared to start for pennies, VPS to grow, a dedicated server to control all the hardware yourself.
How to avoid picking the wrong plan
The classic beginner mistake is grabbing the cheapest plan “for future growth” and expecting miracles. The rule is simple: pick a plan for your current load plus a 30–50% buffer. If a site already lags on shared, don’t torture support — move to VPS. If the project is a test, IHC’s cheap plan will honestly earn its price.
Affiliate program
IHC has an affiliate program: you bring customers and earn a percentage of their payments. The product is cheap, the buyer’s entry barrier is minimal, so affiliate links in “how to make a site for free” blogs convert well. For beginner arbitrageurs and webmaster bloggers, it’s a clear entry point into hosting affiliate programs.
Verdict
IHC honestly solves exactly one task — cheap hosting without surprises in basic scenarios. If your expectations match the price, you’ll be happy. If you expect cloud-level performance from a hundred-ruble plan, you’ll be disappointed — but that’s not the provider’s fault.