Cool Handle Review: Plans, Prices & Specs

What CoolHandle was

CoolHandle sold cheap shared hosting to small businesses: unlimited-style storage and bandwidth, a free domain with privacy, nightly backups, a 30-day money-back guarantee and 24/7 support. Its final published prices, captured while the site was still live, were $3.95 a month for shared hosting against a regular rate of $20.95, $5.95 for WordPress hosting and $19.95 for reseller hosting. Over the years it also listed Windows hosting, VPS and dedicated servers, but shared hosting was always the core.

Its origins are unusual. CoolHandle’s own about page described it as a subsidiary of DomainSystems, Inc., a domain services company, and said that CoolHandle began by hosting DomainSystems’ own websites before growing into a hosting provider in its own right. The copyright line on its site ran from 2002, which is the earliest date the brand itself claimed; some reviews say 2001, and we could not confirm either from a primary source.

What happened

The storefront closed in late 2024

The last working capture of coolhandle.com in the Internet Archive is from November 2024, complete with the prices above and a 2024 copyright line. Captures after that are redirects. No pricing page survives anywhere, so the offer described above no longer exists in any form.

The domain now leads to a hosting.com panel

Checked in September 2026, coolhandle.com redirects to a client area on its own subdomain whose page title is the hosting.com customer panel. That is a billing and support login for existing customers, not a shop: there are no plans and no prices behind it.

Who owns the customers

CoolHandle is listed among the brands of World Host Group, whose flagship brand is hosting.com, the former A2 Hosting, rebranded in 2025. That matches what the customer panel shows. We have to be careful with the detail here: hosting.com’s own mergers and acquisitions page lists many brands but does not name CoolHandle, so while the destination is clear, the date and terms on which CoolHandle joined the group are not something we can state.

If you are still a CoolHandle customer

• Sign in through the client area the old domain sends you to, and use its password reset if your credentials are refused. Support requests go to the hosting.com side, not to CoolHandle.
• Check what the next invoice will be. Promotional rates from a closed brand are the first thing to disappear at renewal, and the $20.95 regular rate on that old shared plan is a reminder of the gap.
• Take a full backup of files, databases and mailboxes now, and keep it somewhere independent of the hosting account.
• Confirm where your domain is registered and that its contact email still reaches you, since CoolHandle grew out of a domain business and many customers hold both with it.
• If you are leaving, unlock the domain, request the transfer authorization code, move the website, then email, then the domain itself.

What to use instead

The realistic comparison is a cheap independent shared host that still publishes what it charges at renewal. Staying with hosting.com is also a reasonable option, since your account is effectively there already; it is a much bigger operation than CoolHandle was, though it is a group of acquired brands rather than an independent company, which is the same pattern that ended CoolHandle.

Why this page exists

We keep reviews of retired hosting brands online because people still search for them, still link to them and still have accounts, invoices or domains tied to them. A dead page or a silent redirect to a sales funnel does not answer the question those readers actually have, which is what happened and what to do next. This page is a status record, not a recommendation: we have not tested CoolHandle and we cannot, because there is nothing left to buy. Everything above is based on what the brand’s own domain does today, what the Internet Archive captured while the site was still live, and what the successor company publishes for the customers it inherited. If the situation changes we will update the page rather than delete it.