Exabytes

What Exabytes actually is

Exabytes is the biggest homegrown hosting story in Southeast Asia, and it is worth understanding what that means before comparing it to the global names on serverspotter.com. The company started in 2001 as a part-time reseller called hostkaki.com, run by Chan Kee Siak, then a 19-year-old student in Penang, Malaysia. Two decades on it serves more than 160,000 businesses across 121 countries from offices in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, running over 3,000 servers and hosting more than 100,000 websites. It remains privately held and independent, while most regional rivals have been absorbed into larger groups such as Newfold Digital.

The product range is broad rather than deep: domains, shared and WordPress hosting on cPanel or Plesk, business email, SSL, NVMe VPS, managed dedicated servers, colocation in Malaysia, plus a pile of digital-business services (site building, e-commerce, SEO, ad management). This is a one-stop shop for small and medium businesses in the ASEAN market, not an API-first developer cloud. In our view that framing matters: if you are looking for hourly-billed compute with a Terraform provider, you are shopping in the wrong aisle. If you run an agency in Kuala Lumpur or Singapore hosting forty client sites and you want a support desk that answers on WhatsApp in your timezone, Exabytes is a serious candidate.

Ownership and funding are also part of the picture. In March 2019 the Malaysian government-linked private equity firm Ekuinas invested roughly US$10.7 million for a stake, and the group has grown partly through acquisitions such as HostPro2u in 2018 and the enterprise cloud provider Iconz-Webvisions in 2018. It is an established operator with regional institutional backing, not a reseller of someone else's reseller.

Pricing: what you really pay

The single most important thing to know about Exabytes pricing is that promo rates and renewal rates are different animals. On the Singapore shared-hosting line, the EBiz Mini plan is advertised around S$16.99 per month (roughly $13.25 per month) and renews at S$66.99 per month; the cPanel AI Beginner plan lists at S$19.99 per month promo and renews at S$80.99 per month. That is the three-to-four-times renewal jump we keep flagging across budget and mid-market hosting, and it is the reason we always tell readers to budget the renewal price, not the sticker. The fine print on Exabytes' own VPS pages confirms the mechanic: promotion pricing applies to new registrations only, and prices revert to default on renewal.

VPS is where the numbers get more defensible. On the global storefront, the SSD VPS Starter plan starts at $3.99 per month for 1 vCPU, 0.5 GB RAM, 20 GB SSD storage and 500 GB data transfer — an honest micro-instance price. The Malaysian NVMe line starts at RM 45 per month for the C1 configuration (1 vCPU, 4 GB memory, 50 GB NVMe storage, 2 TB monthly transfer at 100 Mbps), and the Singapore NVMe line starts at S$20.71 per month for a 2 vCPU / 4 GB / 100 GB NVMe / 4 TB configuration. Longer commitments cut the effective rate sharply: a 36-month term on the Malaysian NVMe C1 works out around MYR 45 per month against a monthly-billing rate that is several times higher, and setup fees are waived on quarterly and longer VPS terms.

Dedicated servers are managed and priced accordingly. The Singapore Value plan runs $79 per month for a quad-core Xeon E3 with 32 GB memory and 2x2 TB drives in RAID1, including a lite management plan and daily backup with 14-day retention. Colocation in Malaysia starts at RM 381.15 per month for a single 1U rack mount with 100 Mbps access. The 100-day money-back guarantee on most shared plans is one of the longest in the industry, but note the entry EBiz Mini plan is excluded from it.

Performance & infrastructure

Exabytes runs its own facilities in Malaysia — the Kuala Lumpur datacenter at Menara Aik Hua, a Cyberjaya facility, and Suntech at Penang Cybercity — and these are presented as Tier 3, ISO 27001 certified and PCI DSS compliant. Servers are also hosted in Singapore, Indonesia and the United States, which gives the group coverage across APAC and a US option. If data residency matters to you, confirm the specific datacenter for your specific plan before ordering: the primary shared-hosting infrastructure is Malaysian, and Singapore-only residency is a per-plan question, not a portfolio-wide guarantee.

The 2026 lineup is built on NVMe storage with a choice of real cPanel or Plesk, which is flexibility few budget hosts offer. The VPS plans include weekly off-server backup and one snapshot, with server uptime monitoring on the compute-optimized tiers. Dedicated plans include daily off-server backup with 14-day retention, delivered via Idera R1Soft. Bandwidth on Malaysian and Singapore links is split by policy: 80 percent of the 100 Mbps port is allocated for local (domestic) access and 20 percent for international traffic. For a Malaysian business serving Malaysians this is fine; for a Malaysian site serving Europe it is a real constraint, and it is buried in fine print rather than the plan table. We consider that a transparency weakness.

The latency argument for the region is straightforward and worth stating plainly. A visitor in Kuala Lumpur or Singapore reaching a US-hosted site typically waits through 180 to 250 ms round trips; serving from a Malaysian Tier 3 facility removes most of that. We have not run our own benchmark suite against Exabytes, so we will not put numbers on its compute or disk performance — our benchmarks page covers the providers we actually tested. What we can say is that the hardware spec sheets (NVMe throughout, 100 Mbps ports, RAID1 on dedicated) are mainstream and honestly presented.

Reliability posture is reasonable for the segment: a published 99.9% uptime SLA, 24/7 monitoring and support, and facilities with certification badges. The track record is two decades of continuous operation through several acquisitions, which counts for something in a segment where hosts vanish regularly.

Where it falls short

Start with the renewal multiplier. Paying four times the promo rate at renewal is not a hidden fee — it is disclosed — but it means the headline comparison against global budget hosts is misleading. On pure price-performance at list rates, an entry NVMe VPS at RM 45 per month is fair rather than exceptional; you are paying a regional premium for local infrastructure and local support.

The second issue is international bandwidth. The 80/20 local-to-international allocation on 100 Mbps ports is unusual globally and is not surfaced prominently. Anyone whose audience is outside Malaysia or Singapore should pin down the actual international allocation before committing.

Third, this is not a developer platform. In our research we found no S3-compatible object storage, no managed Kubernetes, and no GPU instances in the product catalog; DDoS protection on VPS is listed among add-ons that require additional setup rather than included baseline protection, though colocation packages do bundle DDoS mitigation. Billing is term-based (monthly and longer), with no hourly option that we could find. Fine if you want a website or VPS; wrong if you want programmable infrastructure.

Finally, the group structure creates some confusion. Separate Malaysian, Singaporean, Indonesian and global storefronts publish different currencies, different plan names and different promotions for overlapping products, which makes true price comparison harder than it should be.

Who should pick this

We would pick Exabytes when the audience is in Malaysia, Singapore or Indonesia and support in local language and local channels (including WhatsApp) matters as much as the spec sheet. It fits SMEs, agencies managing client sites, businesses that want domain, email and hosting under one bill, and anyone needing colocation in Kuala Lumpur or Penang. The 100-day guarantee makes a low-risk trial possible on most shared plans.

We would skip it for European or North American audiences, where latency and the international bandwidth split work against you and regional players give better per-dollar specs. We would also skip it for teams that need hourly billing, S3-compatible storage, Kubernetes, or GPU compute — those are product gaps, not pricing gaps. If renewal price is your main decision variable, compare the three-year cost against regional alternatives before signing.

Key takeaways

• Largest independent Southeast Asian hosting group: founded 2001 in Penang, 160,000+ business customers, 3,000+ servers, offices in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia
• Own Tier 3 Malaysian datacenters (Kuala Lumpur, Cyberjaya, Penang) plus Singapore, Indonesia and US presence; ISO 27001 and PCI DSS on the colocation facilities
• Honest entry pricing (SSD VPS Starter at $3.99 per month, Malaysian NVMe VPS from RM 45 per month) undermined by renewals that run three to four times the promo rate
• NVMe storage, real cPanel or Plesk choice, weekly off-server backups and snapshots on VPS, daily backups with 14-day retention on dedicated servers
• Watch the fine print: 80/20 local-to-international bandwidth split on 100 Mbps ports, promo pricing for new registrations only, entry plan excluded from the 100-day guarantee
• Not a developer cloud — no hourly billing, no S3-compatible storage, no Kubernetes or GPU products in the catalog

Sources

• https://exabytes.my/about
• https://www.exabytes.com/hosting/vps-hosting
• https://www.exabytes.my/servers/nvme-vps
• https://www.exabytes.sg/servers/nvme-vps
• https://www.exabytes.com/hosting/dedicated-server-asia
• https://www.exabytes.com/hosting/malaysia-dedicated-server
• https://www.exabytes.my/servers/colocation
• https://www.hostprodigy.com/host/exabytes
• https://besthostlab.com/provider/exabytes-malaysia
• https://malaysia4u.com/review/exabytes