Web Hosting In UK

Best Web Domain and Hosting Services

 Web hosting companies usually offer three main paid-for tiers of hosting packages.

Shared hosting 
shared web hosting refers to a hosting service where you share a server with other sites and web hosting accounts. This is generally the most economical option for hosting small to medium size sites because expenditures per machine are covered bu more users.

Dedicated hosting
In dedicated web server hosting you have the entire web server for your own use. Faster performance is pretty much guaranteed. Dedicated hosting is much more flexible than the shared web hosting as you have full control over the server including choice of operating system, hardware etc..

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) or Cloud Servers 

It enable you to scale resource as and when you need it rather than being restricted by the limitations of a physical server. They draw from a pool of processing power, memory and storage depending on your requirement. A VPS runs its own copy of an operating system, and customers have superuser-level access to that operating system instance, so they can install almost any software that runs on that OS.

Finally collocated hosting enables you to purchase your own server and, while it will be kept in the vendor's data centre, you'll have complete control over it so you can install anything you need onto it.

Some providers arrange their web hosting deals according to business segments (small businesses, e-commerce, artists, resellers), features (WordPress compatibility, email hosting, cloud computing, managed service providers) or platforms (Linux or Windows).

Many packages include a wealth of features that you may or may not place value upon, including control panel, the ability to create online stores easily, easy site builder tools and varying levels of support (either on the phone or live chat).

Our list is made up of UK providers (those with a UK storefront with a UK phone number) as well as some foreign web hosts that comply with several ground rules like having EU data centres, a right to cancel, a cooling period, a full refund policy and/or a free trial period.

So first, we've picked out a bunch of deals that are 'best for WordPress or other features' followed by a run-down of our favourite deals from the best web hosts.

Best value web hosting deal:

123-reg.co.uk | Linux Essentials | Web space: 10GB | Included domains: 1 | £2.49 per month
The features you need to make your first personal or community website a success with an included domain and hosting for a single site. You can host a MySQL database up to 500MB, plus you get up to 10GB to store all your pages, posts and images.

View this deal: Linux Essentials

Best WordPress hosting deal:

Fasthosts | Ignite | Web space: 10GB | Included domains: 1 | £1.99 per month
As well as 24/7 support and 10GB of web hosting space with dedicated server cpanel, you can have two databases up to 1GB in size. You don't get a dedicated SSL certificate and advanced scripting, so more complex sites will need to plump for the £6.99 a month deal called Momentum (20GB of space).

View this deal: Fasthosts Ignite

Best web hosting deal for a small business:

1&1 | Plus | Web space: Unlimited | Included domains: 1 | £3.99 per month for 12 months, then £6.99 a month
Unlimited web space and an unlimited number of websites. What more could you want than that? There's full SSL certificate support, while you can have up to 500 MySQL databases plus there's 24/7 support. 1&1 also provides 'click and build' web apps, meaning you can rapidly roll out new features, too.

View this deal: 1&1 Plus

Best Windows web hosting deal:

Windows hosting is necessary for websites that use ASP.NET and MS SQL, which are only available on the Windows hosting platform.

EUKHost | Windows Intermediate | Web space: 50GB | Included domains: 0, but 3 supported | £4.99 per month

As well as support for three domains, you can have unlimited sub domains and email addresses with this package. There's also 24/7 technical support and unlimited monthly bandwidth, too!

View this deal: Windows Intermediate

Web hosting services in the UK...

123-reg

123-reg started as a domain registrar (hence the name) but rapidly expanded beyond selling just dotcom domain names. Its packages start from only £2.99 per month (Linux Essentials, payable yearly) and come with at least one free .co.uk domain name and 100 mailboxes.

All websites are hosted in a UK data centre and are therefore ruled by British laws. The secure facility is served by a 10Gb network connection with direct acces to major internet exchanges.

• Check out 123-reg hosting packages

Heart Internet

UK-based web hosting means UK-based in-house support most of the time. It is the case with Heart Internet which promises all year free support that deal with issues in minutes rather than hours. Like for 123-reg, Heart Internet servers are hosted in UK data centres (the company is German-owned) and all packages come with ample space (from 5GB), bandwidth (from 30GB) and email boxes (from 1,000).

Its beginner package is called Starter Pro and at £2.99 per month (plus a £11.99 set-up fee) is ideal for small websites and beginners alike. A novel feature is its smartphone control panel application that allows users to manage their websites and domain name from a smartphone or tablet.

• Check out Heartinternet hosting packages

Easyspace

One of the grandees in the UK web hosting and registrar landscape, Easyspace has been around for more than 18 years (having been launched in 1997). It has 10 data centres across the country and not surprisingly, offers UK based support, both via phone and online, like most of the competition.

It offers unlimited bandwidth on all its servers with free setup and 100% uptime guarantee. Its packages start from only £28.80 per year (for the basic Pic 'N' Mix) with 3GB space, no database or email accounts. You do get multi-year discounts, free Google Adwords credit (£75), free stock photos and a free domain name.

• Check out Web hosting from Easyspace

Planet Hippo

Easyspace's logo is an orange elephant while Planet Hippo's a hippopotamus; clearly there's a theme here. One of the smaller of the web hosting services in this listing, Planet Hippo has managed to keep its prices at a lower level compared to the rest of the competition. Its One Account Linux costs just £1 per month excluding VAT.

Its cPanel Unlimited is what steals the show though, offering "unlimited everything" for just under £3 per month. You also get a free domain with that package. As with other service providers, you get 30-day warranty, 24/7 UK-based support (but not by phone) and all of Planet Hippo's servers are based in the UK.

• Check out the web hosting offers at Planet Hippo

GoDaddy

The US-based web hosting company is one of the largest in the game and probably the best known one as well. It is also the largest domain name registrar in the world with tens of millions of domain names in its portfolio.

Its cheapest package, is decently kitted at £4.80 per month, rising to £6 after the first year. It is the most expensive in the comparison.

Like most web hosters, it comes with free backup and restore, an uptime guarantee (99.9%), unlimited storage (100GB for the Economy package) and bandwidth and a free domain with the annual plan.

A pretty nifty feature provided by Godaddy on all its package is the ability to increase hosting capacity on demand (e.g. when you experience a sudden surge in traffic) from within your hosting account.

• Check out GoDaddy web hosting deals

1&1

Oneandone is the other big web hosting player, vying with Godaddy for world domination, and is the biggest one in Europe. Located in Germany, it offers a bewildering array of services with prices starting from as little as £2.99 per month (excluding VAT).

While it doesn't provide with a lot of freebies (you don't get a free domain for example and you only get 10GB of storage), OneandOne makes up for it with a free web design software (NetObjects Fusion 2013), 24/7 phone and email support, a graphics archive, a 30-day money back warranty, transparent replication (they call it Geo-redundancy) and a whopping 300Gbps network connectivity.

• Check out 1&1 web hosting deals

UK2

Based in London in start-up territory (Shoreditch), UK2 offers the cheapest starting package of all the providers in the list at 99p a month (although you need to subscribe for two years). It also offers affordable unlimited packages with unlimited emails, bandwidth, free SSL certificate (great for improved security and search visibility), a free domain and a dedicated IP.

Prospective customers will like the lack of setup fees or hidden charges, the 30-day money back guarantee plus 24/7 UK-based phone support on a freephone number and UK-based data centres.

• Check out the web hosting packages from UK2

OVH

This is a French web hosting company you probably never heard about but OVH is the third largest hosting company after Digital Ocean and Amazon with more than one million servers scattered over 17 data centres.

It also provides with web hosting services for as little as £2.03 per month with its Personal package offering unlimited traffic, a free domain name and even a GeoCache CDN (content delivery network) that essentially keeps copies of sites in different locations to slash the time users have to wait to access your website, increase redundancy and improve your search ranking.

• Check out the OVH web hosting packages.

Fasthosts

Fasthosts is another web hosting company that managed to thrive over the past decade, often adorning the back pages of our tech magazines. Based in Gloucester, the company, now owned by German giant, United Internet, states that it has UK data centres and offers free 24/7 phone support.

Like most of its competitors, it offers a 30-day money back warranty and all its packages come with unlimited bandwidth. It is also quite generous with a massive 50GB web space, £155 worth of online advertising vouchers and a free domain name. Note that paying upfront for three years slashes the price of the hosting to just under £4.60 per month.

• Check out the Fasthosts web hosting packages

One

One is different from the other web hosting company here as it pitches itself more as a web builder than a web hoster, encouraging potential clients to use its own web editor, one that doesn't require coding.

What's even more surprising is that it offers a year's free hosting (although you need to pay £10.80 for the initial setup) for its entry level package (one that still comes with a free domain name, unlimited email accounts and unlimited traffic). The company seems to focus exclusively on the shared hosting business and support is exclusively web-based, great when you are at your desk with internet access, not so much when you're away and roaming.

Best Wordpress Hosting

Wordpress Hosting

So you started blogging on WordPress our of passion & like million others you started your journey with entry-level shared hosting. Now your blog is getting great traffic & it’s becoming a source of your bread butter, just like mine.

One fine day, your existing hosting company emails you to “Buzz off” as they can’t handle your website load. In most of the cases, a non-technical blogger would feel dishearten, dissatisfied & helpless. 

If your answer is “No”, then you are probably already on a hosting company that can handle high traffic site or you are yet to experience the sweet taste of millions of page views.  This guide or call it your resource for hosting selection will help you to pick the hosting for your growing or overgrown site.

Another aspect that limits the growth of a WordPress blog is the use of plugins. WordPress can be great when you are utilizing the plugins. You will often see many WordPress users recommending you to limit the number of WordPress plugins as it would affect the loading time of your site. This is partially correct & happens when you are using a badly coded plugin.

The reason you can’t make most out of plugins is the technology limitations of your hosting. If you are on a shared hosting, you might have experienced it at least once. Haven’t you?

The right question that you should be asking right now is:

What is limiting your blog growth at this point?

Is it the technology or your fear of growing big?

If it’s the technology, then you have little to worry about. As in today’s date hosting companies have understood the need of time & we have few great options for hosting high traffic WordPress site. 

Today I will be sharing a list of those awesome WordPress hosting companies that are built to handle high-traffic sites. They are not going to be as cheap as shared hosting companies which typically comes in the range of $3-$10/month. But these awesome companies would ensure your blog can handle the growth that you are anticipating.

WordPress Hosting companies for high-traffic sites:

Let’s have a look at those hosting companies that you can trust for your growing WordPress blog.

Kinsta Managed Hosting:

Kinsta hosting is top in the managed WordPress hosting as they build specially for hosting heavy WordPress sites. If you like technical details, they use Nginx, HHVM, PHP5-FPM, Redis and Memcache to make your site blazing fast. I have experienced loading time of less than 1 second 

My experience with them is great so far, and their tech support is par excellent. Their entry level hosting plan starts with $100/month which let you host 1 WordPress sites.Enterprises should look at their Load balanced plans which start with $870/month which ensures your website never go down. 

What you would like the most is their excellent customer support. Last time (In May 2016), when my site shifted to PHP7 on Kinsta Google cloud platform, I faced a lot of issues because of using many old plugins. Their team including CEO ‘Mark Gavalda‘ helped me at every point to fix all the issues. I have never had such a royal experiencewith any other WordPress hosting.

If you are looking for the best solution for your growing WordPress blog, you should host it on Kinsta Hosting

Pros: 

• Unlimited visits.
• Pricing is competitive & service quality is excellent.
• 10 server location
• SSD storage
• Free Website backup
• Staging & Free SSL

Cons:

• Limited use of Javascript.

After running ShoutMeLoud on Kinsta hosting for last one year, I could say it’s a top notch solution for heavy traffic WordPress blog.

PageLy:

Another top hosting option for high-traffic WordPress blogs. They also allow unlimited visits & their service quality & hardware offering is top-notch. The good thing about them is, they are affordable for entry-level bloggers to who have the limited budget.

You can pick the right plan for you from their seven different plans. Do notice the bandwidth column when picking up Pagely plans or you can always add additional bandwidth any day of the month.

Pros:

• WordPress multi-site support
• Free-site migration of 2 sites

Cloudways:

Before moving to Kinsta hosting, I was with Cloudways for 4 months & they were pretty good with their offering. You can host your site on DigitalOcean server (DO) or Amazon. They provide custom dashboard which makes it easier for you to install a new WordPress site, or you can migrate all your existing WordPress Blogs. One of the best thing about them is that you can host any Website using Cloudways & they are not only limited to WordPress. This also creates an issue with the support, as they are fine-tuned for all the platform.

If you have basic knowledge of troubleshooting WordPress, I would suggest go for Cloudways. The major benefit which you would be getting here is the pricing which comes down to a cheaper price. You can also consider hosting your entry level WordPress site with them, as their most reasonable plan comes for $10/month.

In short, you will be hosting your WordPress site on a Cloud server with no requirement for technical knowledge.

Pros:

• Host on DigitalOcean server.
• Their dashboard is user-friendly.
• Perfect for entry level as well as enterprise level websites
• Scale up or down a server in real-time.
• Pricing is cheap & you can customize your hardware requirement.
• Offers 14 days free trial & free site migration.

Cons:

• Support is average.
• Too many options could be overwhelming.

More quality WP hosting options but with limited visits:

After all, the reason you are buying a premium hosting to handle the high-traffic. Is int it?

This holds true when we think from a blogger perspective. Now, WordPress is not limited to blogging & many businesses have their blog, job portal & many other use cases for WordPress. In many cases, the traffic requirement is less and requirement of rock-solid infrastructure is more.

If you need an enterprise-grade architecture for your WordPress site, here are some of the best options. Do pick their plan according to your monthly traffic requirement.

• WPEngine (recommended for traffic not more than 400,000 Views/Month)
• Presslabs
• Pressidium

By the end always remember, there can never be a single recommendation as once your site is matured for having a premium hosting, you need to consider factors like Pricing, features, scalability, support to pick the right hosting.