Which UK web hosting is the best ?

[Deleted member 175822]

I'll tell you who NOT to use

UK2.net - NEVER EVER EVER USE THEM unless of course you want to kill of your business and be treated with contempt on premium rate support lines by borderline simpletons.

Avoid them like the plague.

Best advice do alot of research and look at reviews prior to going with anyone and usually if they seem very very cheap, the service is very very crap.

Look for companies with 24/7 support, UK phone support with no premium rates etc there are some great companies out there.

You get what you pay for.

 

Vidahost all day every day for me folks.

 

[joinuniverse]

I am actually interested to have a clean list with bullet points of the top 5 dedicated hosting firms in UK.

Based on my experience the criteria for rating a hosting would be:

50% speed and reliability
25% customer support
25% price

Any advice?

Many thanks,

 

[Jolt.co.uk]

I am actually interested to have a clean list with bullet points of the top 5 dedicated hosting firms in UK.

Based on my experience the criteria for rating a hosting would be:

50% speed and reliability
25% customer support
25% price

Any advice?

Many thanks,

There's a hugely diverse list. Are you after ultra cheap, none-server class hardware (ala OVH/1&1)? Does your budget allow you to choose a provider with a better network and real server infrastructure? You weighted 50% for speed/reliability (this is great!) but still, a dedicated server can start at below £100/mo and go into 4 figures for just a single server, depending on hardware spec.

 

[joinuniverse]

What would be a decent required capacity for a website that receives 200k hits pcm?

Does the following dedicated server makes sense?

4CPU 2ghz
4GB RAM
50GB HDD
Storage NAS/SAN (backups)

As far as I was adviced, the use of CPANEL lower the overall server performance dramatically. And unless you are a reseller, you actually dont need the cpanel at all if you have a webmail panel (create/delete accounts, etc) and FTP SSH access. A PHPMYADMIN to access database and that's it.

Any thoughts or pricing ideas for the above mentioned?

Thanks,

 

[Jolt.co.uk]

What would be a decent required capacity for a website that receives 200k hits pcm?

Does the following dedicated server makes sense?

4CPU 2ghz
4GB RAM
50GB HDD
Storage NAS/SAN (backups)

As far as I was adviced, the use of CPANEL lower the overall server performance dramatically. And unless you are a reseller, you actually dont need the cpanel at all if you have a webmail panel (create/delete accounts, etc) and FTP SSH access. A PHPMYADMIN to access database and that's it.

Any thoughts or pricing ideas for the above mentioned?

Thanks,

It somewhat does, yes. I'll work through it for you:

4 x CPUs @ 2.00Ghz - just note that Ghz isn't the best way to measure overall CPU performance these days. Just look for a modern CPU. For your needs an Intel E3 v2/v3 would be idea. Stay away from older, slower, more power hungry CPUs - even if the clock speed is "higher". If the host doesn't highlight the CPU model it's probably because its older

4GB RAM - I'd recommend 8GB minimum these days. RAM is cheap

50GB HDD - look for enterprise hard drives, not slower/less reliable desktop hard drives

Backup space - self explanatory.

cPanel does not dramatically lower the overall server performance. Yes, it will consume some resources but its overhead is not huge. The overhead it does use is easily worth it for making your life easier to run the server, create accounts, etc.

Matt

 

[Alan]

What would be a decent required capacity for a website that receives 200k hits pcm?

Does the following dedicated server makes sense?

4CPU 2ghz
4GB RAM
50GB HDD
Storage NAS/SAN (backups)

As far as I was adviced, the use of CPANEL lower the overall server performance dramatically. And unless you are a reseller, you actually dont need the cpanel at all if you have a webmail panel (create/delete accounts, etc) and FTP SSH access. A PHPMYADMIN to access database and that's it.

Any thoughts or pricing ideas for the above mentioned?

Thanks,

200k hits per month is not a lot if it is spread out (about one hit per 10 seconds), but if your hits come in peaks you will get a different answer.

Assuming you have only 1 website and pages are optimised to around 100k each then it is only 20gig of bandwidth.

It is probably true that cpanel would use up unnecessary resources, the main thing I don't like about cpanel is it effectively modifies many aspects of the way Linux operates and so it is very confusing if you want to start to do some advanced administration.

If you are going down a dedicated server route (of even virtual server), then if you don't know what you should be doing in security hardening it, make sure you get a fully managed server or an expert to set it up.

When you ask about pricing are you talking about having a hosting company provide the server or are you buying for yourself and putting it in your own datacentre (if the later then you will need to consider whether you need a standby server too)

In terms of pricing a small server such as that you probably could get for £50 from a hosting company and then maybe another £50 for full management.

However, I would ask why you would want a small dedicated server rather than a virtual server. In general, in my opinion, a virtual server gives all the advantages and disadvantages of managing your own server, except the upgrade path is very quick, e.g. switching from 4gb to 8gb is done by the hosting company in minutes.

 

[joinuniverse]

Thanks for all the valuable input.

I was looking for a hosting company to "host" my website.

So to sum up, I suggested the following for a website receiving 200k hits per month:

4CPU 2ghz
4GB RAM
50GB HDD
Storage NAS/SAN (backups)
No Cpanel (as it lower the overall server performance)
Forgot to say this server charges me £0.1 per GB of monthly bandwidth tranfer
Fully managed - these guys are experts in setting up cache and memcache to improve overall website performance (i.e I had massive JS queries to database of millions that were wrote in the HDD and making the website allocate huge resources and RAM sometimes collapsing. These guys managed to get this sorted with cache). This service of optimization and monitoring represents the 30% of their quote.
Quoted: £300 pcm
add on: email marketing service where I can send 500k emails per month for £100 (this is a killer I think).

you then suggested:

Intel E3 v2/v3
8GB minimum
look for enterprise hard drives, not slower/less reliable desktop hard drives. Can you put a number here??
Backup space - self explanatory.
£/GB of bandwidth charged separately?
Fully Managed?
either with or without Cpanel (I guess won't be much difference from what you said)
Quote: £ (put a number here) pcm
email marketing platform??

Thanks,

 

[japancool]

I've used OVH before. They have a UK office, but their servers are hosted in France and Germany.

They are very cheap for what they offer (unmanaged servers), but that comes at the cost of robustness - you're not talking about major enterprise level redundancy here. Having said that, in five years, we've only had one (out of five) servers fail - which is one more than you want if all your stuff is mission critical, so you need to make sure you have a good backup and disaster recovery strategy. But you should have one anyway, regardless of who you go with.

It depends what you want, what you're willing to pay and how reliable you need your servers to be. Horses for courses.

 

[little_stork]

Interesting thread.. just out of interest what is a good load time? My hosting is done with hostpapa went with them after reading reviews etc but my site takes ages to load :-/

 

[ServWise]

Good is relative, your site may be slow to you but fast to someone else, slowness may not always be down to the host, it is quite often down to the routing or your internet connection or just bad website coding. I wrote a knowledge base article for our customers recently to highlight some of the common issues with tips on improving your website speed which may be of interest.

https://www.servwise.com/en/knowledgebase/938/Website-speed-optimisation.html

 

[astutiumRob]

just out of interest what is a good load time?

'good' isn't really a measurable term

And 'load-time' is a bit subjective - load time by whom, in what location, over what technology ?

If you want a basic rule-of-thumb, you'll lose 50% of your visitors every second beyond 3 seconds that it takes for something to come up when they get to your site.

So assuming 120 attempted visitors:
* site loads in sub 3 seconds, 120 people see it
* site loads in 3-4 seconds, 60 people see it
* site loads in 4-5 seconds, 30 people see it
* site loads in 6-7 seconds, 15 people see it
* site loads in 7-8 seconds, 7 people see it
* site loads in 8+ seconds, only you will ever see it

^ somewhat simplified but close-enough to give you the idea.

but my site takes ages to load :-/

B2B or B2C ?
Aimed at what audience ?
Average revenue per vistor ?

 

[HostXNow]

Interesting thread.. just out of interest what is a good load time? My hosting is done with hostpapa went with them after reading reviews etc but my site takes ages to load :-/

Your site will take awhile longer to load for visitors checking your site from the UK due to the extra latency by hosting your website in USA.

Moving your site to a UK provider could help a lot regarding your pages loading faster for visitors in UK.

It could also be due to the current provider overloading their server.

Also web hosts using software such as LiteSpeed Web Server can help load your pages faster too.

Chris

 

[CD2 Solutions]

we currently have a combination of godaddy and lcn. the godaddy is a tad faster, but the lcn support is excellent. one server got stuck rebooting, so we called them. about 2 rings, and we were straight through to a customer service person, 5 minutes later it was rebooted.

 

[2020tony]

I have used CWCS for over 10 years first starting out with a shared hosting agreement but now have multiple domains and site on my own dedicated server. prices are about right and customer service is excellent.

 

[Deleted member 195710]

Regarding dedicated servers, i would say that ovh.co.uk

 

[japancool]

Regarding dedicated servers, i would say that ovh.co.uk

For pricing yes, not for robustness and reliability. Also, OVH's data centres aren't in the UK.

 

[JohnW_NetPay]

Does hosting in the US really affect SEO? I ask as I have a few sites hosted by BlueHost and the price is very good and the service is excellent. The domains are bought in the UK and the sites are hosted in the US with the uk registrar pointing the domains to the Blue Host nameservers...

Does it really affect the SEO? all my sites seem to index well tho.

John

 

[Alan]

There is a transatlantic latency. Its easy for you to measure by using a US local proxy and compare to a UK response time.

Last time I measured time to first byte changed by 3.5 seconds transatlantic.

If google are to believed, then user experience is a factor, so faster sites for a local audience should rank higher for a local search.

Of course if you use a CDN you can start to deal with the global latency issues. (and if it wasn't important CDNs wouldn't exist).

If your audience is totally UK based I'm not sue why anyone would bother with a US host. Prices are not really any different in the scheme of things and functionality is the same.

 

[Jolt.co.uk]

Does hosting in the US really affect SEO? I ask as I have a few sites hosted by BlueHost and the price is very good and the service is excellent. The domains are bought in the UK and the sites are hosted in the US with the uk registrar pointing the domains to the Blue Host nameservers...

Does it really affect the SEO? all my sites seem to index well tho.

John

It won't affect the SEO much at all (maybe 0.0X percentage points). You can set the location in WMT.

BlueHost however... Google them and Endurance. Make sure you have a good backup.

 

[Basi Heating]

The type of hosting you need really depends on the amount of traffic your site gets. If your site is well established and gets thousands of visits a days then you should look at a dedicated server. For most small to medium enterprises shared hosting is fine. Try to find a hosting company with UK located servers if your primary target is UK traffic, this will reduce page load time. I would recommend either Pixel internet or Heart internet, both have UK servers, great up time, and offer hosting for around the £30 per year mark.

 

[JohnW_NetPay]

I keep back ups of the sites on a weekly basis. Apart from SouthernMTB.co.uk they are all static advertising sites. SouthernMTB is a forum so the posts are updated frequently so I backup the databases on a regular basis.

Must say... never had a problem with Bluehost tho.... only that there is a time delay from putting a ticket in and them answering it...

 

[Peanut Butter Man]

Hi everybody,

I am currently hosting my domain names on iPage but their servers are located in US so it's not the best thing for SEO, I want to transfer my domains here in UK but I have no idea about which company to choose.
What is the best quality/price here ?

I have used Krystal hosting for years now, great service and pricing

 

[OliverOnlinePrint]

We use fasthosts, never had any trouble with them . They are also doing a VM machine for less than £20 month if you wanted to get your hands dirty

 

[Chris from Mobus]

What people say is true. It depends on what you require. Some hosts will charge the earth and give the earth, but if you only need to host a basic website, you don't need that. You need to first determine how you're going to use the hosting. Do you need a wordpress install? Can your host do this for you, or at least make it simple? How manny email accounts do you need? (Some hosts limit this). Once you know you're requirements, you'll know how low you can go in terms of cost.

 

[HostLoveUK]

It is hard to identify the BEST web hosting company, as you can see from this forum, there are vast amounts! Everyone has different opinions therefore you should know what you want out of your host and expect from them... if they do not satisfy your requirements, move elsewhere

 

[scooke]

I had used ehosting for a VPS but due to budget constraints had to look for an alternative hosting company. I found 123Reg and they offered a far better server specification for less money than I was currently paying eHosting. When trying to stop the automatic renewal with eHosting I followed a text link (with arrow icon indicating ‘to jump to a page’) to the ‘Generate Order Renewal’ page, hoping to find an option to cancel this. As I had no intention of ordering I missed a small bit of confirmation text that told me I had placed an order to renew. This happened by just clicking a text link! No need for a ‘Confirm’ button when you can trap people like that is there?! Was there a confirmation by email with the order details, so I might recognise what had happened and cancel? No. Just an email the next day telling me the invoice has been paid.

Even then, I thought a quick call would correct this but wrong again. I ended up talking to their MD who agreed I placed the order unintentionally. Would they simply refund the money and cancel the order? Not a chance. Of course they will quote their terms and conditions and smugly know they are legally covered, but basic morals tell us not to keep what is not yours to keep. They are immoral and will grab your money at any opportunity.

To cap it all off, I have to stay with them for another year and move to a different server they offer. Knowing the size of the website is nearly 4gb they told me to backup and restore in Plesk. When I could not download the backup file, I was told they don’t allow downloads over 2GB! The reply to ‘well, could you not copy the one single backup file over for me then?’ was ‘Yes, but this be charged at £50+VAT/hr’.

Avoid eHosting there are many other hosting providers with much better deals and hopefully some that have morals.

 

[pickaweb]

There are some great UK web hosting companies here in this forum.
If you have a UK domain name being hosted in the USA may not be too much of an issue
All the best.

 

[Jmillar]

We are based in Wiltshire and we use fastmonk.net. Very very good hosting and they have 15% off everything until the end of January. Just use code MONK15

 

[webhostuk]

I had used ehosting for a VPS but due to budget constraints had to look for an alternative hosting company. I found 123Reg and they offered a far better server specification for less money than I was currently paying eHosting. When trying to stop the automatic renewal with eHosting I followed a text link (with arrow icon indicating ‘to jump to a page’) to the ‘Generate Order Renewal’ page, hoping to find an option to cancel this. As I had no intention of ordering I missed a small bit of confirmation text that told me I had placed an order to renew. This happened by just clicking a text link! No need for a ‘Confirm’ button when you can trap people like that is there?! Was there a confirmation by email with the order details, so I might recognise what had happened and cancel? No. Just an email the next day telling me the invoice has been paid.

Even then, I thought a quick call would correct this but wrong again. I ended up talking to their MD who agreed I placed the order unintentionally. Would they simply refund the money and cancel the order? Not a chance. Of course they will quote their terms and conditions and smugly know they are legally covered, but basic morals tell us not to keep what is not yours to keep. They are immoral and will grab your money at any opportunity.

To cap it all off, I have to stay with them for another year and move to a different server they offer. Knowing the size of the website is nearly 4gb they told me to backup and restore in Plesk. When I could not download the backup file, I was told they don’t allow downloads over 2GB! The reply to ‘well, could you not copy the one single backup file over for me then?’ was ‘Yes, but this be charged at £50+VAT/hr’.

Avoid eHosting there are many other hosting providers with much better deals and hopefully some that have morals.

Its really sad to see you struggling to get you website backup, Which I feel you should get free of charge its not something 400GB data , its just 4 GB and 50GBP for 4 GB data backup is too much.
We offer our customer paid R1soft back (optional) hardly for 2 GBP for 4 GB, addition we also offer free back. service which wont cost you a penny to download 4GB data.
Anyways its time for you to look for alternative, regarding 123reg they are good for domain registration just recheck things for website hosting.

 

[VoIP2Go]

Pick anyone for hosting - just don't pick 123-reg, or 123-rage as they are known by many ex-Customers ;-)

I have been with daily.co.uk for a couple of years now and I'm very happy with them.

 

[MattZS]

I can only comment on the two I have used in the UK. My personal blog is hosted with Vidahost and so far i've found the support good however i've hardly been in touch as the site is just a simple blog. My work use 123-reg who I seen to have to deal with frequently, thir support is okay, they will get the job done (eventually) however I find you get better results with their 'live chat'. The only other host i've used is namecheap who I found brilliant, howeer these are based in the UK.

 

[Homer J Simpson]

TSO have not failed me yet - and I'm a bit of a picky sod!

 

[theBagShoppe]

Very interesting question, I used 1&1 and enjoyed their service. I think they are quite competitive in pricing and customer service is very good as well.

 

[petitionserver]

i use 123REG and i find it best PRICE/QUALITY product

 

[ryedale]

It depends what you want from your hosting really and what level support you need

You can go to one of the big guns like 123 or 1+1 and so on and pay a bit less but you're just a name on the screen to them

Or you can perhaps pay a bit more and go with a smaller company who can provide one to one support and know you and your business personally and how your site should be performing.

 

[MRLogodesign]

i have had good experiences with "fasthosts"

 

[Jolt.co.uk]

i have had good experiences with "fasthosts"

Even with the recent full day outage?

Matt

 

[xCubeHost]

Ive tryed a few, but decided to start my own, theres a few bad ones out there, just finding the good ones to the crap ones!

 

[Lolleo]

Thanks all for input. I have decided to go with Vidahost