Best Web Hosting UK Services for 2022
Web hosting reviews and comparison
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As a web agency with a LOT of web hosting accounts (partially for hosting our clients, and partially because we have lots of side-projects and like to experiment ), we’ve got a pretty good idea of what a quality web host looks like.
We went through all our accounts, reviewed which web hosts are working well, and which ones aren’t (and why). Then we decided to build this massive UK web hosting comparison to share what we found, enjoy!
Based on our reviews, here are the best web hosting services for the UK:
- HostPapa UK – Best Web Host
- SiteGround – Best UK WordPress Hosting
- Kinsta – Best Managed WordPress Hosting
- Hostinger – Affordable UK Web Hosting
- Heart Internet – UK Web Host for Small Business
- HostGator – Great Web Hosting for Beginners
- CloudWays – Best Cloud Hosting for Ecommerce
- InMotion Hosting – Good Business Web Host
- BlueHost – Good Web Host for Beginners
- Dreamhost
- Greengeeks
- StableHost
- Site5
When writing our web hosting reviews, we considered a lot of factors.
These include uptime, support options and response time, speed, server locations, ease of use, cost vs value, disk space, etc.
The 2 most important factors we focus on are support and speed ⚡.
Let’s take website speed for example, did you know that a 1 second delay means page views decrease by 11%, that means over 1/10 of visitors will just turn away for every second your site is still loading… this is why a decent web hosting provider is vital!
As you can see, the quality of your web hosting provider can have a massive impact on the potential success of your site!
A few of the sites we’ve been featured on:
Best UK Web Hosting 2022 – Reviews
Here are the 14 best web hosting reviews for the UK, detailing their cost, support options, and disk space:
1. HostPapa UK – Best Web Host
Price: £1.66
Disk space: 100 GB
Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets
HostPapa is one of the fastest-growing web hosting companies around… and with good reason! From support to pricing and features, they manage to deliver quality services at a fraction of the price compared to higher-budget hosts!
They operate all over the world, including the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore, Mexico, Hong Kong, etc.
Value value value
For only £1.66/mo, you not only get 100 GB of SSD storage, but it also comes with a lot of add-ons… like free migration from your old host if needed, a free domain name, free SSL for security, etc. + they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee if you’re not happy… it’s pretty tempting!
This was only about their base shared plan — you can host up to two small websites with it. They have two other shared packages with additional resources and features if you’d like something extra.
Types of hosting
If you need even higher performance, HostPapa does offer other types of hosting. Apart from shared web hosting, you can purchase WordPress hosting, VPS hosting (virtual private servers – both Linux and Windows), and dedicated servers.
It’s also among the top reseller hosting in the UK if you’re looking to host multiple client sites.
The PapaSquad Support
Their support is also on point. It’s a BBB Accredited A+ support team. Customer reviews (on sites like TrustPilot) describe it as very friendly service with excellent technical support.
You can access HostPapa’s support services through email, phone, fax, live chat, and through support tickets. The support team is available 24/7 and can talk to you in English, German, Spanish, and French.
If you need extra help, you can join a weekly webinar or book a one-on-one virtual training session (free for 30 minutes) with one of their hosting experts. Besides, they also have a well-thought-out knowledge base for common queries.
Safe & Secure
HostPapa has built a solid reputation for its commitment to security. It has a server firewall, monitoring, and intrusion detection. It offers a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate for creating encrypted channels between the site and site visitors. Moreover, there’s Patchman enhanced auto-security & ModSecurity with each plan.
Other than all these, you get or can add advanced security features, including domain privacy protection, premium Wildcard SSL certificate, SiteLock, auto backups, and dedicated IP.
Performance? Top-notch!
When it comes to performance, it’s quite impressive, and additional performance boosts such as rocket fast premium servers, more resource allocation per account, and fewer accounts per server are included on their most expensive web hosting plan, Business Pro.
Plus, a free Cloudflare CDN is a part of each package, making your site equally fast all across the world & offering exceptional server response time. And what about the read and write speed, if big files are involved? Well, HostPapa uses high-quality SSD drives with LSI CacheCade Pro 2.0 caching.
They, of course, also have a 99.9% uptime guarantee. So, website downtime is not an issue.
cPanel control panel
If you prefer cPanel over a custom panel, HostPapa has that for you as well. Using it, you can manage your emails, files, databases, domains, security, backups, and much more.
The 400+ free scripts (that includes WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.) via Softaculous are also a part of the same control panel.
A free website builder
Depending on the plan of your choice, you also receive a free DIY website builder. The cheaper plan version allows you to build two pages. The expensive hosting package includes a more premium version of the builder.
Overall
Their cheapest plan is only £1.66/mo (Exclusive Mangomatter discount, down from £6.49). It’s sufficient for up to two small websites with less concurrent visitors. For more performance, you can obviously look into the premium shared plans or even their VPS and dedicated server options.
Pros
- Plenty of disk space
- Free SSL
- Great support
- Nice freebies
Cons
- N/A
2. SiteGround – Best UK WordPress Hosting
Price: £2.99
Disk Space: 10 GB
Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets
SiteGround knows their stuff. They’re a value for money provider, have very powerful servers in London, and most importantly, the customer support is top-notch (the average response time is 10 minutes at the moment).
Because of its solid reputation and even more dependable services, it has more than two million domains hosted under its belt.
Recommended by WordPress itself
Even more impressive is the fact that WordPress recommends it. It’s one of the only three web hosting recommended by WordPress itself, making it THE option for WordPress.
This fact invites one more question- What about other CMSs? Well, Siteground works excellently with all other CMSs, including Joomla, Drupal, Magento, etc.
The fundamental features
SiteGrounds’ plans also come with a host of cool features like an incredibly efficient security system, automated back-ups, staging area, and are GDPR compliant.
Furthermore, just like most decent web hosting providers, they have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, use SSD storage, a 30-day money-back guarantee, and have the ability to help you with domain name registrations.
The value-added features
What makes SiteGround even more outstanding is the number of value-added features included in all the packages. Even the cheapest hosting plan consists of the following extra features:
- Free SSL certificate: A SSL certificate is used to create an encrypted link between the client and the server. The main reason to use it is to prevent personal information (such as emails, phone number, credit card details, etc.) from getting into the hands of someone tapping in the link. It’s especially crucial for e-commerce stores, and SiteGround gives it for free!
- Free site migration: Siteground also helps you in transferring your site from your previous hosting provider to the SiteGround plan, for free.
- Free daily backups: A rare feature in the value hosting market is free daily backups on the cheaper plans. SiteGround offers that rare feature.
- Free Cloudflare CDN: A content delivery network(CDN) is a network of servers across the globe. It’s used to provide high performance and availability by caching the site on all the servers in the system.
- Free business emails: Siteground, like many other providers, allows its user to create business email accounts for free.
The best control panel (?!)
A year or so ago, SiteGround introduced us to its new & refined control panel. And man, oh man, we love it! It’s sleek, intuitive, and functional. Everything from account setting to web hosting & email settings can be accessed from right there.
It’s a top-notch experience, in a nutshell!
Hosting packages
As far as hosting packages go, they offer shared hosting, WordPress hosting, eCommerce hosting, reseller hosting, and cloud hosting.
They have three shared hosting plans; their most affordable plan starts at only £5.99 per month (50% off the usual price)! Their basic StartUp plan allows for one website, and gives you 10 GB of SSD storage, while their next tier up, the GrowBig plan, allows for unlimited sites, and 20 GB of storage. With this plan and anything above, you’ll also get a free site transfer from your old host, which is always handy.
Among the best customer support teams
SiteGround offers all customers immediate assistance when contacting their offices via phone, tickets, or live chat. Their team of WordPress experts is the stuff of inspiration for other commercial web hosting providers.
By checking their many many online tutorials and e-books, you can also pick up the latest optimisation and security know-how for your WordPress website.
Performance++
You will not be disappointed when it comes to SiteGround’s enhanced website loading speed. SiteGround offers you the chance to customise and individualise your hosting setup and improve your website’s overall loading speed. Their custom-built plugin, SuperCacher, also helps to improve your website’s loading time (only available on their GrowBig plan and up).
Additionally, all the hardware and technology used is upgraded to the current standard, so a plus there as well.
Overall
SiteGround is among the best UK hosts, and perhaps the best WordPress hosting out there. Its features, beautiful control panel, legendary customer support, and fantastic performance are proof of that.
Pros
- Great support
- Recommended by WP
- User-friendly
- Local web server
Cons
- Higher renewal fees
3. Kinsta – Best Managed WordPress Hosting
Price: $35 (USD)
Disk space: 10 GB
Support: Live Chat, Tickets
The previously mentioned providers and many of the upcoming providers (in the list) boast of its superior performance. Surely, their performance is excellent for the commercial, low-cost market they are trying to cover (that’s one of the primary reasons they are on the list). However, for truly remarkable performance, you need to pay a premium price.
It’s simple maths. If you pay more, you get better quality hardware & software, and more server resources.
Kinsta is an excellent example of paying a premium price for premium performance.
If you’re looking for the best managed WordPress hosting service, Kinsta is our go-to at the moment. They host massive companies like FreshBooks, Ubisoft, and Tripadvisor. They have surprisingly competitively priced packages, and the support is truly second-to-none.
Powered by Google Cloud
Their infrastructure runs on the blazingly fast and reliable Google cloud (of course with a 99.9% uptime guarantee; in reality, it’s quite literally 100% because of the cloud infrastructure). It also means you can choose from over 24 Google cloud locations around the world, including ones in the US, South America, North America, Europe, and Asia.
Apart from being reliable and fast, it’s incredibly scalable. If you are unsure of what the future holds for you, don’t worry — you can upgrade for more resources quickly.
Performance first
They recently also added auto-optimizing DB and self-healing PHP features, and they, of course, support the latest PHP version.
Then to increase performance even further, they have an in-house caching plugin to serve the site as fast as possible, and integrate with KeyCDN (a real-time IPv6 & HTTP/2 powered CDN to serve JS, CSS, and images across the globe) for fast loading times around the world.
Moreover, Kinsta uses lightning-fast SSD storage with built-in redundancy.
Top-tier Security
As for security, they offer DDOS protection, GeoIP blocking, of course, the Google Cloud firewall, and more. And even if the site gets hacked, they’ll help you fix it for free.
They have also partnered with Let’s Encrypt to offer free SSL, so no need to worry there. Additionally, you can import your SSL certificate as well.
Never worry about backups.
Kinsta offers automatic daily backups. You can retain the backups from the previous 14 days at the very least. For Business-tier plans, up to 30 days of backups are stored. Plus, if your site is fast-moving, like a news site, you have an option of automatic hourly backups too.
Moreover, if you are updating your website or testing something new on a website, you can take manual backups as well.
Not-so-cheap plans
The only type of hosting Kinsta provides is WordPress hosting based on Google cloud platform. The Starter plan costs $35 per month, which includes 1 site and 10 GB of SSD storage. Other plans include business-tier plans (from $100 to $400 per month) and enterprise-tier plans (from $600 to $1500 per month). Plus, you can get a custom proposal as well.
Each plan is worth the price. If you have the budget, these are the people to trust your WP site with!
Developer friendly
Kinsta gives SSH access, effectively allowing you to use WP-CLI, Composer, and Git platform. They also support secure tunnelling into databases.
24/7 world-class support
As already mentioned, you get second-to-none customer support. The 24/7 live chat is incredibly knowledgeable & available. In our experience, we got almost instant replies each time. Also, 97% of their customers report a cheerful/happy experience with their support agents.
Overall
There can only be one reason not to choose Kinsta for your WordPress site- the price! Apart from that, everything is perfect for lack of a better word.
Pros
- Google Cloud Platform
- Great value for cost
- Bulletproof security
- Great support
- Free site migrations
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Cons
- No phone support (but not really an issue considering how good their online support is)
4. Hostinger – Affordable UK Web Hosting
Price: £0.99
Disk Space: 10 GB
Support: Live Chat
Hostinger is one of those companies that know how to do everything right while keeping their plans extremely competitive.
They started in 2004 and already have over 29 million users… and with good reason. They provide quality hosting services at quite a lower cost compared to some of their competitors.
Low cost, Great value
For only £0.99/mo, you get 10 GB of SSD disk space, 24/7 expert support, WordPress optimised setup, a 99.9% uptime guarantee, and much more.
You need to be aware of one thing, though. The sticker pricing is only applicable if you purchase the plan for four years. It’s a standard practice in the hosting market — so nothing wrong with Hostinger’s pricing tactic, but just a heads up.
30-day money-back guarantee
In case you are worried ‘What if the host turns out to be terrible and I am stuck with them for four years?!’, don’t. Hostinger offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. It’s sufficient time to test the plan for your needs — if you don’t like it, you can simply ask for a refund.
Easy setup & interface
The thing we really liked about Hostinger was how easy their setup flow is. Setting up a new account, all the way from getting a domain name, to setting up hosting, and installing WordPress (or any other CMS) is just extremely well thought out. Everyone — a techie or non-techie — can very easily get their site up and running.
Once everything is ready, managing the site is also straightforward. All thanks to its clean & intuitive interface, which certainly has a better UI/UX than the popular cPanel. Using Hostinger’s control panel, you can manage everything from emails, sites, and databases to SSL certificates & account info.Fast, really fast
Fast, really fast
Your website needs to be fast. The loading speed directly affects your bottom line. And if you are opting for Hostinger, you can be sure that your website isn’t slow because of the web host.
The reasons? Hostinger…
- uses high-performance SSDs to store data;
- has data centres across the world (one is in the UK, making it a fantastic web hosting choice for UK & Europe in general; others are in the United States, Netherlands, Lithuania, Singapore, Brazil, or Indonesia.);
- employs latest PHP 7 & HTTP/2;
- and offers multi-tier caching.
Types of hosting
As for hosting types that they offer, they have shared hosting (which most people need, it’s also the cheapest), VPS, Cloud hosting, WordPress hosting, and email hosting. Moreover, they have free hosting plans as well, which they sell via 000webhost.
24/7/365 customer support
The customer support is also very responsive through live chat, and is available 24/7/365. There’s a knowledge base and an email option as well. However, because they have to cut costs to maintain the incredibly low price, there’s no phone support.
Zyro – The Hostinger Website Builder
If you are planning to build a website on your own, Hostinger’s Zyro website builder can come in handy.
It is a WYSIWYG builder with numerous templates for a range of purposes – from landing page & portfolio to e-commerce. Moreover, the Hostinger logo maker is also included in Zyro-series plans.
Overall
Their shared hosting plans start at only £0.99/mo (Down from £7.99). If you decide to go one tier up, and choose their Premium plan, you’ll also get weekly backups, a free domain, and a lot more server resources.
The value you’re getting here is insane, a well-deserved #1 spot in our list of the top web hosts! Oh, and they also have a 30-day money-back guarantee, a no-brainer in our book!
Pros
- Very easy to setup
- Great performance
- Responsive support
- Super affordable
- Local data centre
Cons
- N/A
5. Heart Internet – UK Web Host for Small Business
Price: £2.66
Disk Space: 2 GB
Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets
The web hosting providers we mentioned till now are globally spread, with servers and/or services available in the UK or nearby (alongside other places such as Asia, US, Australia, etc.).
In contrast, Heart Internet is a UK based web hosting company. Yes, you can purchase a Heart Internet plan from anywhere in the world, but it’s advised for audiences in the UK only.
In the UK, they also sponsor quite a lot of events and conferences like WordCamp, Pixel Pioneers, Hack24, and others. We do like a company that gives back to the community. Anyway, let’s talk about what the hosting offers.
Types of hosting
As for hosting options, they offer shared web hosting, premium hosting for more demanding sites, VPS, reseller hosting, dedicated servers, and WordPress hosting.
The basic web hosting plans start at £2.99 per month (if paid for one year). It’s ideal for a static website with low traffic. The plan includes 100 GB storage, a free domain name, and half-gig memory. For more, you’ll need to look into more premium web hosting options, including Deluxe, Ultimate, and Maximum plans. You can also buy the windows web hosting from Heart Internet — something only a handful of web hosts offer.
For high-traffic sites or sites that need server resources, their VPS packages start at £14.99 per month to £89.99 per month. The dedicated servers’ price depends on your configuration choice — the cheapest one costs £69 per month.
Customer support
Heart Internet can be contacted by submitting an online form on their website or through calling them directly (9:00 – 19:00). You can also contact them via live chat (9:00 – 17:00) or through submitting a ticket (24/7).
If you want to take a shot at resolving a common hosting problem yourself, you can go through the informative articles that are posted on their Support Database page.
Developer features
Heart Internet is developer-friendly as well. It has features such as SSH access, protected directories, cron jobs, mod_rewrite, and .htaccess. In short, you can handle all the activities from the backend without using the GUI.
Smooth at low-traffic, smooth at high-traffic
Heart Internet makes use of a cloud hosting platform that helps your website to even out the web traffic load. This means that your website will not be slowed down when you are experiencing peak traffic periods.
They also use HTTP/2 and regularly update their server hardware to ensure fast web load speeds and customer satisfaction.
Premium email features
Each Heart Internet plan comes with free email accounts. The most basic plan allows you to create 100 business emails! You know, the ones like [email protected].
The email features include 1 GB/account, desktop client, mobile client, auto-responders, forwarding, IMAP and POP3 support, read receipts, and much more.
1-click installers
Heart Internet has one-click installers for all popular apps, including WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Joomla, OpenCart, PrestaShop, and more.
All these can be accessed from their choice of the control panel, cPanel, which many of you will appreciate.
No questions asked 30-day money-back guarantee
Heart Internet is a good enough hosting to be in our top web hosting for UK list. Still, it’s possible you won’t like it, and in that case, their 30-day money-back guarantee will help. If you don’t get used to them in the first 30 days, they will refund the whole amount without asking any questions!
Overall
Sadly, there are no automatic backups, but apart from that, Heart Internet covers pretty much everything. Decent customer support (not truly 24/7, though, which makes sense given its UK-only audience), good performance, free emails, and a 30-day money-back guarantee makes it an excellent choice for the UK.
Pros
- Gives back to the community
- Affordable for static html sites
- Lots of hosting options.
Cons
- No overseas data centres
- Rocky reputation
- No WP support on the basic plan
6. HostGator – Great Web Hosting for Beginners
Price: $2.75 (USD)
Disk Space: Unlimited
Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets
HostGator has been around for a long time (similar to other huge hosting companies like Godaddy and Bluehost), in that time, they’ve gone from good to bad, back to decent again. They’re super affordable, but you’ll feel it in the quality of their services, support, and security. We’ve had multiple sites hacked on their servers, all having similar themes and plugins to other sites on different hosts, and they didn’t get hacked.
Value for money
That being said, if you look at the price, the value you get is pretty impressive for only $2.75/mo… but if you have a bit of a budget, it’s better to go with a host that has a local data centre, so you’re not dealing with the slow loading times that come with having a US server.
However, if you are so much impressed by HostGator’s offering, you can surely enable a CDN and use it.
Features
HostGator’s Hatchling plan, which is their base web hosting plan, offers these features: one website, unlimited storage, unmetered bandwidth, unlimited free email addresses, and $200 in Google Adwords and Bing credits.
It also has a 45-day money-back guarantee and a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
Freebies
Alongside all the fundamental features, the plan includes a lot of freebies as well, such as:
- A free website builder with 100+ responsive templates.
- Free migration, including domain transfer, database transfer, website transfer, and script transfer.
- Free SSL certificate for secure data transfer between the user and server.
- A free domain name for the first year.
- One-click installations for all types of websites: blogs, CMS, wiki, e-commerce, etc.
Types of hosting
HostGator has the following hosting plans: Shared hosting, WordPress hosting, cloud hosting, reseller, VPS, and dedicated servers. That’s about all the hosting types out there.
For basic needs, you can look into the shared plans starting from $2.75/month to $5.95/month. For better performance, you can look into the snappy-range VPS plans, costing from $19.95/month to $39.95/month. And for the best performance, of course, dedicated servers are starting from $89.98/month.
Customer support
HostGator makes it easy for customers to communicate a hosting problem or to make inquiries. You can phone them, start a live chat, fax them, or share your screen and find a solution to your problem in record time. Apart from their year-round availability, HostGator also provides you with a library of video tutorials to help support your hosting needs.
Clean energy powered
For environment-friendly people such as ourselves, HostGator uses renewable energy to power all the operations. Here’s a quote from their blog:
“If you’re already a HostGator customer, your hosting service is already green. HostGator switched to wind power in 2008 with the purchase of Renewable Energy Credits equal to 130% of the power needed to run and cool our shared and reseller servers. The move allowed us to reduce our carbon emissions and provide green hosting services to more than 1.3 million customers without raising rates.”
Secure
HostGator has password protection, offers free SSL, DDoS attack protection, custom firewall rules, network-level flood protection, and large mod security rules to protect the servers from a variety of attacks.
On top of that, you can add SiteLock and Codeguard as extras while checking out.
Overall
HostGator provides both HDD and SSD hard drives and can configure their servers to accommodate your specific loading speed requirements. They provide you with unmetered bandwidth and give you the option of implementing custom server installations which optimises speed and offers you more virtual control. This can improve SEO and the overall user experience rating of your website.
Pros
- Affordable
- Unlimited storage
- Decent value
Cons
- Lower quality services
- Security
- US servers
7. CloudWays – Best Cloud Hosting for Ecommerce
Price: $10 (USD)
Disk space: 25 GB
Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets
Cloudways allows you to deploy, manage, and monitor high-performance apps and websites directly on cloud servers, cutting out the usual web hosting middle-man (this is NOT for beginners). If you know your way around a server, these guys are awesome!
High-speed performance
If you’re crazy about speed, CloudWays is the option to go with. The features they have and the performance tweaks they have made makes it an excellent performer.
- All servers of CloudWays have dedicated resources for its users.
- SSDs with exceptional read & write speeds are used to store website data.
- CloudwaysCDN ensures your site server responds quickly whenever accessed from any part of the world.
- They also have built a custom caching plugin for WordPress (plugin called Breeze) that considerably speeds up loading times. Then for Joomla, Magento, and likes, they integrated full page caching for max speed.
- Auto-healing resolves most of the issues in case your site crashes.
- It uses the latest PHP-ready servers for best performance.
- With its Redis support, combined with Apache, Nginx, and Varnish, you receive superior performance.
Smooth collaborations
For collaborative workflow, CloudWays has many features for you. This includes:
- Git integration: Git auto-deployment lets you get updated code from the live servers whenever changes in the remote repositories occur.
- SSH and SFTP access will allow others to securely log in and make changes to files & folders when needed.
- One team member can be a part of different teams while working on CloudWays.
- If you work on multiple websites, you can classify them and allow team members to access the whole project.
- There’s a staging area as well as a feature to clone applications and servers.
Exceptional customer support
Cloudways gives you unending support through support tickets, live chat, and online forms. You can even request a call from them, and they are readily available 24 hours a day. They also offer a knowledge base, as well as a community forum and they give you live updates regarding their system status on their Cloudways System Status page.
There’s also a premium support option that gets you fast ticket responses, gets you into a private slack channel, offers proactive application monitoring, and you can get help with application & server issues/configurations.
Packages
All CloudWays plans are managed cloud plans where you can opt for the servers from five top-tier services-
- Digital Ocean: DO plans start at $10/month (for 1 CPU core, 1 GB RAM, and 25 GB storage) and can go up to $80/month (4 CPU core, 8 GB RAM, and 160 GB storage). You can choose the data centre of your choice from London, San Francisco, Singapore, New York, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Toronto, or Bangalore.
- Linode: Linode plans cost from $12/month to $90/month. You have all data centre locations to choose from.
- Vultr: Here, the cost starts from $11/month to $84/month. There are 16 data centre locations to choose from.
- AWS: It’s perhaps the most popular service out there. CloudWays’ AWS plans are priced from $36.51/month to $274.33/month. Of course, Amazon has many, many data centres.
- Google Cloud: Again, super famous with a lot of data centres. Here the charges range between $33.30/month to $226.05/month.
All these options have servers in the UK or Europe. Even if they wouldn’t CloudWaysCDN would ensure great performance.
Overall
They make use of solid-state hard drives, and their servers are PHP 7 ready, which gives you top performance speeds when compared to other hosting service providers. Cloudways caches data around the world and uses Memcached, Breeze plugin, and Redis to ensure optimum hosting rates for both WordPress and Magento. They also make use of HTTP/2 supported servers. In short, if server performance is your priority and you’re a bit of a techie, you can’t go wrong with CloudWays, they are one of the best cloud hosting services you can find.
Pros
- Affordable high-performance hosting
- Great support
- Super scalable
Cons
- Bit of a learning curve
8. InMotion Hosting – Good Business Web Host
Price: $6.39 (USD)
Disk space: Unlimited
Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets
While InMotion is not a bad host, their solutions are mostly focused on business hosting, hence the higher price tag of $5.99/mo (for a two-year plan; is $6.99/mo for one year).
They also don’t have a local data centre, so unless you’re targeting a demographic in the US and really want to host with them, there are better options for the UK. If you really want to host with InMotion, our advice would be to get a quality CDN service alongside.
Features
Their cheapest plans, i.e., shared hosting packages, includes the following:
- You get 50 GB of SSD storage on their Launch pack. That’s plenty of disk space, and SSD storage ensures fast delivery of content.
- All the plans include a free domain name.
- You can install more than 400 free apps/scripts using their one-click installer. This includes CMSs like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla to e-commerce solutions like Magento and PrestaShop.
- You can also add a backup manager at the check out for daily automatic backups.
- The plans also include free email accounts. You can create up to 10 email addresses on the launch plan, 50 on Power, and unlimited on the priciest one- the Pro plan.
- Want to move your existing website to InMotion? Don’t worry! They offer free no-downtime website migration as well.
- Another thing (that might be useless for you) the package includes is $150 in ad credits.
To manage all the mentioned features, you get a fully-fledged cPanel!
Each of InMotion’s plans come with a free WordPress website builder, BoldGrid. It’s a popular drag and drop builder with pre-made blocks & themes. Using it, you can launch your first website in a couple of hours!
Security
Their security is top-notch with FREE SSL, malware & hack protection, custom firewall, real-time spam filtering, and DDoS protection.
The UltraStack angle
InMotion Hosting’s shared plans are now on their UltraStack servers. These servers are a custom blend of latest server technology and software designed to offer a fast website experience.
It’s basically a mix of latest PHP, optimised server-side caching, high-speed SSDs, etc.
Types of hosting
When it comes to web hosting packages, they offer Linux shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS, dedicated servers, and WordPress hosting solutions (which has WP specific add-ons like automatic updates and security patches, and a drag-and-drop site builder).
As already discussed, the shared plans start at $5.99/month. Similarly, WordPress plans cost $6.99//month, VPS ones begin from $29.99/month, and dedicated servers are priced from $139.99/month.
24x7x365 Support
If you have a query about InMotion Hosting’s services, you can contact them through live chat, email, phone, or by submitting a ticket. You can also schedule a Skype session with one of their specialists if you want more in-depth advice.
They have an online support page that offers tutorials and other tools that can help you tackle frequently asked questions.
Developer friendly
InMotion’s primary buyers are businesses. Therefore, obviously, they have developer-friendly features. This includes:
- SSH access to make changes to the site via command line.
- And many coding/query language options- PHP, MySQL, Ruby, and PostgreSQL.
Overall
All of InMotion Hosting’s service plans include solid-state drives that offer faster content delivery from your website. This company also uses multiple data centres and advanced routing technology to give you that competitive edge when it comes to loading speed and website user-friendliness.
For UK audiences, though, either you’ll need a CDN or will have to suffer from comparatively low server response time. Otherwise, InMotion is a reliable option, especially for SMBs.
Pros
- High-quality hosting solutions
- Great support
- Good security
Cons
- Expensive
- US servers
9. BlueHost – Good Web Host for Beginners
Price: $3.95 (USD)
Disk space: 50 GB
Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets
Bluehost is a bit of a veteran in the web hosting industry (like Godaddy and Hostgator), they started off as being quite amazing, but then got bought by EIG (who also own HostGator), and things started going downhill quite fast.
Since then, though, they’ve been working on their image and hosting solutions to improve the overall quality, and it’s paying off. Their marketing, and general user reviews are definitely improving.
Today, it’s among the most popular web hosting (especially for WordPress) with its 2 million+ customers.
No UK servers
Sadly, for the UK audience, we probably wouldn’t recommend them because of the lack of local data centres. There are definitely better options. Indeed, you can use a Cloudflare CDN to make it work, but why go for it when you have options like Hostinger & SiteGround?!
Recommended by WordPress
Talking about SiteGround, BlueHost has one unique similarity with it. Like SiteGround, BlueHost is one of the three recommended web hosts by WordPress. And just like SiteGround, BlueHost works perfectly fine with other software (such as Drupal & Joomla) as well.
Types of hosting
As for hosting solutions, they have shared hosting starting at £2.05/mo, WordPress hosting from £2.05/mo, VPS plans starting at £14.91/mo, and dedicated servers priced from £59.66/mo.
In short, BlueHost has plans for everyone— small businesses, affiliate sites, and big organisations & e-commerce stores.
24/7 technical support
BlueHost’s in-house technical team offers experienced around-the-clock support. They offer technical and account support via live chat, phone, or ticket submission. You can check out their video tutorials and knowledge base too if you want to bulk up on useful information.
They have a toll-free US contact number and an international contact number to better accommodate all of their customers.
Freebies
Freebies are always welcomed, and BlueHost offers a few essential ones, including…
- Free SSL: BlueHost plans come with free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate. It helps you secure the connection between the server and visitors by creating an encrypted tunnel. If your site is used to collect leads, sell via e-commerce platforms, or simply asks for personal information like email to get in contact, this SSL is very crucial.
- Free domain name: BlueHost’s primary audience is beginners trying to build a website. And for a website, a domain name is mandatory (unless you are okay with a free subdomain or something). Therefore, BlueHost offers a free domain name for the first year.
- Marketing credits: Individuals and businesses mostly start a website in the hope of getting relevant traffic, which can become potential clients/customers. The free $100 Microsoft Advertising and $100 Google Advertising credits can act as a catalyst in reaching the goal.
Add-ons
BlueHost is an affordable hosting provider, so it’s obvious their plans won’t include everything, especially the premium-level features. Therefore, instead of skipping such advanced features, they have listed them as add-ons, such as:
- Multi-server management: You can add multiple plans to the same account and manage from the single dashboard.
- CDN: Their integration with Cloudflare allows you to access an advanced content delivery network from your account directly.
- Dedicated IP: For advanced control of ports.
- Domain Privacy + Protection: To mask personal information associated with your domain.
- SiteLock: A security tool to prevent DDoS attacks, malware, and other problems.
- CodeGuard: For timely backups.
Scalability
You can start with whatever you need at the moment. If your site grows, you can upgrade to a more robust plan in a few clicks. Pretty awesome!
Overall
Bluehost offers different hosting packages which include Shared hosting, Cloud hosting, VPS hosting and Dedicated hosting. Standard Shared hosting will give you a web page loading time of 2-3 seconds. More expensive packages offer lower density servers which will provide you with more resources that can speed up your website and overall loading time quite a bit
Pros
- Veteran
- Plenty of disk space
- Affordable
Cons
- Rocky reputation
- Servers in the US
10. Dreamhost
Price: $7.95 (USD)
Disk space: Unlimited
Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets
Dreamhost has a really good reputation, and with good reason. They’ve maintained their high-quality business hosting services throughout the massive price-war going right now; people really like them as they’re incredibly reliable. One of the primary reasons why DreamHost is this low on this list is the lack of local servers.
Otherwise, more than 400k people host 1.5 million domains on DreamHost servers. Of which, more than half uses WordPress.
Recommended by WordPress
Talking about WordPress, we already discussed two web hosting of the three WordPress recommends officially- BlueHost and SiteGround. DreamHost is the third one.
It offers one-click WordPress installation, pre-installed WordPress, a free WordPress migration plugin (DreamHost Automated Migration), and a WP website builder as far as WP-specific things are concerned.
Features
A for other features, you get:
- Unlimited Bandwidth and Storage– obviously it can’t be unlimited, but there’s no cap on the bandwidth you can use or the storage you can fill. Remember, it’s shared hosting, and the cheaper the plan, the more the users on the same server.
- Free Domain: Again, similar to BlueHost, DreamHost targets beginners and hence offers a free domain for the first year.
- Free email addresses: You will have to pay $1.67/mo to avail email addresses on the starter plan. On the unlimited plan, you can create unlimited emails for free.
- Free Domain Privacy: It was an add-on on BlueHost. DreamHost offers free domain privacy for zero cost.
- Free SSL certificate: If you are going to use your website to collect leads or sell something, SSL certificate is vital to keep user’s information private.
- Automated Daily backups: In case your site is hacked or stops for any reason, you can simply restore the latest backup. No sweat!
- 97-day money-back guarantee: If you aren’t satisfied with DreamHost’s performance, you can ask for a full refund within the first 97 days of opening the account.
- Advance features: You also have access to unlimited MySQL databases, Unix shell, reseller accounts, support for PHP 7, SSI, Crontab access, CGI access, SFTP & SSH access, and much more.
DreamHost website builder
Apart from all the awesome features, DreamHost also has its own website builder. It’s a WYSIWYG, DIY builder with 200+ pre-made templates to choose from. It also offers real-time SEO recommendations, making sure that your site doesn’t not rank due to technical factors.
It’s for WordPress only, though.
Types of hosting
They offer shared hosting, WordPress hosting, dedicated servers, and VPS hosting.
The two shared plans, Starter and Unlimited, are perfect for beginners with one or multiple sites. The cost of the plans is $2.59/month and $4.95/month respectively (when pre-paid for three years).
There are multiple WordPress plans, of which DreamPress (starting at $16.95) is our favourite for the incredible performance it brings to the table.
The VPS plans start at $10/month, and the dedicated ones start at $149/month.
Good customer support
DreamHost offers live chat, email, phone, and ticket submission as support options. Existing customers can contact them directly by logging into their DreamHost account.
Customers can also keep tabs on the system status of DreamHost and share their experiences or ask questions on the company forum. Additionally, the knowledge-base can shed some light on advanced topics and customisations.
Overall
DreamHost offers a wide variety of hosting packages that all incorporate solid-state drives which allow your website to run 200% faster. All packages are available with unlimited bandwidth, and you have the option of upgrading to a Fast Cloud Server or a Managed VPS Server if you wish to unlock faster loading speeds. All in all, it’s an excellent option for WordPress sites; however, the lack of UK/Europe servers is concerning.
Pros
- Good reputation
- Free domain name
- Free SSL
- 97 Day Money-Back Guarantee
Cons
- Expensive
- Servers in the US
11. Greengeeks
Price: $2.95 (USD)
Disk Space: Unlimited
Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets
GreenGeeks is one of the companies you just know is doing everything right; they’ve seen a massive growth since they went live in 2008. Today, it has over 40,000 customers hosting over half-a-million websites on their servers.
The reasons for their success is pretty straightforward once you start working with them, it’s a combination of global reach (multiple data centres around the world), awesome performance, great and pretty speedy support, and last but not least, they’re putting their energy consumption back 3 times into the grid through wind energy, which is quite impressive!
The “Green” factor
GreenGeeks adds more than 615k KWH/year on the energy grid. All the power is generated using renewable sources such as wind. This fact alone touches people on a personal level to go with their services.
Great features
Putting our personal attachment aside, we’d like to say, GreenGeeks offer fantastic features along with its plans. The cheapest shared plan comes with:
- Unlimited web space: Practically, it provides more than needed SSD space to store website data.
- Unlimited bandwidth: There’s no cap to the amount of total data transfer per month.
- Free SSL certificate: To encrypt any incoming data.
- Free Domain name: You can register a domain for free for the first year.
- Free Nightly backup: To ensure data safety, even if the site crashes or gets hacked.
- Unlimited email accounts: You can create as many professional emails as you want even on the starter plan.
- 30-day money-back guarantee.
- Developer friendly features: Multiple PHP versions, SSH access, FTP access, Perl support, Python support, Git, WP-CLI, Druch, and many more.
Superb performance
Those were not all the features; we kept the performance-specific features aside for this section because there were many, including:
- LSCache: Because of the power of LiteSpeed’s caching technology, visitors will be able to open your web pages blazingly fast.
- PHP 7 & HTTP/2: Latest versions ensure the fastest possible speed.
- SSDs: SSD-based RAID-10 storage makes sure of quick data delivery rate.
- Scalability: You can add computer resources to the plan if your needs increase.
Hosting plans
GreenGeeks offers four types of hosting: Shared, WordPress, Reseller, and VPS.
Their basic plans & WordPress plans start at only USD $2.95/month (down from $9.95) and can go up to $11.95/month for the premium plans. The three VPS plans cost $39.95/month, $59.95/month, and $109.95/month with 2 GB, 4 GB, and 8 GB RAM respectively. Reseller plans are priced $19.95/month, $24.95/month, and $34.995/month.
24/7 support
GreenGeeks offer virtual customer support all year round when it suits your unique schedule. You can contact a hosting specialist via email, live chat, ticket or by directly phoning their support team. In addition to round-the-clock specialist support from their global workforce, you can also have a look at their website tutorials and impressive knowledge base for more hosting tips.
Overall
By optimising their servers, GreenGeeks have built a reliable hosting platform (with 99.9% uptime guarantee) that can give your website the speed it needs to ensure recurring traffic. This web hosting company makes use of Solid State RAID-10 Storage Arrays, PowerCacher, PHP7 and free CDN through Cloudflare. The combined efforts of their cutting-edge technology enable their servers to pack quite a speedy punch!
Pros
- Eco-friendly
- Unlimited disk space
- 30-day money-back guarantee
- 24/7 support
Cons
- Doesn’t charge in GBP
Table of Contents
How to choose a UK web host?
Deciding to build a website is the first big step, and it’s a good one too! According to Nominet, 96% of businesses report having a website positively contributed to more customers & brand awareness. In addition, 99% of all adults aged 16 to 44 years in the UK are internet users according to the Office for National Statistics… it’s a no-brainer really.
If you’re looking to create a website, whether you envision it being a large site that gets a lot of traffic, or a smaller project that won’t need as much capacity, or support as much traffic, you’re going to be faced with a few tricky choices though.
In addition to the actual site design, how the website is going to be set up (blog, business site, or do you need e-commerce hosting), your URL or domain name, and so much more, you’re also going to have to think about which web hosting provider to go with (and ideally, a GDPR compliant host).
There are quite a lot of different web hosting services, and the choice that is going to serve you and your website the best will have a lot to do with the type of site you’re looking to host, the purpose of that website, and the traffic you anticipate it generating. So aside from our web hosting reviews above, we’ve also detailed the most important factors to review when researching the best web hosting companies.
Where are the data centres located?
We’ve mentioned this in the intro, but basically, if the closest server is significantly underpowered, you’d be doing yourself a favour to use one a bit further away. It really doesn’t matter if you’re looking for city-specific services like web hosting in London, Birmingham, or Leeds… the speed difference will be negligible as long as the server is close-ish, or in, the United Kingdom (both SiteGround and A2 Hosting have local servers, and world-wide).
Disk space, how much do you get and are they SSDs?
Before you sign up for any web hosting provider, you are going to want to get an idea of how much storage space your website is going to demand. How many pictures, videos, or other media are you going to have on your site? How much information is it going to need to support (are you using your web host for email as well)? If your site is relatively small, you might not run into a storage problem regardless of the provider you go with.
Uptime, what’s their average?
What’s the point of saving a website hosted on the internet if no one can access it? Uptime is something that the best web hosts are always looking to increase to make sure sites are accessible to anyone at any time of day or night. A lot of providers will advertise as much as 99.9% uptime guarantee, but it’s always good to fact check claims like that. Look up some testimonials online from people who have used their service to get an idea of what the reality will look like. We started tracking the uptime and response times of the biggest website hosting providers on our own hosting status page.
Do they offer free SSL certificates?
SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer, it’s a technology that allows for the encryption of the data that transfers between your site and the visitors. It’s how you can make your site secure, and shows it to your sites’ visitors through the green padlock + https:// next to your URL on most modern browsers. It used to be only important for online stores or other sites that accept payments on-site. But these days, it’s a must for every single site out there (Google has even said it’s a ranking factor, so you even get an SEO benefit by having a secure site).
Luckily, with SSL providers like Let’s Encrypt, there’s no cost to you and you can install and renew them for free. When reviewing hosting services, take note of the ones that offer SSL certificates for free, and I would avoid those that want to charge you money for it.
That being said, there are different types of SSL certificates, and the more secure ones do cost money. The cheapest/free type is Domain Validation (DV) Certificates, next comes Organization Validation (OV), and finally Extended Validation (EV). OV and EV types require actual validation of the entity wanting the certificate.
How much bandwidth do you get?
Bandwidth is important for the performance of your website, so you want to make sure you have enough available to your domain to keep it functioning properly and improve the user experience. When it comes to things like shared hosting and even VPS hosting, you may have access to less bandwidth than you might with other options, but the provider you choose to get your service with may also have an impact on the amount of bandwidth you are allotted. Make sure to consider this before deciding on your provider to ensure you will have the resources you need.
Is the host optimised for speed?
Speed refers to the general loading times of a well-optimised site (with well-optimised we mean not too much code bloat, nicely compressed images, etc – basically just a site that’s designed efficiently). The speed of a site depends on 3 things, server locations, server performance (resources allocated to your hosting account), and custom scripts the hosts might have built to speed up site delivery.
Server performance is a bigger issue, if the server doesn’t allocate you enough resources to run the site itself, you’ll have issues. Basically, just don’t cheap out too much on hosting (eg. don’t go with free hosting) and you should be fine. Our top 5 hosts are very good at this. On top of that, the best website hosting services (like SiteGround) build their own caching scripts to further speed up the delivery of your site.
Can you use a CDN? Are they Integrated with Cloudflare?
The server location used to be very important, if your target market is local, hosting on a server in the US would definitely slow down your site enough that you’d notice is in terms of conversions/leads/sales. But these days, with CloudFlare being free, you can host almost anywhere, activate Cloudflare (which is a CDN or Content Distribution Network that serves your site from the nearest node to your site’s visitor), and have decent speeds no matter the location of your target market. Most web hosts offer this integration for free.
Other benefits from adding a CDN to your site include less load on your local server and DDOS protection if the CDN supports it.
How responsive is the support staff?
This is a big one, and with good reason. Without decent support, the potential loss of revenue/leads/visitors/etc can be massive. Responsive and efficient support can fix up things very quickly, meaning site downtime would be kept to an absolute minimum. While most of the top hosts offer 3 support options, with those being phone, tickets, and live chat, we still prefer support tickets as the go-to support option.
While you might get a quicker response on the phone or over live chat, in most of those cases, the support staff have to think on their feet and try to get an answer right then and there… and yes that works for most smaller issues. But if you have a more complex issue, they might not know what you’re talking about, or that specific person hasn’t been trained to deal with that specific issue, etc. In those cases, it’s easier to explain it in a support ticket, attach screenshots of what you’re talking about… then that ticket goes to the right person, with a clear view of what the issue is, which can then be solved.
Support tickets are also easier to scale for the hosting companies themselves, as they don’t have to man the phones or live chat consoles all the time. Either way, you want support to be responsive and capable, with multiple levels of staff have specific expertise in various areas. What’s on the box might not be what you get in the end, like we found out in our DreamHost vs Bluehost comparison.
Which type of UK web hosting do you need?
Other Web Hosting Comparisons by Country
We also have other web hosting comparisons, focused on different countries like:
Frequently Asked Questions
How much should it cost to host a website in the UK?
The cost of hosting a website depends on a few factors, with the major factor being the needs of your website. If you’re creating a personal blog or business site, then choosing a shared hosting plan at around £3 to £6 per month will work just fine. If you’re planning on building a massive e-commerce store or want to host resource-heavy web applications, you’re better off looking for a dedicated server or VPS, which can run into £100s per month.
How can I host my website for free in the UK?
You can host your website for free if you either host it locally on your computer or if you use a third-party service like wordpress.com or blogger.com. Both of these allow for a free plan that enables you to build a basic website on a subdomain of their primary domain, like myblog.wordpress.com.
Can I host my website on Google?
Practically, no, Google is not a hosting provider. While you can use Google Sites to create a free website, these are more used as a collaboration tool for businesses. They also have a service called Blogger at blogger.com that would be more suited for building personal websites (though there are limits to what you can do design-wise).
How do I choose a web hosting provider?
The best way to choose a web host that suits your needs is to first write down what those needs are. The majority of people just need a web hosting provider that offers fast hosting, a smooth setup system, and 24/7 responsive support. Have a look at our comparison on the page for more details and other factors involved in finding a good website host.
How much does it cost to host a website in the UK?
Hosting a website in the UK can take a few pounds per month to thousands of pounds per year. There’s no fixed range because there are different types of hosting for different types of requirements.
However, most of you who read our articles/reviews/lists are individuals or SMBs looking for value hosting. So, if we were to generalize, it costs anywhere between £2-£5/month (introductory price) to host a website in the UK.
Which UK domain registrar is best?
Any domain registrar with a good reputation in the market is the best registrar because there are not many moving parts. You just need to stay away from those who try to sell your info, spam calls you, or upsell. The only thing you need to see is the prices — the first-time as well as renewal.
Can I host my own website?
Yes, you can host your own website. All you need is a 24/7 power & internet connection and the knowledge to build a server on your computer.
In short, it’s a lot of hassle. Plus, it demands time as well as money. Therefore, we recommend paying a hosting provider for the service.
Can you have a website without hosting?
If you want people on the internet to visit your website, Hosting is needed. A website is a different entity — it can be built, tested, and accessed from your device or any device where you copy the website files (sometimes it’s on server/hosting).
So, yes, you can have a website without hosting. But what’s the point?
Can you buy a domain name forever?
No, you can’t make a one-time payment and own a domain name forever. However, what you can do is buy for the longest time option the domain registrar has and/or keep it on auto-renew.
How much does it cost to host a website on Google?
Google is a technology company primarily known for its search engine. If by “host a website on Google” you mean get ranked on its search engine, it’s free. Otherwise, the Google search engine has nothing to do with hosting. It does have Google cloud, though — its version of cloud hosting.
Can you code your own website for free?
Technically, yes. If you know web design and development, i.e., you can practically use HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL, and more, you can code your own website for free.
Additionally, If you are going to use a CMS like WordPress, there are ready-made templates in the market. You can tweak the code of those to build as per your need.
Is WordPress hosting free?
You can create a website on wordpress.com for free. But, the free version is only limited to a subdomain. Meaning, you can’t use yourdomain.com - or any domain extension as that matter - but will have to stick with yourdomain.wordpress.com. If it doesn’t bother you, yes, you can host on WordPress for free.
If you are asking about WordPress hosting plans companies offer, they are not free in most cases (though the full WordPress install itself that you can download from wordpress.org is free).
And that’s it for this massive guide, hope it helped!