If you’re a UK company, it’s vital to make sure your website is accessible to your customer within a click of a second. One of the significant factors that affect the speed of your website is your hosting provider. All hosting providers have their pros and cons. Still, a major one for UK companies is where servers are situated as this determines how quickly your website is available to the visitor. Here are some of our favourite WordPress hosting options for UK companies.
Kinsta
Kinsta pride themselves in their premium managed WordPress hosting, which is powered by Google Cloud. Our websites improved in speed by around 30% every time we switched one from a different provider to Kinsta. It’s also great as a platform as it gives you daily backups, meaning any mess ups can be reversed.
The only reason to avoid Kinsta would be the cost of hosting. Their premium service is excellent but does come at a cost which means you really have to think about the return on investment when choosing Kinsta as a host. However, we can vouch that the speed improvement your site will receive will be enough to justify the cost.
Moreover, if you’re obsessed with speed of hosting on Kinsta, well the platform offers Nginx, PHP 8.0, LXD containers, and a Maria Database — meaning you don’t have to worry if the host is letting you down when it comes to the architecture of the server. And if you fall into trouble, Kinsta’s easy-to-use dashboard lets you downgrade and upgrade the PHP, restart the PHP, and enable WordPress debugging.
Lastly, Kinsta also allows staging sites, meaning you don’t have to make any brave changes to the live website without seeing it in action. Kinsta will let you create a staging copy of your live and totally change it how you would like before you push the staged site into the live version. This feature massively downplays the risk of hosting new features and lets you play around your website without interfering with the users using it.
IONOS by 1&1
In comparison to Kinsta, IONOS by 1&1 is a great cheaper alternative. Hosting can cost few pounds a month and thus if you’re running a small UK company or simply a portfolio website, this will be a great choice for you. Unlike Kinsta, IONOS does not include daily backups in their core WordPress package, and their support team does lack knowledge at times.
In terms of speed, IONOS tends to be slower due to the servers not being as well optimised. This can cause issues for eCommerce businesses but shouldn’t be a huge issue for well optimised sites that simply are looking to gain quotes and calls from customers.
In general, IONOS usually offers a great package which includes a free domain name and free emails with your domain name, meaning you don’t have to find another host and have your control panel all in one place. This feature is something not present in hosts like Kinsta, which can be a put off if you’re only getting started.
For beginners, IONOS also provides a setup assistant which helps you begin your site by guiding you through the basic steps of hosting and running a WordPress website. It will also suggest some useful plugins and potential themes you may use, if you don’t have a professional website designer creating the website for your company.
Finally, the host also allows the use of CDN, a content delivery network. If you’re working globally and require your customers to use your site heavily, than this is a must requirement as it helps with reduced latency and improved loading speeds.
Bluehost
Our final choice is Bluehost. A WordPress.org recommended host. Bluehost has some outstanding qualities as a hosting provider. Firstly, like IONOS it is cheap to host on Bluehost, and they have UK server locations. It also has a staging feature like Kinsta, meaning you can test out new website design features before making them live.
One of our favourite things about Bluehost is their great support team which can be contacted 24/7. Their knowledge and support makes website hosting much easier for small and larger companies, especially for UK companies requiring a host with solid knowledge of WordPress which can be ropey if highly customised and upgraded.
As part of their many packages, Bluehost tend to offer a free domain name and a free SSL certificate, making it a great and affordable option for expanding companies that are looking to save on their website budget. Their plans start from basic which lets you host a single website with 50GB website space and a free domain. Whilst their higher package which costs around £5.59 a month includes unlimited website, unmetered website space, a free domain, domain privacy, automated backups, and much more.
Before we wrap up, we’ve thought it be best to answer some common questions on web hosting that many company owners ask. We hope to clear up the unhelpful confusion that’s caused by shady hosting companies.
Should I Avoid Shared Hosting?
Shared hosting isn’t bad but can be highly limiting for growing companies, especially in the eCommerce world. A shared hosting server simply puts multiple sites on one hosting server, meaning if they are overcrowded, it can cause great speed and overload issues that will affect your business. However, if you’re a small business that gets minimal traffic, you may consider a shared host for affordability purposes.
Can Shared Hosting Hurt the SEO of My Website?
Yes, it can. Sadly, shared hosting is dangerous, but only if your host doesn’t monitor what type of websites are on the server. Suppose you’re sharing the same server as taboo websites that Google may punish with penalties. In that case, you may risk your website being hurt by search engines due to the server being diminished by search engines for having dangerous websites that steal information, are fraudulent or post illegal content on the same DNS.
Can I Get Free Website Hosting for My UK Website?
You can, but we don’t recommend it. Firstly, free hosting always comes with a catch and this is normally to do with severe server limitations that can cause frequent crashes, no or bad support, bad security and a mountain of other problems that will cause you more issues than good. Whilst its the cheapest option, we’d only recommend a test website on a free platform that won’t affect your business in any way.
Should I Trust the Reviews for Web Hosting Companies?
Hosting site reviews can be tough to digest as host reviews can be fraudulent and fake. In general, we’d recommend asking other business owners or looking into multiple options before proceeding in trusting a host. We’d also consider looking at our above options which we have selected. We believe these platforms will solve your issues and concerns when choosing a host.
Sadly, not many platforms offer free trials due to the cost of running a server and also that many websites require a transfer which includes some work for the support team.
Is Fasthosts Any Good?
From experience, Fasthosts is not a recommended website host. From lack of expert support to bad shared servers that are struggling to even host lite websites, we’d stay away from the host. On the positive note, Fasthosts does have various options for companies including email hosting, WordPress site hosting, and a website builder.
Should I Avoid the Cheapest WordPress Hosting Option?
Cheapest doesn’t mean the worst. In fact, many cheap hosts that cost a few pounds a month do more than enough for most companies, solo traders and hobyists. With so many hosts competiting for customers, the prices are relatively cheap if you look at a monthly price. It certainly beats cost of a physical shop rent or a branch by a long mile. Moreover, your website can be accessed by thousands of people instantly without any restrictions (if the host is reliable).
