Brixly review

Brixly is a relatively new web hosting provider, founded in 2014 by Dennis and Francesca Nind, a married couple, and focusing primarily on reseller hosting. Just six years after its inception, the provider is already managing more than 275,000 websites and blogs, making it one of the fastest-growing hosting platforms designed for the reseller market in the UK. They also offer web hosting, and their migration centre makes switching to them from another provider much easier than usual, but also faster, taking hours instead of days.

Brixly has a London-based data centre network, made up of what they claim are the highest quality Tier 1 providers, in order to ensure that they’re always online, plus a Chicago-based one. They promise 99.9% uptime, guaranteeing money back in the event that they can’t keep that promise.

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Brixly is big on customer satisfaction, so they offer an almost-free month-long trial on every plan. This makes your choice much easier. They also like to take a more personal approach than most, which may not be for everyone, so expect to see a chat window (from the founder, apparently) pop up when you open a certain page and offer you assistance with it. 

Plans and pricing

When it comes to web hosting, Brixly offers unlimited bandwidth, a free SSL certificate, daily backups, and more with every plan, plus all of them are available for a month-long trial costing just £1. Should you decide to stay with them, the Infinity plan (offering 10 GB SSD storage) will set you back £3.95/mo, while the Infinity+ plan (with unlimited SSD storage) will cost £8.95/mo.

However, Brixly’s main product is reseller hosting. Again, every plan is £1 for the first month as a sort of cheap trial, the entry plan then costs £9.95/mo and includes 20 cPanel accounts and 50 GB SSD storage, with every subsequent plan increasing the number of cPanel accounts and removing any storage restrictions. The most expensive plan, Unlimited, goes for £59.95/mo and has 250 cPanel accounts. 

All plans offer a 30-day money back guarantee, and accepted payment methods are PayPal and credit/debit cards.

Ease of use

Signing up with Brixly is simple: you just tell them whether or not you have a domain and if you’re transferring an existing one to them, then select your billing cycle, keeping in mind that the annual one also includes a free domain for both reseller and web hosting. No matter which hosting plan you’ve chosen, you can choose between a data centre in the UK and the US. Brixly does not try to upsell you too much: you can just add a dedicated IP address to your hosting account for £2.95/mo. Choosing PayPal as your payment method also gives you the option of setting it as a one-time payment only, meaning the provider can’t withdraw funds for a renewal without your express permission.

Once you’ve completed the signup process (you’ll have to give them your name, address, and phone number, not unlike most other providers), you’ll get a welcome email with what we found to be a nasty surprise: plaintext password storage. This is simply bad security practice, but may not be a dealbreaker to some. You get access to a client area from which you can manage your services, purchase new ones, see your billing information, and access support.

You’ll have to login to your cPanel separately, but once you’re there, you can get started on your website. As usual, both File Manager and FTP are there if you want to upload an existing website, but lacking one, you have a whole host of one-click install apps available through Softaculous. A free website builder is also included with drag-and-drop features, so creating a new website should be a piece of cake.

Speed and experience

The loading speed of Brixly’s main website is pretty decent: taking 8.3 seconds to fully load, just below the GTmetrix average of 8.4 seconds, plus 92 requests (average being 89), they’re smack in the middle of the range in terms of performance. This means that most users are unlikely to be dissatisfied with their offer.

When it comes to uptime, Brixly guarantees 99.9% of uptime, which translates to less than 9 hours of downtime per year, or 20 minutes in two weeks. We put that promise to the test over a two-week period, when they had a single 4-minute outage at one point. This is well below those 20 minutes, which is an excellent sign.

Support

Finding the help you need from Brixly should first be attempted through their Knowledgebase, at least according to our customer control panel. The Knowledgebase is separated into sections, where it says who contributed to each—Dennis Nind, the founder, and Sam Morley, whose role isn’t stated, are the only names. The articles within each section are clear, detailed, and with plenty of pictures so you can follow along.

If you still can’t figure it out, you can contact the provider’s customer service team through phone, email, and live chat, while registered users can also submit a ticket to either the Technical or the Sales and Billing departments. The former is available 24/7/365, while the latter is only there on workdays, so you may have to wait a bit.  

The competition

Certa Hosting is another cheap, UK-based hosting provider, even cheaper than Brixly, but without nearly as many features as Brixly offers in even their lowest-grade plan. Plus, Brixly includes a free SSL certificate in every plan, which is not the case with Certa Hosting.

Bluehost is also cheap and dependable, with plenty of options, but they simply don’t have reseller hosting, which is the main thing Brixly has. Still, for customers who only need shared hosting, the choice may not be quite as clear-cut and may depend on personal preference.

Hostgator suffers from a similar problem—although their guides, tutorials, and general knowledge attainable through the platform are superior to Brixly’s, and they offer reseller hosting as well, but they have bandwidth restrictions and the plans are more expensive than what Brixly offers.

When it comes to excellent services for excellent prices, Linode offers all of this and more—but they take a lot of technical knowledge, and reseller hosting, while available, is not as clear-cut as it is in the case of Brixly.

Final verdict

Brixly offers great services for great prices, and their one month £1 trial on every plan, no matter how elaborate or feature-packed, makes it easy to choose what works for you in terms of size and pricing. Although Bluehost and Hostgator are both decent alternatives, many customers may find exactly what they need with Brixly.

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