UKHost4U review

As the company name states, UKHost4u is a UK-based web hosting provider. It takes great pride in years of experience they’ve spent in the business, which is justified given that they had their first hosting client back in 2000 and a year later they set up their first official website. 

The reason UKHost4u is lesser-known player among the competing UK-based companies is likely due to the fact they are an independently owned company while about 95% companies on the market are owned by three hosting companies, which they like to point out. 

Without doubt, UKHost4u came a long way from a small web design and hosting company to what they are today, a competent company offering a myriad of web hosting-related options.

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We can conclude that their intended audience are their fellow countrymen, since most of their data centers are located in the UK and their tier 2 center is located in Maidenhead, England.

On the UKHost4u’s main site, you can access their blog which is designed in a simple but pleasing enough manner. There, you are able to look for specific content using the search bar or by browsing the enlisted categories on the side, and if you scroll down a bit you’ll see what is currently offered at a discount. The blog itself seems to be alive and well, updated once or twice per month.

Plans and pricing

No matter how big or small your business is, UKHost4u will have something to offer. The least expensive plan that provides basic web hosting for a small website starts from £2.50 ($3.23) a month, and if you choose to take the plan for six months, the price will be halved. 

In addition to what is generally expected, the basic plan includes unmetered bandwidth, unlimited email accounts, a free Comodo SSL certificate, free Enterprise Spam Protection and Enterprise LiteSpeed Web Server, all of which is rather useful for a start. This plan, along with others, can be easily updated at any time.

When the servers are concerned, they offer a hosted desktop, VPS hosting as well as dedicated servers. As for the types of hosting, there is shared web hosting, managed WordPress hosting, enterprise managed hosting and reseller hosting, with at least three plans for each of them. 

As for the paying methods, available options include debit/credit card, PayPal and direct debit (GoCardless) payment. For those unsatisfied with the provider’s service, there is a risk-free 30-day money-back guarantee with no questions asked, as they state.

Ease of use

After deciding which plan you’ll want to go with, you’ll be given information about your plan in detail (yes, free SSL certificate is included even in the cheapest plans) and have to choose a billing cycle (monthly, annually or triennially), so there is a certain flexibility in terms of payment. 

How much money you’ll save by going for a year or three will be shown as a percentage, just below the full price. Scroll down, and you’ll be offered to pay an extra £2 ($2.59) for an automatic account backup or duplicated IP address.  

You’ll be also offered to register a new domain, transfer an existing one from another registrar or use and update your name servers. The domain register isn’t free and domain names vary between £5.85 ($7.57) and £11.40 ($14.74), which is a fair price.

To finish creating an account, you’ll have to provide a number of rather standard personal information and generate a password with at least five digits. At the bottom of the page, you can choose to receive occasional emails informing you of the latest news, information and special offers. If you want it, you can even leave notes to the UKHost4u team. 

Even if you choose the least expensive plan, you’ll get at least 50GB of SSD storage, meaning you’ll have good enough performance and your website won’t be too slow. If you want a website builder, it is also on offer, but as a separate paid subscription.

UKHost4u provides a standardized cPanel packed with features and extras that will provide an intuitive and stress-free user experience even for less tech-savvy users. Applications and platforms are only a click away and all hosting plans support Node.js, so you can make the whole process even easier. 

Speed and experience

When it comes to speed, UKHost4u gave us commendable performance, taking 3.0 seconds to fully load its page as monitored by GTmetrix test, in comparison with average loading speed of 8.2 seconds. The amount of requests it took was 63 which is still above the average of 89, so we can confirm that they’ve successfully completed the first testing phase.

When it comes to uptime, UKHost4u stresses out that the availability of their customers' websites is their key priority as they promise 99.9% uptime across all of their hosting solutions. The results of our two-week long tests shows no downtime at all and only a few oscillations in response speed, so it appears they are more than likely to keep their promise.

Support

UKHost4u pride themselves in taking customer support seriously, as they offer 24/7 support via ticket, a phone number available during the working hours (Monday to Friday, 9AM to 5PM) and a dedicated knowledgebase.

The search for specific information in the UKHost4u’s knowledgebase has left us somewhat disenchanted. Although it doesn’t look amateurish, there are only nine categories that are further divided into subcategories and clicking on some of them will get you nowhere, since there are zero articles on the specific subject with just a short promise of “Articles coming soon”. 

Others lead to a written solution to specific problems, with adequate illustrations in the form of “How-to-do-something” and those do offer some beginner-friendly instructions and, despite being very brief, they should be helpful to most users. All of the articles appear to be created in 2020 and updated subsequently in the course of the year, hence we can conclude that UKHost4u is actively updating and optimizing their knowledgebase. They don’t have a support forum at present. 

The competition

UK2 and UKHost4u are rather similar, with both of them being UK-based providers with a wide variety of options and hosting plans for different types of businesses. However, while UK2 includes one domain name, backups and automatic malware removal, be prepared to pay extra to get more than bare bones from the UKHost4u.

Catalyst2 is another competent host from the UK, which, unlike UKHost4u, includes free or quite cheap domains and a three-day-trial. In addition to that, Catalyst2 offers more transparent and straightforward pricing, while the discounts that UKHost4u offers apply if you choose an annual or triennial plan.

Hostgator is a much larger company than UKHost4u and it is US-based, while UKHost4u is more focused on the UK market. While both provide a 30-day money-back guarantee, Hostgator adds a free domain name into the basket, and for the first year of use.

Bluehost is an alternative competitor from the US that offers remarkably low prices for the first three years before a price hike as well as a free domain for a year. The UKHost4u doesn’t offer this, so if you don’t mind having data centers in the US, Bluehost might be the right choice.

Final verdict

UKHost4u is a quality beginner-friendly all-inclusive hosting solution that can meet everyone’s needs, but to take full advantage of all its features, be ready to pay a higher price. If you are interested in all the above, but with more affordable prices and you don’t mind data centers located in the US, Hostgator or Bluehost might be better options for your needs.

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