Webhosting UK review

Established in 2001, Webhosting UK, also known as WHUK, has been in the web hosting business for almost 20 years now and, to quote them, they are “here to stay”. Based in Leeds, England, privately owned and independent, they manage their own tech support as well as monitoring, and take pride in the opportunity to be accountable only to their customer. In addition, they claim that being a relatively small company enables them to “invest aggressively in new and emerging technologies” which is certainly a positive approach towards business.

At present, their data centers are situated in Maidenhead, England and their tier 3 data center provides access control together with state-of-the-art security, cooling and disaster prevention and management systems. Web hosting plans they offer are suitable for a personal blog of modest requirements, as well as for completely managed enterprise hosting with high-traffic and resource-intensive websites. Having a plan to meet everyone’s needs, Webhosting UK states that they are presently delivering key cloud and app hosting solutions to over 35,000 client throughout the world. 

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Their blog is visually attractive, features consistent style and relevant topics, and invites readers to leave a comment at the end of every article. By looking at the dates, we can see that it has been updated for the most part at least once per week.

When it comes to social media, Webhosting UK is present on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn, and all of them except YouTube, seem to be active on a daily basis. 

Pricing

Webhosting UK offers a full range of services and at the start you are asked to choose between different types of web hosting: basic shared web hosting, email hosting, WordPress hosting or reseller hosting. As for servers, they offer VPS, cloud and complete managed dedicated servers both for Windows and Linux. 

The least costly, as well as their bestselling plan, is the Premium Web Hosting plan and it starts at £2.49 ($3.24) for a month and offers a free domain, but for annual or higher plans only. This comes with 5GB SSD storage, unmetered bandwidth, unlimited websites and email addresses and the capacity to host two websites. 

Webhosting UK accepts credit/debit cards, PayPal and a bank transfer, and offers 30-day money-back guarantee for all hosting plans purchased by new clients. 

Ease of use

Upon deciding on a plan, you’ll be offered to register a new domain, transfer an existing one, or use it while updating your name servers. Meanwhile, you’ll be reminded, in rather small font letters, that a free domain extra applies only to specific names (com, .org, .biz, .co.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk, and .net.) and just for annual or biennial plans. Afterwards, you’ll choose a legal type and add a company ID number, if there is one.

After this, you’ll add pretty standard personal information, generate a password with a minimum of five digits, choose a paying method and proceed to checkout. Additionally, you can choose to receive marketing-related notifications via SMS, and be offered to join a mailing list where you’ll be notified about occasional news, information and special offers.

Webhosting UK provides cPanel with shared Linux plans while Windows plans include Plesk control panel. Both are simple enough to navigate through, so that even newbies can easily familiarize themselves with them. However, if you get stuck along the way, knowledgebase provides a number of step-by-step guides, hence you can consult it or seek help from round-the-clock customer support. 

Additional apps are one click away, so if you want to use WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, PrestaShop, Magento or other options, they’ll be at your disposal after a one-click installation. If you’re interested in a paid backup service, it is available through CPanel as well. Importantly, Webhosting UK offers a website builder, complete with a myriad of templates and themes that are customizable without much effort. 

Speed and experience

Webhosting UK’s main website showed decent enough performance on our speed test by GTmetrix. The time it took to fully load was 6.3 seconds while the average is 8.4, and 83 requests were required against the average of 89. However, the page speed performance score is 77% which is barely above average of 74%, with the leverage browser caching criterion being the weakest link which made GTmetrix grade it with a C. 

Given that Webhosting UK has much confidence in the reliability of their shared hosting plans and guarantee 99.9% uptime, we had to put it to the test. Uptime test on their main website, which lasted for a whole month, showed no downtime whatsoever and only a few oscillations on a smaller scale. Having this in mind, Webhosting UK’s decision to guarantee 99.9% uptime was more than justified and they are very likely to hold their promise in the future. 

Support

Webhosting UK claims that they take the question of support very seriously as they offer 24/7 customer support via telephone and live chat, which is always welcome.

In addition, they offer a knowledge base, blog, forum and a service status page. The latter provides users with news about the latest updates and the current state of their platforms, as well as with notifications about problems or scheduled maintenance. 

The knowledgebase seems decent enough, although at first it seems a bit chaotic. Articles are categorized by different topics with five of them from each category being highlighted, presumably by the criterion of popularity. On the far right, categories are listed alphabetically, showing the number of articles in each of them, and as far as we could observe, the articles are well drafted and helpful.

A support forum is something we don’t see often enough, so even if Webhosting UK’s one isn’t particularly active, it’s refreshing to see it. 

The competition

Like Webhosting UK, Tsohost is equally experienced UK-based host with plenty of options and a newbie-friendly approach, but their plans bring a free domain into the bargain, which Webhosting UK offers exclusively for annual plans. However, when it comes to support, Tsohost lacks an official forum and their live customer support is available only during the business hours.

Both Webhosting UK and UK2 are UK-based, feature-packed and beginner-friendly, but UK2 offers 30-days money-back guarantee only for selected plans, while Webhosting UK’s guarantee applies to all plans. 

Bluehost’s data centers are US-based while Webhosting UK’s ones are UK-based, but both providers offer a user-friendly approach, transparent pricing and sufficient features. Geography notwithstanding, Bluehost requires its clients to sign up for plans on an annual basis, while Webhosting UK provides a monthly option as well.

HostGator is another US-based competitor, but the one that offers a free domain, a free SSL certificate, plenty of affordable add-ons and more budget-friendly prices in general. Therefore, if you are not looking for a strictly UK provider, HostGator is an excellent alternative, especially for beginners. 

Final verdict

Webhosting UK is a well-rounded web hosting solution for smaller or medium-sized businesses, but their offer doesn’t include much in comparison with other providers. Their greatest advantages are the rich experience they have, a fairly good reputation, wide range of plans and a great deal of support they provide. If you are looking for all of these, with a bonus opportunity to save a bit of cash, you can’t go wrong with Hostgator or Bluehost.

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