Okely-dokely, hosting a website.
One of the most important parts of running your own website is the hosting, if you don’t get it right first time around, it can be a serious pain in the arse.
You can Google for web hosting companies any day of the week and be bombarded with a myriad of impressive, graphic-heavy websites advertising the biggest and best of everything.
Unfortunately the best most of these people can expect is a mediocre, unresponsive and sometimes downright dishonest service.
Shopping around for the best deal is not always the smartest move as cheapest does not equal best.
The first time you ring or email with a technical issue you will see how true this statement can be.
I have used several of the UK’s most popular hosting companies in the past and my recommendation for the best web hosting currently available, both cost and support-wise, is Tentahost.co.uk.
- UK-based Servers
- Datacentre Redundancy
- UK-based Support
- Fully Loaded Featureset
- LAMP Hosting
They provide both single site and reseller hosting packages using the cPanel system on LAMP servers; these include huge featureset’s including SpamAssassin and the Softaculous Installer.
This means that you can install over 175 web applications with a single click – everything from CMS software such as WordPress and Joomla, to Image Galleries, Social Networking Platforms and E-Commerce Sites.
Support requests are always answered by real people with technical knowledge, in a timely fashion; this is evident by the fact that a lot of their business comes from those who are dissatisfied with their current hosting arrangements.
Reliability
Hosting accounts are set up on UK-based servers for maximum responsiveness within the UK. “We don’t overload our servers and they’re monitored 24/7 for responsiveness from a variety of global locations.”
Access & Features
Users have complete control over the featureset that can be allocated to the hosting accounts, with no artificial limits; including unlimited mailboxes, subdomains and MySQL databases.
Technical Support
No Support Monkeys! – “Tentahost offers some of the most responsive support in the business. Don’t take our word for it – look for third party reviews of our service. We aim to respond to your support queries within 1 hour during the working day, and a response is guaranteed within 24 hours at all other times. Support is available 365 days a year.”
So, there’s my pitch, I’ve done my best to save you from the claws of web hosting hell.
Maybe you have given it some thought and decided that another company is the best bet and that you would like to give them a go.
That’s fine, as long as they aren’t Streamline.net or 123-reg.co.uk, let me tell you why. Before I re-designed this site it was being hosted by Streamline, they have a very professional looking site and are very generous with their drive space and bandwidth. The problem is that regardless of what you may have read, their servers are constantly overloaded and extremely slow to respond, at times not loading at all.
I was with them for 2 years and logged at least 4 support tickets due to speed issues – to say I was unsatisfied with the speed and content of their responses in an understatement.
123-Reg on the other hand are an extremely popular hosting site that boast better speed and service than most.
The truth is that they have the worst customer support I have ever used and they constantly show an almost criminal disregard for customers data. If you read 3rd party reviews, countless people complain of spurious charges that take forever to get refunded.
My most recent run-in with 123-Reg was helping someone with a hijacked WordPress site; thousand of people blogged about this specific security issue which was due to compromised scripts finding their way into customers home directories, even when their sites were fully up to date. Every single one of these sites was hosted by…. that’s right, 123-Reg; want to know what they did about it? Denied all involvement. My advice people, steer clear of these two.
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