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Best WordPress Hosting
Providers for UK in 2022

Solution:
  • For a brochure website, £5 per month, use HostXNow
  • For a demanding eCommerce website, £10.5 per month, use HostXNow
  • For Reseller accounts, your best choice is Brixly and HostXNow
  • Get up to 8 CPU’s and 12 GB RAM in semi-dedicated plans from MechanicWeb and HostXNow to outperform most VPS’s.
16 minutes read | Last modified on January 16th, 2022

Summary

Top_UK_providers
Details of our benchmark methodology are explained in a separate post.
Awesome- LiteSpeed testimonial
Krystal Onyx is a failed attempt at building a proprietary software platform lacking key security features. Despite using the latest and most expensive hardware, benchmarks show significant performance drops. TTFB,  disk and database access speed are poor. Do not consider this option and choose the industry standard software stack based on cPanel, Cloudlinux, and LiteSpeed Enterprise.
cPanel accounts on Krystal are overpriced and hosted on old hardware. GURU is as fast as Vultr HF, but their prices are too high. 1 CPU and 2 GB RAM for £10 per month with additional charges for email addons is not good value for money. It only seems reasonable for users who locked themselves with other overpriced options like Cloudways, Kinsta and WPX. For less money, you can take advantage of four times as many CPU resources on faster MechanicWeb’s servers in Germany or two times more resources on faster Brixly’s servers in the UK. At EthernetServers, you can get your hosting four times cheaper for simple websites.
Due to its enhanced resources and limited customers per server, semi-dedicated hosting from HostXNow is a great choice for resource-intensive websites. Their Intel Xeon E-2388G servers deliver extreme performance, which is only matched by AMD Ryzen 9 5950x servers. Hosting plan options range from 2 CPUs/ 3 GB RAM to 8 CPUs/ 12 GB RAM, which should satisfy even the most demanding clients.
Another option for UK clients is Brixly, which recently upgraded its offering with AMD EPYC Zen 2 servers and now provides a 15% faster speed than Guru. They also deploy the latest, fastest hardware such as Ryzen 9 5950x Zen 3 servers from the Hetzner datacenter in Germany. As compared to Brixly’s domestic hardware, these servers are 70% faster and are matching the speed of Intel Xeon E-2388G servers used by HostXNow. The overhead to the UK from the Hetzner data centre in Germany is 30ms. Brixly’s Reseller hosting accounts provide exceptional value for money and are popular among the UK and European clients.  Brixly plans to offer AMD EPYC Zen 3 servers from the Hetzner data center in Washington, DC. These servers are 25% faster than AMD EPYC Zen 2 servers from the UK.
MechanicWeb deserves serious consideration.  They provide similar value for money for shared hosting plans if compared to HostXNow. MechanicWeb offers Ryzen 9 5950x from the same Hetzner data center in Germany as Brixly, and both companies offer very close software stack based on cPanel, CloudLinux, LiteSpeed Enterprise, and other standard software packages including WAF and malware protection. HostXNow, Brixly (with Ryzen Zen 3 in a German data center), and MechanicWeb all show nearly identical benchmarks, so compare the offers from all three companies and choose the best one for your needs!

Introduction

Website page’s loading speed is a critical element of Google’s “mobile-friendliness score”. Speed of page loading, especially on mobile devices, affects search engine rankings. Slow pages never rank high in organic results and are less efficient in converting paid clicks – and this issue is even more important for the eCommerce websites owners.
From August 2021, Google has changed their ranking algorithm by adding Page Experience signals. The new score is partially based on Core Web Vitals such as:
  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – measures loading performance
  • First Input Delay (FID) – measures interactivity
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – measures visual stability
The website owner shouldn’t ignore Core Web Vitals since the Page Experience signal is now a ranking factor. However, Core Web Vitals won’t become THE primary factor. Both Core Web Vitals and the Page Experience signal will be updated annually, and its importance might be reduced over time. But for now, Google is trying to force the change to the website owners’ attitude. If Google succeeds, the web will become much faster to the benefit of mobile users.
The page load speed is determined by two primary factors: your web design agency’s skills and your hosting server configuration. In our study ” How to select a web design agency? Benchmark of 400 web design providers around Cambridge” we have shown a vast range of possible page loading speeds found in the wild.
page loading speed
This is not an arbitrary set – this is the ranking of webpages of web design agencies around Cambridge. If most of them cannot make faster brochure websites for themselves, what can we say about the ordinary website pages’ loading speed? But the actual picture is more complicated – the page loading speed of many websites is pushed further down because of the wrong choice of the hosting providers. The classical cycle of blame, the Hosting provider – Caching plugins – Web page building tool – Web designer – Hosting provider, requires optimisation of each part of the chain.
This post carefully researches available options and recommends several providers for hosting websites for UK businesses. The information is regularly updated.

Hosting in the UK and EU

Can a CDN be ignored?

If your website has only UK visitors – then select your hosting provider in the UK. Another popular hub for the hosting providers is Amsterdam, with its massive Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) handling around 10TB of data every second. It is the largest internet hub on the planet, sometimes referred to as “the centre of the Internet”. Of course, there is a small overhead in the region of 10ms for the PING from the UK to Amsterdam, but it is not a substantial penalty for the page loading speed. Additional options will open up if you decide to consider Amsterdam or even Germany, but you indeed might count for better technical support from the onshore hosting provider. If you serve visitors only in the UK and Europe, do not use the Content distribution network (CDN) services – there is no benefit from doing so. For the website with heavy traffic, use recommended CDN options from our technical study to reduce the origin server load.
Google Core Web Vitals form the new backbone of Google’s search quality algorithms. However, please be aware of the complications introduced with Web Vitals. If you do content marketing with lots of blogs and long-form pillar content, there’s a good chance your website will attract worldwide traffic. In reality, up to 2/3 of your visitors will be outside the UK. Google is unaware that you are a local business only interested in UK customers. The Google Web Vitals are not implemented to penalise websites with international traffic. However, the metrics are calculated from the set of Chrome users from all over the world and the data collected from them. Google strikes a balance by ignoring 25% of the worst data that the Chrome browser reports from your actual visitors. However, you need to make sure you’re serving the remaining 75% with fast-loading pages. So be careful when you say your site only has visitors from the UK; there is a significant global English-speaking community around the UK! Our research article on CDN and HTML delivery at the edge is a must-read for serving international visitors.  It’s worth the effort to use Quic.cloud’s CDN integrated with LiteSpeed, as it’s free or costs less than $1 a month depending on traffic volume.
Static HTML files delivered at-the-edge with proper CDN options shield the origin server from the bulk of visitor requests. However, it’s important to choose your hosting provider carefully to improve the experience of your visitors requesting dynamic HTML pages that are specific to each logged-in user. Your experience with WordPress editing tasks will also be improved with a reliable hosting provider. According to our separate technical study’s hardware and software recommendations, we have selected a range of hosting providers. The essential criteria are LiteSpeed Web Server software and SSD disk with a high-speed PCIe socket for Non-Volatile Memory Express interface protocol (NVMe).  Such a winning formula boosts about four times the speed of specific internal processes on a server, removing the bottleneck in its performance.

Your best option in the UK

If you need a hosting company based in London, consider HostXNow. With its semi-dedicated shared hosting, the company is offering Intel Xeon E-2388G, the fastest server on the market. HostXNow’s performance in all benchmarks is well tuned, and you will be amazed to discover that your current provider offers hardware that’s three times slower. It is true if you happen to be using 20i, the GURU and Krystal Hosting are about two times slower.
At the monthly rate of £14 and £56 respectively, HostXNow offers plans from 2 CPUs/ 3GB RAM/ 150 MB/s disk speed to 8 CPUs/ 12 GB RAM/ 300 MB/s disk speed.  There is a 3 GB/s network uplink with unmetered traffic.  The company provides discounts of 15% for annual billing, 25% for bi-annual billing, and 35% for tri-annual billing. You can get a free trial for a nominal fee of just £1 for the first month to test the hosting and run some performance tests before deciding to move your websites to the fastest hardware in the UK.
HostXNow offers all standard software including cPanel, LiteSpeed Web Server, CloudLinux Shared Pro, Imunify360 malware protection, MailChannels, and Acronis Cyber Backup Cloud to backup files offsite. It has been providing hosting services for the last 12 years, and its owner is an active member of the WebHostingTalk community. The company has many positive reviews on TrustPilot, so you should expect good customer service if you switch to their servers.
HostXNow deserve a large customer base given the excellent spec, especially entry semi-dedicated plan for 10 sites. And Chris is very responsive and open to improvements which I really like. The hosting plans seem to be as optimized as you can make them without spending huge amounts of money.
Alex Cumbers
Alex Cumbers,
Software engineer
HostXNow provides 50 GB of storage, 50 cPanel accounts, 150 MB/s disk I/O, and 2 GB RAM/1 CPU with the Performance Reseller plan for £45 per month. There are fewer cPanel accounts on their Reseller plans due to a lower client density. For agencies requiring higher CPU resources, HostXNow offers three additional plans. The Professional plan includes 100 cPanel accounts with 4 GB RAM and 2 CPUs per child account, the Business plan includes 150 cPanel accounts with 6 GB RAM and 3 CPUs, and Agency plan comes with 200 cPanel accounts with 8 GB RAM and 4 CPUs per child account. The Agency plan is three times more expensive than the entry-level Professional plan, but it offers four times more cPanel accounts and four times more resources per child account.
Multiple CPUs and large RAM sizes will not enhance performance if you are serving brochure websites. LiteSpeed Cache Engine delivers such websites from the server cache. However, anyone who uses Elementor will benefit from E-2388G’s fast hardware speed. Your server’s single-core CPU performance is mostly to blame for Elementor’s slow loading speed. You may prefer the junior plans such as Developer Semi-Dedicated and Developer Enterprise Reseller if you want to edit your site more conveniently. With 5 GB disk space on the Sem-Dedicated junior plan, you don’t have much storage, but you will only pay about £5 per month on annual plans. The junior Reseller plan costs £15 per month for 20 GB of disk space. This is an excellent price for most clients. It also allows users to start using the latest modern hardware and software bundles offered by HostXNow at the lowest possible monthly fee. Eventually, you can easily scale up without moving to another provider when your website becomes busier.
When you have several websites with occasional high CPU load requirements, HostXNow is one of the most competitive offers available. HostXNow’s ultra-fast server and significant CPU and RAM resources per child account allow hosting busy websites that were previously not possible through Reseller plans. However, be realistic about your expectations. If you need continuous high CPU utilisation, you should use a VPS instance with dedicated CPUs instead of a Reseller plan. You should aim for a continuous CPU load of less than 3 CPUs for the entire Agency account, so plan accordingly!
The E-2388G provides only 16 CPU hyperthreads for all users. Don’t expect miracles. Hypervisors allocate CPU threads for a short period of time to different accounts queuing to serve entry processes. With several hundred cPanel accounts per server, you are not guaranteed 4 vCPUs per account. Only on an underutilised server will you be able to use your entire allocation. It is the goal at HostXNow to keep the server utilization below 60% to provide you with more on-demand resources, but you must set realistic expectations if you want a trouble-free service.

Your best value reseller plan in the UK

Brixly offers decent servers in the UK, but they are 40% slower than those from HostXNow.  The company recently switched to a high-availability cluster hosting infrastructure using  AMD EPYC 7502 Zen 2 servers with turbo frequency up to 3.3GHz and DDR4 3200 RAM. According to their current benchmarks, they are faster than Krystal and Guru. AMD EPYC 7543 Zen 3 servers offer an additional 25% speed boost, but will only be available in the UK in the second half of 2022. As soon as EPYC 7543 is available, smaller UK providers like PAC Web Hosting will be switching to it. Brixly might switch to it as well, but for now they might start offering EPYC Zen 3 servers in the Washington, USA from the Hetzner data center located there. Brixly has already upgraded its offering to 70% faster AMD Ryzen 9 5950x servers located in Germany’s Hetzner datacenter. The overhead required to serve the UK from Germany is only 30ms, so we recommend seriously considering this option. A chance to be served on such fast hardware should not be missed!
Brixly’s cheapest Infinity plan is £4 per month. However, most customers probably prefer the Infinity plus plan for £9 per month. It is equipped with 2GB of RAM, 2 CPU cores, 60 concurrent entry processes, a 1GB/s network interface, support for unlimited domains, Memcached, HTTP/3 protocol support, and unlimited storage with a 50MB/s disk speed. Despite only being five years old, Brixly has a lot of positive reviews. The technical team at Brixly consists of about five people, which is sufficient for 24/7 operations. Due to Brixly’s expertise in reseller hosting, the company serves about 250,000 websites. Excellent achievement in the UK market!
Brixly’s  reseller Pro plans deserve special attention. Brixly offers unlimited storage and bandwidth, up to 250 cPanel accounts, 50 MB/s disk I/O speed, 2 GB RAM, and two CPUs per child account. With Brixly, you can boost specific child accounts to 4 GB RAM and 4 CPUs for just £5 per month. Resources like these can be beneficial during the holiday season and provide much more power than top-tier shared hosting plans like those offered by NameHero and A2 Hosting. The WHMCS license costs an additional $10.40 per month. Brixly uses Memcached instead of Redis to improve security. To avoid exploits, the ‘Memcached’ configuration is non-standard.
Brixly reseller hosting is inexpensive, but you should not sign up for it unless you are confident in your technical abilities. Only shared hosting accounts come with “handholding” technical support. It is not recommended that novice users try to set up an agency with cheap reseller plans. You might be better off upgrading your skills on a shared hosting plan before moving to the reseller plan.
Companies like Brixly can offer low-cost reseller plans because resellers mainly work with simple brochure websites. The LiteSpeed Cache Engine caches such sites on the server, so child accounts are rarely accessed except for editing content and updating plugins. Server resources are grossly oversubscribed. A reseller hosting server with 16 CPU cores can have more than 1,000 cPanel accounts. Your child account can access up to two CPU cores, which does not mean that you can use them continuously. Even a continuous utilization of 10% of the CPU core on the child account can cause problems on such an oversubscribed hosting server.
Your entire reseller account with 100 child accounts should aim to have a conservative average usage of less than 6 GB RAM and 1 CPU. Provisioning 2 GB RAM / 2 CPUs per child account is for peak loads only! Most eCommerce customers should expect to be billed £5 per month for boost resources at 4 CPUs/4GB RAM. If you have a client with a successful eCommerce website, you should consider semi-dedicated shared hosting instead of putting them on a heavily oversubscribed reseller hosting account.

Your best option in the EU

The MechanicWeb services are available on hardware from Hetzner’s data centre in Germany. MechanicWeb specializes in high-performance servers and only offers the fastest hardware. MechanicWeb uses Hetzner as it offers Ryzen 9 5950x servers, which, along with Xeon 2388G servers, are the fastest servers available on the market today. In comparison, AMD EPYC Zen 2 servers are 40% slower, and AMD EPYC Zen 3 servers are 25% slower.
For an eCommerce site with high traffic, MechanicWeb’s Power or Prime plans are suitable options. MechanicWeb servers perform 70% faster than Brixly’s in the UK, but Brixly also uses the same fast hardware as MechanicWeb in the Hetzner data center in Germany. Their hosting plans are different – MechanicWeb’s shared hosting plans provide more affordable CPU and RAM. With the Prime account, you receive 3 CPUs and 3 GB RAM, 30 GB of disk storage, 100 MB/s disk I/O speed, and 300 GB bandwidth for unlimited domains for around £10 per month. You can upgrade to the Boost plan (4 CPU, 6 GB RAM), Premium plan (6 CPU, 8 GB RAM), and Elite plan (8 CPU, 12 GB RAM).
There are also fully managed accounts with dedicated CPU and RAM, including Flux (8 CPU, 16 GB RAM), Silo (8 CPU, 24 GB RAM), Saprk (8 CPU, 32 GB RAM), and Apex (16 CPU, 64 GB RAM). As a result of the significantly lower density of users, these accounts are offered with both Redis and Memcached.
Typical software offered on cPanel shared hosting accounts is provided on these dedicated CPU and RAM plans. It includes cPanel, CloudLinux, LiteSpeed Enterprise, Softaculous, ModSecurity, malware scanner, and daily offsite backup. In addition the optional additional software can be installed after the customer requests it. Technically, this is not VPS plans as MechanicWeb does not provide root access. But it will outperform most VPS accounts on Gridpane with a huge margin!

Cheapest option for busy eCommerce websites

HostXNow is the best option for eCommerce hosting. With their Professional Semi-Dedicated plan, you get 6 GB RAM and 4 CPUs for just £21 per month for the annual plan. The modern Intel Xeon E-2388G server is around twice as fast as most other options available in the UK, with some hosting providers like 20i offering hardware that is three times slower. The next best option is offered by Serwer.io with 30% slower hardware. Hardware speed is crucial to your customers’ experience, so we recommend HostXNow. However, Serwer.io offers slightly better value for money if you want to optimise your website’s resources.
Serwer.io’s WordPress Deluxe plan, priced at £24 per month, is an interesting option for semi-dedicated shared hosting.  Serwer.io uses AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X server with 16 CPU cores (turbo speed up to 4.4 GHz) and 128 GB of ECC DDR4-2933 RAM.  In our benchmarks, Serwer.io servers provide similar performance to the newest AMD EPYC 7543 Zen 3 servers. Serwer.io’s plan is affordable. It is about half the price of Cloudways’ Vultr HF 2 vCPU/ 4 GB RAM plan. Yet, it provides faster hardware with four times more resources, including 8 CPU cores, 8 GB RAM, 100 simultaneous entry processes, 8 domains, 40 GB NVMe storage (disk speed 64 MB/s), 3Gbps network uplink, enabled Redis, and support for HTTP/3. This configuration is sufficient for several heavily loaded eCommerce sites and outperforms most entry-level VPS offerings. Overall, it provides about ten times better value for money than Cloudways VultrHF 4GB plan and shouldn’t be ignored if you run a bustling eCommerce site.
Serwer.io is the cheapest solution for a busy eCommerce store. Even if you have up to 100,000 visitors per day, you should talk to Serwer.io about your project. Your website has a good chance of being supported by the Serwer.io shared hosting plan, especially if all static assets are left to the CDN.

Cheapest option for brochure websites

The cheapest LiteSpeed web hosting services are offered by several micro-businesses that rent from OVH data centers. Typical hosting locations include London, Paris, Frankfurt, Montreal, New Jersey, Sydney, and Singapore. OVH serves hosting providers with a mix of slow servers like Intel Xeon E-2136 and significantly faster Intel Xeon E-2388G . Most companies still offer slow E-2136, but HostXNow is one of the first providers to offer E-2388G server.
You can host your brochure website for as low as £5 per month with HostXNow’s annual plan. You may want to consider their Developer Semi-dedicated plan with 1GB RAM and 1 CPU, and 5GB of disk space. A modern Intel Xeon E-2388G server used by HostXNow is around twice as fast as the next best option offered by EthernetServers. When editing websites, the server’s speed is essential, which is why we recommend HostXNow. If you’re looking for the cheapest option, EthernetServers offers better value.
Hosting on OVH London data centre servers might cost you as low as £2.5 per month from micro-company EthernetServers based in the UK. The Silver plan includes 3 GB of RAM, 1 CPU core, 30 simultaneous entry processes, support for HTTP/3 protocol, MailChannels, and 15GB of NVMe storage space (disk speed 100MB/s) for five domains, with 1 GB/s network uplink. They offer 3 years old Xeon E-2136 with DDR4-2666 ECC memory. If you have a simple brochure website or many simple websites with low traffic, you should seriously consider giving EthernetServers a try. This offering is a good value for money with plenty of positive reviews. EthernetServers has been in the business for more than seven years without managing to grow in size. Still, by now, George Sturley, the business owner, has vast experience in setting up and maintaining the service.
Some hosting companies that use OVH are eager to give misleading information. One example of this is WebPlot, which is based in the UK. This company has a bad reputation even among LowEndTalk members. However, since WebPlot claims to be one of the first providers of E-2388G servers from the OVH datacenter in London, we decided to test them. Their servers were poorly misconfigured E-2288G that underperformed EthernetServer’s E-2136. Robert Anderson of WebPlot is often considered a fraud in the LowEndtalk community, and now we know why.

Why we don't recommend GURU

As opposed to many other cloud hosts, GURU (the actual name of the company is UKDedicated) owns the entire Data Center and all servers for the cloud cluster. GURU offers a relatively small CPU allocation for the same money, about two times less than 15% faster Brixly plans priced at the same level. Although GURU runs on five-year-old hardware, our benchmarks show that its performance is comparable to DO Intel Premium on Cloudways.
When choosing GURU, we don’t see any benefit in sacrificing your hardware resources. A few years ago, it might have been a wise choice. They are now offering midrange hardware for a huge premium that isn’t worth your attention. Many affiliate scammers are still trying to convince you to switch to GURU. Compare GURU’s benchmarks with Brixly’s, espesially the one from Germany. Even better – study services from HostXNow. There is no need to pursue further investigation. Nothing can change your opinion about Guru if you still believe their services offer good value for money.

Does Krystal Hosting offer reasonable value for money?

Krystal Hosting  is the main LiteSpeed hosting provider in the UK, heavily marketed by affiliate scammers, and used by the majority of the best-performing web agencies in our study of Cambridge web agencies. With Onyx Personal, you can get 2 GB of RAM, 5GB of NVMe storage space (with horribly slow disk speeds), 40 simultaneous process entries, one domain, and no email services for £15 per month. The Krystal Onyx server uses two AMD EPYC 7542 Zen 2 processors.
For several years, Krystal has worked on “Katapult” – an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform intended to offer extreme performance and simplicity. Onyx is Krystal’s managed shared hosting on the Katapult platform. The benchmarks show that Krystal Onyx performs much worse than Brixly, which is using similar AMD EPYC servers. This decrease in performance cancels out all the advantages of AMD EPYC hardware. In particular, long TTFB, slow access to the disk and database is regrettable.
While it still holds up to fast Intel servers such as those used by GURU, we don’t recommend Krystal Onyx. For the same CPU/RAM resources, Krystal charges two times as much as Brixly, but delivers lower performance. Another drawback of using a homegrown software stack is the inability to incorporate ModSecurity or Immunify360. Krystal is working on integrating ModSecurity into its platform, but a timeline for implementation has not been announced. We can’t think of any arguments for why people would still fall into the trap of using slow hardware and a flawed homegrown software stack when you can get HostXNow services with twice the speed for hardware. Featuring the latest industry software, email support, and 10 domains per account, HostXNow’s junior semi-dedicated plans are of a different calibre.
Krystal offers a set of cPanel plans. The more expensive one, Sapphire, for £30 per month, is already providing NVMe SSD storage. But it is too costly and is running on outdated hardware with disabled Redis. We suggest that you have to wait to see if Krystal will manage to upgrade their more reasonably priced Ruby plan (for £10 per month) to more recent hardware with the NVMe storage. Until then, we don’t recommend using their cPanel services.

Hosting in the USA and Asia

International hosting
Details of our benchmark methodology are explained in a separate post.

Your best options

As we explained above, even a local business based in the UK may need to optimise its website for global traffic to meet the requirements of the new Page Experience metrics introduced by Google.
  • If your clients are in the UK  we recommend HostXNow; for Europe we recommend MechanicWeb’s and Brixly’s servers in Hetzner data center in Germany.
  • If you serve global markets, you have to choose the USA :
    • try Montreal, Canada (HostXnow) to access both USA and Europe;
    • Dallas (MechanicWeb) is the best location between the West and the East Coasts and is more optimised for the traffic to Latin America visitors;
    • select a server in Los Angeles (MechanicWeb) for a website with a significant share of Asian traffic delivered via a CDN provider.
  • If you’re in Asia, use Stablepoint.
  • You will have to use the Content Distribution Network (CDN) service. There are several options, with the most important described in the separate post.

The Hall of shame

The most widely approved hosting provider meeting hardware requirements set in our separate study is A2Hosting with their Turbo Boost plan, which will cost you £7.2 per month if paying for a three years package upfront. The Turbo Boost comes with 2 GB RAM, 2 CPU cores, 50 simultaneous entry processes, unlimited NVMe storage with the heavily throttled 4 MB/s speed, and support for HTTP/3 protocol and MailChannels. They don’t support Redis but provide Memcached memory-caching system for an eCommerce website. The heavy-throttled NVMe storage speed defies the very reason for introducing an SSD with a high-speed PCIe socket. In fact, many plans using ordinary SSD storage will offer 10 MB/s disk I/O speed. So be aware that you’re buying the service with an NVMe SSD drive, but your hard drive speed is throttled below what you get with ordinary SSD storage. This is sheer incompetence on the part of the technical staff at A2Hosting.
The A2Hosting Turbo Boost benchmarks are similar to those of NameHero. Regrettably, A2Hosting restricted disk I/O so severely. Turbo Web Hosting servers come with a built-in caching engine for Full Page Cache. Bloggers who report fast server performance without realising they measure caching system performance on a very slow disk server are confused by this. For junior plans, just be aware that A2Hosting has too much spare capacity on the old hardware to accommodate the new users. According to BuilWith the number of users of A2Hosting has dropped four (!) times during last year.
A2Hosting Usage Statistics
A2Hosting Usage Statistics
The massive exodus is caused by the devastating ransomware attack destroying data for ALL users of A2Hosting. The recent wave of recommendations from all walks of WordPress bloggers to use A2Hosting looks as bad as a massive number of positive reviews on the Amazon page of the questionable Chinese supplier.  We don’t recommend taking an A2Hosting Turbo Boost plan with its dismal 4 MB/s disk speed regardless of any other considerations. CloudLinux recommends this specific value for HDD drive speed. NVMe technology offers a fiftyfold increase in disk I/O speed over HDD, a technology that is two generations behind. A2Hosting is not alone in judging disk I/O speed unfairly. The Business WordPress Hosting plan of Hostinger offered a 1 MB/s limit, which was upgraded in August 2021 to 10 MB/s. Hostinger adds too many caching layers to mask the pathetically slow disk speed, but this is not the only problem they have.

MechanicWeb services

Cloudflare CDN traffic for visitors from China is forwarded to Cloudflare’s server in Los Angeles. You may consider using a low-cost MechanicWeb hosting in Los Angeles to optimize traffic for the origin server for dynamic HTML pages.   Their cheapest Smart shared hosting plan is available for $3 per month and offers 1 GB of RAM, 1 CPU core, 20 concurrent entry processes, 10 GB of NVMe storage and two domains, but still includes Cloudflare Railgun access, HTTP/3 protocol support and MailChannels. MechanicWeb provides an object cache on a Memcached server with SASL security, which ensures that each user has their own Memcached instance. This makes MechanicWeb the perfect choice for eCommerce websites. The full list of features can be found here. MechanicWeb’s Los Angeles server has modern hardware, multiple 100 GBps network uplinks, and is connected to 300+ peers via various fiber transport links on the local Internet Exchange. The Los Angeles server is based on the workstation-grade Intel Xeon E-2288G (Q2 2019, 9th generation Coffee Lake) with 8 CPU cores, 16 threads, 5 GHz Turbo, 16 MB cache and DDR4-2666 ECC memory. This is a high-speed CPU, and this server will provide impressive and fast performance for your website.
The MechanicWeb server in Dallas has a 30% faster Ryzen 9 5950x processor. This is the same server used in the Hetzner data center in Germany.
MechanicWeb’s Power plan is the most interesting one in its lineup. For $10 per month, you get 2 GB of memory, 2 CPU, 50 MB/s disk I/O speed, and 30 GB of disk space for up to twenty domains. We can compare this plan with the shared VPS hosting that Cloudways offers. Cloudway’s VultrHF plan with 2GB RAM and 1vCPU costs twice as much. Many confused bloggers describe Cloudways’ resource allocation as dedicated. Please read our discussion or Vultr’s own offering of dedicated vCPU plans starting at $60 per month to understand the extent of the user misinformation run by the Cloudways team and its affiliate community.
Based on our benchmark, MechanicWeb offers a 90% CPU speed boost over VultrHF. MechanicWeb and Cloudways both offer object caching for eCommerce sites. You will serve each visitor request faster with MechanicWeb, which will result in a better experience for your visitors and a higher conversion rate. If nine times better value for money for 90% faster service is not enough to persuade the users to depart from Cloudways, then nothing will.
MechanicWeb offers Semi-Dedciated plans with a junior Prime plan starting at 3 GB RAM, 3 CPU cores, 40 concurrent entry processes, 30 GB of NVMe storage, disk speed of 100 MB /s, and unlimited domains. It is hosted on the same server but costs around $13 per month. The limit imposed by the allocation of entry processes should be quite enough to host around twenty simple websites from the server’s static cache. This plan is a useful upgrade option from Power plan if your account consistently consumes a high proportion of CPU ‘s resources.
We recommend considering MechanicWeb’s Power or Prime plans as the best options for a high-traffic eCommerce site. You’ll get faster performance and will sustain higher traffic to your website. More importantly, you will enjoy friendly tech support, which should outweigh any other considerations. MechanicWeb offers all the standard options like ImunifyAV for Malware Protection, free daily offsite backup, 30-day backup retention, Cloudflare CDN with Railgun integration, MailChannels outbound spam filter, Softaculous one-click installer, and staging environment.

NameHero

MechanicWeb has been in the hosting business for six years but some clients prefer to work with slightly larger companies. In this case, consider NameHero, a six year old company with a larger size that also offers a number of very attractive plans. NameHero is a winner of the “Best Web Hosting Companies of 2020” award given by FindBestHost. NameHero hosts about 500,000 websites, and its success in receiving an award shows a large user base ready to vote for their champion. The company is currently developing its own custom Data Center in Kansas City to improve speed and redundancy. NameHero is also respected in the community for a large number of online tutorials and online video created by its CEO Ryan Gray.
NameHero’s best deal is the Turbo Cloud plan with an upfront three-year price of £6.5 per month for the Michigan server. The plan features 3 GB RAM, 3 CPU cores, 100 concurrent entry processes, unlimited NVMe storage (disk speed 32 MB /s), 1 Gbps network uplink, HTTP/3 protocol support, enabled Redis and MailChannels. Their server is based on AMD EPYC 7302 (Q3 2019) with 16 cores, 3.3 GHz Turbo,  and DDR4-3200 memory. The NVMe memory is limited by the same number of inodes as MechanicWeb’s semi-dedicated server described above. Our estimate gives approximately the same 30GB of memory as specified for MechanicWeb’s plan. Increased entry processes allocation allows for hosting up to 25 simple websites with static, fully cached pages.
Discout at NameHero
NameHero shows disappointing benchmark results when using AMD EPYC 7302 servers. Brixly’s AMD EPYC Zen 3 servers in Washington, located in the Hetzner data center, are a better choice. These servers are 70% faster than NameHero’s current servers. However, NameHero offers more CPU resources for the same price, so you still get some value for your money, but on much slower hardware. Wait until NameHero updates their hardware to AMD EPYC Zen 3. At the moment, Brixly from Hetzner’s USA data center is the better option.

South Asia options

Stablepoint has a lot of problems with their transition to new hosting model, but we recommend that you check Stablepoint’s Personal Web Hosting and Reseller Hosting. The data centers used by Stablepoint include Linode, Google Cloud, and DigitalOcean. Stablepoint uses LiteSpeed Enterprise Web Server as part of its convenient industry-standard cPanel-based plans. cPanel is a security-hardened professional hosting panel with years of development. Stablepoint offers transparent resource allocation, fixed billing, and a great friendly 24/7 support team. They provide all the standard security features of a cPanel-based account, such as WAF and malware protection.
We advise companies in the US, Europe, and the UK to be cautious when selecting Stablepoint plans due to unpredictable hardware specifications and limited disk speed. Our benchmarks showed that their shared servers were overloaded, resulting in a severe performance degradation. In this article, we have presented shared hosting plans with much faster hardware. In addition, Stablepoint’s shared hosting plans do not support Redis or Memcached. For this reason, most customers are likely to avoid Stablepoint. However, it is a reasonable option to consider if you need to serve customers in Asia. Although we still hesitate to recommend their shared hosting plans, Stablepoint should be sufficient for simple brochure sites.  Affiliates’ overly enthusiastic endorsements should be viewed with skepticism.  Stablepoint pays substantial affiliate commissions on par with Cloudways, which results in heavily biased affiliate recommendations.
Stablepoint Unlimited Reseller 100 offers unlimited storage, 100 cPanel accounts, a low disk I/O speed of 10 MB/s, 2 GB of RAM and two CPUs. You must upgrade to Stablepoint’s Premium Unlimited Reseller plan for $119 per month. Stablepoint heavily oversubscribed their shared servers. Premium Reseller plan provides faster hardware and has fewer users per server. It also increases RAM allocation to 4 GB. Stablepoint does not provide Redis or Memcached on their shared hosting plans.
Larger agencies should consider StablePoint’s dedicated CPU Business hosting plans. This move will enable Redis for your clients and will remove problems with overcrowded servers. LiteSpeed Enterprise and cPanel accounts are provisioned for your clients on dedicated CPU VPS instances from Linode or DO servers.

Adanced options

If you are considering Enterprise-grade shared hosting, reseller hosting, or managed VPS, we recommend studying the plans offered by five providers: NameHero, MechanicWeb, HostXNow, Brixly, and Stablepoint. Depending on your geographical location, HostXNow, MechanicWeb, or Brixly should be your first choice for the top semi-dedicated shared hosting plans. Brixly Reseller Pro,  HostXNow Business Reseller plan, MechanicWeb TurboXL, and Stablepoint’s Business plans are the best options for serving multiple clients with optimal resource allocation for child accounts. MechanicWeb’s HF-68 are among the best managed VPS options for hosting your own LiteSpeed Web Server. You can find detailed information regarding the comparison of all these options in a separate study. Please don’t forget to consider implementing the CDN options described by us.
The following is our final summary of the geographical location of advanced hosting:
  • London (HostXNow, Brixly) to serve UK-based clients.
  • Germany (Brixly or MechanicWeb) will serve the UK, Europe, Turkey, and Israel.
  • Los Angeles (MechanicWeb) will serve clients in the West Coast; this is the best location to optimise for the CDN traffic from America and Asia.
  • Dallas (MechanicWeb) for serving customers in the South Central US and Latin America
  • Washington (HostXNow) or Montreal (HostXNow) to serve clients in North America; it is the best location for optimising CDN traffic from America and Europe.
  • Sydney, Sinagpore, Tokyo, Mumbai, Bangalore (Stablepoint) to serve customers in Asia.

How to Test your options

Most hosting providers suggested above offer a free trial, discounted fee of £1 for the first month, or first 30-day full refund option. So, you can try a couple of them at once by moving your website files to several hosting providers. You can then start changing Domain Nameservers (to point to a new host) and measure your webpages’ overall performance.
Our methodology for testing hosting providers is described in a separate post. Using the free WP Benchmarking plugin, multiple tests can be measured quickly and easily. You will get a lot of information about your hosting provider in less than 4 minutes! Measured data is completely independent of any other settings on your hosting provider package and is unaffected by any other plugins installed on your WordPress site. Follow the simple instructions offered in the above article, and you will be able to determine whether the hosting plan offered to you is worth keeping.

Next steps

If you are hosting your website on a LiteSpeed Web server, be sure to use the QUIC.cloud CDN. This CDN service provides for free 10 GB of bandwidth per month and will serve static HTML files from its edge servers, freeing up your origin server to focus on serving dynamic HTML files for eCommerce website visitors. Please read our post “How to Choose Your Best CDN Provider” for in-depth technical information about CDN services, espesially if you need to host video files.
Web design agencies are important to your website’s function. Selecting the appropriate hosting and a CDN can help with website loading time, but you’re not going to get far without an attractive page design. The democratization of web page design tools has led to an influx of technically uninformed web designers into website development roles. You may be surprised to learn that most designers are unable to design websites with fast loading speeds. Our article on “How to choose a web design agency” helps you thoroughly evaluate which design company is the right fit for your needs.
WebWhim is a design agency based in Cambridge, UK, that specialises in web design services. We are experts in graphic and web development. Our company has over 15 years of experience in the field. We’ll work with you to explore all your business needs and create tailored solutions to meet them. To provide clients with a comprehensive design process, we have created an affordable web design package. It’s possible to learn more about what we offer on our website design page.
We offer web and graphic design. We cover the full spectrum of your needs, from logos to eCommerce stores. Our company offers advice on web hosting solutions, as well as technical search engine optimization. We have a small team with the expertise to meet all your needs.
If you need any assistance, please contact us at svetlana.zh@webwhim.co.uk.
Visit our WordPress research portal for more information. We’ve interviewed various hosting providers and plugin developers to come up with six research articles, all about understanding the WordPress ecosystem. A knowledgeable web design agency is crucial to delivering blazing-fast pages, as are proper plugins and tools, a great hosting provider, and fast CDN. Without these basics, your website will not pass the new Page Experience signals introduced by Google.
Research Portal
Research Portal
Black Hat SEO speed optimisation plugin
Click Here
How to Choose a Secure & Fast eCommerce Platform
Click Here
How to Choose a Web Design Agency
Click Here
LiteSpeed Hosting as Cloudways Alternative
Click Here
Best WordPress Hosting Providers for US and UK
Click Here
How to Choose Your CDN Provider
Click Here
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How to Choose a Web Design Agency
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How to Choose a Secure & Fast eCommerce Platform
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How to Choose Your CDN Provider
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LiteSpeed Hosting as Cloudways Alternative
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Black Hat SEO speed optimisation
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Best WordPress Hosting Providers for US and UK
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