Best Web Hosting Services UK in 2023

Kinsta Review

I’ve heard this described as the best premium WordPress hosting service out there…now, that’s a pretty bold claim, but with a five-year consecutive award streak to back it up, Kinsta might be onto something.

This is a provider for serious business. From a small and rapidly growing team to an established company looking to streamline their performance, Kinsta has a plan for everyone. They’re fast, secure and comprehensive — words to make any CEO’s spine shiver with excitement.

I’ll get into loading times in the benefits section below. But first, with so much marketing gimmickry out there, let me give a smidgen of attention to who this company are.

Kinsta isn’t the only host provider that offers WordPress hosting — which we’ll discuss below — but they do some key things differently, putting themselves in a different league.

Why My Eye is on Kinsta

I love innovation. People don’t often associate creativity with programming and web development. Those people would be wrong

Kinsta’s the true new kid on the block. They were only founded in 2013 with a central office in LONDON TOWN (WAHEEYY!) – amongst other countries.

No, in all seriousness, this company really is standout and the speed with which they achieved their reputation says something about how innovative they really are!

But you’re a business owner, not a nerd, so I doubt you really care how cool their coding is. Well let’s put it in another language, Kinsta is robust, boasts impressive performance, and is guaranteed* to make your business grow.

*(may not actually make your business grow unless you’ve got something worth buying…but it’ll definitely help).

On the WordPress Hosting package, their team handles things like backing up and securing your website, in case something goes wrong (it can be done manually if you want, though).

Kinsta offers a pretty comprehensive range of hosting services, whether your business is just starting, or already in need of some heavy-lifting hosting.

So, whatever your circumstances, if you want some serious, premium hosting and have got the cash to splash, Kinsta is the service for you.

#1. WP Hosting — Faster Loading Times

I mentioned HostGator earlier as my top cloud hosting pick. Kinsta is a bit of a mixed bag in this regard—a better expression might be “Best of both worlds.”

I’ve seen page loading speeds of 307ms over a 30-day analysis, which is well ahead of the average #ftw – that’s under a third of a second.

The loading speed may be higher with the more comprehensive “multipurpose” WordPress themes with tonnes of features. That’s to be expected, however.

Their WP plan runs on the Google Cloud Platform, which is essentially a cloud network that many companies use, including Philips, Best Buy, Snapchat, and Spotify.

Cloud hosting — also known as cluster cloud hosting — gives you the benefit of a personal virtual space without having to rent a whole server.

Kinsta uses 20 servers located across the globe, with more added all the time.

If you’re a start-up, you’ll want to attract lots of customers, and you’ll want them fast. Likewise, if you’re a big biz and you’re feeling the strain of huge customer loads, you want things sped up and optimized. Get the right package, and Kinsta’s cloud-based service will excel in either of these needs.

#2. WP Hosting — Less Downtime

With so many computers speaking to each other —“cloud computing” is another alias for cloud hosting — the chances of crashes dwindle.

It’s simply far less likely that several servers all across the world will crash at the same time, thus send your web site down the chute.

Plus, the automatic systems check for downtime issues every five minutes, while the 24/7 support team is on call to deal with any problems.

If your site suddenly needs a surge of resources to handle a spike in traffic - no problem. This is the beauty of combining WP optimization with cloud hosting.

Take advantage of viral attention without worrying about your site squeezing your bandwidth, as a shared hosting setup would automatically do.

#3. WP Hosting — Outsourcing & Customer Support

The Kinsta team places your website in an environment optimized for WP websites, which explains the boosted performance metrics.

The customer support are also specialists in WordPress-related issues. Some are even WP developers!

Backups are automatic — on file for at least a fortnight (and up to a month). If you want to find lost information, it’s a straightforward process. They take place each day, with the option of making it hourly available as default.

As a last tidbit, there are data centres in Europe to choose from. If your customers are mostly in the UK, grab one closest to it. That’s a useful bit of control.

#4. WP Hosting — Testing (Staging Site) 

Very cool feature. The staging site lets you test out experimental and everyday edits to your site, before publishing or adding to your main site.

Maybe you have new bits of code, plugins (special features/capabilities), or changes to your look. You can quickly test these out before going live.

Kinsta’s basic plan covers you for 25,000 visitors a month, a reasonable amount for a new and growing business. Should you overshoot this (the pains of success, I know) there’s an overcharge fee. But at 76p per 1,000 extra visitors, it isn’t going to break the bank.

The plans scale up from roughly “I’m a small business owner” (25,000 visitors per month) to “I own business itself” (2,500,000 visitors per month). Like I keep saying, whatever the scale of your hosting needs, Kinsta’s got you.

All these plans come with a 30-Day money-back guarantee with all the typical bells and whistles thrown in.

You won’t get an entry-level pricing plan here, but if you’re serious about getting the best service possible, then that shouldn’t really matter.

And you’ve graduated from the first semester of our class. Now it’s time to round out our knowledge so that all the terms I'm using start to make sense.

Designing your website

The most popular site creation and design tool today is WordPress. I always recommend WordPress for people who expect something unique, branded and tailored for their site.

Your website represents you. Like SiteGuard in overall hosting, WordPress is the best of the best for site creation — whether you use an easy customizable “theme” package, or pay an expert like me to customize it for you.

It’s a one-click installation. Having SiteGuard’s native interface come with WP means you save time and hassle — with automatic updates. That falls in the Every Little Helps category.

You can ask SiteGuard’s experts to handle the migration of any old site you had over to their hosting plan, and to provide general WP support.

WordPress

I’ve blathered on about this a few times in the guide. As it says on the tin, it’s a no fuss way to start building your WP site.

1-click installations are actually a standard now with most hosts. Once you’ve bought your web hosting, you’ll find the option to install WordPress with one click.

Hey presto — you’ll have your WordPress, domain and hosting accounts linked up, ready for mobilization.

The app itself will either be through c-panel or a customized version that your host has created — use WP itself to enter.

Because you’ve got your domain — if you haven’t here’s a guide on purchasing a web domain — you can begin on a free WP account.

Why WordPress is (Probably) the Best for You

If you were to go directly through WordPress for everything, you’d need to pay them for hosting and a domain.

But to me, WordPress is a speciality service. They do one thing very well: design your place of business.

If you decide to go the WP route, make sure to get the best hosting for WordPress.

In terms of themes, you want to think of WP as like the Google App store: unlimited. Thousands and thousands of templates.

“Themes”— aka pre-designed sites that you can customize — are a business unto themselves that range from basic to Fortune 500.

• Open a store
• Create a membership site
• Display your portfolio
• Create a browser version for your app

Endless possibilities. But this might not be ideal for your business. Let’s briefly talk about three more CMS’s — Content Management Systems.

It’s important to note that all of these coding types can be incorporated into WordPress. Indeed, one of WP’s coolest features is its expandability for scaling up or customization.

PHP Framework

Actually, your WordPress website might contain PHP elements. What we’re talking about here is a complete Custom PHP website framework versus a WordPress Website framework.

A PHP framework is more secure versus your regular CMS’s. The code is customized just for your site, so hackers can’t send automated problems your way so easily.

In terms of flexibility, you’re looking at the big sharks. YouTube was originally based completely on PHP but now combines many others like HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Some of the most creative programming minds have used PHP to create unique, irreplaceable websites. This obviously means lots of time and programming expenses.

Java Script

Considering that 94.5% of all sites use it, it’s pretty safe to say JavaScript’s crucial, though it’s becoming less popular on the “back-end” (where the deepest code is.)

It’s most utilised for dynamic and interactive web pages. It’s also possible to combine JavaScript with other coding languages, to boost the number of platforms your site runs on.

JavaScript can also reduce load time, increase uptime, and maximise how responsive your website is for the user (the front-end).

You’ll find it’s the standard for every player on the front-end: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, Twitter, eBay. The list goes on forever.

This will be incorporated into some of your WordPress themes—if you choose to use that for your site design — which are focused on enhancing user experience across devices and browsers.

Joomla

These guys are running the closest second behind WordPress though they’re several hundred metres behind in the race.

The reason is the lack of user-friendliness in their CMS. It’s hard for me to recommend this designer as there is no real benefit over WordPress.

They’ve been around since 2005. While WordPress were started at around the same time, WP has 60% market-share and Joomla only 5.

In general, if you’ve used Joomla for some time and love it then continue, especially if you are a developer. But there’s less easy entry for non-developers.

The supporting features are also less appealing by a large margin: fewer themes, plugins, a less active community, and fewer ways to easily expand and scale up your website.

The main advantages Joomla has are multilingual support, multiple templates for different pieces of content, and more advanced access/management controls.

Hosting Types Explained

A few years ago, UK's web hosting industry was lagging behind on the US and even most European countries. However, with over 171,200 active websites in 2023, the UK web hosting market now has a compound annual growth rate of 13.25%. Compared to countries such as Spain, France, and Germany, the growth rate is 2-3x larger.

Welcome to the wonderful world of being a boffin. If you’re here and reading, you are now one of us.

As you tumble down the rabbit hole, even the question of hosting type unravels — that’s this section #TheMatrix

People tell you to go get hosting, but the question of what type is less commonly asked — as though you’re a rookie.

Each type is very different with defined strengths and weaknesses that affect overall capabilities.

Your most common and expected type is shared hosting, which we’ll look into first as it fits most needs. But there are specialized alternatives for the big wigs. Five, roughly speaking:

1. Shared
2. VPS (virtual private server)
3. Dedicated
4. Cloud
5. Reseller

Shared Hosting

This is the most popular, common and least expensive type and probably the hosting you’ll buy as a newbie or small-to-medium sized business.

Of course, with less cost comes less resources, so shared hosting offers the least amount of power. But it does come with great user friendliness, with features like 1-click install.

You have what you need to manage your own site, creating a unique look without needing years of coding experience.

For the vast majority of sites you won’t need to worry powerwise, with low amounts of traffic coming in (traffic = visitor count).

Unless you’re YouTube. If YouTube are reading this, forget what I said above and proceed to the next type pronto!

Your Shared Hosting Team

On a shared hosting plan ideal for smaller and newer sites, you are just one user of many sharing a server’s abilities.

Once you sign up for a plan, you’re slotted into a space in a data centre, with your host promising to look after the performance of your site.

Right now, there are technicians in lab coats monitoring your server’s hardware, software, hacking security, updates, and so on.

If your host doesn’t uphold their end of the bargain — such as by too-frequent crashes — you may be entitled for reimbursement.

Though the communal arrangement has limitations in capacity, self-starters with a creative idea can hop online rapidly on a budget.

This massive pooling (like Uber) lets these hosts offer continuous promotional offers and discounts to their new customers.

Shared Hosting Limitations

There are a few. For sites that handle very sensitive data, shared hosting plans may be a large concern.

The server’s very communal nature may allow viruses to spread across a server site, infecting those linked to it.

You have no way to personalize your security. You’re essentially relying on your hosting team to protect you.

There are also restrictions in the fine-print that you may not be aware of in your shared hosting contract.

The small price often goes hand-in-hand with annoying pricing schemes that may suddenly see your charges quadruple. Your hosting plan can also be terminated for a broader number of reasons.

In some cases, if you exceed your traffic quota! One day swimming in new money, next day site crash. For online product creators with sharp time windows … yeah, be careful.

A sudden spike in traffic might break or slow your site, due to the server’s cap, killing golden opportunities.

It takes three seconds of waiting for a user to click out of a site in frustration. Servers limit individuals so that all have good average performances.

Spam is another issue. Spammers target a certain site and all those tethered to it become targets also.

Overall, it’s still a very capable and useful plan, which suits most businesses. If you expect great spikes in traffic, it’s worth considering an alternative.

Virtual Private Server Hosting  - VPS Hosting

If you like bottle-service, VIP-lounges and limousines, welcome to VPS.  It stands for Virtual Private Server.

This plan is a rung up in terms of power — and as you might have guessed — also in the price tag

(There are some great VPS hosts that are free/cheap but they lack the quality of ones with expensive plans.)

You’ll also get features, integrity and capabilities not possible in shared hosting, though the physical differences are not so wide.

You’re actually still on a single server, but a portion of it has been cut off just for you—so you can put your feet up.

You get enhanced control — remote control — to manage your site, letting your scale your plan up or down depending on current need.

The control panel is expanded. For technical people, this gives you self-tailoring options not available in shared hosting. Security is less of a concern and more robust. VPS goes to an intense standard to prevent causalities.

Cyber-crime is an exponentially growing industry. If you expect to deal with large assets, getting the best VPS hosting available is probably essential.

Your VPS Hosting Team

Aside from the caviar and chauffeurs, VPS offers you majorly increased bandwidth (traffic allotment) and space.

Your VPS team works to ensure your slice of the server pie. It is powerful enough to give your users an outstanding user experience.

If you plan to be in the big league or to get sudden traffic spikes and want to secure performance regardless, say no more. I’m very big on this principle as — in my experience — one of the markers of success is quality.

Getting to the next scale of high-paying client can often involve scaling up your infrastructure in kind.

VPS gives you performance you can rely on. This is a hallmark of stellar business performance and customer service.

Downtime costs to your business are limited several times over, something even smaller businesses could benefit from.

Also - PEOPLE LOVE SMOOTH, QUICK SITES. Sorry for yelling there — bad habit picked up as a kid.

The support teams in VPS solutions are also (usually) very quick to help you out with any queries. Just don’t yell.

VPS Hosting Limitations

It isn’t all roses and sunshine. I’ll give you extra credits in this class if you recall the negative by the end of this sentence.

Dosh, fella. You gets what you pays for, as they say. As you get a whole lot more, you’ll pay lots more too.

VPS hosting is still generally suitable for mid-to-large businesses, as the optimal boost in performance pays for itself.

You’ll also need to pay for tech support if you want to utilize all of the increased controls on offer. Unless you’re already savvy.

This may amount to hiring a team in a 24/7 tech admin support role. No point in having capability if it’s unmanaged.

To Buy or Not to Buy VPS

• You’ll want VPS hosting if:
• You expect to grow your biz substantially over the coming year
• You require optimal security
• You want as much control over traffic adjustments as possible
• You want full specialist customer support 24/7
• You want the capability to handle a large audience or large bursts of traffic
• You’re already edging into the mid-tier or higher category of business

Are you not entertained? Well, then let us PROCEED deeper into the depths of hosting boffinery. Two more types.

Dedicated Hosting

Yep, we’re here. The top of the mountain. The pie in the sky. Your bestest possible hosting setup. YouTube, welcome.

They give you a server to yourself (or more) and look after it with the attention of a shepherd watching his flock.

Yes, there’s a reason YouTube doesn’t go down. Ever. The risk of crashes and downtime issues depletes the bigger and more dedicated the resources.

Of course, this is the most complicated and costly hosting option, but also the most powerful, robust and secure.

Security is extreme in this setup, to safeguard sensitive data stored on the server network site.

In one sense, security risks are lower as there are no tethered accounts transferring potential infected files across the server.

On the other, providers take great care to use the most state-of-the-art scanning systems to search for spammers, hackers and viruses.

Your Dedicated Hosting Team/Limitations

Your team will give you full control over your server, which includes the hardware and operating systems used.

Ironically, opting for a dedicated server puts more of the managerial responsibility in your hands, though you may be provided with dedicated engineers.

Other hosting setups come with a pre-existing team supporting the server, while this plan expects you to build your own.

You should have more technical knowledge or hire a team with it, so they can customize your setup.

This is ideal for people experienced in web development and system administration. You’ll have freedom to define your plan to a fine point.

The role of dedicated service providers at this level is a little vague, with a lot of variability and fewer industry standards.

Maintenance of the operating system and server may include security patch and monitoring updates. But you can also opt to move your team onto the site instead.

There are four main level of support available:

• Fully managed – you, as the customer, put complete faith in the service provider to handle the server
• Managed – you involved yourself in certain aspects, while leaving most of the job to the provider
• Self-managed – you handle most of the operational going-ons, with some support from the service provider
• Unmanaged – you handle everything, from monitoring, security, upgrades and maintenance

Cloud hosting

For the dreamers, the square pegs in a round hole...

We’re not done, not by a long shot.

Chances are you have a rough idea of what “The Cloud” is. Now we'll talk about cloud hosting.

There’s some similarity with VPS here. But rather than being on one site, servers/computers are pooled together from different locations.

You end up with very quick loading times and lots of flexibility in climbing up or down the scale ladder.

This goes for space. Upgrades are immediate, which is why cloud hosting has boomed in popularity recently — we’re still waiting on a single.

Your Cloud Hosting Team

Though there are similarities between ordinary web hosting and “cloud computing,” which is another name for cloud hosting, they can be complex.

Here’s how ordinary hosting works. First, your chosen team will give you access to their servers for a fee.

On that server, you can store website files and info. This is then beamed across the world — onto the World Wide Web. Cloud computing/hosting differs by turning many physical servers into ones connected by a virtual thread.

This is also called cluster hosting. One way of thinking about this is that one site may have traffic problems, causing your site to go/slow down.

But many differently located sites working together would have to all go down to affect you. Much less likely.

Many computers are locked together in a virtual space that can be toggled and controlled very rapidly.

Overall, this offers superior control, very suitable for people who expect sudden and specific traffic increases.

The cloud setup multiplies the hosting capacity to levels that a non-cloud server cannot keep up with.

You’ll have increased power available, with even more decreased risk of downtime (crashes) in demanding periods.

Cloud Hosting Limitations

In truth, cluster hosting resolves many of the issues that can occur in VPS or shared hosting setups.

Despite the instability of actual clouds, cloud computing is a very solid and reliable hosting solution.

In a sense, it’s more communal than shared hosting minus the security, power and space negatives. Though virtually shared, you still have a personal space.

Reseller hosting

Deep boffin territory.

This last type is for you if you want to share some of your paid-for hosting resources with a third party, as a source of income.

You allot a portion of bandwidth, email accounts or space etc. for a fee. This is similar to being a landlord, renting out a place to tenants.

Perhaps you’re looking to offer WiFi in a certain location for a daily charge. In that case, reseller hosting could be ideal for you.