Some web hosting providers are focused on beginners or small sites. Others are especially well-suited for those with big online businesses and tens of thousands of visitors each month.
Still more are great for more niche needs, like domain or host reselling.
Heart Internet occupies an odd gray area where they advertise features as if they want to be a competitive player in the shared and WordPress hosting market, but offer some of the better reseller packages we’ve seen.
Let’s dive deep into what Heart Internet can offer and see if they’re worth your time and money.
Our Verdict ⚖️
Overall, Heart Internet is not the best hosting provider around.
Sure, it's not bad, but you can get a far better deal almost anywhere else.
While the more expensive plans offer great performance and overall featuers, HI shared hosting is just plain bad.
The lack of security measures and fairly steep pricing are way below the industry standard and what the competitors offer.
PROS
CONS
Heart Internet Pros and Cons
Good Reseller Options ✔️
Reseller hosts will be able to use their generous reselling options to make a good profit.
Decent Control Panel ✔️
Most website hosting providers that use something other than cPanel have iffy panels of their own. This one is alright, aside from some annoying advertisements.
Good UK/US Speed ✔️
Speed in these two regions will be pretty responsive, which is good for business and driving traffic.
Great Uptime for VPS/Dedicated Hosting ✔️
While their normal uptime is questionable, their uptime for these two hosting plan types is great.
Shared Hosting is Only for Linux ❌
The basic shared hosting plans are only for Linux operating systems, which limits Windows users to other options.
Only One Domain for Some Plans ❌
Many basic or intermediate hosting plans allow you to use more than one domain and build a small network of websites producing revenue and traffic. Here, you’re limited to one until you go to the most expensive shared hosting option.
Basic Shared Plan is Subpar ❌
Their most basic plan is cheap, but it doesn’t have the features necessary to make it worth your while. Thus, you’ll have to spend more if you want any features or storage worth mentioning.
Customer Support Has a Bad Reputation ❌
Heart Internet’s customer support reputation is pretty dismal, which might be a red flag if you want a team that’ll support you during site setup.
Subpar Uptime for Shared/WordPress Hosting ❌
As mentioned above, hosting for either of these two types of plans can be particularly spotty compared to their competition.
Heart Internet Review (UK 🇬🇧)
Let’s dive deep into what Heart Internet provides so you can understand whether they’ll be a good choice for your online needs.
Heart Internet Pricing 💰
In terms of pricing, Heart Internet starts off fairly competitive at first glance.
They offer three Linux based main web hosting plans – Starter, Home Pro, and Business Pro – with the cheapest and simplest option starting at £3.99 per month.
Heart Internet Shared Hosting 
That’s fairly consistent with the basic offerings from most other web hosting providers, and it comes with 10 GB of disk space and 50 GB of bandwidth.
This is a small downside, as there are plenty of other hosting providers that give you unlimited bandwidth even for their most basic hosting subscriptions.
Initial Setup Fee
However, Heart Internet also charges you a £10 fee if you want their help setting up your site initially.
This is a bit cheap in our eyes; most quality hosting providers offer free migration and set up services as a standard, particularly since the basic plans are usually aimed at beginner website builders or those without a lot of experience.
Other Features
Other features from the basic plan include 1000 mailboxes for any email campaigns. Furthermore, you don’t get any support for MySQL databases (useful for boosting performance for international visitors).
Ultimately, their basic plan isn’t very worthwhile for the actual pounds you’ll spend.
Heart Internet Home Pro
Home Pro does have MySQL databases and can be purchased for £10.99 per month. However, keep in mind that you have to add 20% VAT (value added tax) for this plan and virtually every other plan on the site.
You get 100 GB of disk space, but you’re still limited to the single website for your hosting account. Again, lots of other hosting providers give you unlimited website options or at least let you run multiple websites simultaneously.
Even at this intermediate tier, you’re restricted to one website. At least this tier comes with unlimited bandwidth.
You'll also get manual backup options and data restoration features with this subscription. Password protection is also included, as well as an IP address locking feature to avoid spammers.
The analytics suite of tools is also pretty decent at this level.
Heart Internet Business Pro
The next and most expensive shared hosting option is Business Pro, which measures in at £14.99 per month.
Here you can host up to three blogs at once and get unlimited web space and email boxes, along with the same features from the Home Pro selection.
WordPress Hosting?
What about WordPress hosting? Although Heart Internet advertises WordPress hosting as if it’s a separate option, clicking on that page on their site takes you back to a copy of their Home Pro and Business Pro plans.
That’s right; their “dedicated” WordPress hosting is just a glorified re-skin of their shared hosting options. Granted, they’re the better picks, but even so, it doesn’t look good when compared to other hosting options on the market.
Plugins
These primarily differ from the shared hosting plans because they come with WordPress specific features like instant WordPress set up and built-in plug-ins.
In particular, the WordPress options come with the popular Jetpack plugin, which comes with a whole host of functions like image gallery set up, contact forms, image download optimization, social media sharing, and even better antivirus than average.
Jetpack normally comes as an additional subscription, but here it’s baked into the price. From this viewpoint, Heart Internet’s prices are reasonable.
Getting a decent WordPress hosting service with good features (primarily from Jetpack) for £10.99 or so a month is a good deal.
However, there’s no getting around the fact that the basic shared hosting option is pretty pitiful and other hosting providers have even better dedicated managed WordPress hosting plans.
Overall: Not Good
Overall, Heart Internet’s value for money just isn’t there. You end up having to pay over £10 just for setup with even the most basic service and you have to go to the intermediate option to get any features worth your while.
The cheapest hosting plans might be fine if you plan to use an extremely simple website (and just one, at that), but you can always get a single-website hosting plan from another provider with more bang for your buck.
Even worse, Heart Internet doesn't give you any free domains. Even more money-grabbing hosting providers will give you a free domain if you sign up for a 12-month subscription with any of their plans.
Here, you have to pay an additional fee if you want any domain attached to your site.
Heart Internet VPS
Furthermore, Heart Internet comes with three great VPS plans.
Each of these is fairly customizable and lets you purchase up to 12 cores for even better processing power. You’ll be able to boost your storage space and RAM capabilities as well. These come in Windows or Linux choices.
VPS plans are pretty reasonably priced, ranging from £14.99 to £89.99 depending on the power you want.
You can alternatively go for a managed VPS plan. These plans place many aspects of your sites’ control under Heart Internet experts’ care.
This includes proactive monitoring and automatic updates, along with a 99.99% uptime guarantee. These cost significantly more than the standard VPS plans, though, ranging from £39.98 to £109.98.
Heart Internet Reseller Hosting
You can also do reseller hosting through Heart Internet.
Unlike most of their options, these can be either Windows or Linux based and come with unlimited space and bandwidth and unlimited domains. Oddly, these benefits are present in their basic shared hosting options. It’s a real head-scratcher.
Heart Internet Dedicated Hosting
Finally, Heart Internet does allow for dedicated servers. There are five options to choose from, so each of them comes with unlimited bandwidth and a minimum 100 Mb per second connection.
Your options range anywhere from a 2.33 GHz dual processor with 4 GB of RAM up to a 2.8 GHz processor and 32 GB of RAM.
These come in Windows or Linux options as well.
Heart Internet Uptime
Most web hosting providers advertise that they have extremely high rates averaging 99.95% or greater. Heart Internet does not, which is a first on the market. But it turns out to be fairly accurate, and a good idea on their part.
Shared Hosting
You can expect downtime issues if you use their shared web hosting or WordPress (because they’re basically the same) plans.
How much downtime can vary from server to server and how much traffic you experience in a month, but several hours each month wouldn't be out of order based on our own testing and customer reviews.
While a few hours may not seem like much, it can make a huge difference in terms of customer satisfaction and data recovery.
While you do get automatic data backups with Heart Internet, downtime is a direct loss in potential profits, and it can drive visitors away when they click to your site and see that it’s not as reliable as others on the web.
VPS & Dedicated... Actually Good
On the flip side, their VPS and dedicated server hosting plans have a phenomenal 99.99% uptime. These servers do a fantastic job of staying up and running even with server traffic and spotty coverage across the UK.
This probably has something to do with where their VPS and dedicated servers are located compared to their shared hosting servers, but we aren’t sure.
In summary: their uptime is excellent if you pick VPS or dedicated and subpar if you pick anything else.
Heart Internet Speed
Speed is pretty decent through Heart Internet, particularly if your visitors are from the UK or the United States.
Their servers are located in the UK itself.
So UK visitors can expect response times of 50 ms or less for most pages, especially if you run a WordPress site and take advantage of their WordPress hosting options (which come with bonuses to performance and image data processing).
Europe will be fairly similar in most cases.
US visitors can expect hosting times of 100 ms or so, with plenty of variation depending on site data load and general traffic level.
Speeds Outside of UK/US
Outside these two zones, response times can vary much more dramatically. It’s not out of order to see response times of 400 ms or higher, although these are necessarily the average.
In total, measuring server response time for visitors outside the US is a bit tricky.
Most people get the majority of their traffic from these two zones, so overall, we’d rate Heart Internet’s speed highly.
Security
Heart Internet’s primary security feature is Askimet spam filtration. For what it is, it’s a good function. It scans all your comments and can quickly and easily identify potential spam candidates.
You’ll also be able to filter and remove them relatively easily, speeding up site performance and making it a breeze to moderate larger conversation chains.
No SSL?
One of the bigger downsides of Heart Internet is their lack of free SSL certification, even with some of their pricier plans or options.
SSL certification is a big part of modern website security, and it’s critical if you want the trust of your visitors or consumers if you run an online business.
While Heart Internet does provide SSL certification for purchase, other hosts will often include these as perks for free. The prices for these are also a bit high: £49.99 for a basic, no-warranty SSL.
Paying for Basic Features?
The negatives continue. Heart Internet doesn’t provide security with any of its shared hosting plans, which means you’ll have to pick up additional website security features or provide your own.
Their paid security options range from “Essential” to “Ultimate” and cost between £0.99 and £9.99 per month.
The WordPress options do have security through Jetpack, at least. Heart Internet’s Managed VPS plans also provide monitoring and security on behalf of the people assigned to your server.
What About Premium Plans?
However, their dedicated server plans – the most expensive plans they offer – don’t come with any security built-in, either. You’ll need to pick up one of their security packages or provide your own firewalls and anti-malware measures.
Overall, their security is lacking and it’s annoying that you have to buy extra security. Many other web hosting providers at least give you a basic firewall and malware scanner with their basic or intermediate shared hosting options.
Bonus Features
Most of Heart Internet’s web hosting plans make use of their proprietary eXtend control panel. While there are some control panels that are clunky or cluttered, this control panel was one of the more simplistic and easier to manage we’ve seen.
It allows you to manage all your email accounts without clicking through too many buttons and it provides website monitoring optimization controls within easy reach. It’s installable with a single click, so overall, we’d rate this control panel pretty highly.
The only real flaw is the host of advertisements in for you to upgrade and pay Heart Internet more money. You can click away from these, but it’s still an annoying thing to ignore each time you open the control panel.
Reseller Hosting
While this isn’t a feature of their plans, Heart Internet also allows you to buy or resell different domain names, and even go so far as to provide discounts if you buy domain names in bulk.
This might be helpful if you need to purchase lots of domains for a host of websites. However, there are far better reseller hosting choices for you if you're willing to go down that road.
Refunds
Like most web hosting providers, Heart Internet does allow for a 30-day moneyback guarantee. They'll fully refund any payment for a hosting service if you didn't like what you received, with the notable exception of VPS or dedicated service plans.
For these, you can’t get your money back under any condition. This is a bit strange as most other providers extend their moneyback guarantees to all of their plans.
Heart Internet FAQs
Below, you can find some of the most common questions from our readers that are considering a Heart Internet subscription:
Where are Heart Internet’s Servers Located?
Heart Internet’s primary data center is located in Leeds in the UK. The secondary data center is an EU, which has most of its dedicated servers purchased after 2016 and some of its hybrid servers.
Is Heart Internet Safe?
Heart Internet can be safe overall, so long as you purchase one of their additional security packages or have your own solutions ready to go.
The security features they offer include malware scans, a maximum 12-hour response time, and decent firewalls.
The Managed VPS plans also come with consistent monitoring, so you’ll be able to detect any potential attacks on your servers.
What Types of Hosting Does Heart Internet Offer?
Heart Internet offers a spread of shared hosting options that we described above.
The most basic of these doesn’t come with many features that make it worth your while, although the higher options are decent enough. In terms of price, however, it’s easy to do better elsewhere.
They also offer what they claim to be quality WordPress hosting, although these are mostly copies of their existing shared web hosting plans; they even come with the same asking prices.
The big difference is that they come with WordPress specific features like instant WordPress set up, built-in plug-ins, and easy site importation. These hosting packages are also designed for faster WordPress loading for visitors.
Does Heart Internet Come with a Website Builder?
Heart Internet comes with Sculpt, which is a primarily mobile website builder that isn’t as in-depth as the best website builders out there.
It does come with virtually all of their plans, though, and it might be nice if much or a majority of your traffic comes from mobile users.
Does Heart Internet Come with a Free Domain?
No, free domains are not offered with Heart Internet. You’ll need to pay extra to obtain any domain name.
Conclusion ⌛
Ultimately, Heart Internet’s value for money is questionable.
They do have value if your primary objective is to resell, or if you're looking for a decent VPS or a quality dedicated hosting service. But even in those cases, you can find other hosting providers with better security that you don’t have to pay extra for.
If you’re in the market for a traditional shared or WordPress hosting experience, then you should definitely look elsewhere.
While the Home Pro and Business Pro plans are fine, the simplest plan is inferior to most other options out there.
When you add in a lack of other staple features, like free SSL certification or a free domain name, we can’t recommend them to most in good faith.
You Might Also Like:
Add your own review:
We do our best to independently research products to better help our readers make decisions. That being said, we also want to hear your opinions. We accept individual reviews that are informative and non promotional. Please fill the form below and we’ll publish your review. Promotional reviews by companies themselves will not be published. Thanks!
