One of the questions people frequently ask me is: who provides the best web hosting in the UK? Finding the best web hosting package is not that easy with every web hosting company claiming to offer the best service at the best price. So who is the best web hosting company in the UK?

From experience I would recommend: hostpapa.co.uk

Bandwidth

Hostpapa have not only decided to make the bandwidth available unlimited but they have decided to make everything unlimited. Bandwidth, MySQL Databases, Email Addresses, Add-on Domains, Sub Domains are all unlimited meaning you will never have to worry about upgrading your account or receiving the dreaded accounts email that duly informs you that you have exceeded some limit and must upgrade or suffer your site being suspended…Arghh! So is it really unlimited? I decided to put this to the test by creating an account that really pushed the limits beyond reasonable use and so far they mean what they say – it is unlimited.

Up Time

Up Time is essential as there is little value in having a website that isn’t available for chunks of the day. I’m amazed and shocked at the frequency and duration of outages that occur with cheap hosting.  I recently monitored a clients LCN.com hosted site using Pingdom and after a week of pinging the site every 5mins the results showed that the site was available for just 86% of the time.

Speed

Even if your site is up, it still has to download quickly otherwise visitors will just give up.  Cheap hosting companies share servers between many sites which is fine but if you cram to many sites on one server the result is the server processor has to divide it’s resources between all of the websites it’s hosting.

CPanel 

If a Web Host doesn’t include the CPanel interface then i’d be worried. Most of the cheaper hosting companies use horrible interfaces that really limit your control and often they are not easy to use.

Customer Service

good 24/7 customer service is essential, many times i’ve been in the mist of hosting issue that could be fixed quite easily if the technical service was up to scratch.  Worse still is a service that takes days to reply or doesn’t reply at all.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to go for the cheapest deal – hosting quality varies hugely and if you buy cheap that is exactly what you’ll get, a cheap service that is almost certainly poor.

Can It Be Improved?

Although it’s hard to fault their service i’d like to see the one click installer Fantastico replaced with Softaculous simply because it offers more install scripts and the interface is more polished.  I’d also like to see a virus scanner available in Cpanel as is common with other Cpanel hosting providers however they do offer this service on request through their help desk.  These are minor changes though and I’m really nit picking.

HostPapa

For more information visit: hostpapa.co.uk