Your guides to our hosting services
Secure your perfect website name instantly with our smart domain search and registration engine. We offer dozens of great extensions at ultra-low prices.
Each domain you buy comes with:
- A user-friendly custom control panel
- Practical, user-friendly management tools
- Range of web forwarding options
- Easy DNS management
- Unlimited and catch-all email forwarding
- Free Nominet tag changes and WHOIS opt out
- Friendly UK support
Your own feature-rich control panel
Manage your domains and other services (such as email) quickly and easily from your bespoke control panel. Every feature has been designed for practicality and ease of use. Our bulk management tools make managing hundreds of domains as easy as managing one.
How domain registration works Domains are registered at registry level as soon as you complete the checkout process with us. It can take up to 72 hours for a domain name to become visible on the internet as it globally updates. This applies for all domain names regardless of extension or registrar. However, in the majority of cases your domain name will be live within a few hours.
Once you’ve registered a domain name, you’ll also need to purchase web hosting to build your website.
With us you own your domain name and therefore have full rights and control over it; we never register customer domains in our name.
We have a range of guides and tutorials available for you via our support database. We also provide personal support just for you via your control panel – just get in touch if you need some help!
Sustainable Web Hosting
The internet uses a lot of electricity, contributing to climate change. It’s estimated that it uses over 400 terawatt-hours a year*. That’s more than the whole of the UK, for example. That’s why we’re committed to using 100% renewable energy in our web hosting, as well as ensuring that our data centres are as efficient as possible.
* https://www.websitecarbon.com/
Powered by 100% renewable energy
Our Tier 3 data centres run on 100% renewable energy: wind and solar power. As such, their supply is carbon-neutral.
Operating efficiency
PUE is a measure of power usage efficiency. Our data centres have a PUE as low as 1.12. A lower score ratio is better. A ‘perfect’ efficiency ratio would be 1.0, but our data centres stand amongst the most efficient around. Others tend to have a PUE of 1.2 or higher.
This is achieved through the latest power-saving technologies in servers and uninterruptible power supplies. The same goes for our cooling, which also uses low global warming impact refrigerants.
The power saved through operating efficiency can be added to the grid, allowing more renewable energy to be supplied and reducing the reliance for fossil fuels.
Autoscaling technology
Our hosting platform contributes to our efficiency, too. While a busy website is given all the resources it needs from our multi-server platform, the same applies in reverse. So if a website isn’t busy, it will only make use of the small amount of resource it needs - saving energy.
Of course, if there’s a sudden spike in traffic, our servers will ramp-up instantly, guaranteeing a fast website, however busy it gets.
Give your website the hosting it deserves with our industry-leading UK platform. It’s been built from the ground up by industry experts to provide advanced security and reliability at speeds you won’t believe. It’s a hosting experience like no other.
Key Features
- Powerful market-leading technology
- User-friendly control panel with 70+ one-click install apps
- Secure, state-of-the-art UK data centre
- Global Content Delivery Network and Website Acceleration
- Email accounts included as standard
- Friendly support
- Great value for money
- Supports all programming languages and frameworks
A hosting platform like no other
Our powerful, bespoke hosting platform has been designed for you by experts with over twenty years’ industry experience. We provide you with unbeatable load-balanced cloud hosting, meaning there’s no single point of failure and your website performance will never be affected by other users’ websites, visitors or activity. All servers have SSD storage as standard, and we’ve optimised every part of your experience for maximum speed and security. Our hosting is designed to scale as your website grows, meaning the same great performance no matter how popular you get.
We have a range of web hosting packages available to suit most web space, bandwidth and database requirements. However, if you need a custom solution, we’re more than happy to create a unique plan that works for you.
UK data centres
Our state-of-the-art data centres offer the latest in security and environmental technologies and are manned 24/7, ensuring your data and websites are secure and monitored at all times. We have a resilient national network and enterprise level cloud platform so you get the best possible hosting experience.
Our email servers are kept separate from our web hosting servers, so there is no chance of either affecting performance.
Built for speed
All our packages will give you optimal website performance, wherever your users are.
Our Content Delivery Network (CDN) will cache your website’s public content at data centres around the world. As users’ requests won’t have to travel so far, they’ll experience faster loading speeds.
Along with our CDN, we also have a Website Acceleration Suite. This will improve your page loading times by minifying code and optimising images, automatically. You can either use our standard ‘one-click’ optimisation or experiment with over 30 settings, to chase the best-possible page speed scores.
Feature-rich control panel
Manage your websites, databases, email, files, and every other aspect of your hosting account straight from your bespoke control panel. We’ve developed it ourselves to ensure a sleek, modern and user-friendly experience.
As well as containing all the practical features you need, your control panel comes with lots of useful extras, including a range of website tools and 70+ one-click installs of popular sofware titles such as WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, Magento, and OpenCart.
Multi-channel support
We have a huge support database offering a wide range of guides and tutorials, but if you need one-to-one guidance simply get in touch with our friendly support team.
Our super-fast, super-secure WordPress platform has been optimised for every element of the software.
With superfast StackCache caching, WordPress Tools, Staging, SSD storage, automatic updates, clever database handling, load balancing and much more, it’s the perfect home for your WordPress website.
Key Features
- Superfast StackCache caching
- Automatic WordPress core updates
- WordPress Tools
- One-click WordPress Staging
- Global Content Delivery Network and Website Acceleration
- Powerful platform specifically built for WordPress hosting
- Optimised speed and security for WordPress
- Hassle-free migrations of existing WordPress websites
- Intuitive hosting control panel
- SSD storage
- Secure, state-of- the-art UK data centre
- High quality hardware
- Friendly support
Designed just for WordPress
We’ve developed our own hosting platform just for WordPress websites. So you’ll get a robust, secure hosting environment and consistently excellent speeds. Our hosting is designed to scale as your website grows, meaning the same great performance no matter how popular you get.
To keep our WordPress platform running optimally, we only allow WordPress to be installed. You’re still free to write, add and modify WordPress-compatible code and files, such as themes, plugins, media uploads, and so on. You’ll also have full access to mailboxes and email accounts outside WordPress. If you think you may want to create a non-WordPress website or install/upload something outside WordPress, our standard Web Hosting plans are a better choice for you.
Designed for speed
All our WordPress packages are designed to give you optimal website performance, wherever your users are.
Your WordPress installation includes the StackCache plugin, which was created by us to edge-cache your content. This makes sure that your web pages load at lightning speed.
If you’re using a UK web host, users outside the UK might experience some latency connecting. So we have a state-of-the-art Content Delivery Network (CDN) that will cache your website’s public content at data centres around the world. As users’ requests won’t have to travel so far, they’ll experience faster loading speeds.
Along with our CDN, we also have a Website Acceleration Suite. This will improve your page loading times by minifying code and optimising images, automatically. You can either use our standard ‘one-click’ optimisation or experiment with over 30 settings, to chase the best-possible page speed scores.
Hands-free WordPress
We pre-install WordPress for you so you can get started right away. Simply purchase a WordPress package, choose your settings, and you’re all set.
If you install any third party themes or plugins, you can update them yourself quickly and easily from your WordPress dashboard. We update the WordPress core for you automatically whenever updates are released, leaving you free to concentrate on your business.
We have a range of WordPress web hosting packages available to suit most web space, bandwidth and database requirements. However, if you need a custom solution, we’re more than happy to create a unique plan that works for you.
When you buy a web hosting package from us, you automatically get access to a wide range of one-click install sofware. It’s all free to use for both commercial and personal use, meaning you can create outstanding fully-functional websites in minutes.
Key Features
- 70+ one-click installs to choose from
- No lengthy installation processes
- No coding required
- Secure, state-of- the-art UK data centre
- Friendly UK support
Our one-clicks cover everything from web stores to social networks, so an impressive site is always just a click away. Take a look at all our installs via this guide, then purchase a web hosting package to get started.
CMS (content management systems)
If you want to build any kind of website quickly, a content management system is a solid choice. Not only is it user-friendly, it’s easy to customise. Our CMS one-clicks include b2evolution, CMS Made Simple, Craft CMS, concrete5, Drupal, E107, Expression Engine, Geeklog, Joomla!, MamboCMS, MediaWiki, MODX, Moodle, Nucleus, OctoberCMS, PHP-Fusion, phpNuke, ProcessWire, Serendipity, SilverStripeCMS, Textpattern, Typo3, Vtiger and WordPress.
Ecommerce
Sell from your own website with one of our fully-fledged ecommerce solutions. Each install will give you a fully customisable online shop with the ability to add unlimited products and categories. Our ecommerce one-clicks include AbanteCart, AgoraCart, Cubecart, Magento, OpenCart, osCommerce, phpCOIN, PrestaShop, TomatoCart and Zen Cart.
Galleries, Forums & Social Networks
Create a photo gallery or add one to your existing website easily with Coppermine or Piwigo.
Install your own message boards with features like unlimited posts and replies, private messaging, emojis, theme switching and more. Our forum one-clicks include FluxBB, MyBB, phpBB, Simple Machines Forum and VanillaForums.
Build your own social network in a click for your group or community with features such as editable user profiles, avatars, discussion groups, private messaging and more. Our social network one-clicks include BuddyPress, Dolphin, Elgg and Gnu Social.
Analytics
All the visitor and website data you need in one easy-to- use interface. Simply install one of these analytics titles to learn more about who’s accessing your website and how you can better serve their needs. Our analytics one-clicks include Matomo, Open Web Analytics and TraceWatch.
Webmail
We include webmail as standard with all our hosting packages, but if you want to opt for a different client we’ve given you others to choose from: phpList, Roundcube and SquirrelMail.
Business & Project Management
Make invoicing, staff management, and team projects easy with our business oneclicks: Bamboo Invoice, Dolibarr, dotProject, Feng Office, Gibbon, PHProjekt, Invoice Ninja, Invoice Plane, iQDesk, Kanboard, Simple Invoices and StatusNet. Manage your customers effectively and ensure great communication and sales with phpCOIN, SugarCRM or SuiteCRM.
Advise and support your customers with live chat sofware and support ticket systems that work perfectly straight out of the box. Choose from Crafy/Sales Syntax, Help Centre Live, osTicket, phpFreeChat and Trouble Ticket Express.
We also have several marketing- and advertising-themed one-clicks: LimeSurvey, phpList, PHPMailer, Prosper202, and Revive Adserver.
Tools
Our framework and developer tool one-clicks include Cachet, CakePHP, Laravel, MantisBT and Slim, while our one-click websites tools include Form Tools, LimeSurvey, phpFormGenerator, PhpMyFAQ, Tcexam Xerte, and WebCalendar.
A Tool for Every Purpose
Whatever you need for your website, we should have something for you.
All these tools are free to use, or at least have a free starting tier. So feel free to experiment!
They’re supported by vibrant communities of open-source enthusiasts, so if you need any help, it should only be a few clicks away.
Increase your sales, protect visitors’ personal information, and encourage confidence in your business with an SSL certificate.
Key Features
- Easy set up
- Increase website sales
- Improve your search engine rankings
- Establish trust and authority
- Verified by GlobalSign
SSL certificates explained
An SSL certificate is displayed for websites in the form of a padlock icon in the address bar and a URL that starts with https://. Behind the scenes, this means that the website has been verified and any information passed between the server and a visitor’s web browser is securely encrypted. An SSL connection is vital for any website that requests or stores personal information such as contact details or payment information.
An SSL certificate not only signals trust and authority to your website visitors, it also helps protect them when browsing your website. It prevents data interception and shows your business has been validated, ensuring complete peace of mind for your visitors and better rankings in Google. It’s a must-have when you’re selling online.
An SSL certificate is attached to your hosting package rather than your domain name. For this reason, you’ll need to host your website with us even if your domain name is registered elsewhere. We offer a range of xceptionally high quality UK hosting plans.
Our paid SSL certificates are provided and verified by GeoTrust and our free SSL certificates by Let’s Encrypt.
Free, Standard or Extended SSL?
We offer three types of SSL certificate: Free, Standard and Extended:
Free SSL Certificate
- https:// (instead of http://)
- Improve Google rankings
- Padlock icon displayed in browser
Standard SSL Certificate
- https:// (instead of http://)
- Improve Google rankings
- Padlock icon displayed in browser
- Domain validation certificate
The Extended SSL Certificate includes all the features above plus:
It’s underwritten with a $1.5 million warranty.
Create beautiful websites in minutes – no code or extra sofware needed! Showcase your business, project, or personal brand by building your own stunning website.
Key Features
- Build contemporary, responsive websites quickly and easily
- Choose from hundreds of easily customisable designs or create your own
- Publish unlimited pages
- User-friendly tools and interface
- HTML, CSS and JavaScript are supported if you want to code
- Built-in help centre with videos and knowledge base
- Fast, secure UK servers and friendly UK support
- Back up your website at any time
Simple drag-and-drop design
It’s never been easier to create an inviting, successful website that works seamlessly across all desktop and mobile devices. Our Website Builder has tons of great features that make designing your website quick and easy, such as:
- Simple shopping cart: add your products and prices and you’re ready to go
- Responsive and mobile-friendly
- User-friendly file uploader and manager
- Easy subpage creation, including ready-designed content blocks
- Built-in extension, templates and apps catalogue
- Built-in templates editor
- Image editor
- SEO tools like meta tags, add-to-Google and menu links
- Google Maps, Google reCaptcha, Google Analytics and Google Translate
- 500+ web-friendly fonts
- TawkTo live chat
- 60+ colour themes, 6 theme layouts, and 6 menu styles per template
- Custom favicon
- Free photo library with over 500,000 free professional photos
- Thousands of customisation possibilities
Optimise your website for search engines
There are plenty of tools to help your website rise up the search engine rankings:
- SEO friendly links
- Google Analytics support
- Google XML sitemap support
- Google website submission
- Custom meta tags
- Additional functionality
Make your website stand out from the crowd
Create a truly custom website with all these extra features included at no extra cost:
- Built-in search
- Poll module
- Live chat module
- Discussion forum
- Shopping cart (with PayPal and other gateway support)
- Newsletter
- Blog
- Map
- Photo gallery with optional slideshow and collage modes
- Restaurant menu/services pricelist
- Events calendar
- FAQ module
- Contact form
- Easy YouTube video embedding
- Display RSS feeds from other websites
- Offer visitors downloadable files, e.g. videos
- Social media integration
- ‘Users online’ and visitor counter
To use our Website Builder, simply purchase any of our standard web hosting plans (plus a domain name if you don’t already have one you want to use). Email accounts are included as standard with all our hosting packages.
Shared hosting with a difference
Unlike with other web hosts, your website isn’t tied to one single server but makes use of a whole platform, meaning that you get incredible reliability and speed at an unbelievably low price.
Traditional shared hosting performance is subject to how much traffic you get and what other users are doing. Our platforms are load-balanced and automatically scale to meet resource demands at no extra cost to you. Your website stays online and runs fast so you can concentrate on your business.
Choose from two powerful platforms: Linux or WordPress
- Autoscaling and load-balanced
- Enhanced speed and security
- 100% SSD (solid state drive) storage
- HTTP/2 and IPv6 Enabled
- Secure, state-of-the-art UK data centre
- Global CDN
- Friendly UK support
Data centre and hardware
Our advanced UK data centres are kitted-out with premium hardware and the latest and greatest security and environmental technologies. With technicians onsite 24/7 every day of the year and a resilient national network for ultimate reliability, you can rest assured that your websites are safe with us.
We’ve invested heavily in our hardware to ensure optimal performance and a faultless design with no single point of failure. Each server has Dual Intel Xeon CPU Intel Xeon Silver 4214 12-core processors with hyper-threading for 48 logical cores and 64GB 3200Mhz DDR4 RAM. All MySQL and MSSQL databases are hosted on the same 48- core servers with 192GB RAM and full SSD storage.
We’ve developed an incredibly resilient high performance storage platform utilising 100% SSD storage arrays in a RAID 10 configuration, with battery-backed hardware RAID cards. Storage arrays are then replicated across multiple servers so in the highly unlikely event that disks, arrays or entire servers fail there will be no downtime or impact to your site. There is no single point of failure.
We take daily data backups, which are stored at a secured offsite facility. We also run our own bespoke Web Application Firewall that continually monitors and filters-out threatening requests before they can even target your website.
Email is stored on separate servers from websites. This means that they both remain fast and reliable, and can’t effect each other.
All this means that website performance will never be affected by other users’ websites, visitors or activity. All servers have SSD storage as standard, and we’ve optimised every part of your experience for maximum speed and security.
Our hosting is designed to scale as your website grows, meaning the same great performance - no matter how popular you get.
Green hosting
Our web hosting is powered by renewable energy: wind and solar. Our environmental award-winning data centres have a PUE (power usage efficiency) as low as 1.12, where elsewhere you may get PUE of 1.2 or more (lower is better). Our autoscaling platform ensures that your website gets the resources it needs when it’s busy. That also means that we can save energy when websites aren’t busy.
Global Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Our global CDN stores copies of your public website content at secure data centres around the world, so that users outside the UK experience websites that load quickly and reliably.
We use neutral data centres in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania. These well-connected ‘Points of Presence’ are at critical locations and run the best-possible hardware to give your international users the lowest latency.
Connected to our CDN is our Website Acceleration Suite, which you can use to optimise your website files and code to make it load faster, wherever your users are.
Any Questions?
We have a range of web hosting packages available to suit most web space, bandwidth and database requirements. However, if you need a custom solution, we’re more than happy to create a unique plan that works for you. Get in touch!
Hardware
Our VPS use Dell servers with these specifications:
Processors: Dual Intel Xeon CPU E5-2640 v3 octa-core processors with hyper-threading for 32 logical cores.
RAM: DDR4 3200 MHz ECC-registered memory.
Storage: Samsung SM 883 enterprise solid-state disks in a resilient RAID 10 configuration with a battery-backed cache.
Network
Our network is designed with no single point of failure. Each hypervisor is connected at 20 Gbps and each switch has redundant 40Gbps uplinks. All VPSs are backed by uninterruptible power supplies and a network SLA of 99.99%.
Our entire network is protected by resilient Anti-DDOS uplinks that provide protection against volumetric or application specific DDoS attacks of up to 1 Tbps, including Layer 7 protection.
We support IPv6, which is the new standard for IP addresses. Our servers use HTTP/2 as standard.
CDN
Our powerful content delivery network uses physical, highly optimised servers around the world to cache the content of your websites. Customers will connect directly to multiple CDN nodes instead of directly to our local UK network, resulting in content being served faster and your websites loading quicker.
Data Centres
Your server will be located at one of two UK data centres. They are PCI compliant and ISO/IEC 27001 accredited.
Security is manned 24×7, enforcing a strict access policy, with perimeter fencing and controlled gate access. All halls require photo ID and swipe card entry and are centrally monitored by CCTV.
Software and OS
Our Managed VPS is based on the CentOS 7 operating system and web hosting is managed through our free control panel.
We provide over 70 software packages that can be deployed in seconds. They include: CMS Made Simple, Concrete 5, CraftCMS, Drupal, Elgg, Joomla!, Opencart, Magento, Prestashop, WordPress and Zencart.
Security
Malware scans take place daily, and you will be informed of any issues. Files can be scanned on-demand at any time.
A Web Application firewall will block suspicious activity. It inspects HTTP requests - including forms - for cross-site scripting, path traversal, SQL injection, trojans and more. Logins are protected against brute force login attempts, and covered by two-factor authentication.
Hardware
Our VPS use Dell servers with these specifications:
Processors: Dual Intel Xeon CPU E5-2640 v3 octa-core processors with hyper-threading for 32 logical cores.
RAM: DDR4 3200 MHz ECC-registered memory.
Storage: Samsung SM 883 enterprise solid-state disks in a resilient RAID 10 configuration with a battery-backed cache.
Network
Our network is designed with no single point of failure. Each hypervisor is connected at 20 Gbps and each switch has redundant 40Gbps uplinks. All VPSs are backed by uninterruptible power supplies and a network SLA of 99.99%.
Our entire network is protected by resilient Anti-DDOS uplinks that provide protection against volumetric or application specific DDoS attacks of up to 1 Tbps.
Data Centres
Your server will be located at one of two UK data centres. They are PCI compliant and ISO/IEC 27001 accredited.
Security is manned 24×7, enforcing a strict access policy, with perimeter fencing and controlled gate access. All halls require photo ID and swipe card entry and are centrally monitored by CCTV.
Software and OS
Self-Managed VPS offer the choice of these OS: CentOS 6, CentOS 7, Debian 8, Fedora 28, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 18.04, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2016. Hosting can be managed through cPanel or similar control panels.
Free open-source software can be installed on purchase, including CMS Made Simple, Concrete 5, CraftCMS, Drupal, Elgg, Joomla!, Opencart, Magento, Prestashop, WordPress and Zencart.
