I made this blog post to help people in UK find the best web hosting service. I know only too well how many review sites are out there for web hosting, and most of them just want you to sign up to whoever pays them the best commission for getting you to sign up. Well, I'm an end user and would not recommend a web hosting company if they were rubbish, or even so so. Having used them for many years I feel I've had a good taste of what they are about and can now give an honest yes or no as to whether I would recommend them to others.
Well, my answer is 100% yes, I would recommend them. If you don't want to read a whole lot of text and just want to see what they have to offer go and check out their web hosting packages.
Update for 2021. Vidahost merged with another hosting company. As a result their hosting went downhill really fast. It is now terrible and I would not recommend them anymore. Don't waste your money. Go with Webhosting1st instead [mini review here]. They are very cheap and offer a great service for the price.
I've had websites for over a decade and within that time I have been with so many different web hosting companies. From hosting company's based outside the UK (Mostly USA), to thinking "I don't need to pay for hosting anymore, I'm sick of it" and going over to the websites that offer free hosting. What a disaster that was. Free hosting is alright if you host a mini site or two and don't depend on those sites to pay your bills and feed the family.
If the free hosts servers have crashed and your sites are down for a few hours its no biggie. Ah well, it's free. But if you are making your money online and depend on your websites as part of your business in order to bring in your main source of income the free hosts are not stable enough.
With that said, even if you don't rely on your websites for your daily wages most people still want hosting that's reliable. I know I do. If you have a website that you have taken some pride in building and every time you go to check it out its unreachable your not going to be very happy with your provider.
I have experienced this many times over the years with various company's and the one thing I always thought, when I was paying for hosting was - What the hell am I paying my money for. I won't mention no names but a lot of the UK based Hosting company's are a nightmare and I had nothing but problems with most of the ones I went with.
This was before I found a reliable company based in the UK that could host my websites. Now that I have found this company I no longer experience any problems at all. And its been that way for years. That company is Vidahost (Located in the UK). I have all my websites hosted with Vidahost (Other than my 30+ Blogspot blogs!), and all of them are running Wordpress.
The good thing about Vidahost is that you can pay monthly (No contract). I had the option to either pay for the whole year in one go or just go on a month to month basis with no contract where I can cancel the hosting at anytime I want.
I don't even have a bank card on file. I can always add one if I want to, but I mostly just pay using Paypal. And if I do pay by debit card I just untick the "Save bank details" box. Vidahost are easy going and very versatile. I can honestly say that they are the best and most trouble-free hosting company that I have ever been with. Also, their servers are located in the UK (Berkshire and MK Buckinghamshire) which obviously has it's bonuses for people who have UK domains.
In the years that I have been with them only twice did I experience an unreachable website. Ask anyone who is well schooled in web hosting and they will tell you that is impressive. Both times the issue was sorted out within the hour. Any questions are answered swiftly and politely. Like the other day, one of my websites encountered an error, nothing to do with the hosting side of things. I think it was a plug-in or recent Wordpress update that had given me the dreaded error:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 593 bytes) in /home/blablabla/public_html/wp-includes/query.php on line 1896.
I found out that this error can be down to the PHP.ini size being too small and needing to be changed / increased from 256mb to 512mb. I contacted Vidahost and it was done within half an hour. Their support really is excellent. And even better, It's 24 hour support.
I like to stick with Wordpress for my websites because I'm familiar with the software and find it really easy to use. But Vidahost have an enormous selection of different platforms and software options on their Cpanel. Of course, it has Softaculous which installs the following software scripts and Apps:
Wordpress, Joomla, Abante Cart, PrestaShop, OpenCart, Drupal, phpBB, SMF, Magneto, WHMCS, MyBB, Dolphin and CubeCart. This covers many areas like E-Commerce, Gaming, Polls and Surveys, ERP, Music, Database tools, RSS, Widgets, Frameworks, Wiki's, Blogs, Forums and Portals. Email accounts, Mailing Lists, Autoresponders and AWStats are very useful for me.
However, the Cpanel list of available scripts / software is extensive and there is certainly a lot there that I have never needed to use. Apache Handlers, Cron Jobs, PHP Pear, Pearl, CGI Center and MySQL databases are all ready to be executed if that's what your interested in.
I run a few online shops with Vidahost and have experienced nothing but plain sailing. So if you're looking for hosting for a large or small business website, or even to run some Amazon Affiliate stores like I do this is a really good company to partner with.
If you're new to paying for hosting and managing websites and want to start small, Vidahost's starter package is excellent value for money, and I believe one of the cheapest per year at just £30 ex VAT for the whole year, or around £3 per month. For all the features that come included in this package and with the excellent support, it's a great deal. You even get SSL encryption, if you want to use it, as standard.
Like I said, I would not recommend a service if I wasn't 100% happy with it. But it's easy to recommend Vidahost without any hesitation because I have genuinely been very pleased with their hassle free service and I'm definitely not changing my hosting provider any time soon. Give them a try for 2018 and I bet you will be impressed. I give them five stars. A really good host to work with.
They also offer Virtual Servers, Magento VDS, Dedicated Servers and a special service which is customised to the clients needs. All packages / plans from Starter to Advanced and beyond are on the Cloud so no matter which one you choose it will be extremely reliable and versatile. There is a reseller option. The Reseller packages start at around £150. Vidahost gives the user the option to use either Linux or Windows. Or you can use them both together. Got a review on Vidahost that you want to share? Post a comment below.
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