We get it. If this is the first time in your life that you’ve ever had to think about web hosting, it gets pretty overwhelming. There’s all this new jargon that you have to learn, you can’t scroll two paces without seeing a new British hosting company you’ve never even heard of, and you don’t even know what to look for in a UK web hosting company. So, how do you find the best UK hosting provider for your company?
You use this list of fourteen features any UK web hosting company will definitely have – if it’s worth its salt.
(British hosting just got a lot simpler!)
Table of Contents
How to find the best UK hosting company for your business website:
1. UK-based servers
If you do business in the UK, you’ll want a web hosting company that has servers in the UK. This will help make sure your website loads quickly on your customers’ browsers. (The closer a device is to a server, the faster it will load a website.)
2. Your British hosting company should actually be based in the UK/Europe
If you’re looking for the best hosting UK has to offer, look for a hosting company that’s based in the UK/Europe. When your data centre is based here, you get much faster data delivery for your website and English-speaking support. Also, when your hosting company is in your time zone, all the little things that can go wrong with a website will get fixed much faster.
And, speaking of support…
3. Great customer support
Look at the hosting company’s website. Do their customers leave great reviews? The best web hosting UK-based company will have an active customer support system so that if something does go wrong, you have someone to walk you through what to do.
4. Great uptime
Uptime is a measurement of how reliable a server is. It’s the percentage of time that a server is usually up and running. The best UK hosting solutions all offer at least 97% uptime. (Hosting.uk offers a 99.99% uptime guarantee.) If your UK web hosting company doesn’t offer anything near that kind of uptime, it’s time to look for another hosting company.
5. Ease of app installation
You shouldn’t need to read a tome on web development to install an app on your website. A good hosting company will make it easy to install the apps that help your website stand out, but the best web hosting UK company will go the extra mile to make it easy to install your apps. Even if you have no technical skills whatsoever, Hosting.UK makes it possible to install over 200 apps in one click. It’s the best hosting UK has to offer.
6. Scalability
Shared hosting is great for smaller websites, but when you start getting more traffic, you’ll want to make sure you get the best UK web host plan for that in-between stage where you’ve outgrown shared hosting but don’t quite need dedicated hosting just yet. (If all these new kinds of hosting are confusing you, check out our crash course in web hosting jargon.)
When it’s time for you to scale up your website, the best web hosting UK solutions will offer great VPS hosting, so you don’t have to switch hosting providers when your business grows. Hosting.UK offers lots of VPS plans designed to suit your particular storage needs so you can scale up and down as needed.
7. Security
After all the work you’ve put into your website, you want to make sure it’s kept safe from hackers. The best UK web host for your business will keep your website secure. Check your hosting company’s security plan. Do they have on-site technicians who work 247 to keep your data safe?
8. SSL Certificates
The best UK web host will take your website’s security as seriously as you do. Does your web hosting company offer SSL certificates? This is the best way to keep your data safe and get your customers to trust your website. (Some anti-virus software won’t even allow your customers’ browsers to visit your website if it doesn’t have an SSL certificate.) A web hosting company that doesn’t offer SSL certificates can’t possibly be the best hosting UK has to offer.
9. SEO tools
The whole point of a business website is to grow your business. When you create content, you want to make sure the right people can find it. With so many websites on the internet, it’s almost impossible to get any website traffic at all if you don’t have a great SEO strategy. (If you don’t know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and it’s a way to make sure that your website ranks high enough in search engines that your customers can see it in their search results.)
The best web host UK solutions will offer SEO tools to help get your website in front of your customers.
10. Website monitoring tools
One of the best web host UK services is the website monitoring tool. Hosting.uk alerts you quickly if your website is ever down and even lets you monitor multiple sites! Check your web hosting company to see if they have good reviews on their website monitoring tool.
11. Cloud-based backup
The best web host UK plans will give you cloud-based backup so that if anything ever goes wrong with your website, you don’t end up losing all your data.
12. Email marketing plans
Email marketing works. It’s why all the big companies use it to grow their customer base. But, if you want to run a successful email marketing campaign, you need to make sure you get all the help you can get from your hosting company. Hosting.uk helps you build your mailing list, import your contact lists (from any account!), add sign-up forms, divide your client list into different groups, and add a professional-looking Call To Action (CTA) button to make it easier for you to get your customers to buy from you. And the more your customers buy from your brand and have positive interactions with it, the more loyal they’ll be (and the more likely they’ll be to recommend your brand to their friends).
13. Website builder
A great web hosting company will make it as easy as possible for you to create your website. With a good website builder, you can create a professional-looking website in minutes, even if you don’t have any technical experience.
14. Easy website migration
Picture it: You’re already with a web hosting company, but you think you could do better, so you start looking around. And then, you stumble on a web hosting company that has everything you wanted (and some things you didn’t even know you could ask for)!
You want to transfer your website to this new web hosting company… and it’s the most difficult process you’ve ever encountered in your life. Plus, it costs an arm and a leg. That is not the company for you.
The best web hosting company will make it easy for you to transfer your website to their platform. Hosting.uk has an easy, streamlined website migration process – and it’s free.
The wrap-up
Trying to find the best UK-based web hosting company can be overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Our list of fourteen features of good UK-based hosting providers will help you cut through the noise and find the web hosting company that’s perfect for the needs of your business.
