Reliable UK host for hundreds of small to medium PHP sites and domains

Hosting
1

My current employer is looking to move away from 1and1 due to their poor customer service and extended downtime. We currently use them to host around 200 different domains (don’t ask why…) with them both being our registrar and our host. We would like to transfer both the domains and the hosting to a new UK service as quickly as possible.

Money isn’t much of a problem for us, as we are currently paying around £100 a year and wouldn’t mind paying that a month for the best possible service. We would require updated versions of PHP and as many MySQL databases as possible. If possible, we’d also like a PostgreSQL database and Python support. In addition to this, FTP and SSL support would be great and a huge added bonus would be Git so we can deploy straight to the server from our test environment.

I’ve not purchased hosting for quite a while now, and to be frank I’m not sure where the best deals are for UK based sites. Typically, I would go with the likes of Bluehost, Dreamhost and MediaTemple, although to my knowledge they’re all hosted in America. We’ll also need support in transferring our domains and working sites over, so any service that can provide this would be welcomed.

What would you guys recommend for a good price and great UK service?

2

You might want to take a managed server from Unitedhosting? They will manage your server, so you don’t need to pay attention to that. I only hear good things about them.

3

Even though we host around 200 websites, very few of them get many visitors so I think even their bronze package would be overkill for what we use. I’d say that around 100 of them get around 5 visitors a day, with one or two getting a few thousand a day.

We currently use 1and1’s shared hosting and outside of their own performance issues we’ve rarely gone over on bandwidth.

EDIT: We currently use the Business package offered by 1and1, which offers “unlimited”. Naturally, it actually doesn’t, otherwise we wouldn’t have all these problems.

4

Do you make moneys of these websites? Because 200 websites on a shared host sounds pretty much to me, I know that visitors is not that many, but really 200 websites :open_mouth:

and I’m afraid you can’t get long with £100/year if yo

Edit: Normally shared hosts that offers ‘Unlimited Bandwidth’ and Storage is sometimes really bad someway, etc. they don’t allow the websites to be very CPU consuming, for same reason I’m running on a dedicated server myself, because I don’t want any problems - I make enough moneys from my sites, to have a dedicated server up and running, and yeah - I’m really happy that I’m not facing many of the problems that you can have when you run ‘Shared’ hosting.

5

To cut a long story short, we run a lot of very similar microsites for different niche areas of a huge subject area. We attain leads from these microsites and as a whole they are apparently successful. It’s not a decision I made and I know it sounds rather insane, but my job in this is to get more hosting before I leave the company for a new job.

We run a Windows server ourselves for the company’s flagship site and we rarely suffer any problems. We’ve been quoted around £115 per month for a VPS which sounds pricey to me for what’s being offered, so anything similar to that would be great.

6

Living in UK? - In my opinion, then the host really doesn’t need to be in UK, I live in Denmark myself, but both servers and support here in Denmark really sucks, for that reason I’ve bought a server in Netherlands, because netherlands is one of the main-points to the internet, got really good connections to rest of europe, including UK.

I know a really good host here in Germany, which is really cheap and have great servers, but they’re all unmanaged, but yeah, I’ll give you some examples of hosts that you maybe could use:

They have managed semi-dedicated servers, I was at that host earlier, and I really liked it.

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_managed/ms3000
Hetzner.de is a good datacenter, they have managed servers, which is a little more expensive than unmanaged.

I have an unmanaged server, and I don’t know anything about server-setup or security, only a very little, I’m using the cpanel/WHM to manage my server, and if anything bad happens I will call a server-administrator - from the US, for me, instead of paying 79€ for a dual core, with 2 gigs of ram, I pay 49€ for an i7 quad core, with 8gigs of ram - That’s why Im using unmanaged, because those 360€ I save a year, and even get a better server - is better for me.

Ehm, but yeah, EUKHost.com is a good company, some of their support team is outsourced, but for the use you have, I would take eukhost.com etc, because buying an unmanaged server, hiring a server admin to set it up, it’s not that expensive to be honest, but there’s more work in it.

Best regards,
Lucas

7

I would look for a fully managed VPS, if the budget is there, and I think you can find something given the figure you shared. Alternatively, I would go for a reseller account. You might end up saving some serious money, especially if your usage is low. Going on memory, I recall clook.co.uk having a good reputation some years back, though I don’t know how they’re doing these days. ezpzhosting and innohosting would be two other UK companies I would look at, though I don’t know if they have UK or just US based servers.

UK based hosting tends to be expensive due to the exchange rate. Hosting somewhere else in Europe will probably be cheaper, as zerpex suggested. If the domains you have are not “.uk”, you may lose some rankings in Google for UK search engine users though. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=62399

8

If you’re keen on hosting in the UK, I’ve been using No-Wires for a while now.
Their site isn’t that great, but the hosting is :slight_smile:

Alternatively, as others have suggested, hosting in EU might be an option too.
For unmanaged hosting, LeaseWeb is OK.
If you want really top-notch hosting, Triple-IT is also a very good host. Not cheap (in fact, quite expensive), but very, very professional and extremely reliable.