By far one of the best independent hosting companies in the UK is Vidahost. I have been using them for well over 3 years and host over 30 sites with them, including this one.
Before I start my review, for those looking to pick up some fresh Vidahost promo codes for 2014, here they are:
Promo Code WEBHOT10 – 10% Off Vidahost Standard/Cloud Web Hosting
Promo Code WEBHOT15 – 15% Off Vidahost Virtual Dedicated Servers (VDS)
Promo Code WEBHOT20 – 20% Off Vidahost SSL Certificates
CLICK HERE to go and use them on the Vidahost site!
If you want to find out how to save up to 40% then go to the bottom of the post for detailed instructions.
I Use Vidahost for the Majority of My UK Web Hosting
Every so often I decide to try out another web hosting provider only to be bitterly disappointed in the service and quickly transfer the site over to one of my Vidahost accounts.
They are not the cheapest provider nor are they the most expensive but they are easily one of the best UK hosting providers.
Their cheapest offering, “Basic” starts at £17 a year which includes a free domain name and half a gig of storage – this is perfect if you just want to host one site and thats it. Maybe you are building a blog network and need isolated hosting.
However, if you are like me and host many sites to test new ideas, then you should be looking at some of their slightly more advanced packages.
These jump up to £29 and £59 and offer multiple site hosting, 6 and 16 for the latter, plus increased storage and bandwidth. With these packages, if you buy 2 years at once, you get the 3rd year for free which makes it great value.
Why Pay The Premium?
In a world of web hosting companies offering unlimited sites and unlimited bandwidth, you may be asking why you would pay a premium for web hosting that comes with caps on storage, domains and bandwidth.
In a nutshell, by paying for a dedicated amount of resource – you are allowing your web hosting company to be able to allocate a decent amount of system resources to each site ensuring web pages pages are served quickly.
Although hard drive storage is now relatively cheap, and the faster SSD options becoming slightly more affordable, bandwidth and server CPU overheads still costs money. When companies provide cheap unlimited hosting, the service suffers due to overloading of their systems to squeeze every last penny out to compensate.
They also suffer when a small amount heavy users take advantage of their cheap deals and cause huge spikes in usage causing the servers to struggle at peak times.
I recently used a well know provider to host some site and was shocked at the page load times during peak hours. In some cases pages took up to 9 seconds to load. This is completely unacceptable and will cause drastic haemorrhaging of potential users
The bottom line is if you care about your website load times then you should not be using any sort of cheap unlimited package.
Find a company like Vidahost that caters for the right amount of headroom for your projects. This should include amount of domains that can be hosted, monthly bandwidth and storage.
If these features are capped, this will imply that their server loads are carefully monitored and not over subscribed giving you a snappy hosting service 24/7.
The Vidahost Service
No review would be complete without mentioning the Vidahost technical service. I have opened many support tickets over the years and each one has been responded to within minutes. I would say I get an initial response somewhere between 5 – 15 minutes for every ticket I raise regardless of what time it my be.
The server uptime is 99.9% and I have actually never experienced any server downtime. I monitor a few of my high traffic sites using Pingdom and I have yet to receive an alert from them saying the site was experiencing any issues.
The speed of the actual Vidahost web hosting is nothing short of excellent. All my sites perform very well when running load tests. As I rely on SEO for the bulk of my traffic, having a fast loading site is key to maintaining good rankings. A site that is too slow to load will be penalised by Google and loose rankings.
I use the Genesis framework which pulls my page file sizes to around 300 – 400kb depending on exact page content. That along with the responsive framework and the fast page load times by Vidahost constantly give me top 3 placements for my money terms on both desktop and mobile searches.
Of course their is a lot more to SEO than this for good ranking, but making sure you have these basics in place allow you focus on creating some decent high value content that will stand a chance of ranking well.
As an example, here is the Pingdom site test I just ran:
Click here to run the test yourself…
As you can see the page load time is sub one second using the Amsterdam servers. Using the Dallas testing server, which is the furthest testing server still gives a page load of only 3 seconds – well within the Google guidelines for usability.
Also, there is no cacheing taking place on this site. Plugins such as W3 Total Cache can help the more unwieldy sites shave seconds of their load times.
Conclusion
I seem to have gone a little off piste with regards to my topic, my Vidahost review. I really just wanted to point out how important getting some decent web hosting is if your website is of value to you.
Basically, if you need some UK based professional web hosting, Vidahost should be top of your list and I 100% recommend them and if wasn’t for needing to keep some sites completely independent, would use them for all my hosting needs.
Vidahost Promotional Codes
Still reading and want to test out the Vidahost service? Use these Vidahost promotional codes to get a discount.
Also, remember on every package other than the Starter, you get 3 years for the price of 2. Although this sounds a commitment, remember that you can cancel up to 30 days into the contract if you don’t like the service. Which is unlikely.
Promo Code WEBHOT10 – 10% Off Vidahost Standard/Cloud Web Hosting
Promo Code WEBHOT15 – 15% Off Vidahost Virtual Dedicated Servers (VDS)
Promo Code WEBHOT20 – 20% Off Vidahost SSL Certificates
Get 40% Off Your Vidahost Subscription
To get the best discount from Vidahost, it is currently running a special “buy 2 years hosting and get the 3rd FREE “on all packages except the “Basic” one – which is too small for most pro users anyway.
In order to activate the Vidahost 40% discount:
STEP 1. Click the link and visit Vidahost
STEP 2. Choose Your Hosting Package
STEP 3. Select “Biennially (3 Years For The Price Of 2)” Option from the drop down
STEP 4. Then use WEBHOT10 for a further 10% OFF in the coupon section
Simple!
Example One: Signing up to the 36 Month “Starter” package which would normally cost £87. By using the link above with the Vidahost promo codeWEBHOT10 it will only cost you £52 making a saving of 40%.
Example Two: Another option is to take the 36 month “Medium” package which would normally be £177, using the promotional code WEBHOT10 for a further 10% plus the link provided will only cost £106.
Leave a Reply