Updated May 2019 – 20i Now have a WordPress staging area – whoop!

I know the techy details of hosting can be overwhelming for the uninitiated. Which is why I manage the hosting for the majority of websites that I build, it just makes sense to me to offer good extended service. I want to provide the best possible value for my clients, and make their lives easier when it comes to running their business online.

In order to do that I have to be able to trust the company I select to host all of their (and my own) websites and email, so I’m always looking to make sure I’m getting the best service, and lately it looks like it’s worth trying out a competitor, 20i. They are fighting hard for the UK hosting marketplace and their offering and service reviews definitely made me look.

Generally I have been happy with Heart Internet. I have had pretty good experience of their support team (though many haven’t). But in the past year they’ve had a few outages causing downtime, and there have just been some issues I’ve had with their pricing which makes it difficult to pass on reasonable prices to my clients while still making some small profit (I am a business after all). It’s not a decision I take lightly – migrating multiple websites is hardly my idea of a rocking Saturday night, but it’s one that I think will benefit everybody I support.

Here’s the key benefits of 20i that have had me changing:

Free simple SSL certificates, I know, FREE. Bearing in mind how important SSL certificates are now becoming, this is a dealbreaker for me. 20i can provide free SSL certificates from LetsEncrypt to domains hosted with them, which Heart has refused to do for years, that’s a yearly saving of about £50 for every one of my clients who had a certificate already, and those who don’t can now have one as standard. *WIN*

10GB standard mailbox size (Heart provide 1GB as standard, you’d pay £45 to get 10GB)

Speed – I’m always looking to optimise site load speed for my client websites, and the 20i WordPress platform comes with various layers of caching built in which will eliminate the need for other caching plugins. Plus their independently reported speed comparisons look good: Page load tests showed that 20i were up to 480% faster than other web hosts.

Stability and support – there’s a whole load more tech details including SSD storage, an autoscaling cloud platform and PHP 7 as standard, which just reassure me that these guys know what they are doing. Should the worst happen Trustpilot reviews show that people are very happy with the support they received.

Staging – 20i introduced staging and cloning facilities to their shared hosting, which is fab. Staging allows you to make a clone of a live WordPress site on a staging server, so you can then make changes without affecting the live site. Great when I have major updates to perform.

All of this adds up to Wildflower Digital being able to supply the kind of service that we want to give, at a better price, so we’re giving it a go. 

Update May 2019: I’ve been really pleased with the service that 20i provide. Their user interfaces are intuitive, their ticketed support team have been really helpful whenever I needed them. Overall, I’m a pretty happy customer!