Krystal Hosting started as a brainchild of Simon Blackler who was a 17-year-old on the time. While spending his summer season trip creating a fan web site for an upcoming online game and studying methods to construct it in that course of, he confronted the issue of discovering an appropriate web hosting service. After being aggravated with quite a few overpriced internet hosting options with dreadful efficiency on the UK market, he got here up with the concept of providing an “trustworthy, dependable & private” various on his personal.
Krystal Hosting was lastly based in 2002 and has since turn into one of many largest impartial net hosts within the UK which is at the moment internet hosting about 200.000 web sites. Today, they provide quite a lot of internet hosting options, from commonplace shared internet hosting to managed WordPress, cloud VPS and reseller internet hosting.
One distinctive characteristic of Krystal Hosting is their eco-friendly method. It was launched in 2017 after they turned one of many earliest hosts to be powered by 100% renewable vitality, thus decreasing their carbon footprint to a minimal. Additionally, their knowledge middle is situated in London and all knowledge is saved on a 100% SSD disk to permit its customers the very best velocity doable.
Krystal Hosting’s principal web site feels trendy, user-friendly, well-organized and distinctively (and pleasantly) purple. The similar might be stated about their weblog which, whereas it doesn’t seem to have been up to date in current months, is loaded with articles written in articulate, informative and barely witty style.
As for social media, Krystal Hosting maintains a presence on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. All of those accounts seem lively, with slightly common posts, responses to feedback, answered questions and basic degree of interplay with customers which could be described as pleasant.
Plans and pricing
Three totally different internet hosting varieties (shared, WordPress and VPS) are highlighted on the web site’s landing page with their most vital options. Selecting any of them will lead you to a different web page with a bigger number of choices, relying on a internet hosting kind. The most reasonably priced shared internet hosting plan is labeled as “Amethyst” and goes for £4.99 ($6.57) a month. With this you must get same-day migrations, capability to host two websites, 10GB of SSD area, a free SSL certificates and an internet site builder (with as many pages as you need). This will not be the most affordable shared hosting plan on the market, but it surely undoubtedly represents a wonderful quality-price ratio.
We ought to point out that slightly below the chosen plans there may be an choice to modify on/off calculation for VAT (a value-added tax), which offers you a clearer image of all prices.
Krystal Hosting affords an open-handed 60-day money-back assure with all of its plans, which is twice as a lot time than with most internet hosting suppliers. It’s essential to bear in mind that this is applicable to all services besides domains.
When it involves cost strategies, Krystal Hosting helps bank cards (Visa, MasterCard, Maestro and American Express), financial institution switch and PayPal.
Ease of use
If not one of the pre-designed internet hosting plans are engaging sufficient, barely beneath the rightmost one there may be an choice titled “Show me bigger plans”. It will take you to 2 extra and premium plans suited to essentially the most difficult companies. Additional details about the plans needs to be supplied, akin to web sites’ efficiency, frequency of every day backups, variety of restoration factors and supported apps and options. If you aren’t precisely positive what plan most closely fits your wants, you might have a selection to hunt additional help by contacting Krystal Hosting’s assist crew.
Selecting the choice to be charged yearly will get you two charge-free months, and with a triennial plan it’s possible you’ll halve the entire quantity you would wish to pay on month-to-month foundation. After deciding on a plan, you’ll be prompted to register a brand new area or switch the one you at the moment have. You can then select a billing cycle, add fundamental details about your small business kind, nation and area, review your purchasing cart and proceed to checkout. Curiously, a number of international locations weren’t listed (a handful of non-EU nations) within the choices, so we suppose you may choose the one that’s closest to you.
Creating your account with Krystal Hosting is a reasonably easy course of. After coming into your private knowledge, you’ll create a password and decide a safety query, which could be one thing private, akin to your mom’s maiden identify or extra basic such because the identify of your favourite superhero. Well, since we all know it’s Batman, right here’s a bit of phrase of recommendation: select a query that solely you recognize the reply to. Additionally, in order for you, it’s possible you’ll add an alternate e-mail handle or be part of Krystal Hosting’s mailing checklist.
Krystal Hosting supplies all of its customers with a cPanel as a management panel platform. Popular purposes akin to WordPress, Softaculous, Joomla, Drupal, b2evolution, MediaWiki and lots of extra are only a click on away, so that you shouldn’t have bother managing your newly created web site.
Speed and expertise
After performing a velocity efficiency check supplied by GTmetrix on Krystal Hosting’s principal web site, we acquired slightly humble outcomes. The time required to load the web page was 7.5 seconds, which is barely lower than the typical of 8.1. In parallel, the method wanted 107 requests, which is considerably greater than the typical of 87. The last efficiency rating was a modest C (72%), which is a bit above the typical.
An uptime check decided by UptimeRobot working on Krystal Hosting’s principal web site for greater than a month confirmed us slightly pleasing outcomes. This is kind of lucky, since they assure a 99.99% uptime. During the testing interval, no downtime was recorded in anyway. But there have been a number of main oscillations in response time. However, they’re too few to be of any higher significance with reference to general efficiency.
Support
Since Krystal Hosting, whereas explaining their creed, emphasizes their perception that “high quality assist is a proper” and due to this fact they “won’t ever outsource our assist”, we needed to give it a more in-depth look. Seeking assist on their principal web site will give you a number of choices: to open a assist ticket, begin a stay chat or give them a phone name, the latter being out there from 9AM to 8PM. There is phone assist able to obtain calls round the clock, however solely for patrons who bought their Business internet hosting plan.
As for self-help choices, the very first thing introduced to you’ll be their knowledgebase, in all probability as a result of it’s a well-made one. There you’ll discover round twenty classes full of appropriate articles, a few of them containing about seventy entries and others only a single one. Three from every class (which applies to those who have a minimal of three articles) are highlighted and, from the look of it, most of them are written in an easy, beginner-friendly and useful method. Interestingly, on the finish of every article, customers are invited to depart a grade with a becoming emoticon (enamored, baffled and a depressing one).
The competitors
HostPapa is Canada-based whereas Krystal Hosting is from the UK, however their concentrate on being eco-friendly and utilizing 100% renewable vitality is what attracts them collectively. Both suppliers supply a free web site builder even with the low-cost plans, however whereas HostPapa limits its builder to 2 pages, with Krystal Hosting you should utilize as many pages as you would like.
Hostgator is without doubt one of the hardest rivals to any host, significantly as a result of it affords a myriad of internet hosting choices and options (a free web site builder is included) with its all-inclusive but budget-friendly plans. In comparability to Krystal Host, Hostgator is extra reasonably priced, however it’s not powered with pure inexperienced vitality.
Both Bluehost and Krystal Host are greater than succesful hosts, particularly by way of internet hosting varieties and choices, protecting all of the fundamentals, add-ons, ease of use, reliability and affordability. Bluehost is without doubt one of the largest and, deservedly, finest recognized hosts round, however in the event you would slightly assist a smaller and impartial enterprise, Krystal Host could be a good selection for you.
HostRocket is a fellow impartial hosting supplier, but a US-based one. Much like Krystal Host, it supplies an honest vary of providers and options, good efficiency and user-friendly cPanel with its plans. However, HostRocket’s plans can get expensive, significantly with surprising and approach too costly setup charges. In distinction, with Krystal Host what you see is what you get.
Final verdict
With all kinds of its all-inclusive providers, internet hosting choices and additional options, it’s no shock that Krystal Host is taken into account to be the biggest impartial hosting supplier within the UK. They won’t be as budget-friendly as Hostgator or Bluehost, however they won’t fail to make sure the fine quality, all whereas remaining nature-friendly. After all, in the event you ought to change your thoughts about them, there’s a beneficiant 60-day money-back assure.
