Pickaweb is a UK based website hosting company that has been operating since the year 2000. They have a very good reputation on the review website TrustPilot; which is impressive considering most companies listed on that website have many bad reviews.
Their basic hosting plans start from only £2.49 per month, however they also offer VPS plans and managed and unmanaged dedicated servers.
Although anyone can host with Pickaweb, their services are certainly more attractive to European based customers since all of their datacentres are based in London. This means that visitors to a website from Europe will experience much higher ping times when compared to a website that is hosted in the United States.
In this article, I would like to take a closer look at the company and show you what services they offer.
The London Datacentre
Pickaweb own a purpose built state of the art datacentre in London. The datacentre promises complete redundancy when protecting power and uptime. They achieve this through HVAC, fire suppression, network connectivity and on-site manned security.
In the hosting business, uptime is everything; so I am always curious about the steps hosting companies take to ensure servers do not go down. One interesting fact I noticed was that in the event of power being compromised, they have standby power available that can provide 72 hours of continuous power at full load capacity. This is perhaps how they are able to promise network uptime of 99.9%
Their facility is apparently 71,500 square feet in size, has a 24 hour security team, and a three metre high fence around the perimeter. They also use a biometric entry system and security bollards at the parking perimeter. It’s like something out of a James Bond movie.
Hosting Options
Pickaweb is popular with a lot of small businesses due to their range of shared hosting plans.
Their basic plan only costs £2.49 per month. This plan is only suitable for one static website as it does not include MySQL databases. It also limits email addresses to one, but this should not be a major problem for a simple website.
Their starter plan at £3.99 per month is a much better plan in my opinion. It allows unlimited email addresses, MySQL databases, and websites.
The amount of storage and bandwidth available in all of their shared hosting plans is pretty generous. Even their cheapest plan boasts a healthy 5GB of storage and 30GB of bandwidth.
Their VPS plans start at only £9.99 per month. This will get you an allocation of 1GB of RAM, 25GB of storage, and 2TB of bandwidth.
Pickaweb also offer VPS plans with solid state drive (SSD) storage. These offer improved performance, but this enhanced performance comes at a price.
If you have ever thought about entering the hosting industry, or if you just want to host some websites for friends and family, you want want to check out one of Pickaweb’s reseller plans.
From only £9.99 per month you will receive 50GB of storage and 500GB of bandwidth. You can allocate these resources to as many customers and/or friends as you would like and charge them all an appropriate fee for the privilege.
Larger businesses, and those of you with high traffic websites, should check out Pickaweb’s dedicated hosting plans. This means that you will have a full server all to yourself. Therefore, your website will not be hosted alongside any other websites and you will have full control over how the server is configured.
Pickaweb let you choose from a range of Linux and Windows based operating systems. They also provide a range of additional add-ons and a 99.99% Network availability guarantee and a 2 hour hardware replacement. Their prices are very competitive when compared to other UK based hosting companies.
cPanel is provided with all of the shared hosting, reseller hosting, and VPS hosting plans. Those who purchase a dedicated server will have more flexibility over which hosting control panel they install.
As you can see, Pickaweb’s hosting range covers everything from hosting small static websites to hosting large multinational businesses. They also offer dedicated hosting plans for platforms such as WordPress, Joomla, Prestaweb, and Magento; though these plans seem to be variations of the shared hosting and VPS plans that are on offer.
If you are hosted elsewhere, Pickaweb will help you migrate your websites to their servers free of charge.
All Pickaweb’s plans have a 30 day money back guarantee. If you are not 100% happy with their service, they will refund
We guarantee you’ll love our fast, instant 24*7 service – or we’ll refund your money
Other Services
Like most hosting companies, Pickaweb also offers domain registration services. They sell .co.uk domains for £3.49 and .com domains for £8.99 per year.
Most of their shared hosting plans offer a free domain name when you purchase a plan, however I would discourage you from ever using a free domain for any important websites.
One cool service that beginners may love is Pickaweb’s Website Builder option. It is included with all shared hosting plans. You can create a website in minutes by choosing from hundreds of professional website templates.
Support
Pickaweb have a range of support options for customers. They offer live chat and telephone support twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. Alternatively, you can contact support via email.
On their website you will also find a knowledgebase and a large collection of hosting related video tutorials.
Obviously, it is difficult for me to comment on the quality of support that Pickaweb delivers because I do not host my websites with them. However, they do offer a wide range of support options and have a great reputation on Trust Pilot.
Final Thoughts
Pickaweb are a large hosting company that caters to the UK hosting market. They offer hosting plans for beginners right through to large businesses.
I found their plans to be very competitive when compared to other hosting companies operating within the UK.
If you are based in the UK and are looking for a hosting solution that focuses on the UK market, I recommend checking them out. European based website owners should also check them out.
Thanks for reading.
Kevin
