One of the most commonly asked questions when starting a new WordPress site is which type of hosting you need, and which company provides the best product. Well, there isn’t a simple answer that applies to all cases. WordPress hosting depends on a number of factors specific to your particular project, and hence required some research on your part.
There are plenty of hosting companies out there claiming to provide the best hosting service available, offering speed, security, reliability and much more. That’s all well and good, but it all comes down to how well that host performs, and one of the deciding factors here is the location of the hosting companies’ datacentres.
SiteGround
SiteGround currently offers datacentre locations on three continents: North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. The European datacentre in Amsterdam has always served the European market quite well, however they have recently announced that as part of their strategy to constantly enhance their services, they decided to expand and look for a new additional location.
This addition enables SiteGround to offer even better performance and a localized service to a certain group of clients, so the UK population would be happy to know that they decided to opt for London. This choice was made based on the infrastructure and connectivity available in this city, and will prove to be very beneficial to all those who get a significant part of their traffic from the UK. Although they don’t as yet offer dedicated servers in the London data centre, they should be available at a later stage.
As users of SiteGround ourselves we are very satisfied with not only the hosting performance, but also their support. The help provided by the SiteGround support staff is known to be some of the best out there, and we can testify for that as they’ve always been of great help to our team whenever we faced any sort of issue.
WP Engine
WP Engine is another WordPress hosting provider that we make use of and have been very happy with. They offer datacentres across three cities, and once again they have chosen the UK for their European datacentre, alongside Texas in the US and Tokyo in Japan. Choosing between any of these datacentres is free of charge and you can switch at any time you want.
This expansion into Europe happened back in 2012, and it provides a number of benefits such as reduced latency for domestic visitors because the closer the server is to the site visitor, the faster the site can load, British and European Union legal jurisdiction, as well as compliance of the EU Data Protective Directive on exporting personal data outside of the EU.
If you’re looking for a new hosting provider in the UK and you’d like to opt for the best possible options, the above two will more than satisfy your needs. Have a look through both their websites, take a look at what they offer and the customer feedback they’ve gotten, then decide which option is best for your WordPress site.
Have you used SiteGround’s or WP Engine’s UK datacentres? What are your thoughts so far? We’d love to hear about any benefits or downfalls that you’ve come across in the comments below.
4 Responses
I would highly recommend www.rosehosting.com They are fully managed VPS provider with US and UK based servers.
Thanks for the comment Roberto, but I can’t see WordPress mentioned anywhere on the RoseHunting website…
Hey Mark. Siteground & WP Engine are obviously two of the bigger names in the space, as well as a little more expensive.
There’s a fairly new hosting company called Tap, based out of the UK. Their platform is simple, and their pricing is even simpler, and relatively cheap.
$5/mo/site. That’s it. No confusing tiers. No hidden features. Just $5/mo.
I took them for a spin & wrote a comprehensive review here.
The other awesome thing is that you can setup an unlimited amount of demo sites for free (hosted on a thisistap.com sub-domain). Definitely worth a look. — Oh, and their founders are awesome guys. Incredibly receptive & friendly.
Hey Dave, thanks for the feedback. The guys from Tap actually reached out to me a few days ago and I gave it a quick spin. I have to say that the little time I’ve had to try it out so far has gone quite well. I’ll have to take a closer look at your review too, and I have to agree that their team is very friendly and has always been there to reply to my questions.