HeartInternet.uk review

First impression

Founded in 2004 by Tim and Jonathan Brealey, Heart Internet is a British web hosting company that takes pride in being the first to include a complete billing and CRM system for free with its reseller hosting products. They also claim to have created new and unique hosting solutions that have brought success both to them and their customers. Although Heart Internet advertises its services as “award-winning”, it hasn't received any awards since 2015, which coincides with the twists and turns it went through in the last decade.

The company provides various products and/ or services such as Linux and Windows Dedicated Servers, API created for reseller services, Windows Reseller Hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Cloud Hosting, and Hybrid Servers.

If you’re a new customer, upon opting for a plan you’ll be asked to create an account with Heart Internet, which includes surrendering your full name (even a title), birthday, email, and physical address, and coming up with a solid password. You also get to choose a security question, so make sure to remember the answer.  We should also note that if you’re attempting to sign up from any country outside of the UK, Ireland, Germany, or France, to complete the process you’ll have to get in touch with Heart Internet’s sales team via telephone or email.

Heart Internet’s official site looks pretty plain but it is fully functional and features an interesting and informative blog. You can also keep up with them on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where all accounts are in fine fettle.

Trial period

Heart Internet doesn't have a free trial. All of Heart Internet’s shared hosting plans come with a “hassle-free” 30-day money-back guarantee, and if you want to purchase any of its products you can do it via credit card, and that’s about it.

Billing cycle

Heart Internet offers a wide array of hosting services and most of them are reasonably priced. However, some of the entry-level solutions are a bit more expensive than we expected.

They offer 2 billing cycles which is the Monthly and Yearly plan options.

Control panel

Fortunately, instead of the eXtend control panel, Heart Internet now provides the latest version of industry-leading cPanel with its Linux-based packages, and it’s only a click away from the old-looking customer area. Unfortunately, if you went with a Windows-based package, there’s no cPanel for you.

Fortunately, instead of the eXtend control panel, Heart Internet now provides the latest version of industry-leading cPanel with its Linux-based packages, and it’s only a click away from the old-looking customer area. Unfortunately, if you went with a Windows-based package, there’s no cPanel for you.

Limits

The most pocket-friendly shared hosting plan is Linux-based “Economy” which will cost you £4.99 ($6.70) for one month, or £3.99 ($5.35) per month if billed annually, and this is without adding 20% VAT. The “Economy” plan will provide you a single website, one free domain name (excluding premium domains), 25 subdomains, 100GB of storage space (NVMe SSD), unmetered bandwidth, 512MB of memory, 50 FTP accounts, 10 MySQL (up to 1GB) databases, and one basic website migration. However, there are no free SSL certificates for those who choose one of the low-cost plans.

The next plan is called Deluxe and costs GBP 4.99 per month.

With this plan, you can have 5 websites in one hosting account and unlimited disk space. This means your website can be heavily loaded with large-sized images and videos if needed (though it’s never recommended of course). Monthly bandwidth allocation is unlimited.

And up to the highest plan which is called Maximum Plan that costs GBP 14,99 offers 200 websites, Unlimited SSD Storage, Unlimited bandwidth, Unlimited Mailboxes, 2GB Memory and Auto SSL.

Security

You’re never immune from malware, regardless of what kind of website you’re running or computer you have. We don’t recommend you take chances – just one instance of a malware infection can wreak havoc on your website and your reputation.

Providing essential peace of mind for both website owners and visitors, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificates offer world-class data protection and increase browsing confidence for your visitors.

Having an SSL certificate shows your visitors you have a trustworthy online presence and enables you to securely take online payments and store confidential data using your website.

OS

The company provides various products and/ or services such as Linux and Windows Dedicated Servers, API created for reseller services, Windows Reseller Hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Cloud Hosting, and Hybrid Servers. They both offered Linux and Windows Operating Systems.

Support

While seeking support on Heart Internet’s site you’ll surely bump into the live chat, which is available 24/7 in theory rather than in practice, so make sure to use it Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM (GMT). You also have an option to get in touch with the pre-sales and support staff via a UK-based telephone number, email, and ticket. We decided to test our luck with the support ticket and got a worthwhile answer within an hour, which is a pretty prompt response time for a ticket.

If you want to stay self-sufficient, your best shot is Heart Internet’s “Support Database” which looks a bit old-fashioned but most of its how-tos are up-to-date. There you’ll find over a thousand how-tos separated into nine different categories (“cPanel Web Hosting” being a recent addition). Searching through them wasn’t as easy as we'd like it to be, and all of a sudden the site started slowing down and crashing when we tried using the search box. In the end, we managed to find what we were searching for but it felt like an uphill climb.

Conclusion

If your main quest is to resell, Heart Internet’s solutions provide an appealing price-performance ratio, and the same is true of their VPS and dedicated server packages. However, when it comes to simpler solutions (such as shared or WordPress hosting), the entry-level plans look pale in comparison to other options on the UK market.

If you don’t find having a UK-based host vital to your vision, US-based HostGator and Bluehost can provide you with almost everything Heart Internet can, and they will throw in a bunch of beginner-friendly features to boot.