UK2.net review

First impression

UK2.Net, the Copenhagen-headquartered worldwide internet services group, was formed in 1998 by Dane Bo Bendtsen as an affordable, low-frills domain name registrar and, by 2000, already became one of the largest web hosting companies in the UK, with approximately 435,000 customers.

After a series of strategic purchases, it was ultimately purchased by THG plc in 2017 and is now part of the THG Ingenuity e-commerce services platform. Its offerings include Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, Domain Name Registration, and Dedicated Servers.

Trial Period

If you are not happy with your UK2 Web Hosting account and you are within the first 30 days of your sign-up, you can have a full refund. The refund is not applicable to Set Up Fees, Domain Name Registration Fees, and Overages.

To receive your refund, you can simply close your account by creating a support ticket. Once the ticket is received, UK2 will refund the money back within 30 days. Refund is issued through either BACS or WorldPay.

Billing Cycle

UK2 clients can purchase Shared Hosting plans for a monthly, yearly, two-year, or three-year duration with a maximum of 40% off longer terms, but for VPS plans, payment is accepted for only monthly terms.

They provide Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal, so paying is convenient and easy for their clients.

Control Panel

UK2 has chosen to employ industry-standard cPanel, which provides users with a decent platform to control their applications, backups, and security. This web hosting control panel is extremely user-friendly and makes web hosting and website management easy for content management system (CMS) users such as WordPress, Drupal, Magento, and Joomla.

Designed to remove the agony from web hosting, cPanel is committed to making your life easier. With this proven system, everything you need is at your fingertips to effortlessly construct and automate server management. This lets you focus where you should be focusing - your business, your customers, and delivering a seamless website experience.

Limits

The customers who choose Shared Hosting have three plans to choose from, i.e., Starter, Pro, and Enterprise.

Starter, being their starter package, has 10GB Storage, 10x MySQL databases, and you can host one website. Pro and Enterprise have unlimited storage and MySQL databases, and the variation between the two is that Enterprise has unlimited websites with no limit whereas Pro can have 10.

Each plan has Unmetered Bandwidth, Unlimited Wildcard SSL certificates, Unlimited POP/IMAP mailboxes, and Free Daily Backups. I especially appreciate that they provide you with a free domain name for the duration of your plan – an extremely uncommon practice by any company. The one negative, however, is that the storage is still done on standard HDDs and not lightning-fast SSD drives.

For VPS plans, there are a number of scalable plans ranging from the V1-20 plan with 0.5GB RAM, 25GB SSD Disk Space, 2TB Bandwidth, and 1 Core CPU, to the most expensive V8-20 plan with 48GB RAM, 500GB SSD Disk Space, 9TB Bandwidth, and 8 Core CPU.

Website Builder

UK2 provides its customers with a custom drag-and-drop site builder. It includes over 140 contemporary, responsive, and easy-to-edit templates, so it's a great solution for customers who don't have any programming skills and need to create their web presence within a split second. But compared to other vendors, the builder is quite simple. And it has quite a high monthly cost, which, in my opinion, maybe a bit too high compared to what is provided. All the other vendors provide more sophisticated builders for free.

Security

UK2 operates its own data centers, which are strategically located in the USA, UK, and Europe. These highly secure, state-of-the-art facilities feature optical, ionization, and heat detection sensors, as well as VESDA fire detection systems. With on-site staff available 24/7, your servers are being watched over at all times.

On the hosting side, there are unlimited free Wildcard SSL Certificates for every account through Let’s Encrypt, which provides full security for main domains and subdomains. There are also daily free backups, antivirus, and antispam provided by UK2.

For added assurance, UK2 offers a "Managed Security Cleanup" service should a file or server be compromised. The service has three major components: a Security Investigation to identify why the compromise has been made, a Cleanup to erase any malware, viruses, or unauthorized users, and a Hardening stage wherein security agents harden your applications and plugins based on approved best security practices. Be aware that the service costs an additional one-time fee.

OS

They host their Shared Hosting on CloudLinux. Their VPS plans, though, allow the users a selection of Operating Systems from CentOS 7 right up to Ubuntu 18.04 / 20.04 / 22.0, Debian 10 / 11 / 12, Rocky Linux 8, AlmaLinux 8, and CentOS Stream 8. Other such as CentOS 7 (cPanel included), Windows 2016 & Windows 2019 Standard Edition, and AlmaLinux 8 (cPanel included) also exist but come with an added premium monthly price.

Support

Technical support agents are friendly and available around the clock via Phone, Email, Support Tickets, and Live Chat. They are quick to respond on Live Chat, almost instant, but unfortunately, I can't say the same for email, where I had to wait an average of 10 hours for a reply. I also got the feeling that their support is outsourced and at times had to ask the same question multiple times before my issues were sorted out.

Conclusion

With UK2, you do receive some nice freebies, including unlimited Wildcard SSL certificates and a free domain for life, which is a rare host. I think they are worth your while if you're shopping around for easy-to-use and simple web hosting services. However, I still think their support is a weakness, and the fact their Shared Hosting still uses slow HDDs instead of quicker Solid State Drives means they lag behind some of their rivals.