MechanicWeb offers hosting on Ryzen 9 5950x platform in Germany and Dallas USA. Ryzen 9 5900x is provided by them in London and Los Angeles. Their servers are optimised for the fastest possible speed. In the loading tests os simple websites, they perform 90 ms faster than HostXNow. That is mainly due to better server tuning, and partially (15ms out of overall 90ms) because MechanicWeb has decided to replace Imunify360. They are using CSF (Firewall and Web Application Firewall), ModSecurity (Web Application Firewall), and CXS / ImunifyAV+ (Malware Scanner). Imunify360 is a suite of malware scanner (AV+), Firewall, and Web Application Firewall. Choosing individual software instead of a suite like Imunify360 was a conscious decision by MechanicWeb to improve some small delays in processing web traffic. For uncached requests, with the latest Litespeed updates, most mod_security work can be run more efficiently too which is handy. There is always a balance between outright speed and security, and security takes priority for all hosting companies.
MechanicWeb serves simple websites 90 milliseconds faster than HostXnow servers. This is a noticeable difference, the impact can be accumulated on busy complex websites, where more requests will be directed toward the server. However, we should emphasise that you should not worry about such added delays. If you run a complex eCommerce website, the PHP performance and the efficiency of the database queries will be similar to both providers, as they use the same hardware and the same software.
Generally, the purpose of quasi-dedicated plans is to provide both greater resources and stability at the same time. MechanicWeb’s junior Flux plan has 8 CPU cores and 16 GB of dedicated RAM. This will withstand a greater sustained load than HostXNow’s and MechanicWeb’s shared hosting plan with 8 CPU cores and 12 GB RAM. Flux doesn’t just offer dedicated RAM and storage, it also boosts disk IO speed beyond 1000 MB/s and allows 50% CPU quota average usage. This is something shared hosting cannot offer. Additionally, it provides more isolation than shared hosting, so you can use an object cache such as Redis or Memcached in a safe environment.
Website page’s loading speed is a critical element of Google’s “mobile-friendliness score”. Speed of page loading, especially on mobile devices, affects search engine rankings. Slow pages never rank high in organic results and are less efficient in converting paid clicks – and this issue is even more important for the eCommerce websites owners.
From August 2021, Google has changed their ranking algorithm by adding Page Experience signals. The new score is partially based on Core Web Vitals such as:
The website owner shouldn’t ignore Core Web Vitals since the Page Experience signal is now a ranking factor. However, Core Web Vitals won’t become THE primary factor. Both Core Web Vitals and the Page Experience signal will be updated annually, and its importance might be reduced over time. But for now, Google is trying to force the change to the website owners’ attitude. If Google succeeds, the web will become much faster to the benefit of mobile users.
This is not an arbitrary set – this is the ranking of webpages of web design agencies around Cambridge. If most of them cannot make faster brochure websites for themselves, what can we say about the ordinary website pages’ loading speed? But the actual picture is more complicated – the page loading speed of many websites is pushed further down because of the wrong choice of the hosting providers. The classical cycle of blame, the Hosting provider – Caching plugins – Web page building tool – Web designer – Hosting provider, requires optimisation of each part of the chain.
This post carefully researches available options and recommends several providers for hosting websites for UK businesses. The information is regularly updated.
Typical software offered on cPanel shared hosting accounts is provided on these dedicated CPU and RAM plans. It includes cPanel, CloudLinux, LiteSpeed Enterprise, Softaculous, ModSecurity, malware scanner, and daily offsite backup. In addition the optional additional software can be installed after the customer requests it. Technically, this is not VPS plans as MechanicWeb does not provide root access. But it will outperform most VPS accounts on Gridpane with a huge margin!
HostXnow’s semi-dedicated shared hosting is powered by a Ryzen 5900x servers. They are the fastest servers on the market today. As a result of reducing client density on the server, HostXnow is able to offer semi-dedicated plans with up to 8 CPUs and 12 GB RAM. In all benchmark testing, HostXNow performs well, and you may be surprised to discover that your current provider is using hardware that is much slower. To be specific, your current provider is two times slower if you happen to use Guru and Krystal Hosting, 20i is about 2.5 times slower.
At the monthly rate of £12 and £56 respectively, HostXNow offers plans from 4 CPUs/ 4GB RAM/100 MB/s disk speed to 8 CPUs/ 12 GB RAM/ 250 MB/s disk speed. There is a 1 GB/s network uplink with unmetered traffic. The company provides discounts of 15% for annual billing, 25% for bi-annual billing, and 35% for tri-annual billing. You can get a free trial for a nominal fee of just £1 for the first month to test the hosting and run some performance tests before deciding to move your websites to the fastest hardware in the UK.
HostXNow offers all standard software including cPanel, LiteSpeed Web Server, CloudLinux Shared Pro, Imunify360 malware protection, MailChannels, and FREE backups hosted offsite. Backups are taken every four hours. Overall, you have access to 31 days of backups with 186 restore points. It’s a premium option, especially for NameHero’s unfortunate clients, who typically have access to a single restore point taken up to a week ago.
Due to unpredictability in hardware specifications, we advise companies in the US, Europe, and the UK to be cautious when choosing Stablepoint plans. In Oregon, Stablepoint offers Ryzen Zen 3 servers, but if your location is closer to Los Angeles or Dallas, we recommend MechanicWeb, which offers a similar Ryzen Zen 3 configuration. Our recommendation on the East Coast is to use HostXNow with Ryzen Zen 3 servers located in the Washington, D.C. data center. In Asia, Stablepoint already has EPYC Zen 3 servers in Singapore, so we recommend it to anyone with visitors based in India, Tokyo, or China. We have presented shared hosting plans from HostXNow and MechanicWeb with much faster hardware in this article. In spite of this, Stablepoint should still be considered by the vast majority of users since more technical suport operators would be available to answer customer questions and requests. While we hesitate to recommend their shared hosting plans in the US and Europe, Stablepoint should be adequate for simple brochure sites.
When you have several websites with occasional high CPU load requirements, HostXNow is one of the most competitive offers available. HostXNow’s ultra-fast server and significant CPU and RAM resources per child account allow hosting busy websites that were previously not possible through Reseller plans. However, be realistic about your expectations. If you need continuous high CPU utilisation, you should use a VPS instance with dedicated CPUs instead of a Reseller plan. You should aim for a continuous CPU load of less than 3 CPUs for the entire Agency account, so plan accordingly!
Don’t expect miracles. Hypervisors allocate CPU threads for a short period of time to different accounts queuing to serve entry processes. With several hundred cPanel accounts per server, you are not guaranteed 4 vCPUs per account on the Agency Reseller plan. Only on an underutilised server will your single account be able to use its entire allocation. It is the goal at HostXNow to keep the server utilization below 60% to provide you with more on-demand resources, but you must set realistic expectations if you want a trouble-free service.
Brixly reseller hosting is inexpensive, but you should not sign up for it unless you are confident in your technical abilities. Only shared hosting accounts come with “handholding” technical support. It is not recommended that novice users try to set up an agency with cheap reseller plans. You might be better off upgrading your skills on a shared hosting plan before moving to the reseller plan.
Companies like Brixly can offer low-cost reseller plans because resellers mainly work with simple brochure websites. The LiteSpeed Cache Engine caches such sites on the server, so child accounts are rarely accessed except for editing content and updating plugins. Server resources are grossly oversubscribed. A reseller hosting server with 16 CPU cores can have more than 1,000 cPanel accounts. Your child account can access up to two CPU cores, which does not mean that you can use them continuously. Even a continuous utilization of 5% of the CPU core on the child account can cause problems on such an oversubscribed hosting server.
Your entire reseller account with 100 child accounts should aim to have a conservative average usage of less than 6 GB RAM and 1 CPU. Provisioning 2 GB RAM / 2 CPUs per child account is for peak loads only! Most eCommerce customers should expect to be billed £5 per month for boost resources at 4 CPUs/4GB RAM. If you have a client with a successful eCommerce website, you should consider semi-dedicated shared hosting instead of putting them on a heavily oversubscribed reseller hosting account.
The cheapest LiteSpeed web hosting services are offered by several micro-businesses that rent from OVH data centers. Typical hosting locations include London, Washington, Oregon, Sydney, and Singapore. OVH serves hosting providers with a mix of slow servers like Intel Xeon E-2136 and significantly faster Ryzen 5900x. Most companies still offer slow E-2136, but HostXNow and MechanicWeb areis one of the first providers to offer Ryzen 5900x.
Some hosting companies that use OVH are eager to give misleading information. One example of this is WebPlot, which is based in the UK. This company has a bad reputation even among LowEndTalk members. However, since WebPlot claims to be one of the first providers of E-2388G servers from the OVH datacenter in London, we decided to test them. Their servers were poorly misconfigured E-2288G that underperformed EthernetServer’s E-2136. Robert Anderson of WebPlot is often considered a fraud in the LowEndtalk community, and now we know why.
When choosing GURU, we don’t see any benefit in sacrificing your hardware resources. A few years ago, it might have been a wise choice. They are now offering midrange hardware for a huge premium that isn’t worth your attention. Many affiliate scammers are still trying to convince you to switch to GURU. Compare GURU’s benchmarks with HostXNow or MechanicWeb. There is no need to pursue further investigation. Nothing can change your opinion about Guru if you still believe their services offer good value for money.
For several years, Krystal has worked on “Katapult” – an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform intended to offer extreme performance and simplicity. Onyx is Krystal’s managed shared hosting on the Katapult platform. The benchmarks show that Krystal Onyx performs much worse than Brixly, which is using similar AMD EPYC servers. This decrease in performance cancels out all the advantages of AMD EPYC hardware. In particular, long TTFB, slow access to the disk and database is regrettable.
While it still holds up to fast Intel servers such as those used by GURU, we don’t recommend Krystal Onyx. Krystal is heavily overprised and slow. Another drawback of using a homegrown software stack is the inability to incorporate ModSecurity or Immunify360. Krystal is working on integrating ModSecurity into its platform, but a timeline for implementation has not been announced. We can’t think of any arguments for why people would still fall into the trap of using slow hardware and a flawed homegrown software stack when you can get HostXNow or MechanicWeb services with twice the speed for hardware. Featuring the latest industry software and email support HostXNow and MechanicWeb are of a different calibre.
As we explained above, even a local business based in the UK may need to optimise its website for global traffic to meet the requirements of the new Page Experience metrics introduced by Google.
The MechanicWeb server in Dallas has a about 5% faster Ryzen 9 5950x processor with a slightly larger CPU cores count. This is the same server used by MechanicWeb in the Hetzner data center in Germany.
Based on our benchmark, MechanicWeb offers a 90% CPU speed boost over VultrHF. You will serve each visitor request faster with MechanicWeb, which will result in a better experience for your visitors and a higher conversion rate. If nine times better value for money for 90% faster service is not enough to persuade the users to depart from Cloudways, then nothing will.
We recommend considering MechanicWeb’s Power or Prime plans as the best options for a high-traffic eCommerce site. You’ll get faster performance and will sustain higher traffic to your website. More importantly, you will enjoy friendly tech support, which should outweigh any other considerations. MechanicWeb offers all the standard options like ImunifyAV for Malware Protection, free daily offsite backup, 30-day backup retention, Cloudflare CDN with Railgun integration, MailChannels outbound spam filter, Softaculous one-click installer, and staging environment.
Affiliate scammers cause a lot of confusion about NameHero’s services. NameHero’s flagship AMD EPYC 7302 servers show disappointing benchmark results. HostXNow Ryzen Zen 3 5900x servers in the data center in Washington are a better choice. They are two and a half time faster than NameHero’s current servers. In fact, you can also consider MechanicWeb with Ryzen 5900x in Los Angeles and Ryzen 5950x in Dallas, or StablePoint Ryzen 5900x in Oregon.
On top of that, NameHero’s backups are inadequate – most of the time you can only use a single backup taken a week ago. When you suffer a ransomware attack, a lack of daily backups for the last month or more can cause a lot of trouble. NameHero reneged on their initial plans to upgrade to AMD EPYC Zen 3. If you take an ill advice to switch to NameHero as proof of affiliate scammers’ incompetence, you will be right.
Stablepoint has a decent range of shared-hosting and reseller hosting plans. You first choice should always be a Ryzen Zen 3 server. You can get in London or in Germany from MechanicWeb and HostXNow. In the USA it is available in Oregon from Stablepoint, in Los Angeles and Dallas from MechanicWeb, and in Washington from HostXNow. In all other locations available from Stablepoint you should prioritise EPYC Zen 3 servers, which are just 20% slower than Ryzen 5900x. If your customers are located in more obscured parts of the world, you will have to use EPYC Zen 2 servers, which are 50% slower. It is best to be served from the server which is local to your customers. In the case of the global traffic to the website, you should choose location according the geography of your audience. Dallas is the best location for serving global users. TTFB times are excellent across the USA, and TTFB times to Europe and Asia are among the lowest for USA-based servers.
We offer web and graphic design. We cover the full spectrum of your needs, from logos to eCommerce stores. Our company offers advice on web hosting solutions, as well as technical search engine optimization. We have a small team with the expertise to meet all your needs.
