Bargain Host Review

Bargain Host Reviewed

Bargain Host came to the web hosting market in 2001. Founders James and Scott Innes state the company’s objective is to give the cheapest UK web hosting. Achieving that has given them a large client base, says the London Docklands based company.

Bargain Host Products and Services

Bargain Host offers Shared Hosting on a Unix platform. The four hosting products are budget, basic, advanced, and premium. The difference between products is the number of domains that can be hosted – from one on the budget scheme to unlimited on the premium plus the different services have enhanced MySQL database connections, mailboxes and bandwidth as well. Lots of other add-ins come as standard in the more expensive hosting options.

Benefits of Bargain Host

If you’re looking for a cheap and cheerful, basic service, well this is it. Bargain Host offers a stripped down budget service that the company says does not compromise delivery of a tiptop service.

All email boxes come with MX addresses, webmail, auto responders, forwarders, and Spam Assassin.

Customers can move up to an enhanced plan or downgrade at any time.

Reliability and Performance Review

Web domains have 100Mbit per second data transfer speeds to HP Proliant servers with dual Xeon processors and four gigs of RAM per server. Bargain Host service reliability is rated as 99.94%. Connectivity is via Level (3) and Tiscali giving full connection if one connection is down.

Customer Service and Support

Bargain Host has a distinct pride in customer service and offers 24/7 technical support that includes talking directly to customer advisors, an online FAQ, 78-article knowledge base and email ticket system. Users can also download a cPanel manual. Live Chat is online between 8am and 5pm weekdays.

Web Hosting Features

The strength of the Bargain Host package is the huge number of features included at no extra cost with every plan – including web site basics like a free domain name, PHP/MySQL, extensive stats support and a 30-day money back guarantee. Remote access is by cPanel and the usual suspects are included in all packages, like Fantastico, Web Site Builder. Ruby On Rails is unavailable with the budget plan.

Shared Hosting is available but Bargain Host does not offer dedicated servers, load balancing or other advanced features that would needed by web sites with a heavy bandwidth requirement although the company claims to host sites for councils, the police, football clubs and other large users. Ample web space is available on all plans – starting at 1,000 MBs on the basic service to 40,000 MBs on the premium product.