PipeTen - The Best UK Web Host
Meet the PipeTen team
Way back in 2012, one of our websites - cottage-choice.co.uk - was website of the month!
Why we chose PipeTen hosting
There are several reasons for choosing your hosting company, and I'll guide you through a few of the reasons we chose PipeTen to look after our web hosting: first of all, PipeTen gave us products we needed. I'm sure you'll agree, you could have the best hosting provider in the UK, but if this hosting provider doesn't give you what you want, then what's the point. I'll talk a little more about what we were after from our hosting provider later, but for now I'll move onto the second reason for choosing PipeTen: word of mouth. I already knew of a couple of people who use PipeTen. and were more than happy with the service - and that's always my preferred route to choosing anybody (builder, plumber or web host service). PipeTen also have good reviews over at TrustPilot.com - I know you can't always rely solely on these review sites, but it all adds up to the bigger picture.I mean look at this glowing report about PipeTen....
Independent reviews of PipeTen from Trust Pilot
... Oh, hang on, that's me! It's worth reading the reviews at Trust Pilot anyway, just to get an independent review of what other people think.
What we wanted from our UK web hosting service
First of all we didn't want to pay a fortune in hosting costs. I mean, who does? I don't always consider cheap hosting to be good value hosting either. You might be able to get some hosting from Bob down the road, and he'll only charge you £5 a year - that would undoubtedly be cheap, but is it good value? If the hosting service goes down for week, then that cheapness suddenly may not seem such good value.As a business we're not up there, traffic wise, with Tui or First Choice, but we are trying to grow our on-line presence, so needed someone where we could start small, and increase (maybe to dedicated servers) if necessary. It turns out that PipeTen can do that. Nearly all our websites are written in classic ASP or .Net (er, apart from this website which uses WordPress), so a windows server was also called for.
And, finally, we needed good support - that's what we all need, right? When something goes wrong, we need to know that it will be fixed pretty blumin' quickly. Notice there I said "when something goes wrong", not "if something goes wrong". I've worked in the IT industry for 25 years - and figure it is best to be a realist about these things. If someone tells you their hosting won't go wrong - don't believe them! IT is like any other industry, the wheels occasionally fall off. What I wanted was someone who could pop those metaphorical wheels back on when they did come off.
A snap-shot of the PipeTen website showing the wait time you can expect to have your support ticket looked at...
See that image above? That shows how long you'll expect to receive an answer to support questions. I think that is quiet impressive. If you had a PipeTen technician working in your office - or, if like me, you have a home office, working in the living room - you wouldn't get much better service.
The few times I've had to contact PipeTen about problems - whether they were service related (Windows IIS can be a bit of a bugger); or whether I'd messed something up, they've always come back to me within a couple of minutes. And I've never had a web server outage of more than 10 minutes - which is why I trust these people with our business!
What about costs for our UK web hosting
I consider PipeTen to be very good value indeed (notice I say good value, and not cheap - although they are cheap too. But good value is the primary goal here). We have a few websites on the PipeTen shared server - and this costs £100 per year. And one of our websites(Cottage-Choice.co.uk), the one with a large amount of internet traffic, on a managed cloud server. And this costs £45 per month. As you can see, it's horses for courses - got lots of traffic go for a dedicated server; just starting, out go for the shared option.If you don't need a windows server - for example, if you're looking for Word Press site - the costs come down further still.
Now I need a dedicated web hosting server
So you've chosen the shared hosting server, and you're paying £80 per year. Everyone’s happy - the website is picking up traffic, and your on-line shop is making a profit. Now you're getting so much traffic an upgrade is in order. Although a good problem to have, it still sounds like a nightmare (as soon as upgrade is mentioned, it's time to break out the brown trousers). We had just such a quandary last year. We were quite happy on our shared package, but then traffic picked up quite drastically, and I wanted to go for something with a little more oomph. So it was "upgrade time". I contacted the support people, expecting this upgrade to be a bit of a pig. It only turns out that PipeTen will do the upgrade for you. And, get this, upgrades are free of charge.
Should you need to upgrade, PipeTen will do all the donkey work for you
Free of charge! I haven't been so happy since my children were born - and fortunately the upgrade generated far fewer sleepless nights than the children did.
So there you have it. I highly recommend PipeTen for your UK web hosting. They're good value, reliable, and they help you out when you get stuck! What more could you need.
Should you wish to contact me, about our PipeTen web hosting experience - or about anything really, just drop me an email on john@internetaffiliation.co.uk, and I do what I can to help.
