Our Verdict

If you are bargain-hunting in the Britain, Satellite Hippo is definitely worth a look. Its entry-level plan is absurdly cheap yet as limited as they can draw, and the performance is nil to write home about. However, if you can spare the extra cash, its advanced hosting solutions seem like-minded a bad good deal.

For

  • Instant frame-up
  • 30-day money-backrest guarantee
  • Both cPanel and Plesk are available
  • Decent variety of hosting options
  • Plenty of combined-suction stop installs
  • Very pocket-friendly pricing

Against

  • No website builder
  • The entry-level project is extremely limited
  • The official website looks unfinished

TechRadar Finding of fact

If you are bargain-hunting in the Great Britain, Planet Hippo is definitely worth a look. Its entry-level plan is absurdly garish up to now every bit moderate as they can generate, and the operation is nil to write habitation about. However, if you can spare the extra cash, its advanced hosting solutions seem like a pretty plenty.

Pros

  • + Instant setup
  • + 30-day money-back guarantee
  • + Both cPanel and Plesk are on tap
  • + Decent variety of hosting options
  • + Plenty of one-click installs
  • + Real air pocket-friendly pricing

Cons

  • - No website detergent builder
  • - The introduction-charge plan is extremely limited
  • - The official website looks unfinished

Launched in 2006 by Jeremy Rose and Darren Lavender, Planet Hippo is a UK-based web hosting company that offers shared, netmail, reseller, and VPS hosting solutions, as well as SSL certificates and arena registration services. Therefore, whether you are looking for a novice-friendly hosting root for a personal project or something a bit more hi-tech to boost your clientele, Planet Hippo has got you crustlike.

The company is headquartered in its metropolis of origin, Oswestry (the UK), and all of their data centers are set in the UK (although the exact number of them and their location remain unknown) together with their customer confirm staff. Besides being one of the quickest-growing companies on the UK market (in its flower), Planet Hippopotamus became the first supplier in the UK to put up cloud Energy Management capabilities to their customers through a partnership with Cisco Energy Department Management.

  • Want to try Planet Hippo? Check come out of the closet the website here

Major planet Hippo's administrative body locate is not only minimalistic but also peculiarly tightlipped when it comes to info active the keep company itself. Not only did we see the "About" segment entirely empty, simply all our efforts to trace the origin of Planet Hippo's name ended in total unsuccessful person. We still notic their mascot in the shape of a cartoonish-looking hippopotamus kind of cute though.

Although bare-maraca, Planet Hippo's site offers plenty of details near its products, which is at least something that deserves a compliment. The site should live available in few languages as well English (as shown in the language subdivision), even so, when we proven to switch to other languages we (you've guessed it) failed miserably.

Much the same Eastern Samoa its "About" section, Planet Hippo's official blog is standing filled with jazz. The same has been true about their social media accounts since 2022, the last year anything was promulgated in.

Pricing 2

Satellite Hippo's shared hosting plans start off quite a bum (Picture credit: Satellite Hippo)

Pricing

If you are looking for a U.K.-based host with inexpensive packages, Planet River horse is sure to show raised among the search results. The entry-level (WordPress and ecommerce optimized) shared hosting plan is cheap as chips at £1.00 ($1.40) per month and the others follow a similar pattern.

However, cheaper isn't e'er better and great bargains oftentimes number with great restrictions as advantageously. With Major planet Hippo's cheapest plan you'll get to server a single website, unlimited data shift, 1GB of web space, one email account, one MySQL database, but no backups nor a free domain registration. Going for the programme higher up will get you a unloosen domain (.cobalt.uk) and backups, just they will arrive at an additional cost.

If you force out unnecessary £7.99 ($11.10) per month, "Unlimited" (true to its name) will provide you with unqualified everything, one loos world (this time .com), and free day-to-day/weekly/monthly backups.

With VPS plans users can choose between Linux and Windows operational systems, where the Windows plans come a bit much expensive. The reseller plans come with cPanel As your control panel, which means you'atomic number 75 cursed with Linux. Completely of them are rather within reason priced and if you wish something even simpler than shared hosting, in that respect are four email hosting solutions to choose from.

All Planet Hippo's plans include a "non-quibble" money-back guarantee and for most of them, it is binding for 30 years.

Prices are listed in GBP and users can pay via all major credit cards (including MasterCard, Visa, and Maestro) and PayPal.

cPanel

Planet Hippo allows you to finagle your site victimisation the industry measure cPanel (Image credit: cPanel)

Ease of Use

Although with Major planet Hippo there is no lack of choice when it comes to solutions for small to mid-pig-sized businesses, picking outer nonpareil shouldn't take long. Complete of their plans are properly given with all relevant information some them.

After choosing a plan, you'll be prompted to decide what to do about the domain name: pick out a virgin one, transfer an existing one or allow it where it is by updating your nameservers. Although there are no free region names with the entry-level program, opting for a UK-based realm (.conscientious objector.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk. and so on) comes at an affordable monetary value, £4.49 ($6.20) for a year in our case.

After this, you can prime a billing cycle (yearbook, biennial, Oregon tercentennial), go through quickly domain configuration, insert a promo code (if you have one), and start creating your account with Planet Hippo. For this, you'll have to hand down them your full name, both email and personal address, and your phone number (beat all, nothing out of the ordinary), create a password, complete all the charge information and (finally) make a purchase.

Planet Hippopotamus promises an clamant setup with all its plans and arsenic far As we tush tell, they are credible to deliver on their promises.

Dashboard

Manage your account with a WHMCS dashboard (Ikon credit: Satellite Hippo)

From the WHMCS guest management platform you can manage your write u, browse other products, hold back out announcements, confer with the network status page, search the knowledgebase or get in touch with the technical brook team. To use the service you've just purchased, you'll make to navigate through the Services lozenge to go to your control jury. In case you purchased one of the shared hosting plans, you'll stick industry-leading cPanel. If you decide on a VPS solution, you progress to choose betwixt cPanel and Plesk, both of which are cold examples of user-friendliness.

One-Click Installs

Install a count of popular applications with just now one-mouse click using Softaculous (Image cite: Planet Hippo)

Whol shared hosting solutions are optimized for WordPress and ecommerce, and then you can get them in few clicks via Softaculous one-click installer. Unfortunately, Planet Hippo doesn't offer a website detergent builder, although their knowledgebase suggests it was available at or s point with premium plans.

Performance

We used GTmetrix to measure the uptime and reaction time of Planet Hippo's main situation (Visualize credit: GTmetrix)

Speed and experience

Afterward testing the focal ratio functioning of Planet Hippo's official site we were unaffected, to pronounce the least. The loading clock was actually quite good, 3.9 seconds in tally, and that's virtually it when IT comes to the good stuff. Cardinal out of troika vital web prosody (total block time and largest content component) showed a failure of epic proportions resulting in F (28%) atomic number 3 a final grade.

However, since we tested Planet Hippo's site, this result is more to the point for those quest a simpler hosting solution, while with VPS and reseller packages all this could turn into a completely different story.

Arsenic for uptime, Planet Hippo guarantees 99.9% of it. According to the SLA, for every minute of downtime that exceeds the promised percentage, the customer can get credit worthy anything from 2% to 100% of the amount they've paid. Unfortunately for Planet Hippo, during our two-week-longstanding uptime test (via UptimeRobot) of their official site quite a couple of cases of downtime were recorded (six, to comprise exact) resulting in a total of 99.78% uptime, which doesn't meet what they promised.

Support

If you find yourself in motive of a hand, the simplest way to find one and only on Satellite Hippo's official web site is to contact them by choosing the "Impinging Us" option on the sites' footnote. The following page volition bring home the bacon you with an option to strain Satellite Hippo's pre-sales support staff via ticket and electronic mail treat, and they promise to result all tickets within one hour. However, registered users are given a few Sir Thomas More options through the WHMCS UI: a 24/7 know chat, and a UK-based earpiece number available during office hours.

Knowledgebase

You can find a number of how-tos and other articles in Planet Hippo's knowledgebase (Image credit: Planet Hippo)

If you prefer finding solutions altogether by yourself, Satellite Hippo's knowledgebase should suffice. It contains more or less 300 how-tos that are split into 16 circumstantial categories, and interestingly enough you'll find loads of them affine to electronic mail hosting issues and concerns. However, we know that amount does non equal quality and this is true here.  Some of the how-tos seem to a fault simplistic while others are completely out-of-particular date (yes, we base you, "Prospect 2010 issues").

The competition

Although both Bluehost and Planet Hippo Regius declare oneself fine budget-friendly solutions aimed at beginners, Bluehost send away add you with everything Planet Hippo can and much more than. Besides shared, reseller, and VPS solutions, Bluehost also offers managed WordPress and votive server hosting as well as a wide set out of hosting-related services. In add-on to this, its entry-level package is less suffocated with restrictions and you'll even get a free realm if you support for a full class.

Practically like the hosts above, HostGator is a budget-friendly choice geared towards beginners and webmasters alike. Its grasp of products is similar to what Bluehost has on fling, although its entering-level plan is slightly supreme. It puts no limits on bandwidth nor disk space, gives one free domain, free site transfer, free SSL certificate, discharged drag-and-free fall site builder, and even some sweet free ads recognition. Nonetheless, since both HostGator and Bluehost are US-based, if you want a host from European Community (or from the UK particularly), Planet Hippo might make up a smarter choice.

Certa Hosting and Planet Hippo share both homeland and hometown, but what other? Besides Certa Hosting offering bare bimetal servers as well, their ware range is pretty similar. However, whereas Planet Hippo's plans are more on the cheap side, Certa Hosting provides more powerful performance and superior customer support.

tsoHost is another impressive UK-based disjunctive to Planet Hippo and one that can offer its users with votive servers as advantageously. Active at £3.99, tsoHost's introduction-level plan is more dearly-won than the one you would puzzle out with Planet Hippo. Nevertheless, tsoHost provides slightly greater esteem-for-money away adding one free domain, 100GB of storage space (SSD), upfield to 100 mailboxes, "fuss-free" same-get through installs, and every day backups into the deal.

Final verdict

To resolve our question about Planet Hippo, is there anything also cheap prices for you to stand by? Symptomless, information technology's complex. If this is going to be your first website ever, professional or physical, the entry-flat solution has more than limits than roughly of the ones you can get for release (yes, we are thinking or so Infinity Free). That beingness aforesaid, if you require advanced types of hosting, give them a seek. Every of Planet Hippo's solutions let in a money-back warranty, so if you have a change of heart you won't lose anything just your time.

For those who are unwilling to gamble operating theater simply lack a US-based host, both HostGator and Bluehost are amazing alternatives.

  • Foremost overall web hosting services
  • Best WordPress hosting providers
  • Best cloud hosting providers
  • Scoop Linux web hosting services
  • Best e-commerce hosting
  • Best holy server hosting
  • World-class small business web hosting
  • Best Windows hosting services
  • Best managed web hosting
  • Go-to-meeting green web hosting
  • Best business vane hosting
  • Best colocation hosting
  • Best email hosting providers
  • Best VPS hosting providers
  • Best web hosting resellers

Mike began his vocation as a lead software developer in the engineering reality, where his creations were old by big-name companies from Rolls Royce to British people Nuclear Fuels and British Aerospace. Atomic number 2 now covers VPNs, antivirus and all things security for TechRadar, although he still has a secret love of unconventional susceptible-source and freeware apps which encounte brand new shipway to solve common problems.

Planet Hippo review

Source: https://www.techradar.com/reviews/planethippo