Did you know that there are over 1 billion websites on the internet, all hosted on servers that produce almost as much pollution as the airline industry?
If there was ever a perfect moment to switch to a green hosting solution, the time is now and Eco Web Hosting is one of the few eco-friendly hosting providers around.
If you’re seeking an environmentally responsible web host, Eco Web Hosting warrants serious consideration for your website.
In this comprehensive review, our team of experts thoroughly examines the pros and cons, features, and performance of Eco Web Hosting.
Continue reading to find out if it’s time for you to embrace this green, eco-friendly host for your website.
Table Of Contents
What Is Eco Web Hosting?
Eco Web Hosting is a hosting provider which focuses on fast and eco-friendly web hosting.
Based in East Midlands, in the UK, they use high-performing hosting servers at affordable rates.
However, the real kicker is that they also offset the energy used by their servers to make your website (and all others they host) carbon-neutral, or even carbon negative! I found their hosting package to work very well as well.
What Makes It “Eco-Friendly”?
What makes eco web hosting “eco-friendly” is their core value to reduce the impact of the web hosting industry on the environment.
In addition to offering fast web hosting plans on high-performing servers, the company also uses the following practices to ease the load it has on the environment:
- Carbon Offset Planting: For every hosting package purchased, new trees are planted.
- Funding Gold Standard Environmental Projects: Tree planting and other Gold Standard projects are regularly funded by the team at Eco Web Hosting each year.
- Eco-Friendly Technology: There’s a lot to be said about energy-efficient servers when it comes to hosting and Eco Web Hosting actively reduces the amount of electricity their servers take to run.
- Company-Wide Commitment to Green Business Practices: The team makes active decisions to be as eco-friendly as possible. They work remotely, choose green energy suppliers and reduce their own impact on the planet too.
Eco Web Hosting Plans
Other than being eco-friendly, Eco Web Hosting is known for hosting over 35,000 websites and delivering great service along with high-performance servers.
In their own words…
“Our team wanted to create a company that values quality products and exceptional customer service over acquisitions and sales figures.”
So we put them to the test to see if their hosting lives up to their claims of quality. Time to strap in as we dive deep.
Eco Web Hosting offers shared plans with decent storage and bandwidth.
Not only can you have between one and four trees planted per month, you can also enjoy up to 100GB of monthly storage per website for less than £12/month.
Shared Hosting Plans | Promotional Pricing | Renewal Pricing | Disk Space |
Lowest Tier (Essential) | £3.33/month + free domain (paid annually) | £3.49/month | 1 website, 10GB, 25 mailboxes and 50 GB bandwidth. |
Middle Tier (Professional) | £5.42/month + free domain (paid annually) | £5.99/month | 3 websites, 50GB per site, 50 mailboxes, unlimited bandwidth & global CDN. |
Highest Tier (Ultimate) | £10.83/month + free domain (paid annually) | £11.99/month | Unlimited websites, 100GB per site, 100 mailboxes, unlimited bandwidth & global CDN. |
While many other low-cost web hosts offer unlimited storage and bandwidth, Eco Web Hosting is still on the affordable end of the price spectrum, especially when considering all their servers use solid-state drive (SSD) storage.
That’s because SSD storage is not only faster but also more durable, and compact and it consumes less energy.
The amount of storage offered by Eco Web Hosting is also quite reasonable.
In addition, you’ll also enjoy these perks if you choose one of their shared plans:
- Free SSL certificates
- Easy install for 70+ website applications (including WordPress, Magento & more)
- Above average, 45-day money-back guarantee
- Fast, SSD storage on all servers
- Easy to use, fairly intuitive control panel
- In-house global CDN on higher packages for fast loading times all over the world
2. Managed WordPress Hosting
If you run a WordPress site, keeping up with maintenance, updates, and performance can take a bit of time. That’s where managed WordPress hosting plans could be the ideal solution for you.
Eco Web Hosting offers four tiers for their WordPress hosting and with a number of benefits to boot!
Managed WordPress Plans | Promotional Pricing | Renewal Pricing | Disk Space |
Basic Plan (Plant 1 tree/mo) |
£4.99/month + free domain (paid annually) | £5.99/month | 1 website, 25GB storage & unlimited bandwidth. |
Business Plan (Plant 2 trees/mo) |
£8.32/month + free domain (paid annually) | £9.99/month | 3 websites, 75GB per site, & unlimited bandwidth. |
Professional Plan (Plant 4 trees/mo) |
£16.65/month + free domain (paid annually) | £19.99/month | 10 websites, 250GB per site, & unlimited bandwidth. |
Ultimate Plan (Plant 10 trees/mo) |
£33.32/month + free domain (paid annually) | £39.99/month | Unlimited websites, storage, mailboxes and bandwidth. |
Compared with the unmanaged shared hosting prices, we were pleasantly surprised with the value for money Eco Web Hosting’s plans offer.
For instance, all plans automatically include access to their in-house Global CDN.
You can also opt-in for unlimited everything with the highest tier, which is not available on their shared plans at all.
Other benefits of the managed WordPress hosting plans include:
- Free domain when you pay annually
- Free hosting migration (and usually under 24 hours)
- Automatic daily backups
- Automatic WordPress updates
- Automatic security and protection against hackers
- Staging platform available
- Word-Press-specific optimizations and performance boosts
It’s clear as day that Eco Web Hosting has added a tone of value to their managed WordPress hosting plans.
3. Vps Hosting
If you’re after servers that you can configure and which don’t restrict your bandwidth usage or have sneaky fair use policies, check out Eco Web Hosting’s VPS plans.
VPS hosting stands for virtual private server hosting.
You essentially rent out a space on a server that’s partitioned so only you can access that space.
While you’re still sharing virtual private servers with other people, there is less of a security risk as you share it with fewer people and your website is more protected due to the virtual partition.
Eco Web Hosting offers three VPS plans.
VPS Hosting Plans | Pricing | Features |
Essential Plan (Plant 1 tree/mo) |
£7.99/month | 1 core CPU, 40GB NVMe storage & 2GB RAM. |
Professional Plan (Plant 2 trees/mo) |
£12.99/month | 2 core CPUs, 80GB NVMe storage & 4GB RAM. |
Business Plan (Plant 4 trees/mo) |
£23.99/month | 4 core CPUs, 160GB NVMe storage & 8GB RAM. |
While Eco Web Hosting gives you root access to your server, their VPS plans are fairly under-resourced compared with other web hosts.
However, if you are looking for a decent next step from shared hosting, or a server which gives you more control over your configuration there are some affordable plans to get started with.
On the flip side of that coin, if you’re after more VPS resources, Eco Web Hosting may not be the best fit for you.
Either way, if you decide to try out their VPS plans, here are some perks you’ll get to enjoy:
- Full root access to your server
- No “fair use” restrictions
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Eco-friendly servers through and through
- Control Panel & WHM available
4. Reseller Hosting
If you run an agency or would like to sell hosting services to your clients, the reseller hosting plan is worth checking out.
Unlike many other web hosting providers, Eco Web Hosting only offers one simple reseller plan.
For £23.99 per month, you get:
- Unlimited websites
- Unlimited mailboxes
- Unlimited MySQL
- Unlimited storage
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited Let’s Encrypt SSL
- Global CDN
- White-label control panel (so you can put your own branding on your hosting services)
Eco Domains
Unlike other hosting companies, Eco Web Hosting has a rather limited selection of domain available.
Most of the available domain name extensions are specific to the UK.
Not only that but the prices are above average when compared to the cheapest domain name providers.
However, if you prefer to manage your domain names and hosting in the same place, Eco Web Hosting offers that solution!
Features
1. Ease of Use
At first glance, Eco Web Hosting’s control panel can seem different compared with most other hosting dashboards you might be used to.
Upon creating your account, you will also need to set up the hosting packages you purchased.
If you’re a beginner, you may need to reach out to the support team to help you with this process as it won’t show up in your dashboard automatically.
But once you get the feel of things and spend a few minutes navigating your way around, it becomes fairly intuitive.
In fact, even though the dashboard doesn’t use a control panel as most traditional hosting companies do, it uses Stack CP which is much more user-friendly and streamlined.
Performing simple tasks, like installing WordPress, is just as easy in Stack CP as they are in the control panel.
Overall, once you set up your hosting packages, the rest of the experience is fairly straightforward and intuitive.
2. Disk Space
Even though we like that Eco Web Hosting uses SSD servers on all their plans, they also limit the amount of disk space each of your websites can use.
This is not typical of most plans you are usually offered a total amount of space that you can allocate between your websites and applications however you see fit.
For some users who may have a range of different websites of different sizes, this type of hosting solution may not really be the best fit.
It’s also worth noting that if you are seeking ample storage and disk space, Eco Web Hosting tends to offer less than most other affordable hosting providers do.
For instance, GreenGeeks, GoDaddy, and Hostinger all offer 50GB to unlimited disk space on their entry-level shared hosting plans (which also cost less than Eco Web Hosting’s plans do).
3. Backups
If you own a WordPress website and you’re interested in the managed hosting option, you’ll receive free, daily automated backups.
You’ll also benefit from the multiple redundancies that are in place with the managed servers.
However, the shared hosting plan does not mention including free automated backups.
While multiple redundancies with offsite backups will still be in place, there also isn’t any guarantee that you can access those backups for free either.
4. Security
When it comes to security, Eco Web Hosting includes a decent range of features including:
Eco Web Hosting | |
Free SSL Certificate | Yes |
Spam Protection | Yes |
Free Automatic Backups | Only on Managed Plans |
Web Application Firewall | Yes |
DDoS Protection | Yes |
24/7 Server Monitoring | Yes |
DKIM Email | Yes |
Support
Eco Web Hosting prides itself on providing an exceptional customer support team and we’ve gotta hand it to them!
All our tests and research seem to suggest they’re not lying about that.
For instance, with an average rating of 4.9 on Trustpilot and over 97% of people rating their service as “Good” or “Excellent” it’s pretty clear that customers love their support.
As with any company, there are, of course, a small handful of people with complaints.
In our research, we didn’t come across overarching themes or any recent complaints (the latest was over a year old).
Most of the complaints were specific to the users’ accounts and website setup as opposed to general complaints about the service.
Compared with the hundreds of glowing reviews about Eco Web Hosting, this is a good sign!
Pros & Cons
- Eco-friendly (monthly tree planting to offset your website’s carbon footprint)
- SSD servers on all plans
- Generous reseller hosting packages
- Exceptional customer service
- Decent performance
- Affordable plans
- In-house global CDN included on most plans
- 45-day money-back guarantee
- Free migrations are available on some plans
- Limited storage and bandwidth per website
- Cannot allocate hosting resources however you like
- Unlimited features only available on the most expensive managed hosting plan
- No automatic backups on shared hosting plans
Is Eco Web Hosting Worth It?
Eco Web Hosting plan offers a great service for anyone who is seeking an environmentally friendly hosting plan.
It’s also well suited to beginners with the support team receiving fantastic reviews from hundreds of satisfied customers.
However, in general, we found Eco Web Hosting provider’s plans to be lacking in the number of inclusions and features most other hosting providers offer even on their most basic plans.
Given there are also some restrictions around how much storage space you can allocate to your websites, you might find a more flexible hosting solution to be better suited to your needs.
Check out Eco Web Hosting for some excellent green hosting packages in the UK.
Decided they’re not a good fit? No problem, check out SiteGround instead!
SiteGround is one of our preferred hosting providers which offers more resources and is also taking action to make their services more eco-friendly.
Our #1 Recommendation: Siteground
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