Buying Guide
Getting Hosting for Portfolio Sites right
Written for designers, photographers and consultants whose site does the introductions before anybody meets them — the checks worth running, the trap worth avoiding, and the recommendation we would give a friend.
The short answer
If one line is all you read, make it this: a compact hosting plan running WordPress under a portfolio theme, or the Website Builder where arranging blocks suits you better, both of which leave the files and the domain in your own hands.
The working sits below: the checks, the reasoning and the trap — written for designers, photographers and consultants whose site does the introductions before anybody meets them, without the affiliate league-table theatre this topic usually attracts.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 18 August 2026
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Setup fees
Most writing on this subject is a league table funded by referral fees. We do it differently: name the buyer (designers, photographers and consultants whose site does the introductions before anybody meets them), name the checks, name the trap, and make a recommendation we will defend in the open.
Begin from one fact about this market and the rest falls in behind it: portfolios run on tiny traffic where every visit counts. A few people a week, any one of whom might be the next commission, and every one of whom quietly reads a slow page as evidence of how you work.
What to verify before money moves
Set the feature-grid filler aside and only a few checks genuinely move this decision:
Photographs that arrive instantly, meaning NVMe with caching rather than a generous number in the storage column.
A domain inside the plan, since yourname.com is the whole reason for building the thing.
Room for full-quality work, so no piece has to be farmed out to somebody else's embedded player.
Upkeep light enough that the site asks for attention twice a year instead of twice a month.
Read this before you compare a single price
Portfolio-platform subscriptions charging four times what hosting does, then holding the domain hostage the week you decide to leave.
Once it has been named you see it everywhere in this market — and steering around it does more for you than optimising any other figure on the page.
The verdict, unhedged
A compact hosting plan running WordPress under a portfolio theme, or the Website Builder where arranging blocks suits you better, both of which leave the files and the domain in your own hands.
In our range that means the Sprint plan — SSL, the move and mail already inside, renewal charged at the order rate, and an upgrade path so this decision never has to be made twice.
Order an annual plan and the first year of the name's registration is on us.
Ten minutes of checking, well spent
Put us through the same checks: write to support before paying and see who answers, compare the renewal rate with the order rate, read the refund terms in full, and look the company up — ours is UK Health Care Support Ltd, registered in England and Wales, on the public record.
The refund window covers the rest — bring a live site over (the free migration makes that easy), run it for two real weeks, and let ordinary use answer what no sales page can.
Why we can afford to answer straight
Most 'best hosting' writing is ranking for hire. Our motive is simpler and stated plainly: we recommend the setup we would sell you either way — which leaves the rest of the page free to be useful.
Hosted somewhere else already? We move the whole site at no charge, usually within 24 hours, and it goes on answering visitors throughout.
- Checks you can run again yourself
- Renewal rates published, not footnoted
- A free migration makes the trial easy
- Refund terms with no small print
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
The verdict, turned into an order
The Sprint plan is this page's conclusion in product form — one rate, essentials inside, upgradeable in place.
NVMe and LiteSpeed as standard
The hardware other hosts keep behind premium tiers is simply the baseline build here.
A company you can look up
UK Health Care Support Ltd, registered in England and Wales — a host whose filing you can read before committing to anything.
The essentials inside, not added on
SSL, the migration, backups and mail come with every plan rather than appearing as checkout extras.
Support you can test before paying
Put a hard question to us before you pay — how a host behaves pre-sale is the best it will ever treat you.
A refund without an argument
If we are not the fit, leaving is one request rather than a negotiation — which is why we invite the test.
Prices Side by Side
Our figures beside the big names
What the market typically charges to join and to renew, set beside ours, including the renewal figure most comparison charts leave out.
| Feature | Hosting & DomainsMost popular | Typical household-name host | Typical bargain host | Typical loss-leader deal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price / mo* | $2.42/mo | $4–$6 | $2–$4 | $1–$3 |
| Renewal price / mo | $2.42/mo | $10–$15 | $8–$12 | $4–$6 |
| Cheapest plan renews at its sign-up price | ||||
| SSL as standard | ||||
| Migration done for you | ||||
| NVMe drives on the cheapest tier | ||||
| Daily backups from the first tier | ||||
| Real humans on support, 24/7 |
*The figure in our column is the cheapest annual plan we sell, read live from the catalogue behind our pricing page, so it cannot drift out of date. The three columns beside it give the ranges hosts in each bracket tend to advertise: opening offers that usually want one to four years up front, then rise when the term ends. We stopped naming competitors and printing their prices, because a number we cannot check on the day you read it does not belong here. Set us against whichever host you are genuinely considering, and read the renewal row hardest of all.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Write the job down in one sentence
One honest sentence about the workload beats an afternoon lost in feature grids — write it before you look at a single host.
- 2
Compare on what year two costs
Introductory rates are the oldest device in this market; rank hosts by the second year instead and the order rearranges itself at once.
- 3
Run a real trial inside the refund window
Putting your own site on the platform answers what no review can, and free migration plus the refund terms take the risk out of trying.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- PHP versions set per site from the control panel
- WordPress and 400+ further applications installed in one click
- WordPress Toolkit, with the updates seen to for you
- Webmail in the browser plus IMAP, POP and SMTP for any client
- Spam and virus screening on every mailbox by default
- No set-up charge at any point, and no joining fee
- DDoS filtering absorbed at the network edge
- The name's first year included when you order annually
- SSH, Git and Composer on the developer plans
- Money back within 30 days on hosting plans, 7 on reseller
Frequently Asked
The questions that come up most
What is wrong with the portfolio platforms?
They charge a monthly fee for ever to do what hosting does for a fraction, and leaving means building the site again from nothing. A WordPress portfolio exports wherever you send it, and the domain authority you build belongs to you rather than to the platform.
Does a small plan have room for everything I have made?
Optimised for the web, thousands of images fit, and a 10 GB plan comfortably carries a career's selected work. The one reason to size up is delivering full-resolution originals to clients, which the 200 GB tier absorbs without strain.
Where does the hardware physically sit?
The platform runs from a London datacentre with redundant power, cooling and several upstream carriers, with server-level caching in front that keeps cached pages quick for visitors anywhere. For most sites how the platform is built — NVMe disks, LiteSpeed, restrained account density per machine — counts for far more than where it sits.
Which control panel do accounts use?
cPanel, the panel the industry standardised on long ago. Every tutorial you find online will match what is on your screen, your backups restore onto any other cPanel host, and the skills stay useful for life. Plesk and DirectAdmin are available on particular plans if you prefer either.
Keep reading
CMS Hosting for Content Teams
A buying brief without spin, written for editorial teams choosing a publishing platform and its hosting as a single decision.
Joomla vs WordPress
A buying brief without spin, written for builders weighing a structured content platform against the one every editor already knows.
Hosting for Photographers
The trade guide beneath this pick — galleries, proofing and client delivery.
Web Hosting
cPanel hosting on NVMe drives — SSL, the migration and year one of the name all included.
Domain Names
Find, register and transfer names — year one free with annual hosting.
Changing hosts? Run through our checklist first.
A plain order of work for a move nobody visiting will notice: which files go over first, how to carry the mail across without losing a message, when exactly to repoint DNS, and the two mistakes behind nearly every outage we are asked to rescue.
Your site has earned better hosting.
Every plan carries the essentials other hosts bill as extras — and support that answers.
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