Buying Guide
What genuinely settles Hosting for Side Projects
Written for builders with three ideas already deployed and two more still sitting in a notes app — the checks worth running, the trap worth avoiding, and the recommendation we would give a friend.
The short answer
The verdict up front, the reasoning after: one Turbo plan carrying the whole run of experiments: a flat monthly cost, a new project live in minutes, and the breakout one moved onto its own resources the month it earns them.
The working sits below: the checks, the reasoning and the trap — written for builders with three ideas already deployed and two more still sitting in a notes app, without the affiliate league-table theatre this topic usually attracts.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 18 August 2026
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This page is written for builders with three ideas already deployed and two more still sitting in a notes app. If that is you, the decision does have a right answer — it simply rarely matches what commission-funded ranking tables are paid to print.
Begin from one fact about this market and the rest falls in behind it: side projects follow a power law without exception. Nearly all of them lie dormant while one collects the traffic, so the rational structure is a flat-rate home for the crowd and dedicated resources bought only for the outlier.
The checks that settle it
Set the feature-grid filler aside and only a few checks genuinely move this decision:
Capacity for several sites, so each experiment gets an address of its own without another subscription.
A low cost while idle, since a project asleep all week should not bill like one under load.
Setup quick enough to outrun your own enthusiasm, which is the genuinely scarce resource here.
An obvious next step waiting for whichever project unexpectedly starts working.
The trap most first buyers walk into
Per-project platform charges turning five small experiments into a monthly total the size of a phone contract.
The pattern keeps working because the bill arrives late — at renewal, mid-migration, or exactly when growth takes off. The cure is plain arithmetic: total the cost over two or three years with every add-on you would genuinely need.
The verdict, unhedged
One Turbo plan carrying the whole run of experiments: a flat monthly cost, a new project live in minutes, and the breakout one moved onto its own resources the month it earns them.
In our range that means the Turbo 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.
A copy is taken daily on every plan, and putting a file or a database back is one click in the panel rather than a support ticket.
Check first, trust after
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.
Then let real use decide. Two working weeks inside the money-back window beats every review roundup ever written, and trying us costs the minute it takes to file a migration request.
No paid placements, no referral fees
This is a host writing about hosting, and we would rather say so plainly. No manufactured neutrality, no leaderboard paid for by referral cheques. Honesty traded for trust — and it reads better anyway.
Support means a person at any hour, and the remit covers the awkward practical questions other hosts hand straight back.
- 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
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.
The essentials inside, not added on
SSL, the migration, backups and mail come with every plan rather than appearing as checkout extras.
One rate, published in the open
What you order at is what you renew at — the only comparison that counts is one we win by default.
The verdict, turned into an order
The Turbo plan is this page's conclusion in product form — one rate, essentials inside, upgradeable in place.
Written out of real conversations
Every check here traces back to real exchanges with builders with three ideas already deployed and two more still sitting in a notes app, not to a features spreadsheet.
NVMe and LiteSpeed as standard
The hardware other hosts keep behind premium tiers is simply the baseline build here.
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
Sign up, have a real site moved in free, and work it hard for two weeks — the day-to-day feel is the actual product, and the window makes the test free.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- SSH, Git and Composer on the developer plans
- Mailboxes that answer at the name you hold
- 99.9% uptime as the target, watched around the clock
- Spam and virus screening on every mailbox by default
- A daily copy, with restores you run yourself from the panel
- Staging copies for trying a change before it goes live
- Softaculous included for one-click application installs
- Webmail in the browser plus IMAP, POP and SMTP for any client
- WordPress and 400+ further applications installed in one click
- NVMe SSD storage on every tier, not only the dear ones
Frequently Asked
The questions that come up most
How do I host five small projects for the least money?
One multi-site plan, giving each project a subdomain or a parked domain of its own and letting the quiet majority share the allocation. Five separate platform subscriptions would cost several times as much and give you noticeably less control over any of them.
One project suddenly grows — what then?
Lift that one out onto a larger plan or a VPS and leave the rest exactly where they are. Between our plans that is an internal transfer rather than a rebuild, so your best week goes on shipping instead of replatforming.
Does hosting include mail?
Yes — every hosting plan includes mailboxes at your own name, with webmail, IMAP, POP and SMTP plus spam filtering on from the start. There is standalone email hosting too, for a name whose website lives somewhere else.
Can I choose the PHP version myself?
Yes — PHP is set per site from the control panel, so a legacy application and a current one can run side by side in one account. Extensions and per-site tuning are on the same screen, and none of it goes near a support ticket.
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