Buying Guide
Sizing up Hosting With Daily Backups
A direct answer for anybody who would be devastated to lose their site, which eventually means everybody: how to weigh the field, what to rule out early, and the setup we would take ourselves.
The short answer
The verdict up front, the reasoning after: a plan where the daily copy runs unattended and restoring is one click, moving up to the Nitro tier's shorter interval once a shop or a busy site warrants it.
The rest of the page shows the working behind that call: which checks to run, the mistake to avoid, and how to verify every claim yourself before money moves.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 18 August 2026
NVMe
Storage, every plan
Free
First-year domain
99.9%
Uptime, monitored
Flat
Renewal pricing
Most writing on this subject is a league table funded by referral fees. We do it differently: name the buyer (anybody who would be devastated to lose their site, which eventually means everybody), name the checks, name the trap, and make a recommendation we will defend in the open.
The great bulk of data loss is self-inflicted: a bungled update, a badly written plugin, a directory deleted in haste. Which is why how quickly you can put things back matters far more than whether a copy exists somewhere. Hold that in mind and the noise in this market separates from the signal quickly.
How to weigh the candidates
Set the feature-grid filler aside and only a few checks genuinely move this decision:
Copies taken on a schedule whether or not you remember them, since the automation is the entire product.
Retention with depth in it: last night's copy plus enough history to reach behind a problem that developed slowly.
Restores you start yourself at 3am rather than queueing behind other customers' tickets.
The copies kept away from the machine they exist to rescue, so a single hardware failure cannot claim both.
The trap most first buyers walk into
'backups included' that turns out to mean one copy overwritten nightly on the same disk, restorable only by staff during office hours.
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.
What we would recommend, working shown
A plan where the daily copy runs unattended and restoring is one click, moving up to the Nitro tier's shorter interval once a shop or a busy site warrants it.
In concrete terms that is our Turbo option: one flat rate carrying the essentials (SSL, migration, copies, mail) this market prefers to bill separately, with in-place upgrades ready when the work picks up.
A free SSL certificate comes with every plan and reissues itself before the old one lapses — the padlock is never yours to diarise.
Take no claim on trust, ours included
A host worth your money survives scrutiny: check the renewal figure is published up front rather than tucked into a footnote, put a real question to support at an inconvenient hour and judge the reply, read the refund policy for carve-outs, and look up the company registration — a legitimate business leaves a paper trail.
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.
Our interest, declared up front
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.
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
Written out of real conversations
Every check here traces back to real exchanges with anybody who would be devastated to lose their site, which eventually means everybody, not to a features spreadsheet.
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 verdict, turned into an order
The Turbo plan is this page's conclusion in product form — one rate, essentials inside, upgradeable in place.
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.
An upgrade path that is real
Shared, VPS and dedicated on one platform — today's choice never boxes tomorrow in.
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.
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
- Your existing site brought across by our engineers, at no charge
- A daily copy, with restores you run yourself from the panel
- LiteSpeed caching in the server itself rather than bolted on by plugin
- The name's first year included when you order annually
- WordPress Toolkit, with the updates seen to for you
- A renewal figure identical to the one you registered at
- No set-up charge at any point, and no joining fee
- WordPress and 400+ further applications installed in one click
- People on the support desk every hour of every day
- NVMe SSD storage on every tier, not only the dear ones
Frequently Asked
The questions that come up most
Should I add a backup plugin on top of this?
Where something is irreplaceable, keep two independent copies of it. Our automatic daily snapshots cover the platform layer, while an offsite plugin copy covers the scenarios that keep careful people awake. Storage is cheap and regret is not.
How long does a restore take?
Minutes. Pick the date in the panel and restore files, databases, or both at once. In nearly every real incident the slow part is realising a restore is needed, not the restore itself.
If I cancel, what becomes of my site and files?
They remain yours. Download a full copy from the panel whenever you like, before or during cancellation. Names stay registered in your name for the term you paid for and can move to any registrar once the standard 60-day window has passed.
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.
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