A little over two weeks ago I went dot-com, moving my website to www.riklewis.com.  This was in part due to the fact that I really wanted to move away from 123-Reg hosting, as I’d been having so many problems with them, especially with their uptime and support.

I shopped around, heard good things about Siteground, especially for their managed WordPress hosting.  But at the end of the day I know how to manage my own WordPress sites, this is a service I offer to my own customers.  And I host a lot more than just WordPress sites.  And one of the reasons I’d gone with 123-Reg in the first place was because they were British, and ideally I wanted to shop local again.

In my research, I came across Krystal, and I liked what I saw.  Their cloud hosting options had a few different levels, and whilst 123-Reg caps the number of websites you can host on one plan, at the “Ruby” plan level, Krystal don’t cap it – this was a big plus for me.  Unlimited disk space and databases as well – 123 Reg caps the number of databases meaning I’ve had to share databases for WordPress in the past – this isn’t the end of the world but not ideal from a security standpoint.  Throw in unlimited subdomains, free certificates from Let’s Encrypt, and Litespeed and I was sold.

The purchase process was really easy – credit/debit card or Paypal.  I immediately needed help understanding how the unlimited websites thing worked, and they were very responsive and helpful.  They helped me migrate my sites, and although they couldn’t do all of them (they don’t merged hosting accounts or deal with complexities like changing from “rik.onl” to “riklewis.com”) but they helped me out with a number of them for no extra cost.

The migration itself was easy enough, a total of 6 websites and 5 WordPress instances, all went smoothly.  Helped along by Cloudflare, where all the DNS changes went through and there was no downtime at all.

Obviously it’s still early days, but so far I am very happy with the speed and reliability of the hosting, and can’t speak highly enough of their support staff.  I would honestly recommend them.

If you are interested in using Krystal then please feel free to use my unique referrer code: RIK.  This will get you £5 off your order.