Established in 2002, Clook is a privately-owned hosting company with servers and a brick-and-mortar office located in the United Kingdom. Their main focus is making sure that small and medium business owners as well as private customers get a reliable hosting service and the maximum uptime possible. Clook is heavily invested in providing the best hardware for over 82,000 clients, so they use blade and rackmount servers equipped with RAID1 or RAID10 storage drives.
Features and Ease of Use
Clook provides what’s commonly known as a shared hosting service. The amount of resources they offer in these packages gives the feeling that they tailored their products based on the needs of bloggers, e-commerce business owners, and other small to medium businesses. For example, their most basic package, targeted towards novice bloggers and startups, affords its user 200MB of storage, 5GB bandwidth, one connected website, and unlimited email accounts.
Servers run on Linux OS, an industry-standard and the most-used platform. These servers are equipped with an easy software installer that includes over 400 third-party apps, free of charge. There’s also a server status webpage that allows the live monitoring of individual servers, including their uptime and performance.
On that note, Clook data centers use blade and rackmount servers that operate on dual hex core processors and dual eight core processors with 16GB RAM on each blade and 192GB on rackmount server machines.
Clook’s service includes a versatile offering of shared hosting plans, dedicated servers, reseller hosting, cloud servers, and a specially-optimized Magento hosting service, crafted especially for Magento-based e-commerce websites. The Magento offer includes four packages, allowing over 200,000 monthly visits with the highest grade package. I was happy to see that they included a cPanel installation, which is one of the most popular with the general community.
Pricing and Support
As a hosting provider, Clook provides a fine balance between affordability and performance.
With their shared hosting, Clook offers four payment plans, each with their own set of performance features relative to their price grade. Their lowest-tier offer includes 200MB of disk space and 5GB bandwidth, which is pretty slim unless you’re a blogger with no need to store loads of multimedia content. However, the best offer could serve a small e-commerce website well, thanks to 4GB of disk space and 80GB bandwidth.
Each of these plans can be boosted with extra resources for a monthly fee. This is good in case you suddenly experience higher traffic than usual and need to keep your website performance at a satisfying level. Also, all hosting plans include a 30-day money back guarantee.
Clook offers customized dedicated server packages, but they do require an additional fee for setting up these dedicated servers. On the other hand, if you need scalability beyond their shared hosting packages but don’t need a dedicated server just yet, their cloud hosting package allows you to design your own virtual data center and pay based on the resources you choose to use.
Customer support is great. There’s a 24/7 telephone and ticket support service available to deal with any issues you might have. It usually takes them less than 2 minutes to answer a ticket, and in my experience, phone support waiting time is usually around 60 seconds.
