U.K. web hosting company Krystal Hosting was founded in 2002 due to its founder’s frustration with the lack of good quality hosting providers back in the day. There’s no doubt that he’s done a great job, as today Krystal hosts more than 200,000 websites for 27,000 clients including Nike, Cadbury, the Financial Times, and the NHS. Thanks to its quality service, it has become the largest independent website hosting service provider in the U.K., and its data centers run on 100% on renewable energy.
Krystal’s modern website is in English.
Features and Ease of Use
Here’s a summary of the features you can expect to get with Krystal’s cloud hosting solutions:
- 99.99% uptime guarantee
- Free backups
- Domain registration service
- Unlimited addon domains
- Free 256-bit SSL certificates
- Unlimited disk space and bandwidth
One of Krystal’s most attractive features is the WordPress-optimized LiteSpeed Cache that enables your website to perform six times faster, with SSD storage providing an extra performance boost. Krystal is so proud of its performance that it even provides a live stats web page for complete transparency about how its servers are performing.
The popular cPanel control panel makes it very easy to manage your hosting, backup and restore your data, and access your website statistics. And if you’re moving from another host, Krystal will do the cPanel migration for you, for free, at a date and time of your choosing.
You also get the customary one-click installer (Installatron) with 200+ application installation scripts, and a free website builder with everything you need to build a blog or create an online store, plus integration with SEO, AdSense, and analytics tools.
In addition to its generic cloud hosting solutions, Krystal also offers application-optimized hosting solutions for WordPress, Joomla, Magento, OpenCart, PrestaShop, and Drupal.
Pricing and Support
Krystal Hosting’s three cloud hosting packages (in order of decreasing price) are Ruby, Topaz, and Amethyst. All three include unlimited bandwidth, a free website builder, unlimited email accounts, free SSL certificates, and free backups.
The packages are not the absolute cheapest on the market, but you get what you pay for, and you can get two months free hosting plus a free domain name by signing up for annual billing. And you get a very generous 60-day money-back guarantee that should make you feel better about making this commitment.
Krystal’s 24/7 customer support can be accessed via telephone, email ticket, and live chat. When you create a ticket, you can see the average response time for that day, which gives you a good idea of when you can expect to receive a response. There was a very short waiting time when I tried the live chat, and the human support agent answered all my questions directly:
Krystal Hosting’s website provides a decent (but not outstanding) knowledge base for self-support. This is probably the only area where Krystal’s offering could be improved.
