Pickaweb.co.uk, as you may guess from the website address, is a London, England, based web hosting company. The business was set up in 2000 and is still owned by the original founders. Tony Messer was one of the original founders and is the current Managing Director in the UK.
The founders incorporated the business on December 7, 2010 and it's legally a private limited corporation with share capital. This company is one of the oldest web hosting services in the UK and is well recognized within the UK, but has to yet make a splash on the international scene.
The company hosts thousands of websites in the UK, principally dealing with small and medium-sized enterprises operating in England. It has also hosts many personal blogging websites.
There are a variety of service plans and web hosting products available on their website and they can handle individual bloggers to large corporate accounts.
The company offers various kinds of web hosting services and products, including domain registration, multiple tiers of shared hosting, dedicated server hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting and the more advanced cloud virtual servers. The four basic hosting plans are: Budget, Starter Hosing, Pro Hosting and Business Hosting. It also operates two reseller hosting plans, Reseller Entry and Reseller Plus, for clients who want to start their own web hosting business.
The VPS hosting section givers consumers three intuitively named options: Fast VPS 1, Fast VPS 2 and Fast VPS 3. VPS hosted clients may select SSD disks or SAS, with a Linux or Windows operating system and either Plesk or cPanel control panel. The SSD VPS option also comes in three categories (1, 2 or 3).
The three plan offering scheme remains constant when it comes to dedicated server hosting with plans Dedicated 1, Dedicated 2 and Dedicated 3 on tap for selection. Customers may pick one of three different levels and have the option to pick a Linux (Free BSD, Red Hat, Fedora, Debian or Centos) or Windows (2003 or 2008) operating systems.
A great feature of Pickaweb is that dedicated server and VPS plan clients have the possibility of choosing a full server management service.
Overall, this company's pricing is slightly pricier compared to US-based web hosting services, but is in line with prices in Europe and especially in the UK. US customers should also watch out for value-added tax (sales tax) which they probably aren't used to paying for hosting services in America, but this tax is legally enforced in the UK. Just ensure you are comparing after-tax pricing form Pickaweb with other US pricing.
The three tiered service level system allows clients to pick the ideal choice for them, giving them full value for their money which is why we rank the Pickaweb's price value as moderate to high, especially for UK based clients who would benefit from having data centers close to their clients.
Pickaweb's data center is located in the heart of the world's financial center, London. The site was purposely built for hosting a data center and has redundant levels for power and ultra-high tech in terms of security.
Power redundancy is protected completely against any system collapse, including HVAC and fire suppression technology. Network connectivity is also closely monitored to ensure round the clock access. They also have armed security on-site.
As part of Pickaweb's commitment to the environment and the planet's future, the company has established a Green initiative. The initiative encouraged the company to its state of the art facility to run on 100% sustainable energy.
The company uses the latest in high-end servers (Dell) with industry recognized Intel Xeon E3-1220 processors to ensure high reliability of its systems.
Pickaweb guarantees 99.9% uptime, limited by the typical restrictions.
The state of the art facility built purposefully to host a data center allows us to rate this company's reliability and performance as industry leading benchmarks.
Besides the 99.9% network uptime which we have already mentioned, Pickaweb's services feature a number of other characteristics, including the all-important 30-day money back guarantee and customer service that is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days a year, so no matter if you get in a jam on a usual Thursday afternoon in February or on Christmas Eve, you should be able to eventually speak to an agent.
The service also offers instant set up with control panel options of Plesk or cPanel. You may use Linux or Windows operating systems as per your preference. Other features include auto responders, catch all email, email forwarding, mailing lists, spam protection, SMTP, POP3 and IMAP account options, MySQL databases, free domain name and website builder, Perl, htaccess, Ion Cube, flash and shockwave support, Zend guard loaders, PHP admin and many more services.
E-commerce elements available with their service include Zen cart, open cart, Prestashop, Magento and OSCommerce.
The company offers cPanel which is the trendsetting control panel in the industry so it already starts with a high grade. The fact that it offers a second control panel option with Plesk is an impressive choice not too many other web hosting services can match. The wide variety of services available definitely ranks this website as a great tool to manage and develop your site.
Pickaweb offers a whole gamut of customer support services, showing the company values this part of their business highly. Clients can reach 24/7 support via a telephone number, online chat or by email and response times are reasonable. You definitely won't have to wait too long before speaking to a live person.
You can also access a web hosting tutorial on their website, along with hundreds of useful articles on dozens of web hosting related topics. You can also download user manuals for cPanel and Plesk directly from their website.
The varied contact points and response time for customer service support is at an acceptable level.
Pickaweb has been one of the pioneering web hosting services in the UK, setting up shop quite early in the industry. It has almost 15 years of experience and it shows in the products and services they offer.
Their state of the art data center located in London is highly impressive and screams reliability and along with their Green plan, this company seems poised for continued success in the 21st century.
The company has maintained an excellent customer service reputation and high quality standards which has allowed it to flourish in this cut-throat industry where start-ups are continuously trying to cut in to your margins.
That Pickaweb offers industry recognized cPanel and a second control panel option, Plesk, left us floored. Their 24/7 live support via email, telephone or chat is outstanding as well.
Overall, Pickaweb is an excellent choice for your web hosting needs, whether you are a one-man operation or a representative for a large company.