Heart Internet Review
Are Heart Internet right for you? Find out with our review below
Are Heart Internet right for you? Find out with our review below
Written by: Review Hosting | ⭐ Read user reviews
The scores below show the industry average along with our own users’ reviews. Go to ✅ Heart Internet
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Heart Internet were founded in 2004 by serial hosting entrepreneurs Tim Beresford and Jonathan Brealey.
The duo were the original founders of 123-reg and have since gone on to launch 20i. Heart Internet are currently owned by US hosting behemoth Godaddy.
Historically, Heart Internet’s main focus has been on the reseller hosting segment of the market, which typically means web designers, developers and dedicated web hosting resellers.
Their sponsorship of web design events between 2013 and 2018 demonstrates the importance of this audience to Heart Internet.
Heart Internet offer a wide range of hosting products, including:
Heart Internet essentially has two control panels for customers to manage their products. The first control panel is for account management and purchasing additional products.
The second control panel is called ‘eXtend’ and this is where you manage your shared web hosting package. They have the same approach for VPS and dedicated servers.
Rather than use an off the shelf solution like cPanel, Heart Internet have developed their own control panel called. The design of the control panel is pretty much the same as cPanel.
Both of these control panels are looking very dated and have had no investment for many years. This apparent lack of investment is a story that will repeat itself in this review.
Heart Internet are clearly very proud of their “Award winning web hosting”, however a quick look on their hosting awards page shows their glory days are behind them. Their award nominations and wins were mainly between 2012 – 2015, with no awards since that period.
Heart Internet’s reseller hosting is where the company has historically invested the majority of its resources. This focus on reseller hosting customers helped the brand grow to become the UK’s biggest reseller host for a number of years. Competitor innovation and under investment in the product has seen this lead slip in recent years.
Heart Internet offer a single plan called “Reseller Pro” with some confusing pricing. The can choose to pay monthly, but you will be billed annually (?!?). Or you can pay annually, and save the equivalent of 3 months.
Heart Internet originally placed on limits on the number of websites you could host. However that has recently changed, and as part of the monthly or annual price, your Reseller Pro package can have up to 250 sites. 20i still offer unlimited websites for their reseller plan. Read our 20i review.
On the positive side, Reseller Pro has an impressive list of features and if you use them all you will definitely get your money’ worth.
If you want to sell hosting hands-off and you have some technical knowledge you can use HostPay. In their own words…“HostPay is designed for selling web services and will help you sell and manage thousands of accounts and domains with minimal effort.”
Despite having a dedicated page on their website, Heart Internet don’t offer any WordPress hosting plan per se. Their normal shared hosting plans are available in three tiers, the top two offering one-click install WordPress.
This means they haven’t developed WordPress specific WordPress optimisation features like 20i and Siteground.
The prices are also a bit steep for what you’ll get compared to other web hosts’ WordPress hosting plans. See below…
As mentioned above, Heart Internet’s shared hosting plans are available in three plans. Their basic ‘Starter Pro’ plan does feel incredibly old-fashioned, with no MySQL database included (which means you can’t install WordPress) and a £10 set-up fee!
There is also a huge jump up in price from the bottom to mid-tier plan. I would expect to be able to host more than one website for £10.99 per month – and that price excludes VAT.
All the prices above exclude VAT.
The Home Pro and Business Pro plans come with 70+ one-click install web apps such as:
Although that number sounds very impressive, you are unlikely to use most of them outside of the core group listed above. Beyond these one-click install apps, there are very few additional features on offer.
To emphasise the lack on investment in Heart Internet; shared web hosting customers can download a copy of Serif’s WebPlus X7 software for free. This software came out in 2014.
Heart Internet domain names prices are very competitive and their domain search is among the fastest out there. They also offer the full range of domain name extensions.
Reseller Hosting Pro customers also get discounts on domain names, the amount varies between extensions, but they are generous.
In addition to registering new domain names, Heart Internet also offer a service to buy domain names that have already been registered and are being resold by the owner.
If there is a domain name you want, but isn’t currently for sale their backorder service let’s you stake your claim on that domain, and if it becomes available, Heart Internet will register it for you immediately.
Finally, if you have a domain name you don’t want anymore and you think is worth a bit of cash, you can put your domain name up for sale through Heart Internet’s domain name market place.
Heart Internet’s VPS come with the choice of one of six plans, starting at £14.99 per month (excl VAT) up to £89.99 per month (excl VAT).
The prices are high for the specifications on offer, and I suspect these products have had very little investment over the years.
All the prices above exclude VAT.
If you are a Heart Internet reseller hositng customer, you get a 25% discount on their VPS.
At the time of writing you can get the same specifications as the Base plan from 20i and Krystal for £9.99 per month. Alternativley you can get a VPS from Ionos (formerly 1&1) for £10 per month with 2 vCores CPU, 2GB RAM and 80GB SSD diskspace.
All Heart Internet VPS come with 99.99% uptime guarantee, 100Mbps connection, RAID 10 mirroring, full root access, free IP address, KVM virtualisation, load balancers, unlimited bandwidth and out-of-band access.. cPanel and automatic backups are not included, and will cost you extra.
Although VPS are a great option for high powered server hosting, they are no where as easy to manage as shared hosting. With this in mind, Heart Internet also offer ‘Managed VPS’…
The idea behind managed VPS is you get a high-powered server, cheaper than if you chose to go dedicated with the added benefit of more support than if you bought a dedicated server.
Heart Internet are responsible for…
You are are responsible for…
Now, this is where Heart Internet’s VPS product range starts to get confusing.
On the website they advertise a ‘Managed hosting’ product which is a hybrid of dedicated servers and traditional VPS.
However, this product is not available to order in their control panel, but a product NOT advertised on the website is, called ‘Hybrid Servers’. Whilst not offering exactly the same specifications, it is essentially the same product.
These are the specifcations avdertised on their website…
On he positive side, Heart Internet have a very specific SLA for their managed VPS, something that can’t be said for a lot of web hosts…
“We guarantee 99.99% network availability in a given month for our Virtual Private Servers and Dedicated Servers, as measured by our internal monitoring systems and excluding scheduled maintenance.
We aim to fix any network issues within four hours, and in the unlikely event we fail to meet this promise, you can claim account credit to the value of 1 day of your monthly server fee for each 30 minutes of infrastructure downtime, up to 30 days.”
For those who want a quick answer you can use the support database, which has all the most common questions covered.
If you want need help from a person, Heart Internet are totally text based support, and do not offer any support over the phone.
For me, this makes total sense; live chat and ticket based support are easier to explain technical issues. All their support team are based in the UK.
Heart Internet also run an offsite status website here https://www.heartstatus.uk/, so you can see if they are experiencing any technical issues, and stay up to date with their progress fixing it.
Heart Internet only offer an SLA for their VPS and dedicated server ranges. Their shared web hosting products are not covered by any SLA.
Heart Internet’s SLS promises 99.99% network availability in a given month for their Virtual Private Servers and Dedicated Servers, excluding scheduled maintenance.
Their SLA states that they aim to fix any network issues within four hours, and if they fail to meet this promise, you can claim account credit to the value of 1 day of your monthly server fee for each 30 minutes of infrastructure downtime, up to 30 days.
A simple search for “Heart Internet downtime” will show Heart Internet has a well reported history of technical glitches and issues, which can have quite a dramatic impact on their customers’ websites. Some of these are down to old technology and some down to human error.