123 Reg Web Hosting Review

If you’re looking for a dependable web host, 123 Web Hosting is the perfect choice. We’ve reviewed the best hosts available, and we found that their services are top-notch. You can trust that with 123 Web Hosting, your website will be online as soon as possible.

123 Reg Web Hosting Review

On the surface, 123 Reg is a shared hosting company. You can pay a small monthly fee to share a server with lots of other companies, and the performance is still solid. However, quite a few other services and tools are offered. These include tools related to security, backups, web design, and more.

  • Cloud Backup and Sitelock for keeping your site safe and ensuring that you can reboot your site if anything goes wrong
  • Virtual Private Servers
  • Domain names with the option to bulk order or get a free. UK domain name if you buy hosting through 123 Reg
  • Email hosting so that you can communicate with your customers and have a professional (i.e. domain-based) email address
  • Email marketing tools
  • One-click installations for things like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal
  • A website builder offering impressive templates and tools to create an e-commerce website or a standard business site
  • A wide variety of website templates for getting the ball rolling
  • An area to manage your pay-per-click ads

Packages and Plans

123-reg offers three hosting plans: Start Up, Business, and Professional. The base plan, Start Up ($4.13 per month, or $49.56 per year with a one-year commitment) is very basic, offering 1GB of storage, unlimited montly data transfers, 100 email mailboxes at 1GB each, some email security, and not much else. If you already have an existing HTML site (one that’s not too big) you can upload via FTP, the basic plan is sufficient. The plan supports Ruby, PHP, ASP.NET and Perl, but that’s about it. You can’t install databases, so any application that requires a SQL database is out—popular forum software phpBB and any type of content management software are both no-go. There is also no command line access.

Business (starting at $6.89 per month) is comparable to what you would see with competitors such as the Editors’ Choice winners Arvixe and Dreamhost($2.49 Per Month for Shared Starter Plan at DreamHost)(Opens in a new window), with 50GB storage, 500 email mailboxes at 1GB each, database support, website statistics, almost 70 third-party applications you can install, a stock image library, and access to website templates. 123-reg offers a choice of Linux or Windows hosting, which is unusual and welcome. So if you need Windows hosting, 123-reg is an option to consider, if you don’t want to deal with Microsoft’s Azure cloud environment.

The Professional plan (starting at $12.49 per month) offers unlimited email, mailboxes, and databases. Since the company is based in the U.K., 123-reg offers a co.uk domain for free in the Start Up Plan, three for Business, and five in Professional. Since we were registering a .com domain, we also incurred an additional £10.99 ($18.21) domain fee.

123-reg makes selecting a package harder than it needs to be. In addition to the plan choices, you also have the option to buy a Website Builder package, which is a hosting plan specifically for hosting a regular website, or an e-commerce shop. You can also look into hosting with Drupal, Joomla, or WordPress (starting at £4.16, or $8.27, per month). This kind of hosting provides you with a managed version of these content management systems. One nice thing is that you don’t need to deal with updates or basic configuration of these systems, because 123-reg handles them for you.

Is 123 Reg Expensive?

123 Reg offers shared hosting plans that are packed with solid features, yet the company still keeps prices low across the board.

Shared hosting is almost always pretty cheap on a month-to-month basis, but 123 Reg seems to be an industry leader in keeping costs low. Not only that, but the bandwidth is unlimited for all shared hosting plans, and you get a free UK domain name to go along with your plan. Some higher-tier plans even provide multiple domain names.

That said, let’s take a look at the features you can expect with the most popular shared hosting packages:

  • Free UK domain names for branding your site and giving your company an online name
  • Free personalized email accounts to match your company and domain names
  • Linux-based hosting for high performance and speed at all times
  • A one-click WordPress installation button for launching your site within seconds
  • Support for programming languages like PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby
  • Support for at least one website. This goes all the way up to unlimited websites depending on your package
  • Lots of web space to store all of your files
  • Unlimited bandwidth to support increases in traffic
  • Support for MySQL databases
  • A free SSL with select plans. This includes regular backups of your site to protect your information at all times
  • Hosting that allows for multiple sites on the same server
  • Fast loading times to boost your SEO and make your customers happy
  • A control panel that’s made for both beginners and those who need more technical features
  • Various Linux apps for things like WordPress, OSCommerce, Joomla, Drupal, and MediaWiki
  • Some plans include a JavaScript generator
  • Around 100 professional website templates for getting your design ready
  • Both simple and advanced website stats.

As you can see, each of the shared hosting plans includes several additional features that often aren’t offered by competing hosting companies.

Now let’s say you’d like to select one of these shared hosting plans and checkout. Are you going to have to pay a monthly fee or is it all upfront?

As with many hosting providers, the pricing is quoted as monthly on the website, but you eventually have to pay for a full year upfront. This is one of the downsides of 123 Reg since it’s nice to be able to choose maybe a six-month plan. Or maybe you’d like to save a little money and lockdown three years of hosting. That doesn’t seem to be possible when going through 123 Reg.

Setting Up a 123-reg Hosted Site

The main 123-reg control panel is a long page with clearly marked sections for management tools. The domain management tools are prominently displayed at the top, followed by email, Web hosting, servers, create your website, ecommerce, security, marketing, make money, and account management. Each section has prominent buy links for tools and features.

Despite having bought Web hosting for our site, superfuntech123.com, we didn’t see any Web hosting tools on the control panel. Everything was hidden behind the Manage button, which opened up a new tab. We could go into the file manager to view and even edit the HTML and text files.

Because this was the Business plan, we had access to website statistics tools AWStats, OpenWeb, and Webalizer, the control panel for MySQL database, command-line tools such as ping, an HTML and Perl validator, and a slew of Web resources, including a JavaScript generator, an image library, and website images.

We browsed through the website templates and clicked on one that we liked. The templates are fairly basic and nothing to get too excited about. The template downloaded to my computer. At this point, we had to either open up an FTP session or use the File Manager tool from the control panel. Once the file was on the server, we were able to edit the file through the File Manager tool. It’s a manual process, but it’s not quite hand-rolling your own HTML. Still, tons of providers offer some kind of website creation tools, so it’s really not worth the time and effort to go this manual route in 2014.

Instead, you can try 123-reg’s Instant Site tool. Instant Site provides hundreds of templates to create a website that can be an online store, a photo gallery, or a blog. You can add polls, forms, and widgets to the site. InstantSite Plus (£2.99, or $4.95, per month) limits you to just 10 pages, while Instant Site Pro (£4.99, or $8.27, per month) allows 500 pages. You can also sign up for the Make Me a Website service, and 123-reg will build the site to your specifications.

In addition, the control panel offers a Website Builder, which isn’t a website creation tool, exactly. It’s a hosting plan with bundled website creation. The Personal plan, again, is very basic; it allows only five pages. With Website Builder (starting at £3.99 per month, or $6.61) you gain a drag-and-drop interface for creating polished websites. It lets you add social media links, PayPal buttons and shopping carts, and Google Maps.

Upsells and Other Costs to Look Out For

As you move through the checkout process and decide on your hosting plan, you can expect to see a few upsells that you can either skip or pay for. VAT is billed separately.

Some of the upsells include:

  • Office 365 Business: this has everything from Excel to Word, so you can typically save a little bit of money by buying the suite through 123 Reg instead of through Microsoft
  • Cloud backups: emails, documents, photos, and other files are all backed up through this service
  • Domain transfer: if you already have a domain and would like to move it to 123 Reg, there’s an option to do so depending on the type of domain you have. Some domain names are completely free, but others will cost you a bit of cash
  • Domain privacy: when publishing a website and buying hosting you have to give your personal information. This information is attached to your website for anyone to look up. Ideally, this would only be useful for people maybe trying to buy your site or contact you for business. However, it often results in spam. If you pay for domain privacy, your info is protected.
  • Website Builder: you get this with 123 Reg’s hosting plans, but some people might want to take advantage of the website builder as a standalone service.

If you decide not to go with a hosting plan, 123 Reg still sells things like the website builder, domain names, and email hosting. Depending on the domain name you select, you could end up spending very little each year. However, pricing can go up to significantly if you choose one that’s already owned.

123 Web Hosting Review: The Comprehensive Guide to Choosing the Right Home Page.

A home page is the website’s main page. It’s where your visitors will first see your website. There are a variety of types of homepages, but the most popular ones are those that are simple and easy to navigate.

What are the Different Types of Homepages

There are three different types of homepages:

1) A standard homepage is just a single screen with all the information you need to start selling or displaying your products or services. This type of homepage is typically used by small businesses and individual visitors who just want to check out your site.

2) A blog homepage is similar to a standard homepage, but instead of being a one-stop shop, you’ll have posts from your blog on various different pages within your site. This type of homepage can be great for sites that have many different blog posts from various contributors.

3) A eCommerce homepage is designed for business owners who want their customers to visit their site directly after clicking on an item from their store listing. This type of page usually has more features and includes more functionality than a standard homepage, such as an About Page and Customer Reviews Pages.

How to Choose the Right Homepage for Your Site

There are a few main factors you’ll need to consider when choosing a home page:

1) What type of audience will your site serve? Will it be for people who just want to visit your website, or will they need to be able to buy something from you?

2) What kind of design should your home page have? You’ll want to make sure that your homepage looks professional and easy to navigate, while still being accessible and stylish.

3) What content will your home page include? Will it be basic information like website addresses, contact information, or product descriptions? Or will you include more complex content like articles, blog posts, and video presentations?

123 Web Hosting Review: The Comprehensive Guide to Choosing the Right Host.

When choosing a web hosting company, it’s important to consider the host that will be responsible for your website. A good host can help improve your site’s security, performance, and SEO.

To find the right host for your website, you first need to identify the domain name that your site will be hosted on. This is important because it will determine which search engines will Index your site (and potentially rank it higher). Additionally, it can help keep your website up and running while you wait for a better host or when you decide to switch hosts.

Choose the Right Domain for Your Homepage

Once you have determined the target domain name, it’s time to choose a host that will support that domain. Many web hosting companies offerdomain-supporting options, meaning that they can take care of setting up and maintaining your website on their platform.

Set Up Your Homepage with a Host

Once you have chosen a host and domain name, next step is to set up your home page with them! Many web hosts provide templates or templates from third-party providers that allow you to create an easily accessible homepage without any prior coding knowledge or design experience.

123 Web Hosting Review: The Comprehensive Guide to Choosing the Right Host for Your Site.

Before choosing a web host, it’s important to choose the right domain name for your site. A good domain name is one that’s popular and easily accessible online. You can find this information online or by visiting a website like Namecheap. If you don’t have a well-known name or if your site will be accessed by a small number of people, you might want to consider using a less popular domain name or even signing up for a free hosting account with an unknown host.

Set Up Your Homepage with a Host

Once you’ve chosen the right domain name and set up your home page with a host, it’s time to create your site! To do this, you first need to create a new file in your website root called “homepage.php” and paste the following code into it:

Conclusion

Choosing the right host for your site is a critical part of any online business. If you’re not able to find the perfect host for your website, you may end up with a less than successful site. By choosing the right domain and setting up your homepage with a host, you’ll be able to create a high-quality website that’s optimized for SEO. In addition, it’s important to remember that each host has different features and capabilities, so make sure to compare providers before making any decisions.