Background: The founders of WebFusion (now TSO Host), 123-reg and Heart Internet, 20i are relatively new competitors in the BrainIn web hosting industry space. Yet just two years under their belt, the company has come to offer a significantly more elastic range of products. 20i is located in the United Kingdom and with most, if not all of their resources there. Although it plans to expand elsewhere, they will be ambitious for a later date. Meanwhile, it is still able to provide unlimited resources to customers on premium shared hosting plans. It covers storage, bandwidth, database, email and almost everything else.
Starting price: $4.99
Currency: GBP
Go online: https://www.20i.com/
Review summary and ratings: 4
20i is a new web hosting provider with excellent plans across the board. In fact, given the price-balance they have, the 20i will make a very attractive start-up proposal for almost everyone. Their unique load balancing technology has a definite advantage here which means that there is no real upper limit and even business should feel safe here.
Professionals
- Strong focus on reseller hosting
- Fast and stable
- Good customer support
- Wildcard SSL and automated malware scanning
- Powered by renewable energy
Difficulty
- No access to Apache or NGINX settings
- Simplified control panel
Pros: What I like about the 20i
1. Focus on reseller hosting
After wandering around with the 20i for a while now I realize that this host has a very real slant with it. Most web hosting companies try to splash out a huge load of products and fake the whole market. The 20i, on the other hand, seems to be my primary goal – resellers have a pretty good focus on it.
According to them, their web hosting rebuilders take up most of their resources, as they also create most of their clients. In their own words;
Our founders first came back to the setup reseller hosting package back in 1997, so we know our stuff to make the resellers happy. Many of the big names in UK web hosting are actually resellers of 20i hosting – but no one knows we offer a ‘white label’ service!
Richard Chambers, Marketing Manager, 20i
With that in mind, 20i has made things as easy as possible to resell and rebrand, so many of their resources are set up to handle bulk of high-volume, websites. They also include useful tools for resellers – from customer contact to a built-in help desk ticketing system.
Most normal sites may offer customers free migration to one site, but again, because they are reseller focused, 20i has an automated migration center that you can use to easily move multiple sites to XMTX. Resellers also offer discounts on other products such as VPS and domain names.
2. 20i fast and stable
A combination of the reasons 20i proved to be one of the more stable hosts that I had the opportunity to check the date. One thing I can say is that when looking at a host’s selling points – try to look beyond the surface of what they are saying. The video is very specific, so don’t guess anything!
Auto scaling load balancing capability
While I’m not a big fan of technology proprietary use, I admit that in some cases it can benefit both the business and its customers. One of the more interesting aspects of the 20i is that it is an auto-scaling, load balancing server. This feature has been created by their own development team and is only available to their customers.
So, what is automatic scaling?
Sharing is exactly what most shared web hosting providers do. Once the hosting company thinks it can stuff a server as full of subscribers, then the new subscribers are placed on a new server.
Unfortunately, website traffic is very resilient and a site that has little traffic these days can grow very fast for a variety of reasons. This means that other clients on the server will consume its resources equally.
With 20i auto-scaling and load balancing, websites are not limited to a single server. If one site provides an unusual amount of resources, more resources may be available across a network of multiple 40-core servers. The concept is similar to cloud technology, where processing power from bandwidth and RAM processing can be quickly or easily taken down.
If a server goes down for any reason, the sites hosted there may be removed.
100% SSD storage
I’m sure you’ve seen this term plastered on many web hosting sites today: SSD. Solid state drives, or SSDs can provide extremely fast performance compared to standard mechanical drives. In some cases, the speed difference can easily exceed ten times that of a mechanical drive.
Unfortunately, this is an area where most hosting companies are obscure – do they just use SSD technology for their system drives or do they use SSD to store all their data? Although the price of SSDs is dropping all the time, they are still significantly more expensive than standard drives.
20i assures us that they use SSDs across the board (from their site documentation, obviously Samsung SSDs, which are some of the best today). The move goes back to the company’s belief that they always use the best hardware and can’t cut corners in this area.
Google based DNS
If you know at least a bit about websites and URLs, then you need to know that Domain Name System (DNS) is a vital cog. 20i makes use of Google’s DNS so you can enjoy quick response times no matter how heavy the traffic load on your site.
Again, there’s an added benefit for resellers as you can take advantage of the company’s white-labeled virtual name servers and pass Google DNS under your own brand!
20i speed test
With their servers limited to the UK data center (updates: 20i launches their data center in the United States 2021), I was initially a bit skeptical about 20i performance. Because of this, I conducted a standard webpage speed test from three locations – US, UK and Singapore.
As expected, the UK server showed good response times, but to be honest I was quite impressed with a host that could offer a TTFB below 200MS. It is rarely seen and less than the 400MS recommended by Google.
U.S. speeds have also clocked very well, although time outside the Asia region has slowed somewhat. I know that Singapore generally has a pretty good infrastructure for conducting speed tests, so I can guess that for some reason there has been a slight drop due to the 20i.
3. Good customer support
Although live chat seems to be limited to sales search only, the 20i’s ticketing system is very easy to use and claims that support staff are UK-based specialists.
4. Wildcard SSL and auto malware scanning
Free Wildcard SSL Certificate
With the cyber threat Google is no longer identifying HTTPS websites as insecure, you will be happy to know that 20i provides you with a free SSL certificate. These certificates help ensure that any user data associated with your site is secure. Lets use Encrypt for free certificates of 20i.
Auto malware scanning
Malware is not only harmful but it is very difficult to get rid of. Even if you clean it up today, things like that could come back again and again – over and over again. 20i can help with this as it offers daily anti-malware scanning for all its accounts. It may be something that is easily overlooked, but trust me – it is very useful.
5. 20i is now 100% eco-friendly hosting
When it comes to powering your website, 20i green hosting uses 100% renewable energy sources from wind and solar energy. They do not use coal or nuclear power to keep websites online, which ensures that you can run a truly eco-friendly website without any impact on efficiency.
The sustainability report from Amito indicates that 20i is using wind, solar and biofuels as their power supply. The sustainability report from Amito indicates that 20i is using wind, solar and biofuels as their energy supply.
1. No access to Apache or NGINX settings
The funniest web hosting veterans need to be able to change certain settings is to know that the difference between Apache or nginx can mean a lot. Here again (I guess in the name of simplification) it got out of our hands.
I have no doubt that no matter what support ticket you submit and request, they will be able to make any changes to you, but there is human love for instant gratification.
2. Simplified control panel
The 20i control panel is just a little too basic for my favorite
While this should be good for many users, if you are a little more experienced in web hosting control panel you can find 20i as more controllable.
I think this is probably due to their inclusion in special technology as a stackcatch plugin. For example, if you allow certain settings to be ticked, you may cause some inconvenience.
With WordPress hosting 20i starting from £ 5.99 per month is definitely not the most expensive host out there. In fact, with all its hosting plans, I don’t think it’s fairly expensive and would probably like to buy a better one.
All WordPress hosting plans are fully managed and come with a মাসের 1 first month promotion. Here are the details of each plan:
| Features | Personal | Professional | Unlimited |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website | 1 | 10 | Unlimited |
| Disk Space (SSD) | 10 GB | 100 GB | Unlimited |
| Bandwidth (monthly) | 50 GB | 500 GB | Unlimited |
| Eco-friendly | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| The first month | $1 | $1 | $1 |
| Price | $5.99 / Months | $14.99 / Months | $34.99 / Months |
Conclusion: should be hosted with 20i
Although I have mentioned many times that 20i is very reseller focused, this means that they have the feature of offering resellers which is above the norm. This does not mean that regular web hosting users have less of a plan.
In fact, given their price-feature balance, the 20i will offer a very attractive start for almost anyone. Their load balancing feature means there is no real upper limit and even businesses should feel safe here.
There is only one caveat to all the benefits I have seen in 20i so far and that is that even on their maximum shared hosting plan (business £ 12.99 / mo) you are limited to hosting a maximum of five sites. I know some people prefer to host a bunch of small sites in one plan, so it probably won’t be ideal for you.