AUTOSCALING HOSTING PLATFORM
A web hosting platform like no alternative no equal no competitor no match no other
- Built by hosting experts for optimal website performance
- Unique cloud technology unavailable anywhere else
- Never standing still; always innovating
- 100% green hosting powered by renewable energy
What makes our platform so unique?
Autoscaling servers
We created a new kind of autoscaling, so your site gets the power it needs – however busy it gets.
Global CDN
Our free ihost Content Delivery Network caches your content at data centres around the world.
Optimised PHP
Our custom code makes every website load faster. We aren’t subject to the limits imposed by old-school hosting.
Load balancing
Our reputation for rock-solid server uptime is built on our innovative load balancing features.
Three platforms
Each sub-platform – WordPress, Linux or Windows – is optimised for stellar performance.
Google DNS
We use the best technology available from Google to translate domain names through the Domain Name System (DNS).
Autoscaling: access to as many servers as your site needs
All our web hosting services use ihost’s proprietary autoscaling technology. No other company has access to this.
Autoscaling literally means that our resources scale automatically. Bandwidth, memory and processing power is scaled up or down instantly – depending on demand. This is what makes them true ‘elastic cloud’. If there’s a surge in traffic, your website will continue to offer the same fast experience for every user.
This is because a site isn’t hosted on one or two servers. Instead, it can access the whole platform’s resources: multiple servers. It’s what makes the ihost platform special.
If there’s a spike in demand and your shared hosting ‘neighbours’ become busy, it doesn’t affect your site speed. Busy sites are isolated from others.
This doesn’t happen at other hosting providers, as websites controlled by cPanel are restricted to single servers. With other hosts, if you share a server with a busy site, it will affect your site too.
Global data centre locations
Our global data centres and FREE ihostCDN nodes deliver lightning-fast speeds wherever your traffic is coming from.
We optimise PHP in a unique way
To remain the provider of the fastest shared hosting, it’s important that we use the latest technologies. So we investigate all the speed-boosting technologies available to other web hosting companies.
The problem with these ‘off the shelf’ products is that they don’t scale very well. They’re designed for small companies that use older, single-server technologies. To work with our autoscaling, we found that the better option was to write our own web hosting code.
Our developers have customised PHP-FPM and OPcache to ensure that your website gets the resources it needs, even if it’s really busy. Our code boosts performance for every website running PHP 5.6 or above. For more recent versions of PHP, the speed improvements are even more pronounced. As we’re not constrained by CloudLinux, we don’t have to impose limits on cores, memory, bandwidth and processes.
Your site stays fast, however busy it gets.
Load balancing that does more
Load balancing is about sharing traffic across servers. Other web hosts use load balancing – but not the kind we’ve developed. Their load balancing mitigates failover: if a server goes down, your site will be moved to another, so it stays online.
It’s a kind of disaster recovery. That’s expected: we offer that kind of server redundancy as well, even though we use some of the best hardware in the industry – thanks to our long-term partners at Dell – and a robust 10 Gb network.
But ihost load balancing is of a different calibre.
Our global load balancing makes use of monitors that will respond to traffic load and balance it across multiple servers when needed. Many other providers don’t offer this. The consequence for you is this: with ihost, your site stays online, and remains fast, whatever load the servers are under.
Not only powerful, but versatile too..
You’re given the choice of what operating system or content management system you want to use: versatile Linux, Windows or super-popular WordPress.
WordPress Platform
Managed WordPress hosting, performance-tuned to make sites load up to 48 times faster. Features include: WordPress staging, automatic updates, plugin/theme monitoring, brute force login protection, timeline backups, code optimisation and our own exclusive StackCache speed plugin and more solutions.
Linux Platform
Our Linux platform is great for most types of websites. It’s the most versatile choice. Built for speed and security by our in-house experts, we’ve fine-tuned Apache for even better performance. It also offers over 80 one-click installs of popular open source apps, including Drupal, Joomla! & Magento.
Windows Platform
Our most powerful Windows seamlessly integrates with SQL Server, ensuring robust and reliable data management. This provides high performance and security for your applications. Whether you’re building complex enterprise solutions or managing site migrations, ASP.NET with SQL Server offers a comprehensive and dependable solution.
Google-based DNS
The Domain Name System (DNS) translates domain names – and email addresses – into IP addresses. So when you visit a URL, your browser knows the address of the server to download the page from. It’s an essential part of the internet – so it needs to be fast.
Google knows all about fast internet response times – as you’d expect! Their global fibre network leads the industry. It provides a quick and stable response regardless of traffic. So we built our DNS platform on the same infrastructure as Google.
The host with the most
You’re given the choice of what operating system or content management system you want to use: versatile Linux, Windows or super-popular WordPress.
100% SSD storage
Many hosting companies don’t invest in SSD storage, or if they do, they use the cheapest available hardware. It’s so they can keep ‘sticker-prices’ as low as possible. That’s not the case with us: we use Samsung Enterprise SSDs in our storage arrays.
Dual 12-core processors
Each Dell web server has two Intel Xeon Scalable 12-core processors with hyper-threading. This gives 48 logical cores per machine. These have access to plenty of fast memory: 64 GB 3200 MHz DDR4 RAM. Any of our web servers can serve any website we host at any time.
Data security and offsite backups
We bake-in security to every layer of our web hosting. Our storage is resilient to the level that – in a worst-case scenario – whole storage servers and disks can fail with no downtime. We take daily backups off-site for extra protection. But that’s not all – read more about our secure hosting.
Physical security
All websites and VPS are hosted in secure, state-of-the-art data centres based in the UK or USA. They’re manned 24/7 and include high-level physical security measures. These cover everything from backup power generators to advanced fire protection.
IPv6 and HTTP/2
Our hosting platform is built for the future. We support IPv6, which is the new standard for IP addresses. Our servers use HTTP/2 – a major revision of the HTTP network protocol – as standard. HTTP/2 means that browsers can request and receive more data than before. It results in faster loading websites and happier users.
Advanced support
All our technical support staff are based at our US and UK HQs and have ample industry experience, working closely with our directors for years. For complex issues, they have direct access to our developers in the same building. Advanced support is available 24/7 through our email ticketing system.
Platform FAQs
What’s the difference between autoscaling and load balancing?
They both have the same effect: your website loads faster. However, they work in different ways. Autoscaling ensures that when your website gets busy, it has access to as much resource as it needs, so it doesn’t slow down. A single site can take advantage of a whole server or many servers.
Load balancing stops other busy websites on our shared platform having an effect on yours. It balances the traffic load between multiple servers. It also works as a safety measure: if in the unlikely event of a server failure, it can ensure that your site stays online.
Where is my website hosted?
Your website will be hosted in one of our origin data centres in Reading, UK or Dallas, USA.
Your email is hosted on separate servers to the website, so that any problems or unexpected load from email doesn’t affect the performance of your site.
Do you include DDoS protection?
Yes, we include 1 Tbps+ anti-DDoS measures to protect your website from attacks. This is free of charge with all hosting. For more security features, see our Secure Hosting page.
Do you support 2FA?
Yes, all accounts are covered by two-factor authentication (2FA).
Do you have any speed tests?
We have independent evidence from Loadimpact.com that our WordPress platform is up to 48 times faster than other UK web hosts. For our other sub-platforms, we’d encourage you to sign up and give us a test – we’ll give you your money back if you’re not satisfied.