20i Review

Company: 20i

Background: The brainchild of the founders of WebFusion (now TSO Host), 123-reg and Heart Internet, 20i is a relatively new contender in the web hosting industry space. Yet with only two years under their belt, the company has come to offer a remarkably resilient range of products. 20i is based in the United Kingdom and with most, if not all their resources there. Although it has plans to expand elsewhere, those will be ambitions for a later date. Meanwhile, it is still able to offers customers unlimited resources on premium shared hosting plans. This covers storage, bandwidth, databases, email and almost everything else too.

Starting Price: £4.99/mo

Currency: GBP

Visit Online: https://www.20i.com/

Review Summary & Ratings

4

20i is a newer web hosting provider that has excellent plans across the board. In fact, given the price-feature balance that they have, 20i would make a very interesting starting proposition for almost anyone. Their unique load balancing technology is a decided advantage here means that there is no real upper limit and that even businesses should feel safe here.

Pros: What I Like About 20i

1. Strong focus on reseller hosting

After fiddling around with 20i for some time now I have come to realize that this host has a very real skew to it. Most web hosting companies splash out a massive load of products and try to net the entire market. 20i on the other hand seems to have kept quite a good focus on what I would call its primary target – resellers.

According to them, their web hosting resellers are the ones who take up most of their resources, since they also make up most of their clients. In their very own words;

Our founders set up the first reseller hosting packages back in 1997, so we know our stuff when it comes to making resellers happy.Many of the biggest names in UK web hosting are actually resellers of 20i hosting – but because we offer of a ‘white label’ service, no one knows!

Richard Chambers, Marketing Manager, 20i

With that in mind, 20i has kept things as easy as possible for reselling and rebranding so many of their assets are setup for high-volume, bulk management of websites. They also include useful tools for resellers – from customer communications to a built-in Help Desk ticketing system.

Most normal sites MAY offer customers free migration for one site, but again, because they are reseller focussed, 20i has an automated Migration Centre which you can use to move multiple sites to 20i with ease. Resellers also get discounts on other products such as VPS and domain names.

2. 20i is fast and stable

A combination of factors resulted in 20i proving to be one of the more resilient hosts which I’ve had a chance to test to date. One thing I can say is that when looking at the selling points of any hosts – do try to see beyond the surface of what they’re telling you. Wording is very specific, so don’t assume anything!

Auto-scaling Load Balancing Capability

I’m usually not the biggest fan of proprietary uses of technology but admittedly, there are some cases where it can give both the business and its customers an advantage. One of the more interesting facets of 20i is its auto-scaling, load balancing servers. This feature has been built by their own developer team and is only available to their customers.

So, what is auto-scaling?

Most shared web hosting providers operate on precisely that – sharing. Once a server is as full of customers as the hosting company thinks it can stuff in, then new customers are placed on a new server.

Unfortunately, website traffic is very elastic and a site that has little traffic today may grow very rapidly for various reasons. This means that other customers on that server will suffer as its resources are consumed disproportionately.

In the case of auto-scaling and load balancing with 20i, websites aren’t limited to a single server. If an unusual amount of resources is being consumed by one site, then more resources can be made available from across their network of multiple 40-core servers. The idea is similar to that of Cloud technology, where everything from bandwidth to processing power and RAM can be easily scaled up or down instantly.

If a server goes down for any reasons, the sites hosted there can simply be moved.

100% SSD Storage

I’m certain you have seen this term plastered over many web hosting sites today: SSD. Solid State Drives, or SSDs can offer extremely fast performance compared to standard mechanical drives. In some cases, the speed difference can easily exceed ten time that of mechanical drives.

Unfortunately, this is one area where most hosting companies are unclear – do they use SSD technology only for their system drives, or do they use SSDs to store all their data? Although prices of SSD are dropping all the time, they are still significantly more expensive than standard drives.

20i has assured us that they use SSDs across the board (from their site documentation, apparently Samsung SSDs, which are some of the best in existence today). This move goes back to the company’s belief that they should always be using the best hardware and not to cut corners in this area.

Google-based DNS

If you know the least bit about websites and URLs, you would know that the domain name system (DNS) is a vital cog. 20i makes use of Google’s DNS so that you can enjoy fast response times no matter how heavy a traffic load your site gets.

Again, there is an added advantage here for resellers since you can take advantage of the company’s white-label Virtual Name Servers and pass of Google DNS under your own brand!

20i Speed Test

With their servers confined to UK data centres (updates: 20i launched their data centers in United States 2021), I was initially a little skeptical about the performance 20i would be able offer. Being that the case, I ran a standard WebPage Speed test from three locations – the US, UK and Singapore.

As expected, the UK server showed good response times, but to be honest I was quite impressed at a host that could offer a TTFB of below 200ms. This is rarely seen and is far below the Google recommended 400ms.

US speeds also clocked in very well, although the timings out of the Asia region did drop a little. I know that Singapore usually has a pretty good infrastructure for conducting speed tests out of, so I can only assume the slight drop was due to 20i for some reason.

20i WebPage Speed Test result - UK
WebPage Speed Test – UK; TTFB = 181ms.
20i WebPage Speed Test result - Singapore
WebPage Speed Test – Singapore; TTFB = 1,216ms.
20i WebPage Speed Test  - US
WebPage Speed Test – US; TTFB = 414ms.
20i recommended by Jim Connolly

3. Good customer support

Although live chat seems to be restricted to sales enquires only, 20i has a very easy to use ticketing system and it claims that support staff are UK-based experts.

4. Wildcard SSL and auto malware scanning

Free Wildcard SSL Certificate

With cyber threats being what they are today along with Google now marking not HTTPS websites are insecure, you’ll be happy to know that 20i provides you with a free SSL certificate. These certificates help ensure that any data from a user connecting to your site remains secure. 20i uses Let’s Encrypt for its free certificates.

Auto Malware Scanning

Malware isn’t just harmful but it’s also very hard to get rid of. Even if you clear it today, there are instances where it can come back again – over and over. 20i can help with this since it offers daily anti-malware scanning for all its accounts. This might be something that’s easily overlooked, but trust me – it is very useful to have.

5. 20i is now 100% Environmentally-friendly Hosting

When it comes to powering your website, 20i Green Hosting uses 100% renewable energy sources from wind and solar power. They don’t use any coal or nuclear power to keep websites online, which ensures that you can run a truly environmentally friendly website without any impact on performance.

Sustainability Report from Amito indicates that 20i is using wind, solar, and biofuel as their energy supplies.
Sustainability Report from Amito indicates that 20i is using wind, solar, and biofuel as their energy supplies.

Cons: What can be better at 20i

1. No Access to Apache or NGINX Settings

Most seasoned web hosting veterans will know that to be able to change certain settings in Apache or NGINX can mean a lot of difference. Here again (I am guessing in the name of simplification) it has been taken out of our hands.

I have no doubt that should you submit a support ticket and make the request, they will be able to make any changes you desire, but there is that human love for immediate gratification.

2. Simplified Control Panel

20i Control Panel
Just a little too basic for my liking

Although this should be good for many users, if you’re a little more experienced at using web hosting control panels you might find the one at 20i more restrictive.

I think that this is probably due to their having incorporated specialized technologies such as its StackCache plugin. If you’re allowed to simply tweak some settings for example, you might make a mess of things.

20i Hosting Plans & Pricing

20i WordPress Hosting Plans

20i WordPress hosting plan

With WordPress hosting starting at £5.99 per month 20i certainly isn’t the most expensive host out there. In fact, with all its hosting plans, I don’t feel that it’s expensive at all and would probably make a good buy.

All the WordPress hosting plans are fully managed and come with the first-month promotion of £1. Here are the details of each plan:

FeaturesPersonalProfessionalUnlimited
Websites110Unlimited
Disk Space (SSD)10 GB100 GBUnlimited
Bandwidth (Monthly)50 GB500 GBUnlimited
Eco-friendlyYesYesYes
First Month£1£1£1
Price£5.99/month£14.99/month£34.99/month

20i Shared Hosting Plans

20i shared hosting plans

All 20i shared hosting plans come with auto malware scanning, free daily backup, and DDoS protection. You can enjoy the £1 first month for all the plans. With the introduction of their new data center in the United States – users also get to choose their server location from the two countries.

The Startup plan starts at £4.99 per month and comes with 10 GB SSD storage and 50GB monthly data transfer. Have a look at the details for other plans:

FeaturesStartupPremiumBusiness
Websites125
Disk Space (SSD)10 GBUnlimitedUnlimited
Bandwidth (Monthly)50 GBUnlimitedUnlimited
MySQL1UnlimitedUnlimited
Email Account1000UnlimitedUnlimited
Eco-friendlyYesYesYes
First Month£1£1£1
Price£4.99/month£8.99/month£12.99/month

Caution:  Your account will be automatically suspended if your monthly bandwidth allowance is exceeded. 20i does not state the terms “unlimited bandwidth” clearly in their ToS page; but users are allowed to use a maximum of 10% of server’s processing capacity (which in turn, limit the usage of “unlimited” bandwidth)*.

Feedback from Richard Chambers

Acceptable Usage Policy limit is specifically tied to CPU and across the entire platform. We haven’t ever enforced it to date, despite hosting websites that handle several million hits a day.

20i Unmanaged VPS Hosting Plans

20i unmanaged VPS hosting plan

Here are the pricing for VPS hosting plans:

Features1 Core2 Cores6 Cores
CPU126
RAM1 GB2 GB8 GB
SSD Disk Space25 GB50 GB100 GB
Speed100 Mbps100 Mbps500 Mbps
Price£9.99/month£14.99/month£44.99/month

Conclusion: Who should host with 20i

Even though I have mentioned many times that 20i is very reseller focused, that just means that they have features to offer resellers that are above the norm. It doesn’t mean their plans for regular web hosting users are any lesser.

In fact, given the price-feature balance that they have, 20i would make a very interesting starting proposition for almost anyone. Their load balancing features means that there is no real upper limit and that even businesses should feel safe here.

There is only one caveat to all the advantages I've seen at 20i so far, and that is the fact that even on their highest shared hosting plan (Business at £12.99/mo) you are limited to hosting a maximum of five sites. I know some people like to host a bunch of small sites all on one plan, so this probably won't be ideal for you.

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Article by Jason Chow

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