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We proudly host our website on Rocket.net.
£5.00 /month on annual contract
- £5.99/month No Contract
- ❌ One Website Included
- ✅ 25 Email Accounts Included
- ✅ 25GB SSD Storage
- ✅ Unlimited Bandwith
- ✅ Free CDN
- 🌲 One Tree Planted per month
£33.34 /month on annual contract
- £39.99/month No Contract
- ✅ Unlimited Websites Included
- ✅ Unlimited Email Accounts Included
- ✅ Unlimited SSD Storage
- ✅ Unlimited Bandwith
- ✅ Free CDN
- 🌲 Ten Trees Planted per month
Table of Contents
Eco Web Hosting is a small WordPress host based in the United Kingdom. They use StackCP and StackCache CDN as their control panel interface and CDN platform, much like WPBuzz and 20i. Thus, their features and performance are similar to WPBuzz and 20i. Yet, Eco Web Hosting brings a different angle to WordPress hosting: caring about the environment.
Eco Web Hosting demonstrates its commitment to environmental sustainability in two ways. The first way is that they host their data centers with 100% green energy. The second is that Eco Web Hosting will plant one to ten trees monthly on your behalf, depending on your WordPress plan. According to their website, they plant the trees in 26 countries worldwide.
However, green credentials aside, how does Eco Web Hosting perform in serving your business? In this review post, we will detail Eco Web Hosting’s WordPress services, how they performed on our performance benchmarks and speed tests, and our overall ranking of their web hosting services.
Eco Web Hosting WordPress General Features
| Eco Web Hosting Features | Is this good? | |
|---|---|---|
| Support Hours | No. Support hours are 7am-7pm GMT Monday-Friday, and 9am-5:30pm GMT on weekends. | ❌ Most hosts offer 24/7 support because you never know when your site is going to go down. |
| Server Locations | London, although you can manually request Dallas (United States) as a location. | ⚠️ Servers in both Europe and the United States is good for EU/UK or US businesses, however server options are quite limited compared to other companies. |
| Uptime Guarantee | No | ❌ Most hosts offer at least a 99.9% uptime guarantee. |
| SSL Included | Yes, Let's Encrypt. | ✅ SSL Certificates are required for today's Internet. |
| Money-Back Guarantee | Yes, 45 days. | ✅ 30 days is standard across web hosts, so we love that Eco Web Hosting allows 45 days. |
| Email Hosting | Between 25 and an unlimited amount of email accounts are included, depending on your plan, each with 10GB of storage. | ✅ Having email hosting included on your WordPress plan means you don't have to pay extra for an email hosting plan. |
| Plan Lengths | Monthly and yearly plans. | ✅ Yearly plans include two months free. |
| Backups Available | Yes, daily backups with a 30-day retention period. | ✅ 30 days is relatively standard across most web hosts. |
| Site Migrations | Yes. | ✅ We prefer having a human transfer a website in case something goes wrong. |
| Firewall | Yes, Web Application Firewall (WAF) | ✅ Firewall is crucial and standard among web hosts. |
| Malware Detection | Yes. | ✅ Malware detection is very important and also standard. |
Eco Web Hosting started in 2014, four years earlier than WPBuzz. Eco Web Hosting aims to provide “high quality” web hosting in the “greenest way possible.” Despite web hosting’s impact on the environment, we don’t find many other web hosts talking about reducing their environmental impact besides Ionos (also European!). You can read about Eco Web Hosting’s “Green Credentials” on their website here.
Regarding WordPress features, Eco Web Hosting offers a wonderful assortment of standard WordPress features. We appreciate that Eco Web Hosting includes SSL certificates, email hosting, 30-day retention backups, firewall support, and free malware detection in its WordPress plans. We consider all of these standard features for WordPress plans, and some hosts on the lower end require you to upgrade to get these features. Eco Web Hosting does not.
Read More: Why is email hosting important?
Regardless of the size of your business, it is important to look professional. Having a custom email domain adds to your professionalism. Which looks more professional to you: mybusiness@gmail.com or info@mybusiness.com? If you said info@mybusiness.com, then we agree with you and that is why email hosting is important. Email hosting allows you to have your own email domain instead of relying on Gmail or another free email provider.
If you have Google Workspace, you probably have your own email domain. In this case, Google is your email host. But if you are just using an @gmail.com email address, it is time to upgrade!
However, we are disappointed that Eco Web Hosting does not offer 24/7 support. Most large web hosts offer 24/7 support nowadays. We believe receiving support around the clock is crucial, as you never know when your site will go down or break. In fact, this was one of our hesitations when deciding whether to host our WordPress sites on fellow host WPBuzz. We went with Rocket.net instead.
Eco Web Hosting Optimization Features
| Eco Web Hosting Features | Is this good? | |
|---|---|---|
| Image Optimization | Yes | ✅ You want image optimization to ensure faster page loading, but this can be achieved with WordPress plug-ins as well. |
| CDN Access | Yes. | ✅ CDNs are important if you server customers outside of your local region. |
| CSS/Javascript Minification | Yes. | ✅ Minification speeds loading times by reducing the size of CSS and JavaScript files. |
| Staging Website allowed? | Yes. | ✅ Staging websites allow you to test changes to a website before going live. |
| HTTP versions | HTTP/2 | ❌ HTTP/3 is the latest version. |
| Data Compression | GZIP only. | ⚠️ GZIP is okay, but Brotli is the latest standard in data compression. |
| Full Page Caching | Yes | ✅ Full page caching speeds up the initial loading of your webpagee. |
Eco Web Hosting uses the same StackCP interface familiar to users of 20i and WPBuzz. We especially like StackCP’s visual interface, where it is easy to turn various optimization features, such as image optimization, minification, and site caching, on and off. And for users that aren’t WordPress experts, StackCP notes the risk level of each optimization – how likely it is to break your website – so you can prepare beforehand.
We also appreciate Eco Web Hosting bundling StackCache CDN for free. While it is not as robust as Cloudflare, the StackCache CDN has at least one CDN point on each continent (except Antarctica), including multiple points in the United States and Europe. As you will see in our real-world testing further below, StackCache CDN performs well in some locations but not as great in others. You need to consider this, depending on where your customers and business are located.
Read More: What is a CDN?
A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, speeds up web loading by keeping copies of your website in various places worldwide, so your international visitors don’t have to wait for data to travel across continents to get to them.
Eco Web Hosting WordPress Hosting Plans
£5.00 /month on annual contract
- £5.99/month No Contract
- ❌ One Website Included
- ✅ 25 Email Accounts Included
- ✅ 25GB SSD Storage
- ✅ Unlimited Bandwith
- ✅ Free CDN
- 🌲 One Tree Planted per month
£8.34 /month on annual contract
- £9.99/month No Contract
- ✅ 3 Websites Included
- ✅ 50 Email Accounts Included
- ✅ 75GB SSD Storage
- ✅ Unlimited Bandwith
- ✅ Free CDN
- 🌲 Two Trees Planted per month
£16.67 /month on annual contract
- £19.99/month No Contract
- ✅ 10 Websites Included
- ✅ 100 Email Accounts Included
- ✅ 250GB SSD Storage
- ✅ Unlimited Bandwith
- ✅ Free CDN
- 🌲 Four Trees Planted per month
£33.34 /month on annual contract
- £39.99/month No Contract
- ✅ Unlimited Websites Included
- ✅ Unlimited Email Accounts Included
- ✅ Unlimited SSD Storage
- ✅ Unlimited Bandwith
- ✅ Free CDN
- 🌲 Ten Trees Planted per month
While WPBuzz offers just two plans, Eco Web Hosting offers a wide assortment of plans, including four WordPress plans. All of the plans include a wide array of standard and optimization features, which we definitely appreciate. The only true differences between the four plans come down to scale: number of WordPress websites, storage space, and number of email accounts per website. If you are a small business with only one website, you only need the Basic plan. On the other hand, if you are an Agency or manage many websites, you’ll want to go with the Professional or Ultimate plans.
Read More: How much storage do I need?
10GB is plenty for websites that don’t have a ton of high-quality photos and don’t store videos locally. If you are using WebP as your image format – which you should be doing! – then you could have a thousand or two of WebP photos and not need more storage. Also, if you embed video from YouTube or Vimeo, you don’t need to worry about storage either. But if you store your videos locally, and especially if the videos are 1080p or 4K, then you may want to upgrade your storage.
And since Eco Web Hosting is all about caring for the environment, the number of trees planted per month varies based on the plan. The Basic plan only gets one tree per month, while the Ultimate plan gets ten trees per month. According to Eco Web Hosting’s website, the trees are planted in Haiti, Indonesia, or Nepal. However, all four plans use 100% renewable energy to power your website.
Eco Web Hosting WordPress Performance Tests
As with all of our web hosting reviews, we tested Eco Web Hosting using our test WordPress website to see how Eco Web performs in real life. We ran all of these tests using the Basic Managed WordPress plan. As the performance characteristics do not vary among Eco Web Hosting’s WordPress plans, we chose the smallest plan to run our tests. There are three components: Google Core Web Vitals, GTMetrix Performance, and worldwide speed testing. The results are below.
Google Core Web Vitals – Lighthouse Scores
First Contentful Paint (FCP)
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Total Blocking Time (TBT)
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Speed Index (SI)
Total Performance Score
Read More: What do these scores mean?
Google likes fast-loading websites because they provide amazing visitor experiences. These scores show how fast and how smoothly a website loads. The better your score is, the greater chance that Google will increase the search ranking of your page, especially if your competitors score poorly. Google prefers everyone to score 90-100, while 50-89 is ok. A score below 50 is poor.
While part of these scores will depend on how efficient your website is, part of these scores also depend on how fast your web host provider is. Additionally, if your web host provider offers optimization features such as minification, then that will improve your score. You can learn more about these metrics on this Google web page.
We expected Eco Web Hosting to perform very similarly to WPBuzz; however, this was not the case. Eco Web Hosting’s performance on Google Lighthouse was worse than WPBuzz. Having said that, we believe this is due to us hosting our website in London with Eco Web Hosting compared to hosting it in the United States with WPBuzz. As Google’s servers are in the U.S., the extra time required for data to travel between continents would explain the poorer scores.
However, the scores above are from a page with optimized WebP images already. For pages with unoptimized images, we found a quirk with StackCache CDN’s image optimization software, which Eco Web Hosting and WPBuzz share. We originally ran a page full of unoptimized JPEG images hosted on WPBuzz through Lighthouse. Unfortunately, those results were not great at all.
After discussing the results with WPBuzz support, the main problem was image optimization. While the servers were delivering optimized images, Google Lighthouse was not capturing this and instead displaying the unoptimized JPEGs. WPBuzz support could not figure out why this was occurring other than to note that the optimized WebP images are being displayed in real life.
If you are using unoptimized images – especially JPEGs – this is a flaw and takes away one of the reasons to go with WPBuzz or Eco Web Hosting. However, if you convert your images to WebP or another optimized format, then the image optimization won’t matter since you are already optimized. But this is something to consider if you use JPEGs or other large image formats on your WordPress site. The scores above and below are based on pages with optimized WebP images.
| Lighthouse Metric | Raw Value | Lighthouse Score |
|---|---|---|
| First Contentful Paint (FCP) | 1.3 seconds | 98 |
| Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | 4.2 seconds | 44 |
| Total Blocking Time (TBT) | 50 ms (miliseconds) | 100 |
| Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) | 0.021 | 100 |
| Speed Index (SI) | 2.2 seconds | 99 |
GTMetrix Performance
Read More: What do these scores mean?
As mentioned above, Google likes fast-loading websites because they provide amazing visitor experiences. GTMetrix analyzes and scores web pages using mostly the same criteria as Google Lighthouse. However, GTMetrix allows you to customize the scoring based on location and type of mobile device. GTMetrix also weighs criteria differently than Google itself, providing another opinion on how the user experiences your website loading.
We used three scores from GTMetrix that match Lighthouse for comparison: FCP, SI, and LCP. We then added the Time to First Byte (TTFB) because many people are interested in this score. Finally, we also added the total fully loaded time to measure a complete loading.Based on GTMetrix’s documentation, there are how the scores measure:
- TTFB: Good is less than 800ms and bad is above 1800ms.
- FCP: Good is less than 0.9 seconds and bad is above 1.6 seconds.
- SI: Good is less than 1.3 seconds and bad is above 2.3 seconds.
- LCP: Good is less than 1.2 seconds and bad is above 2.4 seconds.
- Total Load Time: GTMetrix doesn’t have a score chart for this, but based on our own testing, less than three seconds is good and over five seconds is bad.
You can learn more about these metrics on this GTMetrix web page.
While Eco Web Hosting has a good TTFB score of around 700ms, the rest aren’t that great. They are worse than WPBuzz, which uses the same StackCP platform and CDN. However, Eco Web hosting had some fantastic scores, including London, which came in blazing fast with a total load time of 1.3 seconds. Of course, we hosted our website in London, so this isn’t surprising. Yet, this is an excellent score if your customers are in the UK.
We were surprised that some other cities had speedy scores, too, including San Francisco, Tokyo, Frankfurt, and Sydney. StackCache CDN only has 21 locations worldwide, compared to Cloudflare’s 260+ locations. Thus, while Eco Web Hosting’s average scores are dragged down by some lagging locations (Mumbai and Hong Kong were the worst), other locations performed quite well.
Having said that, if you need top-tier global performance, we recommend a provider that uses Cloudflare’s top-level Enterprise CDN. Rocket.net, GoDaddy, and Kinsta all bundle Cloudflare Enterprise into their WordPress hosting plans. You will want to study the scores by location and decide based on where your customers are located.
| Server Location | Time to First Byte (TTFB) | First Contentful Paint (FCP) | Speed Index (SI) | Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | Fully Loaded Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chicago | 549ms | 1.8s | 3.0s | 3.3s | 4.1s |
| Dubai | 1200ms | 2.3s | 2.5s | 2.5s | 2.9s |
| Frankfurt | 428ms | 1.2s | 1.8s | 2.0s | 2.1s |
| Johannesburg | 966ms | 2.3s | 2.6s | 2.7s | 3.2s |
| Hong Kong | 690ms | 2.4s | 3.8s | 4.3s | 5.8s |
| London | 469ms | 1.0s | 1.1s | 1.1s | 1.3s |
| Mumbai | 935ms | 2.6s | 3.7s | 4.0s | 5.3s |
| San Francisco | 490ms | 1.2s | 1.4s | 1.5s | 1.6s |
| São Paulo | 830ms | 2.2s | 3.3s | 3.6s | 4.9s |
| Singapore | 728ms | 2.2s | 2.7s | 2.9s | 3.2s |
| Sydney | 723ms | 1.6s | 1.9s | 1.9s | 2.2s |
| Tokyo | 590ms | 1.3s | 1.5s | 1.5s | 1.7s |
| Vancouver | 545ms | 1.8s | 2.9s | 3.2s | 4.0s |
Worldwide Load Testing
Unfortunately, we could not perform a Worldwide Load Test on Eco Web Hosting. When we attempted the load test, Eco Web Hosting blocked our traffic, much like WPBuzz. This is not necessarily bad, as it means that Eco Web Hosting is highly sensitive to DDoS attacks and blocks them immediately. That is great!
Our Eco Web Hosting WordPress Review Recommendation
We like Eco Web Hosting’s commitment to caring for the environment. Running a website uses energy, and multiplied by the millions of websites worldwide, the Internet is not an innocent player in climate change. Thus, we celebrate Eco Web Hosting planting over 177,000 trees and offsetting over 8,000 tons of carbon dioxide as of April 2023. Eco Web Hosting notes that this is the equivalent of not burning 15,000 tons of coal.
However, when it comes to running your WordPress website on Eco Web Hosting’s servers, what is our verdict? We’d recommend Eco Web Hosting if your business or your customers care about the environment and you want to use a “green” web host. Especially since Eco Web Hosting offers “stickers” you can place on your website, letting visitors know you are hosting using 100% renewable energy. That is awesome and could be a great way to show your business’s commitment to the environment.
We also recommend Eco Web Hosting if you want an easy, simple WordPress hosting solution. StackCP’s interface that shows you the risk level of each optimization option is very cool, in our opinion, and perfect for non-techies. Eco Web Hosting will also transfer your website for free, which we recommend if something goes wrong. Finally, we appreciate Eco Web Hosting providing a 45-day money-back guarantee, which is longer than the industry average of 30 days.
Yet, we’d recommend comparing Eco Web Hosting to similarly-priced web hosts such as Hostinger or KnownHost. If you don’t need unlimited websites or are willing to pay more for better performance, WPX is an excellent alternative, albeit a bit more expensive.
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