Update to new Professional Hosting accounts

As of today the price to purchase a new Professional Hosting account is £7.95 per month. This only affects new purchases at this time. We’re increasing the price due to the substantial investment we’ve made into both the Professional Hosting platform and the overall company during the past 24 months. Moving forward, the pricing change will help us to keep improving and deliver a better product. Unlike other providers we’re committed to providing every essential feature as standard. Some of the biggest improvements we’ve introduced are as follows:

Snapshot

Our on demand Snapshot tool goes one step further than our automated backups (also provided free of charge). Snapshot allows you to make an instant copy of your website data at any time. Moreover, you can download the zipped file, for offline safe keeping. We recommend you always keep an offline copy of your site data for emergencies. Snapshot and our automated backups are provided as standard, we don’t upsell this as an optional extra. You can read more on using Snapshot here: https://www.34sp.com/kb/146/how-to-manage-snapshots.

Unlimited Weebly

There is no longer any page limit when using the Weebly site building tool on your Professional Hosting account. You’re free to create as many web pages as you like, and again, at no extra charge.

Improved security and performance

In addition to making underlying changes to the Professional Hosting architecture for increased security, we’ve also bolstered our network connectivity and deployed enhanced anti-DDoS technology. Most of these items happen quietly in the background, and we never mention them. We do hope you see their impact though, faster, more reliable and more secure hosting.

Free hacked site mitigation (WordPress only)

Despite our best efforts to protect sites, shared hosting platforms do remain vulnerable. If your WordPress site does get hacked, we’ll work with you for no extra cost to get you back on your feet. You don’t need to pay a penny more or purchase an additional service, we will help you as best we can. Many providers charge for this service as an optional extra. You can read more on our hacked site mitigation process here: https://www.34sp.com/wordpress-hacked.

Support team increase

In order to keep delivering on our support promise, we’ve been hiring aggressively over the past 24 months. We now have our largest support team in our 17 year history; this means we now have our highest ever ratio of support team members/clients. The result should be quicker responses to phone calls and emails, seven days a week.

Let’s Encrypt SSL

We’re keen supporters of this effort to secure the web for free. As such we’ve offered Let’s Encrypt certificates for several years now. In the future we will be adding subdomain and wildcard support, too. Unlike other providers, we don’t require you to spend a penny extra to secure your website.

Improved Mercury spam filtering

In late 2016 we completed the testing and implementation of a brand new spam filtering system on the Mercury email platform. We replaced the older policyd system with a much more modern implementation. This new system works far better with modern anti-spam policies such as SPF. The net result is faster email with fewer delays and less spam.
If you purchased your Professional Hosting account after 2014, your email is hosted on our Mercury platform as standard. If not, we’re working to migrate everyone over to this platform.

What’s next

On top of all of these improvements, we want to deliver even more great enhancements to our Professional Hosting range. Therefore we are raising the base price of this plan. At this new price, less than 30p per day, we believe the Professional Hosting plan continues to offer fantastic value for dependable, secure and powerful shared hosting in the UK. The complete feature list provided as standard with every Professional Hosting plan is now:

• Automated backups
• On demand Snapshot backups
• Free Let’s Encrypt SSL with automated renewal
• Unlimited transfer and no page limits
• UK based support over email and phone
• CloudFlare CDN access
• Enhanced DDoS protection
• Weebly site builder with unlimited pages
• Mercury email with 100 mailboxes, webmail, IMAP, POP3 and SMTP
• Advanced shared hosting security
• SSH access

The new pricing allows us to push even further, from hiring additional staff to deploying even better features during the next few years. As always, we believe in fair and simple pricing built on transparency and openness. The price of £7.95 includes VAT and no hidden fees. Finally, we’re also committed to giving back to the bigger community. We don’t often talk about it, but your business helps us to support hundreds of UK charities with free hosting. You can check out some of the great causes here: https://www.34sp.com/charity-hosting

If you have any questions about any of these features or the price rise, drop us an email to support@34sp.com, and we will be happy to assist.