Important Announcement: Daily.co.uk is now a part of Tsohost.

Daily.co.uk (also known as Daily Internet) is a web hosting company targeting users in the UK. The company is based in Nottingham and offers a range of hosting plans, including cheap shared hosting on Windows and Linux, as well as domain name registrations.

Founded by Abby Hardoon in 2006, Daily Internet PLC was originally called Hostvue (UK) Ltd. Mr Hardoon previously established Host Europe PLC which runs a number of well-known companies including 123-Reg, WebFusion and Magic Moments Internet. He sold Host Europe to Pipex for £31 million in 2006 and launched Daily Internet officially in 2007.

Hosting Plans

Daily Internet places equal emphasis on domain name registrations, shared hosting and VPS hosting, but promotes VPS plans prominently on its home page. Here’s a brief run down of its web hosting services.

• VPS plans are split into Linux, Windows and Windows Hyper-V variants. Within each variant, there are a range of plans with differing specifications. All offer root access, and Linux users can choose their OS. There’s a lot of detail on each plan, and unusually, it’s promoted more heavily on the website than shared hosting. Support and management is not included and is charged in addition. Backups are not included.
• Shared website hosting is available on three plans: Starter Pro, Home Pro and Unlimited Pro. Starter Pro is a very basic, very low cost plan which offers unlimited bandwidth but not much else. The most expensive plan is a more traditional unlimited shared hosting plan. Customers can choose Windows or Linux shared hosting. Backups are not included.
• Reseller hosting is split into two plans, v2 Starter and v2 Unlimited. Resellers can only host 20 client accounts on the Starter plan. Web space is restricted to just 1 GB on Starter. There are no space or bandwidth limits on the more expensive plan, although only 5 MySQL databases are permitted. That means ‘true’ reselling with multiple WordPress installs would be out of the question. Again, no backups are included.
• Ecommerce hosting is effectively a site builder plan with similar features and benefits to shared hosting services. The main difference is the extra set of ecommerce features, although not all of these are free across the board. For example, customers on eShop Personal cannot set up a Facebook shop, Google Translate or social bookmarking. Of the three packages, eShop Enterprise is the most comprehensive, but there are still strict limits on the number of products and categories that can be created. Daily Internet says it takes disaster recovery backups, but it recommends that customers create manual backups through the eShop system.
• Instant Website hosting is another type of site builder package. There are two variants: Plus and Pro. These are fairly typical, basic website hosting plans marketed at people who prefer not to get into the technical side of website hosting. Backups are not included. Customers can pay a fee to have Daily Internet staff set up their website for them.

Uptime/Downtime

There’s no reference to an uptime guarantee on the Daily Internet website. In a 2010 press release, I found one mention of a 99.9% uptime guarantee, but this specifically relates to its Hosted Exchange email service – not its web hosting service.Daily Internet does have a system status page, but it only gets updated if there’s an issue. The company doesn’t post any uptime statistics on its website.Backups are offered, but they are a chargeable extra. Daily Internet charges £25 per year for weekly backups and £45 per year for daily backups. Backups are stored on a different server to the customer’s website and can be accessed via FTP.

Support

Daily Internet’s primary support channel is its knowledge base. There’s an impressive range of technical help documentation that should help to answer most questions beginners and intermediate users have.Support is provided via email and a UK telephone number. There’s also a fax number. Both are 0845 numbers and are therefore not free to call. Customers outside the UK may struggle to use these numbers at all.Personal support is not provided round the clock. Daily Internet only opens its telephone support department from 9am to 5.30pm on weekdays, excluding bank holidays. Email support is offered via a ticketing system from 7am to 9.30pm on weekdays and from 11am until 7.30pm on weekends and bank holidays.On VPS plans, it appears that setup assistance isn’t included and must be paid for. Most VPS hosts include this for free.The company has an active Twitter feed which is updated with facts and blog posts every few days. It’s not used for support. Its Facebook page is also a one-way stream and staff rarely interact with customers. Interestingly, Abby Hardoon, the company founder, ‘Likes’ the occasional post.

In the News

Before Daily Internet was founded, Abby Hardoon hit the headlines for attempting to remove directors from the Host Europe board after a dispute. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2003/may/01/4

Control Panel

On most of its VPS packages, users are provided with cPanel with WHM or Plesk 11 (Linux) or Plesk 11 only (Windows). This applies all plans except for the cheapest Linux VPS which has no control panel software installed.On Hyper-V Windows VPS plans, Daily Internet customers are provided with WebsitePanel instead of a more well-known solution like cPanel. There is an online demo on the site but the link was broken at the time of writing this review.A separate control panel, MyDaily, is provided for domain name management only.

Extras

Shared hosting customers receive one free domain name (.co.uk or .com) or a free .com transfer. Daily Internet also provides shared hosting customers with £100 in Google AdWords credits. Shared hosting customers get free access to its Fotalia library.Site builders are included for free on shared plans. Although mobile website builders and cloud storage is available, these are only free on a trial basis. Customers on Unlimited Pro get access to a SSL certificate. Some tools you’d expect to be free, such as search engine submission, are chargeable.On ecommerce hosting plans, free domain names are limited to one co.uk on eShop Business and one co.uk or .com on eShop Enterprise. Customers get the same Google Adwords credits as shared hosting clients.VPS plans come with one free IP address.

Money Back Guarantee / Cancellation Policy

Daily Internet’s VPS and shared hosting plans offer a meagre 7-day money-back guarantee. This excludes domain names which are charged at full price if the package is cancelled. The Terms of Service clearly state that no refunds are offered after 7 days.

Summary

Daily Internet clearly markets its services at customers looking for a UK-based host that offers VPS hosting. If you want the flexibility of a host that offers Windows and Linux hosting, you’ll find plenty of plans to suit, but bear in mind the control panel limitations on the Hyper-V plan.Despite its prices being very competitive, some of the limits imposed on the plans are very low and seem outdated. For example, the ‘Unlimited’ reseller account only comes with 5 databases and 10 mailboxes; most resellers would quickly outgrow it. The feature lists for all services seem rich, but once you dig into the detail, you find that the plans aren’t as generous as they first appear: the lack of backups is a good example.Limited support will be a concern to users who like to know help is always at hand. Additionally, the limited money-back guarantee means there’s only a week to test drive Daily Internet before the customer is locked in to a plan. Having said that, there’s a vast amount of detail about what’s on offer, so there wouldn’t be any nasty surprises ahead.Daily Internet clearly relies on a good solid reputation and a well-established reputation in the industry, and the knowledge base is really very good. If you want the safety net of round-the-clock assistance, free backups or truly unlimited resources, you might be better off looking elsewhere.