Platform – Acorn Web Hosting

LEADING HOSTING

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.

Learn more

Global CDN

Our free Acorn Web Hosting Content Delivery Network caches your content at data centres around the world.

Learn more

Optimised PHP

Our custom code makes every website load faster. We aren’t subject to the limits imposed by old-school hosting.

Learn more

Load balancing

Our reputation for rock-solid server uptime is built on our innovative load balancing features.

Learn more

Three platforms

Each sub-platform – WordPress, Linux and Windows – is optimised for stellar performance.

Learn more

Google DNS

Our custom code makes every website load faster. We aren’t subject to the limits imposed by old-school hosting.

Learn more

Our free CDN – for a faster website, globally

The Acorn Web Hosting Content Delivery Network will cache your website at different locations around the world, so that it loads faster wherever your users are. It’s free, and there are no bandwidth limits – so we recommend using it all the time.

Compress code and images, automatically

We created the Website Acceleration Suite as a way to get all sites to load faster. This is better for your users, and good for SEO: we know how much importance Google attaches to web page loading speed.

So our Suite optimises the things you might get warned-about in page speed scoring. Images are resized and compressed, and HTML, CSS and JavaScript is minified. That’s not all: there are over 40 performance-boosting features that you can use to fine-tune your website.

We also made a safe ‘one-click’ option for those who don’t have the time or inclination to get too technical. Toggle it on, and you’ll see immediate, dramatic improvements.

More power than cPanel

By not being restricted by cPanel, we can offer more features and better performance.

Numer OF Accounts

Acorn

Unlimited

CloudFlare Pro

Restricted

Disk Space

Acorn

Unlimited

cpanel

Restricted

Band Width

Acorn CDN

Unlimited

Cpanel

Unlimited

Autoscaling Cloud Platform

Acorn

Cpanel

Redudndant web server

Acorn

Cpanel

Build in Replication Fail over

Acorn

Cpanel

Global CDN

Acorn

Cpanel

Website Accerlation suite

Acorn

Cpanel

Anit-DDos Protection

Acorn

Cpanel

Built-In Web Application Firewall

Acorn

Cpanel

Isolated Web, MySQL, FTP, Control Panel and Storage

Acorn

Cpanel

E-mail kept securely away from website storage

Acorn

Cpanel

Windows Server

Acorn

Cpanel

WordPress Optimised

Acorn

Cpanel

Google DNS

Acorn

Cpanel

origin web Hosting

Acorn CDN

From Free

CloudFlare Pro

More power than cPanel

By not being restricted by cPanel, we can offer more features and better performance.

Number of Accounts

unlimited

Restricted by the server’s hardware

Disk Space

unlimited

Restricted by the server’s hardware

Bandwidth

unlimited

Restricted by the server’s hardware

Autoscaling Cloud Platform

Redundant Web Servers

Built-in Replication & Failover

Global CDN

Website Acceleration Suite

Anti-DDOS Protection

Built-in Web Application Firewall

Isolated Web, MySQL, FTP, Control Panel and Storage

E-mail kept securely away from website storage

Windows Server

WordPress Optimised

WordPress Staging

Google DNS

What makes our platform so outstanding?

We developed a multi-server platform that no other web host can compete with.

Don’t Just Take Our Word For It

We chose Acorn Web Hosting after suffering a lot of downtime. Since we switched our hosting to Acorn we have not suffered any downtime and our website loads time is much faster.

We needed a web hosting provider that provided reliable support after being let down by other hosting providers. We now have all the support we need.

We chose Acorn Web Hosting after our previous hosting provider Godaddy let us down repeatedly.

Autoscaling: access to as many servers as your site needs

All our web hosting services use Acorn Web Hosting’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 Acorn Web Hosting 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.

These tests were carried out by LoadImpact.com, using 50 concurrent requests. They showed that Acorn Web Hosting were up to 48x faster than other web hosts.

Page speed is crucial for better search engine rankings and happy visitors.

In this example the site traffic increased 20% so the platform automatically scaled up to reallocate more servers.

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 Acorn Web Hosting 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 Acorn Web Hosting, your site stays online, and remains fast, whatever load the servers are under.

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.

All domains hosted with us benefit from Google DNS. Acorn Web Hosting Resellers can take advantage of our white-label Virtual Name Servers and offer this rock solid, cutting edge DNS solution under their own brand.

Not only powerful, but versatile too

You’re given the choice of what operating system or content management system you want to use: Linux, Windows or WordPress. If you want to use all three in one account, you’ll need our Reseller Hosting plan.

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 70 one-click installs of popular open source apps, including Drupal, Joomla! & Magento.

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.

Windows Platform

Our robust Windows web hosting is backed by a speed-boosting IIS cluster. This cluster provides redundancy: there’s no single point of failure. Our Windows platform is optimised to be fast and secure. It’s the perfect choice for sites that use ASP, ASP.NET, MS Access, or MS SQL.

The host with the most

As we develop our own hosting products, we can give you better value. All web hosting includes:

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 2.2 GHz Intel Xeon (Cascade Lake) 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 Midlands, UK. 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.

Knowledgeable UK support

All our technical support staff are based at our Nottinghamshire, UK HQ. They have ample industry experience, having worked with our directors for many years. If you have a really thorny issue, they have direct access to our developers in the same building. They can be contacted through instant live chat and our email ticketing system.

Don’t Just Take Our Word For It

We chose Acorn Web Hosting after suffering a lot of downtime. Since we switched our hosting to Acorn we have not suffered any downtime and our website loads time is much faster.

We needed a web hosting provider that provided reliable support after being let down by other hosting providers. We now have all the support we need.

We needed a reliable WordPress hosting provider. We chose Acorn through a recommendation after testing other providers.

We chose Acorn Web Hosting after our previous hosting provider Godaddy let us down repeatedly.

Forever evolving

It’s our responsibility to keep you on the most technically-advanced web hosting platform. We’re committed to improving our services and adding new features. It’s something we work on every day.

Frequently asked questions about our platform

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 data centres in the Midlands, UK. Public content from the site will be stored in servers around the world by our free CDN.

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). If you’re a Acorn Web Hosting Reseller, your customers will be covered by 2FA too.

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.