Shared Hosting Tips in the UK

During the Domain Summit 2025 that took place in London, Filip Borcov, Founder of Site.pro, met with Seb de Lemos, CEO and Co-Founder of Hosting.com. The two CEOs discussed the hosting service climate in the UK, the relationship between hosting companies and website builders, and shared insights on marketing and branding.

The UK Hosting Market

The hosting market in the UK is not as fast-growing as in some other countries, with an annual growth rate of around 5%. This makes every customer important, and maintaining a loyal customer base should be a top priority for hosting companies.

According to Seb, Hosting.com often becomes a customer’s second or third host. The company has a very low churn rate — less than 1% per month — and many of its clients are long-term customers. Hosting.com focuses not on acquiring as many new customers as possible, but on retaining existing ones and improving its services to meet their needs. Currently, Hosting.com adds around 1500 websites per day.

Payment Gateways in the UK

Most people in the UK pay with credit or debit cards. Online merchants usually use Stripe Payments as their preferred payment processing solution.

PayPal has seen increased usage in recent years, but most Britons don’t use it for continuous payments — rather for one-off transactions. Historically, billing in the UK was done through direct debit, but it hasn’t been especially reliable or transparent, as the process of direct withdrawal is largely manual. The main issue is that you can’t always be certain if a payment has gone through, so businesses often have to assume that it has.

The automation of direct debit was first pioneered by GoCardless, and currently direct debits are slowly being replaced by open banking solutions.

Hosting Companies vs Website Builders

Hosting providers do compete with website builders, although they don’t offer the same product to the same audience. For example, users come to Hosting.com to host websites they have already built on WordPress. Still, large B2C website builders gradually consume a part of the market that belongs to hosting providers, because, aside from their main product, they also sell domains and hosting.

Ideally, hosting providers would like to capture part of the market currently held by website builders, by offering their own website-building tools. However, it is difficult to compete with large, well-established companies that focus solely on developing website builders. As a result, when a hosting provider offers a website builder, it is usually aimed at existing customers — those who have previously purchased domains or hosting — rather than at new users unfamiliar with the brand.

It is important for a business to know its identity and capitise on it. Hosting.com knows that they provide hosting for WordPress websites, they recently started a partnership with Rocket.net, one of the fast-growing hosting companies in the US.

Unlike major website builder companies, local hosting providers often lack the resources for extensive A/B testing and experimentation, which can lead to inconsistencies in customer experience.

Product Mindset

It’s more important than ever to adopt a product mindset — to think about the Aha-moments that capture customers’ attention and make them excited about your platform.

Hosting companies that have been in business for many years often provide technically robust products but don’t always communicate their value effectively. A company may offer excellent technical support and service, yet fail to invest enough in communication, testing, and user feedback.

Lessons From Failures

Hosting.com and Site.pro have experienced their share of failures, but these have provided valuable lessons for new businesses:

Fail #1: Not having a clear plan or vision for your company.
It’s crucial to understand the value of your business, its worth, and the direction of its growth. A lack of clarity often leads to regret. You might have great technology, but be lacking a clear vision of your business. Without a vision, a company cannot change nor scale.

Fail #2: Creating a new brand separate from the old one.
It’s easier to build trust with customers when different products operate under the same brand. From a marketing perspective, it’s also more cost-effective, since brand awareness benefits all associated products.

Customers and Rebranding

When a product undergoes rebranding, the service often remains the same — or even improves. However, customers are loyal to the brands they know and can be resistant to sudden changes. The question is: what should a company do when rebranding becomes inevitable?

Site.pro has been merging two brands over the past year. After extensive testing, the team concluded that rebranding doesn’t significantly affect customer relationships. While it may take time for customers to get used to new logos and visual identities, if the service remains good, they will stay with the company even if they aren’t thrilled about the rebrand.

For companies, merging brands is generally more beneficial than keeping them separate. Umbrella branding strengthens brand recognition and marketing efficiency, while separate advertising efforts tend to dilute it. It is proven again and again by giants, such as Virgin, Yandex, MS—congromerates buy out local services, rebrand them, and instantly increase revenue of rebranded products. The real challenge lies in acquiring new customers, not in retaining existing ones who are already paying for the service.

Is There a Reason Not to Join Brands?

Actually, yes. When a company owns multiple brands that compete with each other, it can sometimes be more advantageous to keep them separate. Customers may migrate from one service to another, but if both belong to the same company, no revenue is lost.

This strategy is common in industries such as automotive, hosting, and confectionery. Which approach makes more sense depends on the specific situation — different companies require different strategies. However, when brand unification does make sense, companies must manage the transition carefully and communicate it clearly to customers.

To join or not to join? The answer is always: conduct A/B testing to find out.

How to Satisfy Different Markets

Both Hosting.com and Site.pro operate internationally. Hosting.com runs 25 global brands under one roof, some of them are self-built (StablePoint, Verpex), some are acquired and then rebranded. The company has brands in multiple countries with fast-growing markets— India, Colombia, Kenya.

Site.pro, on the other hand, has a single brand that operates globally, serving over 100 countries with 40+ payment gateways. However, serving many markets, as beneficial for business as it is, comes with its own set of obstacles.

When expanding, companies often face a variety of local demands. Customers from Bangladesh may require local payment gateways; customers from Thailand—local tax compliance; and so on. It’s easy for a business to fall into the trap of trying to satisfy everyone and stretching its resources too thin.

That’s why businesses should prioritise markets where they already have paying customers. Once the service in an existing market is optimised, they can move on to new ones.

Without clear prioritisation, growth becomes difficult, and it’s crucial to define your key markets. For Site.pro, for example, it’s the United States, the United Kingdom, Lithuania, and several African countries. But the company is planning to focus even more precisely, aiming at UAE in particular with its ERP and accounting software.

The Question of Free Trade

There are a lot of new businesses starting in the developing countries of Africa and Asia right now, and its market growth and potential are obvious. But both political and legal restrictions imposed by relationships between countries prevent businesses from operating and collecting payment freely.

This, however, only applies to business entities, and not natural persons. A natural person is able to manage companies under different jurisdictions in different countries. A European company cannot, for instance, trade with China, but a natural person can: it includes finding partners and sharing business. You can have partnerships with Chinese companies as a natural person, but no official brand relations, agreements, or transactions as a company. It is, of course, a risk, but some businesses are willing to take it for the sake of profit growth.

For companies, it would be beneficial to be able to collect payment worldwide, but payment gateways often belong to particular countries with their laws and restrictions. For instance, Stripe belongs to the US, and hence when a government imposes a set of sanctions and rules, they have to follow them. Additional pressure can be put on companies by investors and paying customers.

Another problem is local restrictions, preventing international companies from entering the market from within. A good example would be the African market with its range of payment gateways being on the issue for hosting providers and website builders. But it’s far from being the only one—Nigeria has its own big players international companies would have to compete with. In a way, it is a way to protect local businesses from global giants, but it also restricts them from further growth.

Business and Morality

Despite countries like Iran and North Korea being extremely closeted, there are ways to find partners there and trade through them. Working as a group, any business can trade anywhere. So, what prevents businesses from selling their products in North Korea? Mainly, external pressure put by banks and the moral side of this question.

Many businesses would like to explore new, previously unknown markets. Iran is a big country which has a lot of great local hosting companies, partnering with them will bring mostly benefits, speaking from a financial standpoint. But the Iranian political regime makes it nearly impossible for European countries to trade there. Although it is curious that a giant like Google still sells ads in Iran just like in any other country. Still, a lot of businesses have a moral code that doesn’t let them support economies of countries which have policies violating human rights.

But do businesses have to agree with a country’s political course to trade there? Would a hosting company be comfortable having a data center in China with its set of regulations regarding data privacy? It is a question to be discussed with the team and customers.

Final Thoughts

The UK hosting market may be mature and slower-growing than in other regions, but its strength lies in customer loyalty, service quality, and long-term relationships. As the industry evolves — with open banking replacing traditional payment systems, website builders competing for users, and companies exploring global markets — success will depend on adaptability and product vision.