Catalyst2's story began in 2000 when Paul Redpath, its director and founder, started a small business with a single server. Two decades later, Catalyst2 is home to thousands of UK sites running on a fully cloud-based infrastructure. The company is (rightly) proud of having won numerous awards for its services, including being the best web host in 2020, as well as having the best customer service. Some of Catalyst2's most notable clients include Royal British Legion, FareShare, Daylesford Organic, Virgin Care and the list goes on. Catalyst2 has two offices in the UK, the main one being registered in Belfast, UK. Its two data centers are also based in the UK: one is in London Docklands and the other is in Reading. Both share a Tier 3+ infrastructure, which involves the use of double-powered and redundant servers, storage, network links, and other IT components. Though lacking in glamour, the official Catalyst website is easy to use and well stocked with information about the company and all of its services. On top of it all, if you explore the 'About' section and head over to 'Our Team', you'll learn a bit more about Catalyst2's founder, his right-hand man (and co-director), and see how they and the rest of the team Catalyst2 team would have looked like they were cartoon characters. It's a bit trivial, but a nice little touch all the same. Unsurprisingly, the site is only available in English, and prices are displayed in GBP. He also has a blog full of short but well written articles on a variety of hosting related topics. If you like social networking sites, you'll find Catalyst2 on a number of them, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. However, some of these accounts show no signs of life.
Catalyst2 plans are initially quite cheap, but there are some major limitations (Image credit: Catalyst2)
Award
catalst2 currently offers five web hosting plans, but you can also get three additional packages for premium Windows hosting and three more for premium Linux hosting. The cheapest plan called "Mega Deal" will cost you only €11.99 (€16.70) for a full year of hosting and will provide you with up to one hosted domain and one subdomain, 500MB of disk space, 5GB of data. transfer, standard control panel, one-click installs, an FTP account, file manager, support for a variety of scripts, weekly backups, antivirus, basic spam filtering and the list goes on and on. While the resources with the "Mega Deal" don't seem like a big deal (yes, we're talking ridiculous restrictions on storage space), when we factor in the price, the plan starts to look a lot better. While you can typically choose between a monthly or annual billing cycle, with "Mega Deal" only the latter is available. In addition to this, Catalyst2 provides five packages titled Animals ("Squirrel", "Kangaroo", "Giraffe", etc.) for managed VPS hosting, four for email hosting, three for reseller hosting, and three for flex servers (ie that is, short-term managed dedicated servers). For more information on managed hosting, dedicated servers, or other hosting-related services (such as managed AWS, backup and disaster recovery, and more), you can contact the team. Catalyst2 support. While catalyst2 doesn't offer a free trial, all of their shared hosting plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee. When it comes to payment methods, Catalyst2 accepts all major credit/debit cards and PayPal.
Ease of use
Since catalyst2 is best known for its fully managed 'high end' VPS solutions in the UK, let's try one of them. However, if you're not sure which solution best suits your needs, go to "Hosting" and click "I'm not sure!" to get a recommendation. After submitting a short form that includes an expected number of daily visits to your site, the number of email accounts you think you need, GB of disk space, the type of site you want to build, and your email address, will be contacted. by a Catalyst2 staff member with some suggestions. Either way, choosing one of the many options that Catalyst2 offers shouldn't overwhelm you, as everything is displayed in a very clear yet detailed way. All plans also include a free website migration, so if you want to take advantage of it, don't forget to let the Catalyst2 team know. The second option you will be asked is which operating system (OS) you want to use on your server, and here you can choose between the Linux and Windows options. To make a purchase, you'll need to create an account with Catalyst2, which means you'll need to provide a lot of personal and billing information, and create a strong password.
Easily manage your website using cPanel (Image credit: cPanel) Depending on which operating system you've chosen, you'll either use cPanel or Plesk as your control panel, both of which are as easy to use as possible. Since most Catalyst2 packages include a one-click Softaculous installer, dozens of open source web applications (such as WordPress) will be yours in no time. It's also worth noting that catalyst2 offers support for PHP 7, Perl 5.8, SSI, MIME, and Cron Jobs, but not for some of the equally popular scripting languages like Python or Ruby on Rails, which seems a bit strange. Anyway, on the last note, if you're not particularly tech-savvy and hoping that a beginner-friendly website builder would make building your website even easier, then you won't. You're out of luck, because catalyst2 doesn't. Don't provide any.
We use GTmetrix to measure the performance of our Catalyst2 site (Image credit: GTmetrix)
Speed and experience
Among the reasons why we should choose catalyst2, this provider describes itself as "fast" and goes on to say that their server speeds are rated "very good" as calculated by serverscores.com. With that in mind, we decided to test the speed of the main Catalyst2 website, as provided by our favorite website performance analysis tool by the name of GTmetrix. The results were indeed “very good” and ended up with a B rating (91%) for GTmetrix. The site took 7.1 seconds to fully load (which is pretty average) and (again) with a pretty average 94 requests to do so. Catalyst 2 claims 99,997% network uptime as of May 2007, and since they use Tier 3+ infrastructure, this should mean at least 99,982% uptime per year. After closely monitoring the Catalyst2 site for two weeks (via Uptime Robot), we saw zero downtime, resulting in a report showing 100% flawless uptime. At the same time, there were no significant spikes in response time, showing a stable average of 342,32 milliseconds.
Support
The first of the prominent reasons why we should choose Catalyst2 out of the sea of similar Managed Hosting oriented hosts is their 'great service' backed by 24/2 UK customer support. With this 'star team' you can use a phone number (free for UK users), live chat, support ticket system or just send them an email. There are also two separate phone numbers (one for UK citizens and one for international customers) and an email address for business enquiries. It is important to note that with Catalyst24 the level of support you will get depends on the hosting package you have purchased. So with simple shared hosting packages you will get standard (but still great) support, while with premium managed and dedicated server hosting packages you will be entitled to XNUMX/XNUMX premium support.
The Catalyst2 Knowledge Base covers a wide variety of common web hosting topics (Image Credit: Catalyst2) To access the Catalyst2 Knowledge Base, you will need to go to the 'About' section and select it from there, though there is already a 'Support' section, which makes it all a bit counterintuitive. However, the knowledge base is well stocked with detailed guides covering a wide variety of common issues and concerns. There is also a service status update page to help you stay informed about outages and scheduled maintenance.
Competition
US-based Kinsta and UK-based Catalyst2 are renowned for their fully managed hosting solutions, which are varied enough to suit most needs. However, the similarities end there. While all of Catalyst2's data centers are located in the UK (making them more suitable for UK users), Kinsta has their own CDN with 28 locations around the world (making them more attractive to the international market). On the other hand, while Kinsta offers ten cloud managed WordPress hosting solutions of varying sizes, with Catalyst2 you can choose between shared server, cloud, managed VPS, and dedicated server solutions, and most of them will offer better value for money. Cloudways is a Malta-based hosting provider, one of the most popular options for fully managed cloud hosting, as well as one of the pioneers of cloud hosting in general. In terms of price and functionality, Cloudways beats Catalyst2 by a hair. However, since Cloudways is aimed at more experienced and technically savvy users, if you're new here, Catalyst2 is definitely your safest bet. HostGator offers similar hosting options to Catalyst2, and apparently at a similar price. However, at the end of the promotional period, HostGator might blow you away with the huge price increase, while there are no such surprises with Catalyst2. Nonetheless, HostGator's entry-level plans still look much more appealing than Catalyst2's and for two simple reasons: they place fewer restrictions on your resources and they come with HostGator's own plans.