Guru Web Hosting Review – Best UK WordPress Hosting?

Guru is a UK based web hosting company, their full title is Guru Cloud Hosting.  They have been around for a while, initially offering server hosting under the name UK Dedicated Servers.  Guru offers single site-packages, reseller packages and VPS packages. They have bold claims on their website, claiming to make websites run faster than with comparative hosting, 100% uptime and super-quick WordPress hosting.

I moved this site to Guru just over 2 years ago and I noticed the difference instantly, everything I would normally do with WordPress is noticeably quicker than with my previous host 20i (review here).

I stumbled upon Guru accidentally whilst searching for reviews on another host. I contact sales via the live chat and was offered reseller hosting for £1 which was a nice bonus as my previous hosting package was due to renew very soon, I was also offered a free Boost when I mentioned that I had performance issues with my previous host.

One of my main reasons for moving was performance on a budget and standard cPanel site control panel, both were lacking at 20i which is why I moved. Read my full review of Guru Hosting and find out why I believe it is better than my previous host 20i Hosting and why I think you should give Guru a try – first month just £1.

Who is Guru Cloud Hosting for?

Guru Hosting is for anyone requiring fast UK based hosting.  Guru promotes their WordPress speed and clearly highlight that WordPress runs 89% faster than on an Apache server, 76% faster than Nginx and so on.  Their tag line is “Your website – faster with Guru” which I have found to be true.  I was with 20i before and have been with several other small and large UK based hosting companies and Guru has been the best speed experience I have had.

What features do Guru hosting offer?

Guru Cloud Hosting offers all the standard features of cPanel with a few more bells and whistles. The hosting I am going to focus on is reseller hosting as that is the package that I am currently on. They also offer Shared Cloud Hosting, VPS hosting and Pro packages for both Shared and Reseller offering semi-dedicated power.

Guru Reseller Package

The reseller package is a great option when you want to start your own hosting business, you can set up your own packages, set resources and charge whatever you want. The cPanel WHM is included and you can easily manage users and resources from there.

I use the reseller package to host WordPress sites that I run and also for family, I prefer to operate in this way as each package can be assigned a package with resources, and if in the future I need to move to a host with high resources for an intensive busy site, I can always do a cPanel transfer to transfer all settings easily.

Since I signed up to Guru, they have altered the Reseller Cloud package a little, the resources are the same but the backups are now four-hourly rather than hourly – I still get hourly as I signed up when this was standard. Everything else remains the same.

BOOST Package

All sites have access to 1xCPU and 1xGB RAM which is a standard if not superior specification to most comparable hosts – most offer 256MB/512MB as standard and less CPU. If your site uses WooCommerce or Magento or is very busy, it is recommended to go for the Boost option addon. This costs £5pm and doubles the CPU and RAM providing more power to resource intensive sites.

Server specification

Guru servers run on Cloud Linux which is very popular amongst most major web hosts, Guru adds LiteSpeed and HTTP/2 which is not as common on most web hosts but is great for WordPress websites as there is a free LiteSpeed WordPress cache plugin that takes advantage of this software to cache and serves sites quicker and more efficiently.

One of the big advantages of Guru is the fact that they own their own hardware and are not a virtual host. This means that they control their servers and can be a bit more flexible and helpful when things go wrong. My previous experiences with HostXNow, for example, were soured because they were very rigid with resources and suspended a site without warning. I have had issues with Guru and they upgraded me to Boost to see if it helped and it did.

Another feature to mention is that PHP 7.3 is now offered as standard, this greatly boosts performance of WordPress sites over PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0. I have moved sites from PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0 and witnessed the marked speed and performance increase.

E-Mail

E-mail is a little contentious with some hosts as it is now not provided as standard with all packages. With the rise of free e-mail hosting with Gmail etc, hosts are reducing their e-mail burden by offering it as a premium service.

E-mail is provided in the Reseller packages as standard but the shared hosting package requires an e-mail addon. The explanation from Guru is that they provide hosting over multiple servers which are optimised to maintain high level of service and super quick load times.

Guru use a separate dedicated email platform to ensure email delivery and filter for spam, this leads to a far superior and cleaner e-mail service with less clutter. The drawback to this is that if you simply want to use the forward e-mail service in cpanel, you still need the addon.

A workaround is to use an external e-mail service such as Elastic Email which work well with WordPress and can be used to send order e-mails newsletters and so on.

Other notable features

I have covered some of the main standout features of Guru Hosting including the package specification. I can’t fail to mention the outstanding support offered at Guru. Support is available 24/7 by ticket and live chat and also by phone, support is UK based. They help with everything, even issues with WordPress sites and finding issues when plugins cause conflict.

Uptime is very impressive, all of my sites average at 100% with UptimeRobot which is excellent, there have been some instances of downtime but they are usually a minute or less. Some longer downtime instances were due to my WordPress plugin conflicts.

This is the current uptime report as of 7th January 2020. Pretty impressive as Guru’s pricing is a lot more affordable than comparable providers.

The response times have improved but they were never that slow anyway.

PHP Versions

If your sites still runs on older PHP such as 5.2/5.6, Guru runs HardenedPHP which secures old and unsupported versions. If your site is not ready or upgrading will cause too many issues, this is a great feature as most hosts no longer offer anything below 5.6 and even that will be increased to nothing below PHP 7.0 very soon.

Currently, the default PHP setting has been changed to 7.0 from 5.6 and PHP 7.4 has been added. I haven’t switched all of my sites to 7.4 yet but the few WordPress sites I have switched have experienced no issues so far.

Guru Hosting Packages

Guru offer several packages suiting all sizes of customers with a single site, multiple sites, tens of sites and high usage VPS sites.

I am on the Reseller package which is fine for me and my multiple WordPress websites, standard hosting with email addon would also work just as well by using addon domains. The Shared Pro package is very high spec, 4 times the main resources and CDN is included, saving £10pm.

I may move to the Reseller Pro package in the future which is similar to the Shared Pro without the CDN.

The VPS packages are dedicated servers, fully managed and updated by Guru, these are the daddy of servers as only you can use the resources and extract maximum power from the server.

All packages offer 24/7 UK based support via phone, e-mail or live chat.

Conclusion

My opinion after 2 years is very positive, having had to switch hosting multiple times since my previous longstanding host went down, I am very happy to recommend Guru Hosting to you, the reader and my friends and family. There are many reasons for this, the cost of the package, support, hardware ownership, reliability, package specification.

I have had some issues during this time and have contacted Guru at very unsocial hours – not expecting a swift reply. I contacted support whilst working on a site at 23:30 on New Years Eve and got a reply within 1-2 minutes!! I certainly didn’t expect it, I just fired off a ticket and expected a reply after New Years. Problem solved and another plus point for Guru.

Guru proactively try to help with any issues even if they are outside of their remit, such as WordPress plugin conflicts causing the site to go down. I have had this happen a few times and Guru have helped me get back online.

In terms of the Reseller Package, it is well resourced and is fine for most sites, I recently implemented a CDN service (KeyCDN review) to take off some of the load and I have seen my resource usage drop drastically. Guru offers CDN but it costs more than I need monthly but it is there if I need it as an addon.

I should update this last paragraph, I did try KeyCDN, they were very good and probably one of the best providers outside the most expensive top 3. The problem was, I wasn’t getting value for money as my site was not getting the traffic to get value for the prepaid payment.

I switched to BunnyCDN (read my BunnyCDN review) and this proved to be the best option. I explain more in the review but even if you are not hosting with Guru, I suggest that you consider a CDN service as it really takes a load off the host server and improves performance overall.

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