Brixly

The UK bred quite a few excellent hosting providers over the years. Many British hosts have a reputation for strong infrastructure and friendly support and not for nothing.

The main issue, however, is that most UK providers eventually get absorbed by larger companies, so only a couple actually get to compete against the top providers. Brixly is one of the few that stay independent and are emerging to the global market on their own.

And that’s only part of the reason I’m doing this Brixly review.

The host’s plans look quite impressive. The fees are affordable for the resources granted, especially compared to the prices of other UK companies. Even better, the provider has a solid reputation despite its young age.

I was eager to see if it performs well too.

Let’s see what Brixly hosting can do.

What Is Brixly?

Brixly is a young, independent, family-owned hosting provider based in the UK. Although a considerable part of its user base is in Europe, it is now expanding to the US.

It all began back in 2017 when the founders were looking at reseller hosting plans and quickly realized there are very few quality providers out there. So, they decided to fill this gap, and Brixly was born.

Although young, Brixly is already going strong. It hosts well over a quarter of a million sites, and it’s one of the fastest-growing platforms in the UK. Although there are few professional Brixly reviews, users heap praise on the provider every chance they get.

Brixly’s primary focus is on the reseller market, and it offers a range of plans that let you start your own hosting service. But this doesn’t mean the company is good only for resellers. It has quite a product range, including budget-friendly shared hosting and highly elastic cloud plans.

If you’ve read other reviews on Web Tribunal, you’ll know smaller, independent hosts often have more to offer than massive providers. Judging by Brixly’s features and reputation, the outcome looks good.

Let’s check if the test results confirm all the positive Brixly hosting reviews.

The Essentials—Brixly Uptime, Speed, and Support

Server availability and speed, as well as the aptitude of support agents, are the foundation of hosting. Providers that cut corners usually exhibit issues here, rendering the service, in its entirety, unusable. That’s why these are the first three things I test whenever I sign up with a web host.

1. Brixly Uptime—99.97%

Uptime is the first and possibly most important aspect to consider. Providers that do a poor job of maintaining and securing their servers often have outages. And, if your service is continuously doing down, it’s as good as driving away website visitors.

That’s why I hooked up a website hosted on Brixly web solutions to StatusCake. This tool measures the percentage of time a website remains available.

Brixly performs reasonably, recording an average uptime of 99.97% over months of testing. This means a few minutes of downtime here and there. It is unlikely to affect your website, and you probably won’t even notice it without uptime monitoring software.

One nice thing is that Brixly is so confident it makes its own uptime logs public. You can go to the provider’s website and check any server’s uptime, up to a week back.

From the looks of the results, Brixly’s metrics are pretty much in line with StatusCake results. It’s a good sign since 99.97% is excellent availability.

It’s worth pointing out that Brixly hosting comes with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. If monthly uptime falls below this, you can get a portion of your hosting fee back. The SLA provides some assurance the host will maintain decent uptime.

Verdict: We’re off to a good start with Brixly’s excellent uptime results.

2. Respectable Speed

• Response time—0.38s
• Time to a fully loaded website—0.98s
• Under load—0.95s

Speed is the next key aspect to look at. Server speed plays a significant part in how fast your website loads. A slow server is a massive pain, so you should look for a provider to be as fast as possible.

I tried Brixly to see how fast the baseline infrastructure is. I used multiple testing tools for the Brixly review, including Pingdom and K6. These let me check how quickly the host can process requests from visitors and how fast it delivers a full web page.

I also tested how well the servers handle heavy traffic. All three factors are crucial to quickly delivering content.

As it turns out, Brixly hosting performs well.

When you request a web page, the servers take 0.380 seconds to deliver the first byte of data. Such TTFB means the infrastructure processes requests fairly quickly. Only a few hosting providers have slightly better results.

The time to deliver a full web page is just as impressive. Brixly averages a time till fully loaded of 0.98 seconds. This reveals high-speed infrastructure, and you can compare Brixly vs. SiteGround in terms of frontend performance.

I performed a backend test to see how the provider handles heavy traffic. For this, I tried two websites, one on shared hosting and one on a larger Brixly VPS plan, for the more advanced users out there.

Unfortunately, the smaller plan didn’t perform so well. It held on for a while, but 200+ concurrent connections did bring the average response time down to 10 seconds. It’s hardly a promising result.

The VPS performs much better. For the same test, the host’s response times fell to a mere 0.95 seconds. While the servers do slow down just a tad, they don’t noticeably lose out on performance under heavy load.

Overall, Brixly offers fast UK hosting. Frontend speeds make it easy to maintain a fast web app. You might need to go for a VPS if you get big traffic spikes, but the backend is still okay. A few hosts, like InterServer and DreamHost, are somewhat faster overall, even though Brixly gives them a run for their money.

Verdict: Brixly’s robust frontend records top-notch content delivery times, and the backend is decent, though it does exhibit some delay under heavy traffic.

3. Top-notch Support

Support is often overlooked, but it holds the same importance as the previous two factors. Whenever you have a question or a problem, you should be able to contact the support team and get quick and helpful assistance.

However, checking how support handles itself can be tough, especially if you don’t know what to ask. I checked how the support performs to gauge what kind of service you can expect.

I can report that the tech team is refreshingly apt. That said, reviewing Brixly support revealed a few bugs with the system.

To start, you can contact the team 24/7 via live chat and email. There is also phone support. Though unavailable around-the-clock, this isn’t a huge issue.

The live chat is a bit clunky, however. It sends out a few automated messages and requests your email before forwarding you to the support team. And you usually have to wait for 10-15 minutes for a reply. Sometimes, the system leaves you waiting forever so you have to restart the browser. The provider does suggest using email ticketing, but a better live chat would improve the service.

Once you get through to an actual support representative, the overall impression improves a bit.

Brixly web hosting support agents do a decent job answering questions and helping you with the service. They know their way around the platform and how to help customers get the most out of it.

I started off with the basic questions, and the support agent I reached was able to answer everything pretty much instantly. It’s a good sign that the support is well-trained and doesn’t just follow a script.

Once I got to more technical queries about the host’s web server configuration, the support was reasonably knowledgeable as well. They can help you get around all sorts of issues and are particularly experienced at optimizing reseller services.

The knowledge base is decent as well. It has numerous well-written and detail-rich articles on topics like becoming a web hosting reseller and getting around common technical problems. The system even arranges them according to popularity, so you’ll always see the most relevant articles first. There are some broken knowledge base links on the website, but it’s only a minor thing.

Verdict: The support team performs splendidly, all things considered, though there are technical problems to work out.

The Pros of Brixly

Many customers praise the host for its excellent features. Unsurprisingly, it offers a bunch of tools that catch the eye.

I listed the most significant advantages for the purposes of this Brixly review.

Let’s dig right in:

1. Robust Server Stack

There are reasons behind Brixly’s top-notch performance.

For starters, the provider runs data centers with Dell Blades and Supermicro machines, equipped with Intel Xeon processors and at least 128GB DDR4 RAM.

All plans, save for dedicated ones, are deployed on top of robust cloud infrastructure. This adds great reliability since the service won’t go down if one physical machine fails.

The setup sports excellent security features to boot. They include a powerful firewall, antivirus software, and automatic cleanup of compromised files. Thanks to all that and its auto-healing feature, and the UK-based hosting provider has an impressively reliable setup.

The server stack is powerful as well.

The provider’s OS of choice is CloudLinux instead of commonly-used open-source distributions like CentOS or Ubuntu. This provides much more reliable performance and security. It also prevents other users on the same server from interfering with your experience.

Furthermore, instead of choosing between Apache and Nginx web servers, Brixly uses both.

Well, Brixly hosting features Nginx, but it is deployed in front of Apache as a reverse-proxy. This plays to the strengths of Nginx and uses it to quickly deliver static content. If a user requests dynamic content, like PHP code, Nginx will forward the request to Apache, which is much speedier there. This gets you lightning-fast content delivery across the board.

Now, Brixly did not come up with this tactic on its own. However, it is relatively uncommon to see this combination in shared hosting because it is difficult to pull off. For the most part, developers configure it themselves on virtual or dedicated servers. Brixly has a very uncommon setup that delivers all sorts of advantages, faster speeds included.

Speaking of, the host runs the mod_lsap Apache module. This module is based on LiteSpeed’s PHP API, which is one of the fastest ways to deliver PHP content on Apache. Mod_lsap makes it nearly as fast as the other LiteSpeed, which is impressive. If you want to run PHP-based web solutions like WordPress on Brixly, the potential performance boost is incredible.

All in all, if you need reliable and fast UK hosting servers, Brixly can deliver.

2. CloudNS cPanel Plugin

Now, if you’re new to hosting, you might be confused by Brixly’s unusual web server setup.

Not to worry. The provider enables an easy way to configure everything

You can fine-tune the overall backend setup through Brixly’s proprietary control panel plugin called CloudNS. It lets you deploy various pre-configured server templates. Which makes it much easier to adapt the configuration to your particular website, and it can be a huge time-saver.

For instance, you can enable various daemons like PHP FPM, which can get you a speed boost. You can also set up symlink protection or configure DDoS mitigation.

Lastly, the provider has a robust caching solution you can work with, like Redis for WordPress. All it takes to configure it is a few clicks. It will get you full-page caching for your website and the speed boost that comes with it.

CloudNS is a very innovative solution. It gives beginners more power over their server’s configuration.

3. Generous Plans

UK hosts are often a bit pricey for the server resources, at least compared to the US or Amsterdam-based companies. Brixly is a fortunate exception. Even more importantly, though the plans are quite affordable, you still get quite a bit of server resources.

For instance, the starter £3.95/month plan comes with 1 CPU core and 1 GB RAM, and the second plan doubles this. It’s a hefty amount of resources for shared hosting and can take you quite far. For reference, most shared platforms offer 50% of 1 CPU core at most, and even this is enough for most websites.

Shared hosting runs CloudLinux—a premium Linux distribution. It also features a bunch of proprietary tools, like Brixly Bolt-Cache and a custom antivirus software. You also get backups with offsite storage included.

All of these drive up the value of the plans. Still, the overall prices remain low, even though Brixly could reasonably charge more.

The UK reseller hosting plans are fairly generous as well. For just £8.95/month, you can set up 20 client accounts, each able to access up to 2 CPU cores and 2 GB RAM. And you can double the resources of individual accounts for £3.95/month. To top it off, your clients will get all the good stuff included with standard shared hosting.

The storage is a bit slim, as you get 2.5GB per client account. Still, you can host plenty of client websites, and offer lots of server resources.

Overall, the provider offers fair rates, and you’re unlikely to lack resources.

However, if you need something more powerful, Brixly has just the thing, as you’ll see.

4. Room to Scale

Brixly has resource-rich plans. That said, websites can grow quite large, and basic shared or reseller web hosting don’t always cut it.

If you have this on your hands, Brixly won’t disappoint you. There’s a range of higher-end plans for accommodating demands.

For starters, you can buy VPS hosting. There are a few VPS presets, though you can configure your own plan with access to as much CPU, RAM, and storage as your application needs. You can manage it yourself or let the provider take over.

If you need a control panel other than cPanel, Brixly cuts a special deal with DirectAdmin. You can get a license for just £1/month, and you can create as many client accounts as you want. The price remains the same for as long as your VPS is active. This makes the plans way cheaper than the typical UK cPanel hosting, especially if you need a license that can support multiple accounts.

If you need yet more resources, dedicated servers do a pretty awesome job. These come with Tier-1 bandwidth, robust CPU models like Xeon E5-2623 v3, and up to 512GB DDR4 RAM. It’s great for massive apps that need their own machine.

Of course, you might need something that can handle unpredictable workloads. For such cases, you can go for the cloud plans, which can scale up or down instantly. They are fantastic for websites with huge traffic spikes or similar projects.

They also replicate your website across a cluster of virtual servers. This way your site will remain available even if one of the virtual machines fails.

You get plenty of room to grow. The provider has something for everyone and is an expert at handling high-end projects like website reseller companies.

5. Great for WordPress

WordPress is immensely popular. That’s why many hosts optimize their services specifically to make the CMS run as smoothly as possible.

Brixly is one of them. And, I have to say, its features are on point, especially if you go for the managed WordPress plans.

These are hosted on Brixly’s cloud servers. They feature failover clustering, load balancing, and hourly backups, leading to insane performance and reliability.

Brixly web hosting is configured to work smoothly with WP Rocket, one of the leading speed optimization plugins for WordPress. WP Rocket is paid, but it can get you a fantastic website boost, so it’s worth considering.

You get standard useful advantages like WordPress cloning and staging, one-click login, and the possibility to set up automatic updates. All great features.

If you are a WordPress fan already, you might be familiar with the bugginess when trying to preview a WordPress site via cPanel. Namely, using add-on domains usually breaks the preview feature. Brixly resolves this through a proprietary plugin, showcasing incredible attention to detail.

Brixly hosting engineers perform vulnerability patches on WordPress (along with Joomla and Drupal). This resolves common WP security issues without you having to install any extra software. It’s still recommended you run a security plugin, though—you can never have too much security.

All things considered, Brixly is WordPress-optimized and offers plenty of useful features. It guarantees excellent performance for your site. And, if you need WordPress reseller hosting, Brixly is ready for your business.

6. Daily Backups

Backups are one of the most essential features, as important as anti-malware tools or DDoS protection. If anything compromises your website, be it an attack or human error, you will be able to roll back the unwanted change.

Brixly uses R1Soft—a standard solution for cPanel accounts. It takes daily backups automatically, though you can take snapshot ones too. The latter are handy if you need to perform an update and want to have a more recent file.

The UK-based hosting provider can do full or partial restores of your website. A granular recovery is a useful option if you just want to roll back one file and don’t need a full-on server restoration.

Another bonus is that Brixly keeps the files safe by storing them offsite. Instead of simply keeping the data on a separate machine, Brixly keeps files in a different data center. So even if an entire facility goes bust, you’ll still have a copy.

Brixly’s daily backup service will keep you covered from all sides. It all amounts to some of the best web hosting in the UK if you need a reliable service.

7. Fantastic for Emailing

Website owners usually want basic email hosting. Having a professional email address and a small inbox lets you open communication lines to website visitors. It’s particularly useful for businesses that need an easy way to receive and answer queries daily.

Spam protection is included, as well. It is provided by Magic Spam, which sells pretty decent webmail anti-spam for popular control panels.

One pleasant surprise when researching for this Brixly review is the MailChannels integration. It is an SMTP relay service that ensures email delivery and catches compromised email accounts. It’s an excellent alternative to buying a dedicated IP and manually checking that your emails aren’t ending up in spam.

If you need something a bit more robust than basic webmail, though, you can go for managed Microsoft Exchange hosting. This ups the email storage to 250GB per inbox, so it’s more suitable for larger projects. Plus, it comes with decent features of its own, like a 99.999% availability guarantee and optional Outlook licensing.

Microsoft Exchange is typically used for organizations that heavily rely on emailing and collaboration. However, Brixly lets you get a single email inbox, too, so the solution is flexible.

Brixly’s email plans leave a positive impression. Definitely a huge advantage if you need to open lines of communication with your clients or other businesses. And since Brixly targets businesses like web hosting resellers, the mailing is a great fit.

8. Free Migrations

Migrations often get complicated, especially if you’ve never handled one before. And, when you’re transferring a vital website, you don’t want to make a mistake. That’s why Brixly can help move your website.

Here’s where things get a bit complicated, since not every migration is handled by Brixly’s team.

Instead, Brixly has a proprietary system called “Migration Centre.” All you need to do is enter the logins to your old cPanel account and specify if you want to move entirely or just individual websites. You can even move a whole reseller hosting account over to Brixly web solutions.

Now, given that migrations usually require troubleshooting on the receiving end, you might be wondering how well an automated system can handle this.

Don’t worry. If your website is hosted on technology other than cPanel or the Migration Center mishandles the process, the support will take over. An engineer will move the contents of your plan manually.

It’s a pretty neat system, and it’s handy that Brixly performs QA for sites that can’t be transferred automatically.

9. Reseller-friendly

Brixly has a broad range of plans, but its main focus is on being a UK reseller hosting provider. You can purchase larger amounts of resources at discount pricing, chop them up into smaller plans, and resell them to clients. It’s an excellent way for web developers and agencies to earn a few extra bucks, and you can even start your own hosting business. Heck, Brixly itself started as a hosting reseller!

What stood out in the making of this Brixly review is how well the provider handles all facets of reseller hosting.

The host has three distinct kinds of reseller plans. The main difference is the control panel they are based on. You can go for cPanel, Plesk, or DirectAdmin, which are the three most popular solutions on the market.

The pricing and features are pretty much the same. The plans start at £8.95/month and get you 20-250 client accounts. Each client account gets access to 2 CPU cores and 2 GB RAM, which is a hefty amount of resources. You can double the amount if a couple of clients outgrow their plans.

As far as UK reseller hosting plans go, these have all the excellent features of shared hosting. In addition to that, you get access to WHMCS, which is the industry-standard billing and CRM integration. You also have an option to get private nameservers and fully white label the plans, so you’ll appear as a separate hosting company. It’s essentially everything you need to run your own business.

An excellent option is to resell domains. This service isn’t likely to make you a bunch of money, but you can save your customers the trouble of going to a domain registrar.

If you need something a bit more robust or flexible, you can go for Brixly VPS or dedicated servers. You even have the option to resell full-size VPS servers. It’s easy to design a full-on hosting business on top of Brixly’s offer.

Brixly has some of the best reseller hosting in the UK (and not only), and its plans are pure brilliance.

10. WildCard SSL

Most hosting providers let you automatically install a basic single-domain SSL certificate for free. This is a pretty standard way to encrypt data flow to and from your customers, and it works fine for most users.

That said, single-domain SSL can’t really secure a more complex site with multiple subdomains. This can be a site running a store on a subdomain, a multi-language site, or anything similar.

In such cases, the typical certificate can only encrypt the root domain and leaves subdomains not secured. This is an obvious security issue, especially for ecommerce sites that rely on customer trust.

That’s why Brixly hosting lets you automatically install a WildCard Let’s Encrypt SSL. It encrypts the root website domain as well as all subdomains.

The installation feature is a pretty handy addition for bigger websites. There are other ways to get free SSL encryption, but handling it automatically makes things dramatically easier.

11. Free Hosting for Charities

If you run a charitable organization, you’re in luck. Brixly has free web hosting for charities, and it already supports 1,500+ UK-based ones.

All you need to do is send the registered number of your charity, and the UK-based hosting provider will contact you to discuss the solution. In general, you get a shared hosting plan with as much storage and bandwidth as you need (provided that you don’t abuse it). It includes all the standard benefits of Brixly hosting.

In short, if you want to host a site dedicated to your charity, you might not even have to pay for the service.

It’s a generous policy by Brixly.

12. Impeccable Reputation

Brixly basks in numerous positive reviews. It has a 4.8/5 score on TrustPilot, across 400+ reviews, and 43 testimonials on HostAdvice, all positive.

Clients practically unanimously agree that Brixly has a top-of-the-line service. They praise the speeds, helpful support, and excellent tools. Both website owners and resellers enjoy using the service.

Negative comments are few and far between. Still, Dennis Nind, the CEO, replies to every negative Brixly review. The answers provide extensive context on each issue and even contain details on the back and forth between the clients and the support engineers.

Numerous client testimonials just reiterate the excellent results Brixly recorded.

It’s a great assurance the platform consistently performs well.

The Cons of Brixly

Although the provider offers little to complain about, there are always things to improve. A few things came up in the making of this Brixly web solutions review, so let’s cover them.

1. Limited Data Center Choice

Brixly started out as a local host in the UK and added a facility in Chicago. Even though its presence is expanding, the choice of facilities is still kind of limited.

The provider can do the job for Western Europe and the better part of North America. If you get website visitors from a remote location like Australia, though, your load times might suffer because of higher latency.

It’s worth considering where the bulk of your users are located since Brixly only lets you host a website in two facilities. If you need US or UK web solutions, the host works swimmingly. Otherwise, you might want to consider a company with broader coverage, like Hostinger.

2. Paid Domain Privacy

Brixly sells domain names at okay prices. For instance, a .com extension would cost you £8.99/year, which is about the standard price. You can even get free domain registration for .com and .co.uk domains, saving you a few pounds in the first year of hosting.

However, domain privacy costs an additional £5/year. This service keeps your contact info concealed in public WHOIS records, so no one can get your number and email address and spam you. It’s pretty useful. Still, many registrars toss it in for free, putting Brixly web hosting at a bit of a disadvantage.

3. Conflicting Website Info

While Brixly’s website is pretty informative, not all the info is up-to-date. For instance, the provider states it has a 30-day money-back guarantee in some places, while other pages state its 60 days.

In actuality, all plans have the standard 30-day money-back period. The provider just hasn’t changed the product page info.

The issue can be easily corrected. However, it’s important to be aware of such details, and it’s kind of neglectful of Brixly to feature outdated info.

Brixly Plans at a Glance

Brixly only has two shared hosting plans. If you outgrow these, you would need to move to VPS or cloud hosting. Price-wise, it’s quite a smooth transition, so you can scale up or down easily. Keep in mind the pricing listed in the Brixly review reflects the month-to-month deals. Paying like this gives you a £1 trial of any plan for a month. Alternatively, you can pay for a full year and take advantage of a 17% lifetime discount. Both are solid options. Either way, the shared hosting has quite affordable rates, especially for a UK web solution. Here’s what the two plans look like:

Do We Recommend Brixly?

You bet!

Brixly has a fast frontend and a well-trained support team. Its shared hosting has plenty of useful features, like proprietary WordPress tools, WildCard SSL, and powerful mailing features. And it’s all available for as low as £3.95/month.

And that’s not all! Brixly is among the leading UK reseller hosting providers, with excellent plans and pricing. It also has a cloud platform that allows for quick scaling and is fantastic at handling traffic spikes.

And did I mention charitable organizations get free hosting?

The offer just keeps getting better!

Admittedly, there are a few things the provider is yet to work out, like the clunky website and poorly designed live chat feature. None of these are massive issues, though, just be aware of them.

Bottom line—with its choice of services and lucrative deals, Brixly makes a convincing case for buying its services. If you need hosting in the UK or the US, it has a highly competitive solution. It also has some of the best reseller hosting in the UK, making it one of the easiest ways to start your own hosting business.

There’s a lot to love about Brixly, and the host gets to take its rightful place as one of UK’s top providers.