Krystal

What Krystal actually is

Krystal is an independent British hosting company — Krystal Hosting Ltd, registered in England and Wales with a London registered office — founded in 2002 by Simon Blackler after, in his own account, frustration with poor service and bad practices at the large hosting corporations. Two decades on it is still independent and unfunded, which in a market of roll-ups (see the Newfold family on our shared hosting page) is worth something. Krystal runs one of the more credible sustainability programmes in the industry: power bought from Ecotricity, 100% renewable; data centres with a PUE of at least 1.2; Certified B Corp status; 1% for the Planet membership; ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials Plus certification.

The website publishes live counters — 45,937 active customers, 302,797 websites hosted, 117,037 domains managed, and over 5 million trees funded (one tree per active client per month) as of late October 2026. That is either a bold transparency move or a marketing one; either way the numbers are on the record and can be checked again in a year.

Product-wise Krystal covers the full hosting spread: cPanel shared web hosting, business hosting, managed WordPress, reseller hosting, VPS, and Krystal Cloud, its own IaaS platform with virtual machines, block and file storage, S3-compatible object storage, load balancers, a container registry and on-demand GPUs. There is also a bespoke "Krystal Managed" arm doing private cloud and consultancy around AWS and Azure. For our WordPress hosting audience the managed WordPress line (with an AI site builder included) is the relevant product; for everyone else it is the cPanel plans or the cloud.

Pricing: what you really pay

All prices below are in pounds sterling, VAT treatment depending on where you buy from — this is a UK company selling primarily to UK customers.

What sets Krystal's shared plans apart is that they publish actual CPU and RAM allocations, which most shared hosts refuse to do. Amethyst costs £7 a month for 1 CPU, 2GB RAM, one site, 10GB NVMe storage, unlimited mailboxes and bandwidth, and daily backups. Ruby is £11 a month (2 CPU, 4GB RAM, 5 sites, 25GB NVMe, free domain). Emerald is £19 a month (3 CPU, 6GB RAM, unlimited sites and NVMe storage, 12-hourly backups, PCI-DSS scan compliance). Sapphire is £37 (4 CPU, 8GB), Diamond £67 (6 CPU, 12GB) and Tanzanite £97 a month (9 CPU, 18GB) for what Krystal describes as ultra-high traffic sites. Every plan includes free SSL, unlimited mailboxes and databases, phone support, and a 60-day money-back guarantee — twice the usual window.

Two honest notes on the word "unlimited": storage on the upper plans is bounded by inode limits, which scale from 250,000 on Amethyst to 2,500,000 on Emerald and above, and bandwidth is unmetered rather than infinite. Read the plan table and you know exactly what you are getting, which is more than most competitors offer.

Krystal Cloud prices per second with monthly equivalents published per package. C-1 (1GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 10GB storage, 1.00TB transfer) is £10 a month or £0.0137 an hour; C-4 (4GB, 2 vCPU, 75GB, 2.50TB) is £27.50 a month; C-16 (16GB, 8 vCPU, 175GB, 4.50TB) is £91.25 a month; and the largest CPU-optimised package, C-288 (288GB RAM, 96 vCPU, 400GB, 13.00TB transfer) is £1,140 a month. Memory-optimised machines go to 960GB of RAM, and GPU packages attach Nvidia T4 or L4 cards to any VM. Block storage, file storage, S3-compatible object storage, offsite backups with point-in-time snapshots, load balancers and the container registry are each itemised on the same pricing page. New cloud accounts get £100 in credit to try the platform.

Our view: this is mid-market pricing. You can find shared hosting for a third of £7 and VMs cheaper elsewhere (our benchmarks page covers what raw cloud VMs cost). What the premium buys is published resources, UK support and the environmental credentials — and if those matter to you or your customers, the numbers hold up.

Performance & infrastructure

The shared platform runs LiteSpeed with its caching layer, all-NVMe storage, and enterprise Dell servers with dual CPUs; Krystal describes the stack as performance-tuned and low-contention from Emerald upwards. Shared hosting lives in Netwise's London data centres — Netwise Central, Krystal's home since 2016 with 28 cabinets, and Netwise East, a newer East London site where Krystal is anchor tenant with room for 112 cabinets. Both run on 100% renewable power (Krystal helped Netwise switch in 2017), and East connects back to Krystal's London network core at 100 Gbps with triple DDoS-protected diverse transit.

Krystal Cloud spans three locations — London, Amsterdam and New York — with a 100G backbone, firewall rules, anycast DNS, DDoS protection and 1TB of external transfer included per VM. Block storage keeps three copies of your data across the cluster so a failed host recovers without a restore. There is a documented API and a Terraform provider, and the console shows real-time spend and per-VM metrics.

We have not benchmarked Krystal ourselves — our dated sysbench, fio and iperf3 runs on the benchmarks page cover cloud VMs from other providers — so we make no speed claims here. What we can point at is the SLA structure, which is unusually concrete. The hosting and VPS SLA promises 100% network availability, with service credits of 5% of the monthly fee for every 30 minutes of failure, capped at 100% of the month's fee, credited to your account without expiry. Managed VPS and managed dedicated customers get support response commitments too: acknowledgement within 2 hours and permanent fault correction within 2 business days. Krystal Cloud VMs carry a 99.99% uptime target with credits for the unavailable time. The plan tables print "99.99% uptime guarantee" for shared hosting, so the marketing number is the conservative one — an unusual direction of travel.

Where it falls short

Price, first. £7 a month for one site and 2GB RAM is roughly double the budget hosts and triple the discount giants. You are funding UK wages, renewable power and tree planting; not every project needs to.

Geography, second. This is a UK-centred company with UK-based support (a London phone number, ticket and chat; 24/7 emergency phone only from Sapphire upwards) and three cloud regions — London, Amsterdam, New York. There is no Asia-Pacific presence, and an Australian or Singaporean audience will notice the distance. Shared hosting is London-only.

Consistency, third. The DDoS protection figure is quoted as 4,000Gbps on the homepage and 2.0 Tbps on the hosting pages — a small thing, but on a site whose brand is transparency it grates. "Unlimited" storage and bandwidth are bounded by inode limits and fair use. The SLA's 100% network availability wording is hedged with exclusions for maintenance and causes outside Krystal's control, which is normal but worth reading before you quote it to a client.

Finally, depth. There is no global CDN product, GPU availability is limited to T4 and L4, and managed dedicated servers appear only in the SLA and the bespoke managed arm rather than as a standard product. If you need bare metal or a hundred regions, this is not your provider.

Who should pick this

We would pick Krystal for UK businesses, charities, agencies and resellers who want hosting that is easy to defend on procurement: data sovereignty in the UK, GDPR alignment by default, published resources, real phone support and verified green credentials. The reseller and business lines suit agencies holding client sites, and Krystal Cloud is a credible Hetzner-alternative for UK-anchored VMs with S3-compatible storage and Terraform support. The 60-day guarantee also makes it a low-risk place to move a portfolio.

We would skip it for the cheapest possible single site, for audiences outside Europe and North America, and for anything that needs hyperscaler reach, bare metal or specialist GPU work.

Key takeaways

• Independent UK host since 2002, B Corp certified, 100% renewable power, ISO 27001 — credentials with certificates behind them, not slogans.
• Shared plans publish real CPU and RAM: £7 a month gets 1 CPU, 2GB RAM, 10GB NVMe and daily backups; up to 9 CPU/18GB for £97.
• SLA is concrete: 100% network availability with 5%-per-30-minutes service credits on hosting, 99.99% uptime target on cloud VMs.
• Krystal Cloud covers London, Amsterdam and New York with per-second billing, S3-compatible object storage, T4/L4 GPUs and a £100 trial credit.
• UK-only shared hosting and no APAC regions; 24/7 phone support costs the pricier plans.
• Priced above budget hosts by design — our pick for UK and EU buyers who value transparency, support and sustainability over the last pound.

Sources

• https://krystal.io/
• https://krystal.io/hosting
• https://krystal.io/cloud
• https://krystal.io/cloud/pricing
• https://krystal.io/legal/hosting-sla
• https://krystal.io/legal/cloud-sla
• https://krystal.io/blog/post/meet-netwise-east-our-new-london-data-centre
• https://krystal.io/managed