Hi — I’m Alex Morgan, the founder and lead reviewer at BlogZenn. I’ve spent the last eight years buying, breaking, and benchmarking web hosting accounts so you don’t have to.
My Background
I started in IT support for a mid-sized accountancy firm in Manchester, managing around 200 staff email accounts and keeping client-facing WordPress sites online. After five years I went freelance, building and maintaining sites for small businesses across the UK — solicitors, estate agents, a handful of independent restaurants, and one very demanding dog-grooming salon.
That’s where the hosting obsession started. When a client’s site goes down at 11pm on a Friday, you find out very quickly which hosts pick up the phone and which ones make you submit a ticket. I’ve been on both ends of that call.
In 2019 I started writing up my findings properly — first on a personal blog, then here on BlogZenn, which I relaunched in 2024 as a dedicated home for honest, UK-focused hosting and domain reviews.
How I Test
Every review on BlogZenn is based on a live, paid account — not a complimentary press account, not a sandbox demo. I purchase the plan, point a real domain at it, install WordPress (or whatever CMS is relevant), and use it for a minimum of 30 days before forming a verdict.
For hosting reviews I measure:
- Uptime — monitored with UptimeRobot at 5-minute intervals over 30+ days
- Page load speed — tested from London, Manchester and Edinburgh using GTmetrix and Pingdom
- Support response time — live chat, ticket and phone calls timed and graded
- Control panel usability — how long it takes a non-technical user to launch a site from scratch
- Renewal pricing — because introductory rates rarely tell the full story
For domain registrar reviews I focus on transfer friction, WHOIS privacy policy, DNS propagation speed and the true cost of owning a domain for three years (not just year one).
Hosts and Registrars I’ve Reviewed
I have active or recently-closed accounts with Namecheap, SiteGround, Kinsta, WP Engine, Cloudflare Registrar, Porkbun, 123 Reg, IONOS, Fasthosts, and several others. My Namecheap account dates back to 2017 — it’s currently home to eleven domains across three projects.
Editorial Independence
BlogZenn earns money through affiliate commissions — if you click a link and buy a hosting plan, I may receive a small fee at no extra cost to you. This never influences my ratings or recommendations. Hosts that pay higher commissions do not receive higher scores. Every verdict on this site is based on what I actually observed during testing.
You can read my full affiliate disclosure on the Disclosure page.
Get in Touch
If you have a question about a host, spotted an error in one of my reviews, or want to suggest something I should test next, you’re welcome to reach me via the contact form or at alex [at] blogzenn [dot] com.
I read every message, though it may take a few days to reply during busy review periods.