I was wondering if anyone can recommend a good host. I'm currently a Siteground customer

Hi guys! I was wondering if anyone can recommend a good host. I’m currently a Siteground customer but the recent price hike has left me baffled and can’t justify spending 50% more on the same service (3 years – @£300 would now cost me £600). I am on the market for the following:

Host with UK Servers
Can host mail as well
Decent TTFB
Decent support
Optimised for WP

I have 5 websites and under 30.000 visits/month, running Elementor with Jupiter X on most of them. I’ve been using TSOHost in the past and switched to Siteground 4 years ago as the service was terrible. People do seem to move to Cloudways now but unfortunately I need Mail as well and they don’t offer this. Inmotion hosting is something people recommend but I’m a bit reluctant as they are US based web hosting.

Kinsta/WpEngine are out of discussion as they’re priced even higher than Siteground.

How’s BlueHost/A2/Heartinternet? What’s a decent side-step from Siteground?

Best WordPress hosting reddit 2021

UPDATE 13/08/2020: Thank you so much guys! Was completely not expecting the amount of useful feedback, really appreciated!
I’m currently leaning towards GURU & Stablepoint but I have Cloudways on my list as well. I’ve always kept things together (mail+website) on the same host, and honestly I can see the advantage if you’re managing this for clients, but with me it just seems easier even though you’re probably not supposed to have all the eggs in one basket.
Seems like the hosting market has changed dramatically in the last couple of years, with most providers becoming greedier. New users get all the benefits and small prices while existing customers are forgotten. It’s the same scenario as what the broadband & phone companies used to do and seems like we can’t do too much other than switching providers – unfortunately in this case it’s a bit more tricky than just transferring a phone number.

Answers:

Hosting, assuming you’re doing jt for others, should be a profit center. Not a cost center. Which means that you should be shopping based on value, not cost.
Email should be hosted separately. That’s just a fact. Yes it costs more to do it this way. The right way of doing things usually does cost more. Divorce is expensive for a reason.

Places with inconsistent/variable pricing generally should be avoided. If something so basic as price can suddenly 2X or more, what other wild swing is gonna slam you in the face.

“Promotional” prices tend to reflect an organization that specializes less in hosting than in marketing.

Kinsta is way better than WPEngine, On pretty much any axis you can measure. But they are expensive and the “PHP workers” will absolutely bite you in the ass if you get any serious traffic.

For a small handful of sites Cloudways is a good option. At scale (as you grow your agency) their pricing makes less sense.
Do more digging here. Use the search. Do your diligence.

It’s painful and time consuming to change hosts. Most hosts want it this way. Pain of disconnect is one of their best levers to reduce churn.

So find something that you can see yourself growing on and sticking with for years to come. Not just the best deal for the next 12 months.