Trade Counter
The student account that survives graduation — and might start a business
Written for students who want work of their own on an address of their own — and for the ones who end up hosting half the coursework on the corridor and wondering whether to charge for it.
Straight answer first
Take a Launch plan with SSH and Git switched on, registered in your own name and paid on your own card — that single decision is what turns three years of coursework into an asset you still control after the enrolment record is closed.
The rest of this page is the operator's reading of the same purchase: what the account can actually carry, what a prospective employer or a first paying client sees when they look at it, and the point at which hosting other people's work stops being a favour and starts being a small business with obligations attached.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 4 August 2026
Free
Move-in migration, per site
24/7
Cover at any hour
Daily
Backups on every account
$0
Charged to open an account
Most student hosting advice is written for someone with one portfolio and no ambitions beyond it. This page assumes rather more: that the account will outlive the course, that other people's work will end up on it, and that at some point you will be asked to keep somebody else's site running.
That changes what matters. Storage and bandwidth are the least interesting specifications on the page. Whose name the account is registered in, whether you can hand a site over cleanly, and whether the platform gives each site its own walls are the things that decide whether the account is still useful in three years' time.
What the university web space cannot do for you
University space is lent, not owned. It is tied to an enrolment record, it usually sits on a subdomain of the institution, and it is withdrawn on a timetable set by somebody in IT services who has never heard of you. Every link you have handed out over three years dies with it.
The practical consequence is not sentimental. Recruiters open portfolio links during screening, and a dead link is read as carelessness rather than as an administrative accident. An address you registered yourself keeps answering regardless of what any registry of students says about you.
There is also a control point buried in this. On your own account you hold the DNS, the certificate and the mailbox. On borrowed space you hold none of them, which means you cannot move, cannot prove ownership and cannot fix anything at two in the morning before a deadline.
What the account looks like from the other side of the desk
Assume the person judging your work will poke at the infrastructure a little. They will notice whether mail from you arrives from your own domain or from a free provider, whether the padlock is present on every subdomain rather than just the front page, and whether the site is served quickly from a cache or slowly from PHP each time.
None of that requires spending more. Free SSL is issued as soon as the domain points here and reissues itself before it lapses; mailboxes on your own domain are part of the plan rather than an upsell; LiteSpeed caching runs at the server rather than as a plugin you had to configure.
The one thing worth doing deliberately is separating the experiments from the shop window. Keep the portfolio on its own domain and put the half-finished coursework on subdomains, so that a broken build is never the first thing a visitor meets.
The point where hosting classmates stops being a favour
Hosting a friend's project on a spare domain inside your account is fine until it is not. The moment somebody else depends on it, three problems arrive together: they can see nothing of their own site's health, you cannot give them access without giving them access to everything, and if they leave you have no clean way to hand the site over.
A single hosting plan puts every site inside one filesystem, one set of database credentials and one backup. That is exactly the arrangement you want for your own work and exactly the wrong one for anybody else's. Separate accounts are what buy isolation, per-account quotas and a handover that consists of moving one account rather than untangling a shared one.
The Launch plan is deliberately a single-site plan. Pro carries twenty-five sites on one account, which suits a shelf of your own experiments. When the sites belong to other people and money changes hands, the ladder continues into reseller hosting, where every client gets a cPanel of their own and you get WHM above it.
Due diligence on a student budget
Apply the checks you would apply to any supplier, because that is what a host is. Hold the renewal figure against the joining figure. Read the refund terms rather than the badge on the pricing page. Look the company up — ours is IGI Security Services Ltd, registered in England and Wales, and the record is public.
Ask the support desk something genuinely awkward before you pay anything at all. How a desk behaves when it has no money from you is the best available prediction of how it behaves when it does, and that reply is free to obtain.
Then let a fortnight of real use decide. Move something across, break it, restore it from the daily backup, and see whether the panel and the people hold up. That is a better test than any ranking table, and it costs nothing but the time.
Why we are comfortable naming a plan on our own page
We sell hosting and we are recommending hosting, which we would rather say plainly than dress up as neutral research. What that buys you is a page with no referral fee riding on the answer, so the reasoning can be inspected rather than merely believed.
The same catalogue runs from a single-site plan up through reseller accounts, VPS and dedicated hardware, so nothing here is written to steer you into a tier you do not need yet.
- Checks you can run before you spend anything
- The renewal figure printed next to the joining figure
- Migration into the account done by our staff
- Refund terms written out, not summarised on a badge
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
An address that is yours
The domain and the account are registered to you, not lent by an institution, so nothing expires because a student record did.
The real toolchain, not a sandbox
SSH, Git and Composer are on the account from the start, which is the same equipment the production stacks you will be hired to work on actually use.
A company with a public record
IGI Security Services Ltd, registered in England and Wales — worth checking on us before you trust anybody with a domain.
Room to grow into a trade
One site, twenty-five sites, or a reseller account with a cPanel per client: the ladder is in one catalogue and you climb it in place.
A price you can budget against
The joining figure and the renewal figure are the same, which matters rather more when the budget is a student loan.
Migration handled for you
Coursework or a portfolio already sitting somewhere else comes across at no charge, usually inside a day, with the old copy still serving until you say switch.
Price Tags Compared
How we compare with the household names
Typical sign-up and renewal prices across the market, set next to ours — the second number most comparison charts leave off.
| Line item | Hosting SellerBest seller | Typical big-brand host | Typical budget host | Typical loss-leader |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price / mo* | $2.42/mo | $4–$6 | $2–$4 | $1–$3 |
| Price at renewal / mo | $2.42/mo | $10–$15 | $8–$12 | $4–$6 |
| Renewal price on the entry plan is unchanged | ||||
| SSL on every plan | ||||
| Site migration included | ||||
| The entry plan uses NVMe storage | ||||
| Entry plan gets a backup daily | ||||
| Live human support, 24/7 |
*The number in our column is the cheapest plan on our shelf, priced on an annual term and pulled live from the very catalogue that feeds the pricing page, so it cannot drift out of date. Other columns show the ranges shared hosting tends to advertise inside each bracket: introductory rates that normally ask for a one-to-four-year commitment, then climb once that term expires. Naming individual competitors and printing their prices is something we have stopped doing. A figure we cannot re-check on the day you read it has no business sitting in front of you. So compare us with whoever you are genuinely weighing up, and read the renewal line first. That line tells you more than the headline ever will.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Register the name before you build anything
Put the domain in your own name and point it at the account first, so that every link you hand out from that moment onward is one you will still control after graduation.
- 2
Separate the shop window from the workshop
Portfolio on the domain, experiments on subdomains. It costs nothing on the same account and it means a half-finished build is never the first thing an employer meets.
- 3
Decide early whether other people's work belongs here
If somebody else is depending on a site, give it its own account rather than a folder in yours — the isolation and the clean handover are the whole point.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- SSH, Git and Composer available from the moment the account opens
- A backup taken daily, with the restore run from your own panel
- Mailboxes on your own domain rather than a free provider
- Free SSL issued automatically and reissued before it lapses
- PHP chosen per site, so an old coursework build and a new one coexist
- LiteSpeed caching at the server rather than a plugin to configure
- Softaculous for one-click installs of WordPress and 240+ other applications
- cPanel, so what you learn transfers to any other cPanel host
- The renewal figure printed next to the joining figure
- A ladder from one site through reseller accounts without changing supplier
Across the Counter
Things people ask us all the time
Can I host a coursemate's site on my plan and charge them for it?
Technically yes on a multi-site plan, commercially it is a bad habit. They would sit inside your filesystem and your backup, you could not give them a login without exposing everything else, and offboarding them means picking one site out of a shared account. Once money is involved, give each site its own account — that is what reseller hosting exists for.
What has to be in my own name rather than the university's?
The domain registration and the hosting account, both paid on your own card. Anything on institutional space is lent to you for the duration of your enrolment. Anything registered to you keeps answering afterwards, which is the entire difference between a portfolio and a screenshot of one.
When is it worth moving from one plan to a reseller account?
When two or three sites belong to somebody other than you and you are being paid to keep them running. At that point you want a cPanel per client, quotas you set yourself, and the ability to hand an account over intact. Below that, a multi-site plan is cheaper and simpler.
Is the money-back window the same on hosting and on reseller plans?
No, and it is worth reading before you buy. It runs to 30 days on shared, business, WordPress and WooCommerce hosting, and 7 days on reseller. VPS and dedicated servers are built to order, so they sit outside it entirely. Plan your trial around whichever window applies to the thing you are actually buying.
Read next
Hosting for Wildcard SSL
One certificate over every subdomain — read from the operator's side, where the subdomains are yours before they are your clients'.
CMS Hosting for Content Teams
Choosing a platform and a host together, judged by the editorial workload rather than the feature list.
Web Hosting
cPanel hosting on NVMe with SSL, migration and the first year of the domain included.
Dedicated Cloud
Reserved resources with cloud flexibility — the rung above a VPS when a client list justifies it.
Moving your site to another host? Start with this checklist.
A step-by-step order of work for a move your visitors never spot: which files to copy first, how to carry email across without losing one message, the right moment to repoint DNS, and the two mistakes behind nearly every hour of downtime people ring us about.
Start on an account you will still own in three years.
SSH and Git from the first day, SSL and migration included, and a renewal figure that matches the joining figure.
See Web Hosting plans