If you are looking for a 123 Reg alternative, it is almost always because of the renewal invoice rather than anything that went wrong technically. The pattern is familiar: a headline price of £1.99 a month, three good years, and then a bill roughly three and a half times bigger. As at August 2026, 123 Reg's cheapest Economy hosting is £1.99 a month ex VAT on a three-year term and renews at £6.99 a month. UKBox charges £4.79 a month ex VAT and holds that price for three years in writing. Both sets of real numbers are below, including where 123 Reg comes out ahead.
Credit where it is due: 123 Reg publishes renewal prices on the same page as intro prices, which not every host does. Here is what those pages showed on 31 August 2026, ex VAT, on the three-year term:
| 123 Reg plan | Intro (3-year term) | Renews at | Rise | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Economy | £1.99/mo — £71.64 up front | £6.99/mo — £251.64 | ×3.5 | 1 website, 25 GB, 1 email address |
| Deluxe | £2.99/mo — £107.64 | £8.99/mo — £323.64 | ×3.0 | Up to 10 websites, 50 GB, 2 email addresses |
| Ultimate | £4.99/mo — £179.64 | £11.99/mo — £431.64 | ×2.4 | Up to 25 websites, 75 GB, 3 email addresses |
| Maximum | £5.99/mo — £215.64 | £15.99/mo — £575.64 | ×2.7 | Up to 50 websites, 100 GB, 5 email addresses |
The three-year term is the important detail. You are not comparing £1.99 with £4.79 for a month; you are comparing £71.64 for three years with what comes after it. The intro price is real, it is just borrowed from year four.
We would rather you heard this from us than found it out afterwards. If you pay three years up front on Economy, 123 Reg costs less than we do over those three years. £71.64 against roughly £143.70 on our annual billing is not a close call, and their Economy plan gives 25 GB of storage against our Starter's 10 GB, with a free domain for year one.
Two other honest points. 123 Reg has been going since 2000 and has been part of GoDaddy since April 2017, when GoDaddy bought its parent Host Europe Group for €1.69bn; they are not going anywhere. Their upper tiers also allow far more websites than ours — up to 50 on Maximum, where our largest shared plan allows 10. If you host dozens of small sites on one account and you diarise the renewal date, staying put is defensible.
Our shared hosting is £4.79, £8.39 and £14.39 a month ex VAT for Starter, Business and Pro, with the first month at £1 for new customers. Every plan includes cPanel, LiteSpeed, free SSL, Imunify360 security, daily off-site backups, Softaculous and free migration. Annual billing costs ten months for twelve and includes a domain.
What matters for this comparison is that the price is held for three years in writing, with no separate renewal rate waiting at the end of a term. Beyond three years we have never raised an existing customer's price — when we launched new plans this summer, existing customers kept their rates and were moved onto the better allowances for nothing — but three years is what we put in writing, so judge us on that.
Over six years on the entry plans: 123 Reg Economy is £71.64 then £251.64, giving £323.28. UKBox Starter on annual billing is £143.70 for three years and £287.40 over six if the price does not move. The gap is not enormous, and the real difference shows up elsewhere.
123 Reg prices mailboxes per mailbox, per month. As at 31 August 2026 their Pro Light mailbox is £1.99 per mailbox a month on an annual term and renews at £3.99; Pro Plus renews at £4.99, Premium at £6.99 and Ultra at £7.99, with 10 GB to 100 GB per mailbox depending on tier. Their hosting plans include one to five email addresses depending on plan, so a team of any size is buying mailboxes on top.
Run the arithmetic for ten people at the Pro Light renewal rate: ten mailboxes at £3.99 is £39.90 a month, or £478.80 a year. Our Starter Email plan is £4.99 a month flat for ten mailboxes, or £49.90 a year on annual billing. That is not a trick of tiering; it is what happens when one provider charges per person and the other charges per business. Hire an eleventh person and the per-mailbox bill rises again, while a flat plan does not move until you outgrow the mailbox count.
Aliases matter here too. On our plans info@, sales@ and accounts@ can all land in one mailbox at no extra cost, so you pay for people who need a login, not for every address on your website. Storage allowances for each plan are listed on the email hosting page, and 10 GB blocks are £2 +VAT a month if you need more.
Migration is free on every plan and we do it for you. Your site is copied and tested here while the old one stays live at 123 Reg, so you approve a working copy before anything changes. Mail is copied message by message with folders and read flags intact, and your old mailbox stays untouched until you confirm the new one is right. Only then does DNS move, a step measured in minutes.
Your domain is a separate matter: leave it registered at 123 Reg and point it at us, or consolidate here at £8.95 for .co.uk and .uk and £12.95 for .com.
UKBox Ltd was incorporated in 2023 (company number 15154892), which next to a company founded in 2000 and owned by GoDaddy is no contest on track record. On our side of the scale: our own space in UK data centres in London, Coventry and Maidenhead rather than resold cloud, accounts filed at Companies House and prepared by chartered accountants, around 5,000 websites hosted, and no contract or minimum term, so leaving is as easy as arriving.
Our 99.9% uptime figure is a target and a track record rather than a credit-backed SLA; if you need contractual service credits, ask and we will discuss it rather than pretend the standard plan includes them. Support typically replies in about ten minutes between 8am and 5pm, and staff are generally around from early morning to late evening — but that is not a guaranteed 24/7 desk, and we would rather say so than let you assume it.
No. It is a large, long-established UK provider that publishes its renewal prices honestly and works perfectly well for a lot of businesses. The complaint we hear is about the size of the jump at renewal and about paying per mailbox, not about sites falling over.
Not for the first three years if you prepay their Economy plan — they are cheaper, and their storage allowance is larger. From renewal onwards we are cheaper, and on email we are dramatically cheaper for any team above two or three people.
No. Domain registration and hosting are separate services — leave the domain where it is, or transfer it if you would rather have everything in one place.
The three-year hold is in writing. In practice existing customers' prices do not change when we launch or reprice plans, and when we improved our email allowances this summer existing customers were upgraded free rather than asked for more. There is no contract, so if we ever did put a price up you could leave.
The honest test is not this month's price but the six-year one, with your actual headcount in it. Our three-year cost calculator does that arithmetic against the major UK hosts and against per-user email pricing, and the hosting plans are here. For the wider picture, our comparison against the big UK hosts covers Fasthosts, IONOS and the rest.
123 Reg prices were taken from their own published pages on 31 August 2026: web hosting and email hosting. Check them before you decide — intro offers change, and we would rather you verified than took our word for it.
— The UKBox team
