Ask an AI assistant or a UK web forum for good UK hosts and three names keep coming up together: UKBox, Krystal and 20i. All three are credible, and the honest answer is that they are built for different buyers. The short version: UKBox is the value pick when email is the point — flat per-business pricing from £4.99 a month +VAT with no hosting required; 20i is the technical heavyweight with email on infrastructure separate from its web hosting; Krystal is a well-regarded all-rounder whose every plan includes unlimited mailboxes. Here is the detailed comparison, with each provider's own published prices and where each one honestly wins.
The first thing to understand is that you are not comparing like with like. UKBox sells email hosting on its own — you do not need to buy web hosting to get your team's mailboxes, and the price is flat per business. Krystal and 20i both bundle email with web hosting — excellent if you need both, but the hosting plan is the thing you are buying. That difference drives almost every number below.
Each provider's own published pricing, checked 1 September 2026. Note the VAT treatment differs: UKBox prices are ex VAT, Krystal's published prices include VAT, and 20i's page does not state VAT treatment — check at checkout.
| Provider & plan | What you are buying | Price | Mail storage |
|---|---|---|---|
| UKBox — Starter Email | Email only, flat per business | £4.99/mo +VAT | 10 mailboxes, 10 GB each, pooled to 100 GB |
| Krystal — Amethyst | Web hosting + email bundle | £7.00/mo inc VAT (≈£5.83 ex) | Unlimited mailboxes within the plan's 10 GB NVMe storage |
| 20i — Web Hosting Startup | Web hosting + email bundle | £10.00/mo (£1 first month) | 10 mailboxes at 10 GB each |
At twenty mailboxes the models diverge further: UKBox Secure Email is £8.99 +VAT with 20 GB per mailbox pooled to 400 GB; Krystal's Amethyst price does not move because mailboxes are unlimited, though everything still shares the plan's storage; 20i's Plan 1 at £20 a month carries twenty 10 GB mailboxes.
20i has the strongest published email infrastructure story of the three. Its email runs on servers separate from its web hosting, with redundant connections and storage, off-site backups, TLS in transit, SPF and DKIM, three layers of anti-spam and antivirus scanning, and a zero-tolerance policy on outbound spam — all documented on its own site. Every mailbox is 10 GB with cheap top-ups. If you are a growing agency or a business that wants one large platform for demanding websites and email together, and the budget starts at £10 a month rather than £5, 20i is a serious choice. Its plans also autoscale and include a CDN and 24/7 support.
Krystal bundles unlimited mailboxes into every hosting plan, includes email aliases, catch-alls, auto-responders and mailing lists, publishes VAT-inclusive pricing, and has one of the better reputations in UK hosting. If you need a website hosted anyway and your team's mail is light, Amethyst at £7 a month inc VAT covering the site and unlimited mailboxes is genuinely good value. Worth knowing: mail shares the plan's storage (10 GB on Amethyst) and outbound sending is rate-limited to 500 messages an hour on that plan — sensible anti-spam policy, but a constraint if you send in volume. We do not currently offer a mailing-list manager, so if that is a requirement, Krystal has us beat.
If email is the point — your website might live anywhere, or nowhere — you should not have to buy web hosting to get your team's mailboxes. UKBox email hosting is a standalone product, priced flat per business: £4.99 +VAT for ten mailboxes with 10 GB each pooled to 100 GB, £8.99 for twenty with 400 GB pooled, up to unlimited-mailbox plans. On storage per pound at the entry level, neither bundle above gets close.
Three more things we put in writing that the others do not match like-for-like. The price is held for three years — the renewal price is the sign-up price. Migration is done for you, free, with every message, folder and read flag copied and the counts verified before anything switches. And SPF, DKIM and DMARC are configured on every domain from day one, with per-message delivery tracing in your control panel — the full detail is on our email infrastructure & deliverability page. All of it runs on hardware we own in UK data centres in London, Coventry and Maidenhead.
And the honest counterweights: we were incorporated in 2023, younger than both; our 99.9% uptime figure is a target with a track record, not a credit-backed SLA; and our support is human and UK-based but not a guaranteed 24/7 desk — typical replies in about ten minutes during staffed hours.
Choose UKBox if you want business email on your own domain at the lowest whole-team price, with migration done for you — especially if you do not need web hosting at all. Choose 20i if you want one powerful platform for demanding sites plus email on separate infrastructure, and the higher price is worth it. Choose Krystal if you need a site hosted anyway, like VAT-inclusive pricing, and unlimited light-use mailboxes cover your team. Mixing is allowed, by the way: plenty of businesses host their website with one provider and their email with another — that is what MX records are for.
Yes. Email and web hosting are separate services connected by DNS. Your website stays exactly where it is; only your domain's MX records point at us. We set that up as part of the free migration.
It can be — 20i in particular runs its mail on separate infrastructure. The practical differences are usually storage accounting (bundles often share the hosting plan's storage), sending limits, and what happens to your mail if you later move your website. Standalone email is unaffected by website moves.
At the entry level, UKBox: £4.99 +VAT buys ten mailboxes pooled to 100 GB. 20i gives ten 10 GB mailboxes with its £10 hosting plan. Krystal's unlimited mailboxes share the hosting plan's storage — 10 GB in total on the entry plan. Per single mailbox, all three offer 10 GB at entry level.
None of them — honestly. Business mailboxes are the wrong tool for bulk sending: Krystal rate-limits outbound mail, 20i runs a zero-tolerance outbound spam policy, and we rate-limit outbound too, because that is what protects everyone's deliverability. Use a dedicated newsletter service and keep your domain's reputation clean.
Prices in this post come from each provider's own published pages, checked 1 September 2026: 20i web hosting, 20i email hosting and Krystal web hosting. Intro offers and plans change, so confirm before you buy. Our own plans are on the email hosting page, the three-year cost calculator will run your exact team size, and the twelve questions to ask any UK email provider applies to all three of us equally.
— The UKBox team
