Labs

Nottingham-based Heart Internet is the latest project from the team that originally developed WebFusion and 123-Reg. With 2.5GB of storage and a generous 20GB monthly bandwidth limit, the Starter Professional package has impressive specifications, and the email capability stretches to 1,000 1GB POP/IMAP mailboxes, complete with webmail access and spam protection. At £2.92 per month, it is also the least expensive package here, although this doesn't included domain registration or the one-off £9.99 setup fee.

You can upload your website through the single FTP account or using the online file manager, but there's

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no support for direct publishing from Microsoft FrontPage. It offers a healthy range of extras, but really useful additions such as Joomla and WordPress are available only in the Home Professional package, which costs around £10 per month.

You manage your website and associated accounts through the eXtended control panel interface. This provides access to a wide variety of tools, but it's not particularly easy to navigate, partly because it's packed with only nominally useful extras, and partly because the important stuff isn't available in the initial interface, but buried one level down.

Heart Internet's hosting is based on Linux, so there's support for PHP 4 and 5, Perl and Python. It is the only company in this test to use Sun ONE ASP, which provides ASP compatibility on a Linux server. You'll have to upgrade to the Home Professional package (which costs £10.56 including VAT per month) to gain SSH access, however.

Heart Internet's Starter Professional package provides good value. The lack of SQL database support will be a deal-breaker for some, but if you want to operate a club or organisation website for many members, the enormous email quota is a sure-fire winner.