Midphase Review 2026: Still Open, New Owner, Real Prices
The Midphase homepage at midphase.com, captured in October 2026.
Short answer: Midphase is still in business. As of October 2026, midphase.com loads a working Midphase store, and the brand is a trading name of UK2 Group LLC. UK2 Group was bought by the hosting group Your.Online in February 2026. Your.Online says the brands stay separate, and there was no forced account migration. Midphase is fine for a small, low-traffic WordPress site if you budget for the renewal price, not the $1 first month. If you need fast human support or monthly billing that stays cheap, move to Hostinger, FastComet or a managed cloud host such as Cloudways.
This page replaces our 2020 review, in which almost everything has since changed: plans, prices, owner and email platform. Facts below were checked on Midphase’s own site and the new owner’s announcement in October 2026, and the move guide uses real screens from a test site.
Midphase Quick Facts
| Item | Details (as of October 2026) |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1998 according to one page on midphase.com, though another says “23 years of experience” (about 2003). The earliest Wayback Machine capture of midphase.com is from June 2003 |
| Bought by UK2 Group | UK2 Group bought midPhase Services’ shared hosting and VPS business in December 2007 |
| Bought by Your.Online | Your.Online acquired UK2 Group, announced February 2, 2026 |
| Current owner | Your.Online. Midphase is a trading name of UK2 Group LLC (Wilmington, Delaware) |
| Where midphase.com goes now | A 301 redirect to www.midphase.com, which is a live Midphase site |
| Old customer accounts | Still Midphase accounts, managed in the Midphase CHI control panel. Email has moved to a newer platform called StackCP |
| WordPress hosting price | $1 for the first month, then $7.99 to $20.99 per month. Annual plans from $85.88 for the first year |
| Money-back guarantee | 30 days |
| Support | 24/7 technical support by ticket. Sales chat 24 hours. Phone for sales and billing 6:00 am to 3:00 pm Eastern, Monday to Friday |
| Our recommended alternatives | Hostinger, FastComet, or a managed cloud host like Cloudways |
Is Midphase Still in Business?
Yes. Midphase did not shut down and was not folded into another brand. midphase.com redirects to www.midphase.com, which still sells domains, web and WordPress hosting, email, VPS plans and a website builder. The CHI control panel and support pages are live too.
What did change is the owner. On February 2, 2026, Your.Online announced that UK2 Group had joined it. UK2 Group runs four hosting brands: UK2, Midphase, Westhost and Resell.Biz.
Your.Online’s announcement that UK2 Group, the company behind Midphase, joined the group. Captured in October 2026.
Your.Online says the business will run independently and that “the brands will remain separate,” with no integration into its other platforms. Its other UK hosting brands include Heart Internet, which it bought from GoDaddy in March 2024. You can already see the two brands working together: the Dedicated Servers link on midphase.com now goes to Heart Internet, which Midphase calls its sister brand, and the Midphase contact page lists an office address in Leeds, England.
A Short History of Midphase
Midphase started as an American budget host. Here are the dates we could confirm:
- 1998 or 2003: Midphase’s own site says it was founded in 1998. Its LinkedIn page says 2003, and the homepage’s “23 years of experience” also points to about 2003. The Wayback Machine has its first copy of midphase.com from June 2003.
- December 2007: UK-2 Group, a British hosting company, bought the shared hosting and VPS business of midPhase Services, Inc., including the ANHosting.com and Autica.com brands. UK-2 said at the time it would keep Midphase as a separate brand.
- July 2008: Midphase relaunched with a new website. It said at the time that it hosted more than 120,000 sites.
- 2017: THG (The Hut Group), the UK online retailer, bought UK2 Group from private equity owner LDC. THG later ran its hosting brands as part of THG Ingenuity.
- By 2024: Midphase was moving its email hosting to the StackCP platform (more on this below).
- February 2, 2026: Your.Online announced that UK2 Group, including Midphase, had joined it.
Your.Online’s announcement does not name the seller or the price.
What Happened to Midphase Customer Accounts
The 2026 sale did not move anyone. Midphase accounts are still Midphase accounts. You log in at the same CHI control panel (chi.midphase.com), you pay Midphase, and the legal name on the terms pages is still UK2 Group LLC. Your.Online says the sale is not meant to change how the brands serve customers.
Email did move, earlier. Midphase’s knowledgebase has a guide to migrating email hosting to “a new and enhanced platform called StackCP.” Customers had to start the move themselves from the Email Migration page in CHI, type in the password for every mailbox, and expect several hours of downtime for big mailboxes. The guide warns that POP3 users would not get their old emails copied, and that new migrations were sometimes paused “due to high demand.” Webmail now lives at stackmail.com. Customer reviews from spring and summer 2024 describe lost logins and slow replies during that move.
If you can’t get in: Midphase’s migration guide recommends setting a recovery email address in CHI, because two-factor codes go to your email. If your only email is hosted at Midphase and it stops working, you can be locked out of both. Add a recovery address on a different provider (Gmail, Outlook or similar) now.
Midphase WordPress Hosting in 2026: Plans and Real Prices
Midphase’s four WordPress hosting plans with the 1-year term selected, October 2026. The renewal price sits under each plan.
Midphase sells four WordPress plans. You can pay monthly, yearly or every two years. All prices below are in US dollars, before tax, as of October 2026.
| Plan | 1 month | 1 year | 2 years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essential | $1 first month, then $7.99/mo | $85.88 ($7.16/mo), renews at $95.88 | $161.76 ($6.74/mo), renews at $191.76 |
| Personal | $1 first month, then $13.99/mo | $157.88 ($13.16/mo), renews at $167.88 | $305.76 ($12.74/mo), renews at $335.76 |
| Professional | $1 first month, then $16.99/mo | $193.88 ($16.16/mo), renews at $203.88 | $377.76 ($15.74/mo), renews at $407.76 |
| Premier | $1 first month, then $20.99/mo | $241.88 ($20.16/mo), renews at $251.88 | $473.76 ($19.74/mo), renews at $503.76 |
What renewal really costs
The $1 offer covers only the first month. After that, the cheapest plan costs $7.99 a month. Unlike many budget hosts, the gap between the first term and the renewal is small on the yearly plans: Essential goes from $85.88 to $95.88 a year. The catch is the starting point. At about $7 to $8 a month for one site, Midphase is no longer the cheap option it was in 2020.
Note that the free domain only comes with yearly or two-year WordPress plans. Midphase’s own fine print says it is not included with the monthly packages.
What each plan includes
| Essential | Personal | Professional | Premier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Websites | 1 | 5 | 10 | 25 |
| Storage | 25 GB | 50 GB | 100 GB | 200 GB |
| Mailboxes (10 GB each) | 1 | 5 | 10 | 25 |
| CDN | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| SiteLock | Not listed | Not listed | Annual plans only | Annual plans only |
Every plan also lists daily backups with one-click restore, a staging site, automatic WordPress core updates, daily malware scans and removal, free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates, edge caching, Git version control, a 1 GB database limit, and a choice of data center in London, Dallas or Singapore. Midphase advertises a 99.99% uptime guarantee and free site migration onto its servers. We did not host a site on Midphase, so we can’t speak to its speed or uptime ourselves.
Support and Refunds
Midphase’s contact page says technical support for domains, hosting and email is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, by ticket. Sales also answer on chat around the clock. The phone line, +1 (302) 405 7677, covers sales and billing only, from 6:00 am to 3:00 pm Eastern Time, Monday to Friday.
The refund policy gives a full refund on web hosting if you ask within the first 30 days. Setup fees, domain registrations, SSL certificates and SEO tools are not refunded, and neither are automatic renewals. So if you plan to leave, turn off auto-renew before the renewal date, not after.
What Midphase Offered in 2020 (Historical)
In October 2020, Midphase sold three WordPress plans, Starter, Primary and Pro, at $2, $4 and $5.20 a month for the first term (renewing at $4.99, $9.99 and $12.99) with 5 GB to 20 GB of SSD storage. None of those plans or prices exist anymore.
Should You Stay With Midphase?
Stay if your site is small, works, and about $96 a year for one site is fine. Move if the 2024 email migration burned you, you need phone support for technical problems, or you want more speed for the money.
Pros:
- Still open, with a stable brand and a clear owner
- Small gap between first-year and renewal prices on yearly plans
- Daily backups, staging and malware removal on every WordPress plan
- Free migration if you are moving onto Midphase
Cons:
- No longer cheap: $7.99 a month after the $1 first month
- No phone line for technical support
- The 2024 email move caused real trouble for some customers
- Homepage still advertised “Lower Spring prices” in October 2026, which suggests the site is not closely maintained
How to Move Your WordPress Site Off Midphase
The safe order is: copy the site, test it on the new host, and only then cancel. Many hosts will move a site for you for free. To do it yourself, use a migration plugin. Our All-in-One WP Migration guide covers one option. Below we use a different free plugin, Duplicator, and we ran every step on a test install.
Our test: a fresh WordPress 7.1.2 site with six posts, four pages and three images, and Duplicator 5.0.5 from WordPress.org (over 1 million active installs as of October 2026; see our Duplicator review for the full picture). We moved it from one folder to a new folder with its own empty database on the same test server, which is the same process you follow when moving to a new host.
Step 1: Take a backup you control
Before anything else, make a full backup and download it to your computer. Midphase’s plans include daily backups, but those live on Midphase’s servers. If you want a second backup tool, see our backup plugin roundup.
Step 2: Build a Duplicator package
Install Duplicator from Plugins > Add New, then go to Duplicator > Backups > Add New. The first screen lets you name the backup, pick where it is stored (the default is a folder on your own server), and set an optional installer password. Click Next and Duplicator scans the site. On our test install the scan found about 125 MB of files and a 1.2 MB database, and every check came back “Good” apart from a notice that the archive would not be encrypted.
Click Create Backup. On our test install, both builds sat at “Initializing” for a few minutes before Duplicator switched by itself to running the job from the open browser tab. After that, each build finished in about a minute and a half. If yours stalls, keep the tab open and wait. The finished archive was 50.5 MB, plus a 171 KB installer file.
Duplicator 5.0.5 on our test install after building a backup, with the Download menu open. October 2026.
Open the Download menu and choose Both Files. You get the archive (a .daf file in this version) and installer.php.
Expect upsells. In the free version, almost every Duplicator screen carries an “Upgrade to Pro” box, and cloud storage, scheduled backups and drag-and-drop imports are Pro features. None of them are needed for a one-time move.
Step 3: Pick a new host and create an empty database
Sign up with the new host and create an empty MySQL database with a user and password from its control panel. Note the database name, user, password and host.
Step 4: Upload the files and run the installer
Upload the archive and installer.php to the new site’s main folder (usually public_html) with FTP or the host’s file manager. Then visit yoursite.com/installer.php in a browser.
The Duplicator installer on our test install, with the new database details entered. October 2026.
The installer has two steps. In step 1, enter the database host, name, user and password. Duplicator detects the new URL and folder on its own and shows the old values next to them. There is a cPanel tab too, if your new host uses cPanel. Click Validate. On our test install, all four checks passed. Tick the box to accept the notices and click Next. Our test site of 50 MB finished in a few seconds.
Step 2 of the Duplicator installer after a successful install on our test site. October 2026.
Step 2 shows the results. On our test install every line was “good,” and Duplicator had updated 20 database rows to swap the old address for the new one.
Step 5: Log in and let Duplicator clean up
Click Admin Login and sign in with your usual WordPress username and password (they come across with the database). Leave “Auto delete installer files” ticked. On our test install, Duplicator removed the archive, the installer and its working folder as soon as we logged in, and confirmed that “This site has been successfully migrated.”
The migrated test site right after the first login, with Duplicator’s cleanup report. October 2026.
You may also see a notice that Duplicator’s encrypted settings were reset. That is normal after a move and only matters if you had saved cloud storage logins in the plugin. If any files are left behind, delete installer.php and the archive by hand; leaving them on a live server is a security risk.
Step 6: Switch DNS and test
Test the site on the host’s temporary address first: open posts and pages, try forms, log in and out. Then point your domain’s DNS or nameservers at the new host (in CHI if the domain is registered at Midphase). Allow up to 48 hours and keep the Midphase account running until then.
Step 7: Move email, then cancel
If your email is hosted at Midphase, set up the mailboxes at your new provider and move old mail before you cancel, or you will lose it. Then turn off auto-renew in CHI and cancel the hosting. Remember that Midphase’s 30-day refund only covers new purchases, not renewals.
Where to Move: 3 Alternatives
- Hostinger: the best fit if price matters most. It is cheaper than Midphase in the first years when you prepay, and its dashboard is easy for beginners. Try it at Hostinger.
- FastComet: traditional shared hosting with a classic setup that long-time Midphase customers will find familiar. Check the renewal price before you buy, as our review explains. Visit FastComet.
- Cloudways: a managed cloud host with monthly billing and much more server power, for busier or growing sites. Our Cloudways vs SiteGround comparison explains how it works, and our managed WordPress hosting guide lists more options. See Cloudways.
For more hosting reviews, browse our hosting hub.
FAQ
Is Midphase still in business?
Yes. As of October 2026, Midphase is still selling hosting, domains and email at midphase.com. The brand was not shut down or merged into another host.
Who owns Midphase now?
Your.Online. It acquired UK2 Group, the company that has run Midphase since December 2007, and announced the deal on February 2, 2026. Midphase is legally a trading name of UK2 Group LLC.
What happened to my Midphase account?
Nothing, because of the sale. Your account, login (CHI) and billing are still with Midphase. The bigger change for most customers was the 2024 move of email hosting to the StackCP platform, which required each customer to start the migration and re-enter mailbox passwords.
Is Midphase good for WordPress?
It is fine for small sites. The WordPress plans include daily backups, staging and malware removal, and the yearly renewal is only slightly higher than the first year. But at $7.99 a month after the first month, it is not cheap anymore, and phone support is for sales and billing only.
What is the best alternative to Midphase?
For the lowest price, Hostinger. For classic shared hosting, FastComet. For a busy site that needs more speed and monthly billing, a managed cloud host such as Cloudways.
Final Verdict
Midphase is still around and, as of October 2026, nothing forces you to leave. Its WordPress plans are decent but no longer a bargain, and the 2024 email migration and sales-only phone line are weak spots. If price, speed or support matters more, move with Duplicator or your new host’s free migration to Hostinger, FastComet or Cloudways.