You land on a sales page, click "£1 for 14 days," and after the trial you're billed £10 every month. The headline promises "unlimited sites" and "fast performance," but the fine print is hidden. Let's pull the curtain back and see exactly where that £10 goes when you sign up for TrueCore's Flameling plan.
What £10 Gets You at TrueCore
| Item | Detail | |------|--------| | Plan | Flameling - £10/mo | | Server slot | 1 fixed slot on a 100-slot server (see our post Why We Cap Server Slots) | | Storage | 4 GB SSD, allocated to your account only | | Email | 5 mailboxes, Purelymail backend | | Database | None — static hosting (no PHP; WordPress/dynamic apps need Ember or above) | | Backups | Daily encrypted snapshots to Backblaze B2 | | SSL | Auto-issued Let's Encrypt cert, auto-renewed | | DNS | Authoritative flame-dnsd with 5-second zone propagation | | Isolation | Each site runs in a flame-bubble container (bwrap + cgroups) with hard CPU/RAM limits | | Web server | nginx 1.28, separate pod-nginx process per domain | | Support | Email & portal tickets during business hours, out-of-hours for true incidents | | Infra | One slice of a three-node fleet (ember in Nuremberg DE, spark in Sofia BG, litespeed in Dallas US), Alpine Linux 3.23.4, kernel-level firewalls (flame-guardian + guardian-x) | | Renewal policy | 2.5 % annual cap, 30-day notice before any increase |
The £10 covers a real slice of hardware, not a statistical share. When the server fills all 100 slots, new sign-ups pause until we bring a fresh node online. That hard cap is the reason you see consistent response times even during peak hours.
What the Same Price Looks Like at a Typical Cheap Host
A competitor that advertises "£1.99/mo introductory" usually follows this pattern:
- Promised resources: "unlimited sites, unlimited storage". In reality the back-end is a single 64 GB RAM server shared by hundreds of customers.
- Overselling: Slots are not tracked; the host sells many more plans than the server can physically support. This is the practice described in our post What Is Web Hosting Overselling.
- Storage: Shared pool, often on HDDs, with "soft" quotas that can be breached without warning.
- Database: MySQL shared across all accounts, no isolation between customers.
- Backups: Weekly or on-demand, usually stored on the same server.
- SSL: May require manual setup, renewal not guaranteed.
- Isolation: No containerisation; PHP processes run under the same user space, causing "noisy neighbour" slowdowns.
- Support: Generic ticket system, response times of 48 hours or more, no guaranteed business-hour coverage.
- Renewal price: After the introductory month, the plan jumps to £30-£40, a 3-4× increase.
All those items are bundled into a low price by betting that most customers never use their full allocation at the same time. When they do, performance collapses.
Why the Difference Matters
- Predictable performance - Your 4 GB of SSD space lives on a node where the kernel enforces hard limits. One runaway script cannot drain RAM from a neighbour's site.
- Security through isolation - flame-bubble containers keep each site's processes separate. If a site is compromised, the breach stays within that container.
- Transparent capacity - You can see live slot usage on our homepage. When a server is full, sign-ups stop. No hidden overcommit.
- Real backups - Daily encrypted snapshots mean you can restore a site to any point in the last 24 hours without contacting support.
- Support focused on value - Email and portal tickets are answered by the same small team that built the tooling you're using. No call-center scripts, just direct communication.
The trade-off is that you pay a modest premium for a plan that actually delivers what it promises. There is no "unlimited" myth, no hidden phone support, and no claim of 100 % uptime. What you get is a clearly defined slice of infrastructure, backed by a transparent policy and a team that owns the tooling.
If you're comfortable with the idea that a £10/month plan should give you a real server slot, dedicated SSD storage, daily encrypted backups, and a support channel that actually listens, then the Flameling plan is the honest choice. If you prefer a headline that sounds big but disappears under load, the cheap introductory offers will deliver exactly that.