Hosting, Market by Market
Web hosting built for France
What actually differs when your order comes from France: the local domains we can register, what your card is charged, the distance to our servers, how tax applies, and which payment methods we still can't accept.
Local Differences
Buying from France, point by point
This isn't a template with the country swapped in. Each line below shifts with where you're ordering from.
Local domain endings
.fr — all of these we register for you directly.
Prices in your currency
Figures display in EUR; the card is billed in USD. The conversion happens at your bank, which may add a fee of its own.
How far our servers sit
About 10–35 ms for the round trip. Full speed. Putting a server inside your own borders would gain you nothing.
Support on your clock
CET/CEST — one hour in front of UK time, all year round. First replies target 2 hours in English, day or night.
Local Endings
What your national ending costs
Numbers pulled directly from our live price list — no rounded estimates.
| Domain ending | Year one |
|---|---|
| .fr | $11.99 |
| .eu | $8.99open to anyone resident inside the EU |
See the full price list — all 65 of the endings on our list, without exception.
Unique to France
Details that apply in this market only
Paris answers roughly 10 ms out from London, which puts it among the shortest international hops anywhere in Europe. We carry .fr. The ending demands a registrant established in the EU, so it's open to you where an American buyer gets turned away. The French-specific wrinkle to watch: a Cartes Bancaires card wearing no second badge can be declined.
Operating in France
Beyond price and ping
The parts of running a site here that a plan comparison never covers.
Eligibility, consent banners, and the CNIL
Hosting matters less here than two French particulars. Start with eligibility. AFNIC limits .fr to registrants established in the EU or EEA, a bar you clear and an overseas buyer does not, so the ending is genuinely yours for the taking rather than a lottery ticket you queue up for. Consent is the second one. Few regulators in Europe have pushed harder on cookie banners than the CNIL, and the pattern it keeps landing on is the banner that makes refusing more work than accepting.
No host can handle either of those for you, though both change what you end up installing. Consent tooling and analytics that honour a refusal pile extra PHP work onto every page view, and absorbing exactly that load is why NVMe storage and LiteSpeed caching sit under the account. Mentions légales belong on the site as well, naming the publisher and the host. You can name us, and say London, without hedging a word.
- We register .fr direct, and being established in the EU is the thing that qualifies you
- Every request carries the cost of consent tooling, and your caching layer is where that bill gets settled
- Checkout can refuse a Cartes Bancaires card if there's no Visa or Mastercard badge on it
At Checkout
Payment methods that work at checkout, and those that don't
Where our supported methods diverge from your country's habits — flagged up front, not discovered at payment time.
What we accept
Any Visa, Mastercard or American Express card, credit or debit alike, issued in France or anywhere else, provided the issuer has enabled international payments on it. Stripe handles the transaction end to end, so those digits never land on our servers.
Not supported yet
Most French Cartes Bancaires cards also carry a Visa or Mastercard badge, and anything dual-badged goes through our checkout without fuss. A CB-only domestic card may bounce. We can't take PayPal here either.
Full detail on payment methods and how we handle currency.
City by City
Nearer to you in France
The same story, told city by city.
Asked and Answered
What customers in France want to know
Does ordering work from France?
Absolutely. Visa, Mastercard and American Express cards issued in France are all accepted, and provisioning fires automatically the second payment clears — no manual approval step, no need to be anywhere near the UK. Prices display in EUR so you can judge the cost; the actual charge reaches your card in USD.
Which payment methods are common in France, and do you accept them?
Here is the honest version rather than the sales one. Most French Cartes Bancaires cards also carry a Visa or Mastercard badge, and anything dual-badged goes through our checkout without fuss. A CB-only domestic card may bounce. We can't take PayPal here either. The one method that always works is a card enabled for international payments. Better to know that now than after an hour spent comparing plans.
How fast will pages load for visitors in France?
Our hardware runs in London, roughly 10–35 ms away. Full speed. Putting a server inside your own borders would gain you nothing. For a first-time visitor pulling a cached page, the gap barely registers — an edge node near them can serve it. Where distance does show up is logged-in activity: the WordPress dashboard, a checkout, anything uncacheable, because each of those actions makes the full London round trip. Our infrastructure page breaks down what a CDN speeds up and what it cannot touch.
Will tax be added to an order from France?
Order from inside the EU and VAT may apply. Where it does, the amount is worked out and shown at checkout before a penny leaves your account, so nothing gets bolted on afterwards. Buying as a VAT-registered business? Put in your number and the reverse charge takes care of it.
Do I need a UK address to hold an account?
No. The company running things is British — Vitalcare at Home Ltd, registered in England and Wales under number 15098204, verifiable on the public Companies House register — yet buying hosting involves no residency check and no business-registration check. An order from France processes exactly like one from London.
What happens if the plan doesn't suit me?
Hosting plans give you 30 days to change your mind, reseller plans 7. That is long enough to put a real site live and measure it against your own traffic instead of taking our figures on trust. Still not convinced? Ask for your money back. Domain registrations are the one exception, because the registry bills us the moment a name goes live, which makes them non-refundable.
Run your own test from France
You get thirty days to benchmark it against your real audience. If the numbers fall short, claim your money back.
Browse the plans