Choosing The Best Hosting For Your Website

Comparing Hosting Companies

All the Hosting companies reviewed here have many options. To make a fair comparison I have ignored their first term discounts and given the price for a continual hosting product. I have used the cheapest offering giving shared hosting – so beginners can host several sites on their web-space. 

Think Long Term

choose hosts who can offer upgrades to top speed single site hosting, once your enterprise is off the ground.

False Economy – Combining Hosting and Domain

Avoid buying your domain and hosting from the same source, until you research it thoroughly, some may well offer a great discount or even free domain, but when it comes to renewal after the initial period, make you pay through the nose for every subsequent year.

Check VAT

Always check whether the hosting fee includes VAT or not! some quote with VAT others without. Whilst business owners may be familiar with this, beginners often miss this important issue.

Affiliate Links

Some of the links below are affiliate links, the commission earns a little towards the running of my website, and does not increase the price you pay.

Hosting Providers

A2

I have no hesitation at all in recommending A2 hosting. I use A2 to host some of my own sites and have done for many years.

Response to customer queries and problems has always been very good, just raise a ticket and the answer is there quickly. In some cases, their staff make the changes themselves.

Based in Datacenters in the US and Europe. Very fast SSD-type disc stacks. In tests against Hostgator, BlueHost, GoDaddy, and others, A2 beat them by a huge amount with load times less than 2/3 of the others.

Speed is a big Google rank factor so get the best NOW. From just £2.39/month for shared hosting 

Go Daddy

They may have the  best site  for offering existing domains, but for hosting I wouldn’t bother . Lacklustre speed, service and high price. For £7.99/month for shared hosting I would expect a lot better. They advertise their  security is top notch, but this weeks news from Wordfence – a well known security plugin site does throw a different light on how good it actually is –

hosting site accounts compromised

Go Daddy do offer all the usual services and facilities, but with all the negative feedback online I just think its maybe not the best available

Hostgator

Well certainly no complaints about up time or service. I’ve had 2 sessions of several years hosting with Hostgator. Cheap and very Competent . Service second to none. Whenever I needed assistance, I used the online chat facility and got straight through, problems sorted out immediately. They have extensive Knowledgebase files which you can access and usually find answers in.

Hostgator are trusted by more pro users than almost any other provider and currently host  over 2  million sites worldwide. 

Importantly they will migrate and set up your site for you. This alone is worth the asking price, to avoid downtime on your money sites. 

I was last with HG a couple of years ago when it wasn’t  the fastest speed hosting and there was no free SSL for domains, they have fully addressed these issues now and their . From $ 3.95/month + VAT for shared hosting which is the current offer and is highly recommended especially for newbies to site hosting

  • Free SSL
  • Unmetered bandwidth
  • Quick customer service
  • contact – phone, twitter, chat, ticket, email

Important for me, was standard cPanel access, access to raw web logs and version control for PHP. Also one click install of WordPress, although this is almost standard anywhere now. 

HostGator

BlueHost

Well liked host. Been around a long time. Reliable but Expensive. $12.99 + VAT for shared hosting at the min term which is 12 months  Much cheaper if you sign up for 36month contracts.  To be  fair with my comparisons, I give the price to include multiple (no limit) websites.  Note that their price list does not include VAT.   

Spire Hosting

Spire , no doubt named after the famous Crooked Spire of St Marys in Chesterfield, Derbyshire is my local hosting company,  is run by Dan Smith, who took the trouble to come and see me when I signed up! ( I can’t see GoDaddy sending anyone round to see new clients anytime soon). Dan is a phenomenon, he sorts problems out on the fly, even advising and sorting out stuff that really isn’t even his problem as a web-host, but his loyal customers will appreciate that extra mile.

I have been with Spire a few years now and would not hesitate to recommend them. Their new CCD drives have really made the site speed rev up and the free SSL will be appreciated by all , especially newbies. It is all done automatically which is a great saving on time for most users. 

SiteGround

One common procedure which comes up when changing hosting, is migrating the site.  I recently changed from Hostgator to A2 with 10 sites and most I managed easily, but two had problems, which took an age to sort out.

I like to gain experience and would encourage anyone to do all these regular tasks, but not on your main money site ! Let the hosting company move it. They do it day in day out and are much less likely to make a stupid error, like I did with the wp database config.  Also they’ve probably come across every silly mistake possible and can rectify it quickly.

Sevices: Siteground will migrate your site to their hosting for free. Its just not worth the risk of that downtime and potentially having to rebuild a site.

WordPress Hosting: Siteground are WordPress specialists, if you have a site based on WP, its great to  know that there is such a wealth of experience and utilities available here.

Performance: From this year, Siteground has been using the Google Cloud network Hosting, which is huge, fast and reliable, on SSD persistent drives for the fastest possible web load times

Price: Siteground’s prices are very similar to the others in this review, actually at the lower end. Where they score heavily is in communication. If you open a ticket with a problem, its usually replied to within the hour. When using their chat service, you can usually talk to someone within minutes or most times instantly. 

That …. GOOD CUSTOMER SERVICE ….is worth changing hosts for.

Check Out Great Hosting

Some of the links above are affiliate links. The commission helps to keep the website running, and does not affect the price of the services to you.



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