There are numerous web hosting companies in the market today. In addition to that, many resellers buy website hosting from companies and then resell it. A lot of business owners, especially small business owners who have brick-and-mortar companies don’t bother much about the hosting of their site; however, deciding on the hosting of your site is very important as there are many things that you need to take into consideration when you decide the best web hosting provider for your business. Many website owners or business owners leave the decision of the hosting company to their website designer. The problem with this is that the website designer may just sign up for the cheapest web host so that their margin is not affected. In addition to that, they may subscribe to web hosting plans which are cheap, to begin with (the first year) but then shoot up later. This will needlessly increase your expenses over time. Every business has specific needs and depending on the needs of your website you can decide which web hosting provider will be the best for you. Some businesses are small and just need an online presence. Some businesses need a site hosted on a server that has excellent uptime and will load fast. This is very important if your website will have a lot of traffic. Some businesses have critical data and need services that ensure that the security of the web hosting company is very high. In addition to that, websites that have constant changes will need daily backups and preferably will need a website that will provide free backups. An e-commerce company, a brick, and mortar small business and a WordPress review blog, have different objectives so each one needs to have a website hosting plan which will be the most appropriate for them. We have listed below five of the best web hosting companies: SiteGround.com is a website hosting provider that is recommended by many forums and blogs. It has been recommended officially by industry-standard companies like Joomla, WordPress.org, and Drupal. Even though Siteground is recent in the market since it was launched in 2004, the fact that SiteGround now has over 1.6 million domains hosted with them makes it one of the top hosting providers in the industry today. They have data centers that are spread over Europe, the United States and Asia. SiteGround has three plans, including the Startup plan which is their basic package. It is good for one site and is very basic. It doesn’t offer the famous caching plugin of SiteGround which is the SuperCacher. The SuperCacher ensures that your site is very fast. This comes in GrowBig plans and the GoGeek plans. Let us check the main features of SiteGround: While many hosting providers give you ready-made software solutions to ensure that your site is online, SiteGround has designed in-house solutions so that you get a great hosting experience. One of the biggest worries when it comes to hosting is that your site should be online when your visitors want to access your site. This is known as site uptime. The platform of SiteGround is made on Linux containers. This helps to ensure that your site is stable and the uptime is intact even if you have sudden large spikes in traffic. This system checks the servers every half second. If there is an issue, it is automatically resolved even without any human solving it. This ensures that the uptime is excellent. The load time of SiteGround is the best in the industry. With their caching plugin, SuperCacher, you can load a site in less than 750 ms which is excellent. Also, when you load a site, the load time is consistent which is very important. Fast page load time is an important factor when it comes to ranking your website on Google in addition to giving your website visitors a better experience The customer support of SiteGround is quick, friendly and technically savvy. This makes it a great website hosting provider even if this is your first website and you are confused about how to set it up. SiteGround has managed WordPress hosting in every plan. This ensures that your WordPress site is fast, easy to install and secure. It also has account isolation technology even on shared servers. This ensures that the security of your websites is high. They also have a server monitoring system which they have designed. They take care of any WordPress updates or plugin updates. They make daily backups of your site for free. You also get added security with the software they deploy including SpamExperts, SpamAssassin, Leech Protect, IP address blocklists, and hotlink protection. Though the features of SiteGround are excellent, the pricing is reasonable and on par with industry standards. You get a 1 website basic account for $3.95/- per month, an unlimited site plan for $5.95/- per month and a resource-intensive plan for $11.95/- per month. They also give you a 30-day money-back guarantee. The start-up plan gives you access to one website, and 10GB of web space and it can easily handle up to 10,000 visits per month. The GrowBig plan is for multiple websites, it gives 20 GB in space and it can handle 25,000 visits per month. The GoGeek plan is for multiple websites, it gives 30 GB of space and can handle about 100,000 visits per month. You can test the SiteGround website hosting service with a 30-day money-back guarantee here. Bluehost has over 2 million websites across the world and is one of the biggest hosting companies in the world. With over 2 decades of experience, Bluehost is one of the most recommended, popular and cost-effective website hosting providers in the market. Bluehost has a staff of 750+ employees. They ensure that the systems and servers are on par and that the customer service is great. The uptime of Bluehost at 99.99% is almost perfect. There were just 2 outages in the past year which is excellent and much better than industry standards. The page-load of Bluehost wasn’t great earlier but has improved this year. With a load speed of less than 500 ms, it is excellent, to say the least. The page load depends on the weight of the page but on average, Bluehost beats its competition when it comes to speed. Though Bluehost used to have expensive plans, it has optimized its prices in 2018 to tackle competition. Bluehost has initiated a low starting price of $2.75 per month. They are not the cheapest web hosting providers in the market but since the load time has improved, they have excellent uptime and now a reasonable entry price; it is quite a good deal. You need to keep in mind though that the introductory price of $2.75 per month comes only with a 36-month commitment. If you want a one-year plan, you will need to pay $8.99/- per month which is higher than the competition. Bluehost has excellent tools when it comes to online security. With an increase in online attacks and hacking, your website needs to be secure. Bluehost provides your site with SpamAssassin, Spam Hammer, and Spam Experts. You also get CloudFlare with Bluehost which ensures that you don’t get DDoS attacks. DDoS attacks are attacks where a huge amount of fake traffic hits your site which crashes the site. Bluehost also provides hotlink protection so that no one can steal your content and images. It also provides block facilities for suspicious IP addresses. You can also set up two-factor authentication for logins and a password protects all your directories. You can integrate CloudFlare which improves your site’s speed and increases its security and Google Apps directly into your control panel. This makes accessing it very easy. Bluehost is excellent when it comes to WordPress site installations. It is officially recommended by WordPress. WordPress has officially recommended SiteGround, Bluehost and Dreamhost for WordPress installs. You can also easily install any app, e-commerce feature and a wide range of plugins on your website. Bluehost has an interface that is very easy to use. This makes it very beginner-friendly. It is very easy to access your email addresses and your website all in one place. You can even customize the control panel as per your needs. The interface is the most simple that is available. Most of the software which you need to install can be done with just one click on the icon. One big disadvantage though is if you are moving your sites and email accounts from any other web hosting provider to Bluehost, you will need to pay a fee. Most web hosting providers don’t charge a fee for migrating sites so this is something very surprising that Bluehost is doing. Bluehost starts with a basic plan for $2.75 per month as widely advertised. This gives you access to one website, 50GB storage and ‘unlimited’ bandwidth. This will also give you 5 email accounts and 100MB of storage. The higher level is $5.45 per month and you can use it for 10 websites. It gives you 150GB storage, 100 email accounts with 500 MB storage each and ‘unlimited’ bandwidth. Their final plan is $5.45 per month. This is for ‘unlimited’ websites with unlimited storage, email accounts, bandwidth, and email storage. You can test the Bluehost website hosting service with a 30-day money-back guarantee here. When it comes to WordPress Cloud hosting, HostGator is an excellent web hosting provider. It is not as popular or famous as the competition but it is an excellent web host provider especially if you are looking for cloud hosting. The advantage of HostGator is that it has a managed WordPress platform that gives excellent performance. The platform bundles robust functionality with scalable cloud hosting. This allows your site to run faster and makes your site more secure. You get excellent load speeds for your site and you don’t even need a CDN or caching. When it comes to site uptime, the HostGator Cloud’s uptime is great at 99.96%. It beats the industry standard and has only 41 outages in the whole year. The outages are more than Bluehost and SiteGround but are still impressive. The load speed of HostGator at less than 450 ms is very impressive. You are assured that you won’t lose customers because your site is slow. The speed is better than industry standards. It is 50% faster than the competition (the industry standard is 890 ms) Though the speed is fast, HostGator ensures that you get a stable uptime. This is rare in the industry i.e. consistently fast load time. This is due to the site being in cloud storage. You get a fast site and your site visitors get a great customer experience. When you consider that HostGator has plans that start at $2.75/month, you are getting a great deal. It is cheaper than most of the branded web hosting services in the market. The only issue that we have is that the cheap price option is only for 12 months after which you will need to pay a higher amount. With HostGator, you get a host of free add-ons like Anti-Malware which helps you to keep your site secure. It gives you Global CDN which helps in having a faster and more secure site. Content Delivery Networks take the large files on your sites like videos and images and send them directly to the visitor rather than via your site. This makes your site very fast. It gives you free daily backups. These backups are automatic and free once you have activated them. Unlike, Bluehost which we reviewed, HostGator offers free migration of your sites and email accounts from any other web hosting provider. You also get unlimited storage of your files with all the plans. This allows you to keep adding content to your website without worrying about space. HostGator has a 24/7 support team which you can access with any option you choose like email, chat, and phone. Online chat is the fastest and easiest to get your issues resolved. The customer support is friendly and very knowledgeable and will easily resolve complex technical issues you may encounter. They don’t have support via social like Facebook or Twitter but since their website chat is so excellent, you shouldn’t face any issues. HostGator gives you a Hatchling plan for $2.75/month. It gives you support for one site. The Baby plan costs $3.95/month for unlimited sites. The business plan costs $5.95/month for unlimited sites and comes with a dedicated IP and free SEO tools. All the plans give you free SSL certificates, one-click installs and an unlimited amount of storage. The plans are very competitive and they are reasonable when you compare them with the competition. You can test the HostGator cloud hosting service here. GoDaddy, supported by its advertising may be the most famous web hosting provider in the world. The brand is one of the most recognizable in the field. It is over 2 decades old. With over 17 million customers, $2,000,000,000 in revenue and 6,000+ employees, it is the biggest domain registrar in the world. It has many good points but since it is such a huge company and there are so many customers to which it needs to cater, over time, GoDaddy has not lived up to its potential and in many areas has been left behind by its competition. One of the biggest advantages that GoDaddy Hosting has is that it has been in the web hosting game for a very long time and has excellent cash reserves to work on research and employ the best technology available. Uptime is one of the most important criteria when it comes to web hosting and GoDaddy leads there. It has an excellent uptime rate. Even though GoDaddy deploys a lot of customers on shared servers, on average, the page-load of GoDaddy is good. As per our tests, GoDaddy has always ranked in less than 450 ms so the speed of its page load is excellent. When it comes to a small business, there is a high possibility that the website won’t get a significant amount of traffic. Considering this, more than the server capacity, having a host of products is important. GoDaddy is excellent in this regard. It is a one-stop-shop for all the business needs of a small business. Along with buying your domain and your hosting, you can avail of its free or paid email account services. It is an excellent website builder which you can use to build your site fast and easily. You can also access a large number of applications that you may need to run your online business. If you want a professional website designer, GoDaddy helps there too. It can connect you with professional web designers. As compared to other web-hosting providers, GoDaddy doesn’t give many add-ons for free. You literally have to pay for every add-on like an SSL certificate, etc. In addition to that, if you don’t use the email provided in your plan in the hosting and go for the email plan, then after you cross the minimum storage benchmark, you are charged. The customer support of GoDaddy is quick and efficient. They are friendly and resolve your issues quickly. There are mixed reviews online about the customer support of GoDaddy but honestly, we haven’t faced any issues. However, the support falters a bit when the questions get too technical. Customer support can resolve most of the questions of an average business owner though who needs a website. GoDaddy has three main plans. The first is the single-site economy plan. It starts at $2.49/month for the first year. The second plan is the deluxe plan. This gives you access to use unlimited sites and comes for $4.99/month. The Ultimate plan has more power and more databases. You also get a free SSL certificate. This plan is only $7.99/month. GoDaddy also has a Business Hosting option which comes at $19.99/month. This option gives you a VPS i.e. a Virtual Private Server and a free SSL certificate. Most of the plans don’t include a free SSL certificate and that is very necessary especially when it comes to Google mentioning “not secure” for a non-SSL site. You can test the GoDaddy hosting service here. Established in 2001, InMotion is one of the oldest brands when it comes to website hosting. They are big in terms of the number of clients and have over 300,000 domains hosted with them. They are excellent when it comes to transfers and customer support. The brand holds a record of being CNET Certified for over 15 years in the web hosting industry. They also have an A+ service rating from the Better Business Bureau (BBB) which is a consumer protection agency that reviews the performance and integrity of Canadian and U.S. businesses. Though the uptime of InMotion is not great at 99.9%, it is not bad as it is barely less than the market and industry average. Uptime is very important in case you have constant traffic to your website and if your website gets constant traffic, then InMotion may not be perfect for you. The page load speed of InMotion is not too fast at 800-850 ms speed. Though your site won’t be affected too much by the speed level, once more, if you have a highly visited site, this web hosting provider may not be the best for you. Another excellent advantage of InMotion is you get a lot of free add-ons. You get a free domain name. You get free site transfers if you are transferring your sites from another website host provider. You get free data backups. You get free integration with Google Apps. If you have an e-commerce site, then you get easy integration with payment processors and leading e-commerce service providers and platforms. Customer support is one place where InMotion beats its competition by miles. You are quickly connected to a live customer service representative who solves your issue or answers your questions intelligently and quickly. This saves a lot of your time. Since InMotion has a very reputed name in the field of web hosting, they also make sure that they verify each account which may take time but you are assured that the security of your site is strong. This reduces the number of fraudulent and suspicious account holders on their servers. Security is another area where InMotion excels. InMotion’s hosting for WordPress comes with a free Sucuri security plugin. This plugin will scan your site for security risks. You also get anti-spam, remote backups, and anti-virus protection. In today’s world where security is very important and hacking a site is very easy, this feature helps a lot. In addition to that, InMotion has tied up with Corero Network Security and offers a Super Secure Smartwall Threat Defense System (TDS). This system detects and eliminates DDoS attacks in real-time. This is very necessary especially if you have a large site as you may be a victim of “fake” visits which may hit your website in hundreds of thousands of hits which may render your site inaccessible to genuine visitors. InMotion has 3 plans. The first and basic plan is the Launch plan. It starts at $6.39 per month. With this plan, you can set up 2 websites and have 6 free parked domains and also create 25 sub-domains. With the Power plan, you can set up 6 websites, and 26 parked domains, and create 100 sub-domains. This plan is for $8.49 per month. The Pro plan is at $14.71 per month. With this plan, you can set up unlimited websites, parked domains, and sub-domains. All the above-mentioned plans come with unlimited bandwidth and storage. They also have a 90-day money-back guarantee. You can test the InMotion hosting service with a 90-day money-back guarantee here. You can check below the key factors you should consider when choosing between web hosting companies and our recommended web hosting provider solutions. Site Uptime is the most important factor when it comes to deciding on your website hosting provider. Uptime is important as if your site is not up or if the server that your site is not available then the visitors to your website won’t be able to see it. This will result in a loss of business and affect your brand name. Most of the reputed web hosting providers have excellent site uptime of over 99.9%. You may not need a hosting provider which has an excellent uptime if you don’t expect too many visitors to your website; however, it is always good to host your website on a server that gives you good uptime. Another advantage of having your website on a server that has excellent uptime is that when search engines like Google access your site to index it, the site will be available. This will improve the ranking of your website on Google. A higher position on Google will help you to get more visitors to your website which will, in turn, improve your brand name and increase sales. Page load is the speed at which the pages on your website will load when a visitor accesses it. There is a tremendous amount of research online that confirms that page load or the speed at which the content of a page is displayed to a visitor is very important when it comes to online sales. In addition to an improved customer service experience, Google and other search engines give a boost to the positions that your website is ranking which in turn gets more visitors to your website. This helps you to make more sales. Having a fast page load is very important especially if you are in the e-commerce industry and you need to make sales. Even if you have a small business or a brick-and-mortar business, having a website that loads fast impresses the visitors to your website. Though you may not “need” a fast site, wouldn’t you want a site that is fast and responsive when your brand loyalists visit your website? For many website owners, the cost of hosting is a very important factor when it comes to deciding the best web hosting provider for them. When you check the various offers in the market, make sure to check that there are no clauses or fine print which will offer a low up-front amount and then later make you pay higher. There are a lot of unethical practices in the web hosting industry and you need to make sure that you don’t fall prey to one of them. You can move your websites to another web-hosting provider if you feel that your provider is needlessly charging you extra. However, moving a site if you are unhappy with the provider is a hassle. If you have a WordPress site, you will need to transfer your SQL databases etc. Many service providers charge to transfer sites so you need to make sure that you decide on your web hosting provider before you set up your site. Most web hosting providers will give you money-back guarantees which will range from 30-day money-back guarantees to 90-day money-back guarantees. When it comes to pricing, you should always try to understand if the web hosting provider will charge the same price every year or if they will increase their prices after the first-time commitment is over. This is a practice done by many web hosting providers so make sure you check this before you buy the plan. Another practice of many hosting providers is to offer free domains and SSL certificates which will be free for the first year or the tenure of the first billing cycle and then will be chargeable. Setting up a site and maintaining it is complex unless it is your profession. Most of the time, you will need to get in touch with customer service to understand how you need to set up your site or if there is an issue with your website. If your web hosting provider has excellent customer support, working on your websites will be easy. If your provider’s customer service is horrible (and there are many cases of horrible customer service including direct ignoring client emails), maintaining your website can become a nightmare. Most of the web hosting providers that we have reviewed have excellent customer service. In today’s world where hacking has become easy and there are literally millions of instances of website attacks ranging from phishing and brute attacks to WordPress theme and plugin vulnerabilities, having a web hosting provider which will take the security of your website seriously is very important. In addition to daily backups and two-factor authentication, there are many options that various web hosting providers use to ensure that the websites on their servers are not hacked. Since most website owners buy shared hosting plans, websites become vulnerable to attacks from other sites which are hosted on the same server. To counter this, web hosting providers like InMotion verifies each new account. If you have an e-commerce website, it is very important to ensure that the security provided by your hosting company is high. Many web hosting providers will provide you with add-ons that will improve your website and make running and maintaining your site easy. This ranges from one-click WordPress installs to free automatic daily backups. Many providers also give you free unlimited storage, free email accounts, free SSL certifications and free site transfers if you want to migrate from another web hosting provider to them. These add-ons are very important so you need to check if you will need them and then accordingly decide on which host to go with. As you can see above, there are many excellent web hosting providers in the market today. Depending on your need, you can choose the web hosting provider that will be perfect for you. If you need good load time and want WordPress hosting then you can go for Site ground Web Hosting services. If you want a reliable and reputed web hosting provider, then Bluehost is an excellent choice. If you want a fast host which is cloud-based and will give you fantastic load time then go for HostGator Web Hosting. GoDaddy Web Hosting is excellent when it comes to small business hosting but be careful of hidden fees and you shouldn’t opt for add-ons that you don’t need as your monthly billing will increase. Finally, if you want excellent security and customer service, you should go for InMotion Web Hosting.
Web Hosting Companies
Web Hosting Companies: SiteGround Review
High Uptime (99.99%)
Load Time
Friendly Support
Quick WordPress, Free Security add-ons, and easy website transfers
Current Plans
What are the advantages of SiteGround Hosting?
What are the disadvantages of SiteGround Hosting?
Web Hosting Companies: Bluehost Hosting
Uptime
Page Load Speed
Price
Security
WordPress and Integration
Current Plans
What are the advantages of Bluehost Hosting?
What are the disadvantages of Bluehost Hosting?
Web Hosting Companies: HostGator Review
Site Uptime
Fast load speed
Competitive Pricing
Free Add-ons
Customer Support
Current Plans
What are the advantages of HostGator hosting?
What are the disadvantages of HostGator hosting?
Web Hosting Companies: GoDaddy Review
Great uptime at 99.95%
Page Load
One-stop Shop
No Free Add-ons
Customer Support
Current Plans
What are the advantages of GoDaddy hosting?
What are the disadvantages of GoDaddy hosting?
Web Hosting Companies: InMotion Review
Uptime
Page Load Speed
Free add-ons
Customers Support
Security
Current Plans
What are the advantages of InMotion hosting?
What are the disadvantages of InMotion hosting?
What to look for when choosing the best web hosting companies?
Web Hosting Companies: Site Uptime
Web Hosting Companies: Page Load
Web Hosting Companies: Cost
Web Hosting Companies: Customer Support
Web Hosting Companies: Security
Web Hosting Companies: Add-ons
Conclusion: Web Hosting Companies
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