Picking the best web hosting service can be the difference between a good and great website. But it's not the easiest of subjects to understand if you're not au fait with the ways of the web. The best web hosting space is a competitive one, where each company puts out a lot of spin, confusing jargon and sometimes outright fibs, making it tricky to see the wood for the trees. So in this article, we’ve done the work for you. Below, you'll see our selection of best web hosting services available today.
1. Bluehost
If you’re new to hosting, we recommend Bluehost, because it provides an easy to use interface, as well as superior customer support via phone, email or live chat. Depending on your plan, your WordPress software is either installed automatically or in one click.
We'd add that Bluehost also offers the best website hosting for WordPress sites. There are also some good analytics and SEO tools to help you improve your website’s performance. And overall you get a great all-round service, making Bluehost an excellent choice for anyone, novice or experienced.
2. Siteground
Siteground provides friendly, helpful and enthusiastic 24/7 support through a wide variety of channels, including chatbots, phone, email, live chat and tickets. Calls are answered quickly, and tickets receive a first reply within 15 minutes on average.
Are you expecting to lean on technical support a lot, when setting up and managing your website hosting? Then choosing between services on the basis of price alone may turn out to be a false economy. Time is money, after all, so for the best customer service in the hosting sphere, we’d recommend Siteground.
3. HostGator
Looking for shared hosting? We recommend Hostgator. Basically, if you want to sell things on your site, you need Business; otherwise go for Hatchling if you want to host a single domain, or Baby for more than one domain.
It’s a great hosting provider in general, offering first-class uptime, performance and customer support, whatever your plan. But specifically on the shared plans, you get more for your money than with most, including a free domain, free SSL certificate, $100 of AdWords and Bing credits, unlimited free email addresses, and a website builder that includes 100+ mobile-friendly templates and an image library.
4. InMotion
Want VPS hosting? Then our pick of the providers is InMotion. While its cheaper shared hosting plans have their limits, InMotion really shines when it comes to the more advanced stuff. Inmotion also offers dedicated Sysadmin support to expedite your data migration and server setup, and a choice of optimisations depending on whether your sites are based on PHP or WordPress.
And even though their VPS plans are not the cheapest, we’d argue that they’re the best value overall, because the specs are so high. For example, on the cheapest plan you get 4GB RAM, 75GB SSD storage, 4TB bandwidth, three dedicated IPs, free SSLs and a cPanel for just $29.99 a month.
5. Hostwinds
If you or your company has the resources to pay for dedicated hosting, you don’t want to mess around. You need a hosting provider that provides a high-spec service and a range of tools to make configuration and customisation easier.
And there’s a fabulous amount of flexibility in the system. And for that, we recommend Hostwinds. With Hostwinds’ dedicated hosting, which starts at $79.50 a month, every server is fully managed, so you don’t have to waste your time worrying about mundane tasks such as sys admin duties, server monitoring and nightly backups.