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Two things are certain in this world: death and taxes. In the online world, it’s speed and uptime. If you don’t have both, your site will surely suffer. That’s why choosing the right web hosting service for your website is one of the most important decisions you’ll make for your business.
Don’t make the mistake of saving a few bucks on a killer web hosting deal only to have your site come to a screeching halt. Our best picks will give your site first-rate performance and a ton of must-have features.
3 Must-Haves In A Web Host
Bigger isn’t always better. Size is just one of the key factors that separate a good host from a bad one. A good website host can:
- Load your websites quickly and reliably from any point on the globe.
- Offer a fixed resource allocation that will prevent your website from going down due to someone else’s mistakes.
- Provide you with informed and easy-to-reach customer service that resolves issues immediately after the occurrence, without the need for your prompting.
What about pricing? Pricing, as with any business purchase, plays a role. But with the proliferation of low-quality shared hosting companies battling for pricing advantages, the lower the price, the lower the quality hosting tends to be. For this reason, we list pricing as a reference point in our comparison table for your short list, i.e., once you’ve narrowed down some suitable candidates, only then focus on pricing.
Shared vs Dedicated Hosting: Which Is Better?
What’s the difference between shared and dedicated hosting? In a nutshell, allocation of resources. Shared servers are less expensive, but typically don’t perform as well. Visit our hosting types comparison to learn more.
Best Shared Hosting Providers
Below are our reviews of the best shared hosting providers. Be sure to see if they have free trials to test them out firsthand. Or visit the company websites for more information and to sign up for hosting.
Winner: Rochen Review
In addition to winning our top spot as the best shared hosting company, Rochen is the runner-up in our dedicated hosting competition. Rochen has servers in both Dallas, Texas, and London, England, and you have the option of choosing your server location.
The advantage Rochen has over other shared platforms is that it tightly controls the resources allocated to each website hosting account. It does this by not overselling, a common practice in the hosting industry where more bandwidth is allocated to each account than is, in fact, available on the server.
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Runner-Up: A2 Hosting Review
A2 Hosting has been around since 2003 but really stepped up their game to be a hosting leader in the last few of years. Customers rave about their unique hosting features, server uptime, security measures and helpful support. A2 Hosting has 4 data centers, with 2 in the U.S., 1 in Europe and 1 in Asia. They clearly have made a commitment to speed, uptime and security and offer free features you won’t find elsewhere.
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3rd Place: SiteGround Review
Launched in 2007, SiteGround has become one of the big names in shared hosting these days. They’re best known for their reliably fast speed, proven uptime and excellent customer support.
If your site is moderate in size, SiteGround is one of the best choices out there, especially for managed WordPress hosting. But if you need more, SiteGround lacks some of the more advanced features other services offer — most notably no unlimited disk space, no script library and no Windows hosting.
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Read Our Full SiteGround Review
Best Dedicated/Managed Website Hosts
Below are our picks for the best managed and/or dedicated website hosts. Read on to find out why we use Rackspace and to find the pros and cons as well as key features for our top picks in this category. Still have questions? Visit the websites to learn more.
Winner: Rochen Review
Rochen is the winner this year in our dedicated hosting competition. They have servers in both Dallas, Texas, and London, and you have the option of choosing your server location. Rochen offers a managed infrastructure that keeps your site running fast with minimal downtime. They back that up with exceptional customer service and optimized platforms based on your type of system.
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Runner-Up: Hostwinds Review
Hostwinds launched in 2010 and has become a major player in shared, VPS and dedicated hosting. This hosting service is packed with features, although they don’t do a great job of publicizing them on their website (you have to do a lot of digging).
Getting up and running with Hostwinds is a breeze, and they offer free site transfers. With their Softaculous Auto Installer, you can instantly set up and install hundreds of applications with just the click of a button. Customers give excellent reviews for Hostwinds’ uptime and quick, knowledgeable tech support.
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3rd Place: Rackspace Review
Rackspace is a big player in both the shared and dedicated hosting space. Historically they are known for their exceptional customer service, (via their Rackers and their Fanatical support service), available via phone, ticket or chat, 24/7/365. Unfortunately, having been previous customers of there’s, we’ve watched the quality of support and hosting reliability decline in recent years, dropping them from our top spot.
Rackspace managed hosting solutions are diverse, from cloud to dedicated. They also offer cloud file backup and dedicated email hosting (via Rackspace Email), all for reasonable prices (you can get mailboxes for as little as $1/ month).
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Comparison Table
We also have a comparison table that compares pricing and other details side by side. See the terminology section on our main hosting page if you don’t understand any of the terms we use in our table.
| Provider Name | Rochen (Shared and Dedicated 1st) | A2 Hosting (Shared 2nd) | SiteGround (Shared 3rd) | Hostwinds (Dedicated 2nd) | RackSpace (Dedicated 3rd) | BlueHost | DreamHost | FatCow | HostGator | iPage |
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| Provider Name | Rochen (Shared and Dedicated 1st) | A2 Hosting (Shared 2nd) | SiteGround (Shared 3rd) | Hostwinds (Dedicated 2nd) | RackSpace (Dedicated 3rd) | BlueHost | DreamHost | FatCow | HostGator | iPage |
| Intro Hosting price (Monthly) | $7.95 shared; $200 dedicated | $3.92 | $3.95 | $150.00 | $3.95 | $2.59 | $4.08 | $2.75 | $35.88/year | |
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| Bandwidth | Unmetered | Unlimited | Unmetered | Varies | Unmetered | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unmetered | Unmetered | |
| Disk Space | 60GB | Unlimited | 10GB-30GB | Varies | 50GB to unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unmetered | Unlimited | |
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What About BlueHost, Cloudways, DigitalOcean, DreamHost, FatCow, GoDaddy, HostGator, HostMonster, HostPapa, InMotion, iPage, InterServer, Just Host, MDDHosting, Microsoft Azure, MyHosting.com, & Network Solutions?
A rule of thumb in the hosting industry is that “bigger is not always better.” The other thing you need to be wary of is that lots of companies that started out as domain registrars, decided to “add on” hosting so they could compete in this lucrative industry and cross-promote their services. In most cases, while they continue to provide good domain registration services (since that’s their core competency), they have come up short in the hosting business.
Additionally, the hosting industry has more providers than you could possibly imagine, and it’s impossible for us to cover them all. There’s many great hosting providers out there, but for each legitimate, trustworthy service, there’s a couple bad ones. We have curated this review to cover some of the companies we feel are the best in their respective categories, and some of the more “popular” companies that we don’t feel merit a top ranking.
We’ve also refrained from covering “super popular” hosting companies that spend all their time advertising but don’t provide much quality or customer service when it comes to actual hosting.
Now without further ado, here are some other hosting companies that we do feel merit recognition:
BlueHost | Cloudways | DigitalOcean | DreamHost | FatCow | GoDaddy | HostGator | HostMonster | HostPapa | InMotion | IONOS | iPage | InterServer | Just Host | MDDHosting | Microsoft Azure | MyHosting.com | Network Solutions
BlueHost Review
BlueHost has been around for quite a while and is a good choice for those looking for plenty of back-end features. However, you may find the customer support to be slow if you are a user who requires more customer service than average. BlueHost does not push clients by up-selling to “better” services, and they offer a good number of features for a low price compared to many of their competitors.
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DreamHost Review
New web hosters recommend DreamHost for their affordable, simple service. One-click installers and expert tech support are selling points for newcomers to DreamHost who are looking for a simple blogging platform. With no CPanel access and limited script running capabilities, this is not a good choice for a web host heavy user.
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Read Our Full DreamHost Review
FatCow Review
FatCow provides users with affordable web hosting and access to immediate customer service assistance through a live chat feature. FatCow offers a web hosting solution that uses CPanel, which some users require, yet it does not require a dedicated server. Fat Cow servers are fully powered by renewable energy so you can feel good about using their service.
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HostGator Review
HostGator is a web hosting service that offers several one-click options as well as cPanel access, which makes web hosting an easy experience for newcomers. Host Gator frequently comes recommended as one of the best web hosting options out there for individuals and companies alike, both in price and features offered. They also offer VPS and dedicated hosting, in addition to shared hosting.
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Read Our Full HostGator Review
iPage Review
iPage is a web hosting company that offers many features for the experienced web hosting client. Newcomers to web hosting take caution — with their focus on more experienced users and the lack of cPanel, you may face a steep learning curve. But if you are an experienced web host user, iPage offers much more advanced options than many of their competitors.
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Cloudways Review
Since Cloudways launched in 2011, this company has shaken up the way consumers can optimize managed cloud hosting for their WordPress sites. Through Cloudways, you choose from 5 top cloud hosting providers (Amazon, Google, DigitalOcean, Vultr or Linode), and then Cloudways manages your hosting through an easy-to-use platform.
Cloudways is packed with a ton of features for high-end functionality, and it’s also highly-scalable. You get CloudwaysCDN, 1-click server cloning, on-demand or scheduled backups, dedicated firewalls, multiple databases and PHP versions and much more. Their pricing is surprisingly affordable, and their live chat tech support gets positive reviews.
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InMotionHosting Review
InMotionHosting is a popular, big-name choice these days in the web hosting market. They offer an impressive array of features with competitive pricing. You also get a large variety of plans to choose from. The issue that gives us major pause is some significant downtime reported and overcrowded servers for well over a year now.
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IONOS Review
IONOS (previously known as 1&1) offers affordable service with a moderate learning curve for those looking for a basic web hosting solution. IONOS uses all-inclusive pricing, unlike many other services that charge extra setup fees and higher renewal rates.
The Web Hosting Portfolio, Next Level Hosting, allows customers to customize the performance of the web project at any time. IONOS has added several features in the last few years and offers a free 30-day trial.
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DigitalOcean Review
DigitalOcean’s tagline is “Simple Cloud Hosting, Built for Developers.” And it is just that — you get VPS and DSN management, and that’s pretty much it. They do have SSD drives and flexible API on their side, but users report more downtime than many other services.
Their best-selling feature? Digital Ocean’s pricing is affordable, but unless you’re a small business and don’t need +99% reliability, you should probably look elsewhere.
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HostMonster Review
HostMonster is owned by the hosting company BlueHost and in the past offered fewer features. But HostMonster does get credit for bumping up their features in the last few years. Still, Host Monster is a relatively basic service and isn’t very user-friendly. If you are seeking more advanced features such as unlimited MySQL databases, then this is not the hosting solution for you.
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HostPapa Review
HostPapa is a Canada-based independent company that’s been around since 2006. They offer hosting, domains, website builders, office email solutions and other services, so hosting is not their specialty. HostPapa’s pricing is middle of the road, but you get some good features and perks, like free domain registration, SSL and Cloudflare CDN. You’ll have to upgrade for access to unlimited SSD storage, automated backups, MySQL databases and other advanced features.
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InterServer Review
InterServer is a U.S.-based hosting company that’s still small and not well-known, but InterServer has many positive user reviews online and a robust set of features. They offer excellent free security features, 460+ scripts for 1-click installs and a helpful and friendly support staff. If you’re a small business, nonprofit or blogger, we recommend you consider InterServer.
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Just Host Review
Just Host has been around for more than a decade and used to be a solid option. But the buzz online by long-time customers is not good news for this web hosting mainstay.
Consumers complain about everything from poor tech support to unreliable site uptime and functionality. JustHost does have competitive pricing and a wide array of features, but we can’t recommend them unless they get their act back together.
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MDDHosting Review
MDDHosting is a lesser-known web hosting company that only offers managed shared cloud and VPS hosting, but they get stellar reviews for their speed, uptime, reliability and customer service. They offer several pricing options, but they lack several features other services provide, including a script library, customized error pages and 1-click app installs. If you’re a smaller-sized business, it’s definitely worth considering MDDHosting.
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Microsoft Azure Review
If you want a big name web hosting solution, then Microsoft Azure is just what you are looking for. You can scale this platform to suit the smallest or the largest website. Unfortunately, navigating information on available hosting packages is so confusing that most potential customers have to call for customer service assistance to ensure that they get what they need from Microsoft Azure.
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MyHosting.com Review
MyHosting.com has been around since 1997 and offers shared Linux and Windows web hosting with most of the major features you require for basic website hosting. They also offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space. However, MyHosting does charge additional fees for additional MySQL databases, email addresses and other features that many other providers give you for free.
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Network Solutions Review
Network Solutions has been in business since 1979 and used to be one of the big names in the web hosting space. However, their popularity has really fallen over the years, likely because they’re one of the most expensive providers. They also only offer a moderate amount of functionality (although they have added a few extra features like unlimited MySQL databases, 1-click installers and .htaccess configurability).
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GoDaddy Review
GoDaddy is one of the most recognized names when it comes to web hosting. However, while they make hosting easy for newcomers, they have been known to cause problems for some users.
The most common complaint by users of GoDaddy’s web hosting service is that they lack flexibility and offer only basic functionality. GoDaddy may be a good fit if you are new to web hosting, as it is a good introductory hosting company.
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Which Web Hosting Solution Is Right For You?
It’s important to find a service that offers functions that you need now as well as those you may need in the future. One of the most difficult parts of hosting a website is moving that website to another host if you don’t make the right choice the first time. This can occur for a number of reasons including growth, language/code changes, the addition of e-commerce or videos, etc.
There are some major factors you need to consider when choosing a web host. Check out the video below for some great tips.
Best Domain Registrars
Another huge decision you need to make for your website is choosing a domain name registrar. Although several hosting companies also offer domain name registration services, we don’t recommend hosting with your domain registrar.
Why? Hosting and domain registration are extremely different entities, and most companies simply aren’t great at both. With that in mind, be sure to check out our reviews of the best domain registration companies to find an affordable and reliable place for your site to reside.
Decide on a web host for your business? Let us know in the comments!
Tagged With: Comparison
