A Comprehensive Review of Hosting Companies – Which One Is Right For You?
Choosing a host is one of the hardest choicest to make – yet is one that is very little thought of. We plan out the design, the development, user experience and SEO, but when do we ever plan or care about the hosting?
That is, of course, until something goes terribly wrong and your website is down for hours and your emails keep bouncing as spam. That’s when you realize hosting becomes the most important component of your website. Without a reliable host, there is no website.
Unfortunately, it’s near impossible to really figure out what host is the best. If you tweet or google about a host, you’ll get just as many negative reviews as you do positive. Therefor, I’ve gone through several hosts in an attempt to find really find the one with the best uptime, the best email and features – and the best cost.
GoDaddy
GoDaddy is one of the most popular choices for hosting and domains. They were one of the first hosting companies I went to and I still buy all of my domains from them. They also have a lot of domain extensions (like .it for Codesnipp.it) that the other companies didn’t offer.
Pros:
- Domains are super cheap and range around $11.99
- Hosting is really cheap – the lowest plan is $41.99 per year and offers 10GB of space, 100 email accounts and 10 MySQL DB’s
Cons:
- No real cPanel access
- Can take over an hour to set up MySQL DB’s
- WordPress runs REALLY slow (over 17 seconds per page load on my site) once the DB starts becoming large (with a lot of posts) and no amount of optimization helps
- Server response is really slow
- The GoDaddy site itself is terrible, crowded and impossible to find anything out
- Tech support is worthless and unknowledgeable
Yahoo Hosting
Yahoo Hosting boasts an all-in-one business solution for the web. I haven’t owned Yahoo Hosting myself, but have come across this server several times with clients, enough to know the ins and outs.
Pros:
- Hosting is $119.40 per year and includes a domain in the price
- Easy to use and set up for beginners.
- Includes unlimited disk space, data and email space.
- 24/7 support
- Built in rankings and traffic report generator.
- Really nice, clean interface
- A lot of tools
Cons:
- No cPanel
- Does not allow custom htaccess
- WordPress is limited on Yahoo Hosting due to them forbidding htacccess, which means no SEO-friendly permalinks, caching or anything else.
Blue Host
I switched to Blue Host after finally giving up on GoDaddy. Blue Host was recommended to me by several people, seemed really affordable and was fast and reliable for for the first few months. Unfortunately, that didn’t last and I had to move after the serious downtime.
Pros:
- Very affordable hosting at only $83.40 a year for unlimited data, storage and email.
- Free domain
- Real cPanel
Cons:
- After the first couple of months, I had severe downtime every few days
- Server was faster than GoDaddy, but still slow and at times, very laggy
Dreamhost
Several of my clients used Dreamhost and it was great for awhile. However, as with all really cheap hosting companies, downtime was a killer.
Pros:
- Hosting is $107.40 per year for unlimited space and data.
- cPanel access
Cons:
- A LOT of downtime for several hours, even days
1and1
Thankfully my experience with 1and1 was short. They have to be one of the worst hosting companies I’ve ever dealt with due to their lack of tech support and custom service. Good luck on this one if you decide to go with them.
Hosting starts at $47.88 per year for only 10GB of space and unlimited data.
Pros:
- ?
Cons:
- Backend makes you feel like you’ve gone back in time to the 1970′s.
- Tech support? What tech support? How about send an email and wait a week for a stupid, unhelpful response?
Rackspace
Rackspace is used by CoreCommerce for all of their hosting, which means I come in contact with them every time I do an eCommerce site.
Pros:
- Very fast and responsive on both the CoreCommerce and WordPress frameworks.
- A bunch of different hosting packages to fit any need, including those that need scalable hosting.
- Comes with a lot of advanced configurations
Cons:
- Fees are pretty expensive….so expensive it was impossible to find their prices for basic hosting.
- Has had some downtime.
- Meant for larger companies and seasoned server professionals.
Host Monster
Host Monster is one of the few cheaper hosting companies that seem to run ok. I left them awhile ago to go back to GoDaddy (before I left them from Blue Host), but only because I wanted to have my domains and hosting in one place at the time. I haven’t ran WordPress on Host Monster though, so I don’t how they handle DB speed.
Pros:
- Hosting is only $71.40 a month for unlimited space, domains and data.
- 24/7 support
Cons:
- Website looks like it was made in the 90′s and never updated.
- A little bit of downtime.
ZeHosting
ZeHosting is my current and all-time favorite hosting companies. They originally came to me as a client and hired me to code their website. I feel in love with their hosting services, especially since I was allowed to try it out for free on Codesnipp.it. I now host all of my sites with them. They have awesome and normally instant customer support and my site’s load time is near instantaneous.
Hosting is $119.40 per year for 25GB of storage, 100GB of bandwidth and 1,000 emails. Extra space can also be purchased for a pretty affordable price. ZeHosting claims their accounts are powered by hundreds of servers, and while I can’t confirm that’s true, I can say I’ve had the most uptime and the fastest site ever on ZeHosting.
Pros:
- Very affordable
- Near instant custom service via Twitter, IM or email
- Tech support usually comes from the owner, Pierre, himself.
- Very helpful
- Real cPanel
- WordPress runs like a cheetah on steriods
- The most uptime out of all sites.
- Always offering great coupons for hosting
- They don’t seem to pack a million users onto one server, so everything remains super fast.
- They’ve only gone down once since I’ve been with them (almost a year
Cons:
- I did have to switch to gmail masking of my email, because ZeHosting is a little too proactive with their spam filters and a bunch of incoming emails from clients and colleagues were getting blocked. But this was easy and free to switch over.
About the author
Amber Weinberg specializes in clean and semantic XHTML, CSS and WordPress development. She has over 10 years of coding experience and is pretty cool to work with. Amber is available for freelance work, so why not hire her for your next project?
Have you (or anyone who comments) used Media Temple? I feel like a good amount of the blogs I read are hosted on Media Temple, I’d love to get someone’s opinion on them.
Thanks!!
I know a lot of larger sites use Media Temple, but I’ve heard that they have a lot of downtime, plus their hosting rates are pretty expensive, so I haven’t tried it out myself.
I’ve used Media Temple before. Namely for the reasons you mentioned. It seemed like a popular host among the design community.
The problem I had was unresponsive/unhelpful technical support and sluggish performance. A lot of the negative reviews I’ve read about their Grid Service matched my experience.
So I have stayed away from Media Temple. But this was over three years ago. They may have improved since then.
When it comes to personal blogs and smaller business, I’ve been extremely happy with Site5.
For sites that generate more traffic, I don’t hesitate to recommend LiquidWeb; both their VPSs and Storm on Demand cloud servers.
Yea I’ve heard some terrible things about Media Temple, which makes me wonder why so many of the popular design sites use them.
Many of the sites that you see displaying a banner for Media Temple as their host are sponsored sites. They generate a lot of traffic, and therefore are offered free hosting in exchange for advertising.
According to the FTC (if they are US-based), they should be disclosing that in the same way they should disclose affiliate links because the relationship is not readily apparent to an uninformed user.
I vaguely remember reading somewhere that 9rules has a partnership with Media Temple that provides free hosting under certain circumstances.
A lot of the more well-known design/web blogs are a part 9rules, so I wonder if that could be one reason you see so many Media Temple hosted blogs despite their poor track record.
My bad, should have read Brian’s reply first.
I’ve used 1&1 for over 7 years for various projects without an issue that wasn’t of my own making. The only time I had to call tech support was about 5 years ago with a dedicated server that I had accidentally shutdown instead of rebooted after a kernel upgrade (one of those “oops! wrong terminal!” moments). It turned out the NIC was having issues and not responding to WoL. It took about 30 minutes, including 10 minutes of waiting for a person to pick up the phone, to get back online.
I can’t comment on the control panel, though. I do 99% of my work over SSH. I try Cpanel every now and then on some of my accounts, but the File Manager hangs up all the time. It’s just a lot faster to open up a terminal and go.
I’ve used GoDaddy to purchase domains, but only when they are running specials. I buy my domains through Enom at $8/each. It’s nice to not get annoying emails all the time about how my domain is about to expire (with 6 months left…).
I’ve started using HostGator for some projects in the last couple of months. I’m not sure, though, if I’ll be satisfied or not.
HostGator was ok when I used it, didn’t have any problems at all, but was only with them for about six months.
I’ve been with HostGator since December 2010, and it’s been ok so far. My hosting has gone down once (in the middle of the night), and was back up within the hour. Support has been much better than GoDaddy, but not incredible. The prices are alright.
I might try out ZeHosting for my next site.
Great post Amber!
Nice overview Amber, surprised not to see Media Temple here though. I was hosting with Hostgator for years and switched MT last year, and best choice I made. Very fast servers and the people are top notch. Support has got to be the best around, they monitor Twitter actively and are responding to problems before a lot even know there was one. lol
They are also greatly active within the community, I have been to a few development conferences for jQuery, and they are always on site, promoting and hosting parties. And of course, handing out schwag!
They do get server hiccups more than I would like on their grid service, but the flexibility, access and support far outweigh any negative I may feel there.
Anyways, just my $.02!
-Ryan
Yea I’ve heard a lot about their downtime which was a big negative to me, plus the fact their clustered hosting is outrageously priced.
Tey go to all the jquery things because we are hosting most of jquerys stuff on their servers. A couple of employees from there on are on the jq team too
I have used Media Temple before but found they were too pricey. I currently use two great services and love them for the flexibility and price:
- NameCheap.com: domain purchase. You actually own the domain and can do whatever you like with it.
- ICDSoft.com: great price and excellent service. Very reliable, have not had any downtime yet. Very easy to use.
George
People should always bear in mind that hosting companies aren’t always a one-stop deal. Resellers, registrars, data centers, and so on; it can get pretty hairy. Sometimes one company is handling everything, but often it’s a middle-man doing domains with someone else one block down doing the server machines themselves, or a middle-man with a company or two doing domains and servers behind them with a transparency in-between. I’ve been through some MAJOR headaches with domain registration, pushing, transferring, etc. Man, oh man. All of this is why I’ll never become a reseller and offer hosting myself. But I have run into some good providers (best word I choose to use for them). Unfortunately, Go Daddy isn’t one of them. I worked with them a bit in 2006 and 2007 and wasn’t satisfied. I’ve also dealt with Host Monster, Host Gator, eNom, two local places in Michigan, an independent setup at a University, and recently a place in my town. And what each of those is, reseller/registrar/data/etc, is a little different – example: Go Daddy hosts and is a domain registrar, and I’m not sure if anyone is behind them. Whereas I think Host Gator is a reseller of eNom, and you can even become a reseller of Host Gator. It’s kinda like a darn daisy chain after a while. *lol*
p.s. I’ve also dealt with DreamHost. Forgot about them. So far, I am ok with Host Monster and Host Gator. Gator offers a lot of unlimited stuff, their support is always extremely spot-on and helpful (almost always very nice, too), and all the sites I’ve setup on them, most of which are WordPress or Drupal, all run fine with no reported downtime.
I’ve been seriously considering a host change lately (I’ve used Netfirms for a few years), so this post is well timed.
You would think finding a reliable web host would be easier in the “media age”, but it doesn’t seem that way. Thanks for some options!
Yea deciding on the last two hosts after GoDaddy was so difficult, I thought I was going to go nuts. You’d think there’d be an easier and simplier solution in this day and age…maybe that’s a good business idea for someone LOL.
I work with several hosting due to work and I host my own personal site with Site5 which I really like but spam filters are just ridiculous.
I also use GoDaddy for registering all my domains (web hosting isn’t good).
I also like very much 1&1 and I can honestly say I never had any real issue. Quality-price relation is really good. Also support.
I love Rackspace since it’s very fast as you said Amber.
And about Media Temple, I have used their services for a while and then switched to Site5. It’s just too expensive for that much downtime (Media Temple site is really well designed though).
Yea their site is really well designed, but I’m not paying all that money to see a pretty site
When I used 1&1 they had no phone support, it was email only, and they took forever in answering it as well.
Of course you’re not, and neither am I!
The thing with Media Temple is that they promise you too many things so you won’t feel stupid paying so much money for their web hostings but the reality isn’t the same. Then again at the end of the day that’s what most of hosting company do I guess.
1&1 do have phone support (at least now). They might not be as fast as Rackspace for example, but not a bad one in my opinion.
BTW, have you ever tried Site5? I would definitely recommend them if you’re looking for real cPanel. I only had issues with mail filtering
I generally use Justhost.com and i havent any issues i think in about 2 years they been had down time twice and not for longer than about 15min which is good and also they are priced good also and have unlimited space, bandwidth and everything else..
Hmm never heard of them before, will have to check them out.
What great timing! I’ve been looking for a different host for a new site I’ll be creating soon. I’m currently using iPage to host two domains and I have to say, I’m pretty disappointed in them. I liked the idea of them being green, and they’re pretty cheap, but I’ve had a lot of cases of downtime. Two weeks ago they were having server issues for four days straight, if not longer, and that was kind of the last straw for me. I mean, four days? Really?
Great post! Really informative. Was hoping to see a review of Host Gator or Media Temple as well, but really glad you’ve got such an awesome audience that they answered most of my questions right in the comments!
One question though – you said you were with Host Gator for a few months and had nothing negative happen. What made you switch? Same question to anyone else who tried Host Gator and switched.
I just switched because it was my ex bf paying for it (ugh drama) and I wanted my domains and hosting the same place.
Really great post as always Amber
I have hosting with a couple of providers (MT, RackSpace US and UK, Amazon S3), but out of all of them I prefer Hetzner in Germany (www.hetzner.de). I literally have my own server farm with them by now, running 25 dedicated servers there, and out of the 5 years that I have been with them I have had only 1 hour of downtime … and this was due to me being stupid and shutting down a interface. I do a estimated 250-300GB of data per server, but with a cap of 5 TB, why would I worry?
Oh, if you hit the 5TB mark, they don’t deny your traffic, they just downgrade the interface from a 100MB to 10MB… bit plus from my POV
Just my 2c
Great post!
I have used HostGator in the past, and their support staff was very good. In fact I got a call from them when I closed the account to see if there was anything that they could do to retain me as a customer. I needed PostgreSQL, so there wasn’t anything at this time they could do.
I switched over to WebFaction, which is a little more pricey. The support staff, their response time, as well as the server uptime, there are excellent which makes up for the pricing. As with some that you mention above, they keep the number of clients per server down so as to not decrease the overall performance. The don’t use cPanel, but the control panel they have custom built works great.
It’s worth checking them out. They do give you a 60 day moneyback guarantee, so you can try them risk free.
Extremely useful, thank you.
Another great post. I use GoDaddy now and haven’t had any big issues with them, but agree that WP can be slow on it. I was also recommended InMotion Hosting, which I was going to look into but now I have some additional options to look into. If anyone has any input on InMotion, please let me know
Why did this review sound like a recap of past relationships that never worked out? “First, I was with Godaddy. Things didn’t work out, and I switched over to Bluehost.” I just found that amusing.
I recently created an account with Host Gator during their 50% off Black Friday deal. At that time, I was still using Bluehost. The renewal would’ve been double the price I paid for the first year, so I knew things had to change, unless of course I happened to win the lottery soon. Overall, Bluehost was alright, with the only negatives being the occasional downtime.
LOL because finding hosting is like finding a good significant other…you have to go through a few duds first
I had hosted sites in ServerFly really a bad experience, the support is really poor, they had a support chat but I think is just one guy fixing everything because you habe to wait almos 15 min for the answe to your question so simple problems takes you a couple of hour to find out if they can help you.
Now I had some sites in 3ix is real cheap smallest hosting package es just $21 a year, 40 GB space, 100 GB monthly traffic, with my sites I have not had a problem but some local fellow frelancer from El Salvador had mayor issues like sites erased out of the blue, and a client had some information missing, in both cases the issues had been solved, thay give lame excuses but somehow fix the problems, a pro is that they have many servers, you had a cool cpanel with a thing called fantastico that helps you install wordpress, joomla, etc in just seconds, the best is that they offer you reseller packages and every host that you make in this pack has his own cpanel.
For some clients had used in the past local hosting provider that are just plain lame, with a plethora os restrictions like access for just one computer(that must be a PC), no support for many applications and very expensive like $100+ for a 50 MB plan (yes, megabites) for that and other thing I refuse to work with local providers.