A Review of the Best Website Hosts
I have been marketing on the Internet since 2004 and I’ve been through quite a few webhosting services. This qualifies me to tell you what I’ve found, don’t you think? There are a LOT of website review sites, unfortunately most of them are just affiliate marketers hoping to make a few bucks off you when you choose one of the sites they reviewed.
What to Look For in a Web Hosting Company
Every web hosting company has reseller accounts. This means anyone can resell the services to you. But what happens when the reseller goes out of business?
That happened to me recently through a hosting company that I started using through a membership site of theirs. Suddenly they were not responding to support tickets and their phone had been disconnected. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I came across a blog post from one of their customers whose sites had completely disappeared on January 1st. Her problem was even worse since she didn’t know how to recover her sites without a recent backup.
Shared Hosting
If you’re new to online processes, you’ll want to start with a shared hosting account. This is affordable, but means you have other sites on the same server with yours. This could be a problem if one or more of those sites suddenly become high-traffic sites and consume excessive bandwidth. It’s good to know that you can communicate with your webhost and know they will address the issue if it becomes a problem for you.
Support Team
You’ll want to know that you can communicate with your support team and that they are qualified to answer your technical issues. Many of the day-to-day issues can be supported by outsourced staff, but make sure more difficult technical issues can be escalated to more qualified technical staff what speaks English.
Data Center Location
Find out where the data center is located. If it’s located in a hurricane path you could experience more outages than you anticipated.
Data Center Ownership
It’s vital for you to confirm that the website hosting company you select owns their data center and reports 99.9% uptime.
Servers
Most of the web hosting companies offering shared hosting use Linux and Unix servers. This is what you want to use. Some have the option of using windows servers – don’t do it! These are the most unreliable servers and should not be used for business services.
Free Website Hosting
Most of the searches for website hosting are for free services. This is a very bad idea. Why? Simply because you get what you pay for and with free hosting – you haven’t paid anything! So how do you think they make their money?
- By collecting your personal information when you signup for an account and marketing other services and “get rich quick” programs back to you.
- By selling your eMail address to lead generation services
- By selling your personal information when available
- By displaying lots of advertising on your website dashboard and/or your site
Usually these free website hosting companies are into other businesses and use their free website hosting service to collect leads for those businesses. Wouldn’t you rather host your website with a reliable hosting company that you know will be around? I’d hate for you to wake up one day and find your site(s) gone! This is a very real possibility.
Paid Website Hosting
Remember – you get what you pay for, so let’s look at the most reliable hosting companies. These are the best website hosts I have used and recommend:
These guys have been around for years and many marketers swear by their service. I have found you either love them or you hate them. Fortunately, I’ve never had the issues some of the haters had. You can buy their “baby” package and host an unlimited number of addon domains. This allows you to run several websites from a single account. This also means you don’t have to point to the root of the domain. Although this creates a sub-directory within your main domain, it is accessed in a browser window just like any other individually hosted domain so nobody ever knows it’s hosted on another account.
Addon domains do not have their own cPanel (web hosting manager) and can be more confusing to maintain. Personally, I don’t like addon domains because they can affect the performance of all the other sites you have on the account.
Servers located in Houston, TX
Live Chat
Help Desk System
Toll-Free Phone Support
User Manuals
FAQs
Video Tutorials
Excellent customer service and hosting. Unfortunately, they do not use cPanel as their web hosting manager. If you are purchasing software to use on your website, you will find that most require or use cPanel. Regardless, I found their dashboard quite difficult to use and navigate. But – they’re hosting is hard to beat – NEVER had any issues with them.
The data center is located in Hopkinsville, Kentucky
Live Chat
Help Desk System
Local and Toll-Free Phone Support
User Manuals
FAQs
Video Tutorials
This is another best website host that does not use cPanel as their web hosting manager, but the dashboard is much easier to use than IXWebHosting. One of the features I like about 1and1 is you have access to your eMail on the server through a web browser. This makes it easy to pickup your eMail when you’re not at your computer. Most other hosting companies make you go through cPanel to get your eMail.
Founded in Germany with server sites in several European countries and Chesterbrook, PA in the US.
The data center is located in Lenexa, KS in the US. They have their own trained support staff located in Chesterbrook, PA.
FAQs
Help Desk System
Toll-Free Phone Support
Video Tutorials
User Manuals
Easy Setup Guides
There are many other hosting companies I have used, but refuse to review because many of them are already using major sites (like WordPress) to market their services. I tried many of these that were highly recommended and for many different reasons, had to move all my sites to a new host.
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I have been marketing on the Internet since 2004 and I’ve been through quite a few webhosting services. This qualifies me to tell you what I’ve found, don’t you think? There are a LOT of website review sites, unfortunately most of them are just affiliate marketers hoping to make a few bucks off you when [...]
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