Best Web Hosting Companies VS Worst Providers: Beware, The Host Bites!

If you’re going to run a website, you’re bound to meet a new friend or a new enemy – your hosting provider. We bet, you prefer the former option, don’t you? However, the matter gets more complicated once you learn that even among the most favored virtual hosting providers lurk the ones that are bound to disappoint you. To avoid the pitfalls of misleading advertising and false claims, you need to figure out, which companies pledge the best web hosting and appear to be really speedy, reliable, and supportive, and which ones fail to stand by their promises. Today, we bring you a list of the best web hosting enterprises of 2017. Moreover, we name a couple of the worst offshore hosting companies you can stumble upon. Let’s go!

Top 6 Best Web Hosting Enterprises That Make You Happy

Fortunately, web hosts and cloud web hosting solutions that can make you happy in 2017 are not extinct. There is still a bunch of fast, reliable, and comprehensive hosting solutions. Such solutions stand up to the title of the best web hosting companies of this year. You won’t see free hosting sites on this list, but the pricing plans they offer are quite affordable. Let’s see what are the items listed:

#1: Bluehost – Reputable Virtual Host to Trust

Our runner-up for today is Bluehost, a well-established hosting company that delivers the experience that’s bound to please you. Bluehost company resides in Utah, USA, and its inception dates back to 1996. At present, it has its home with an area of 50,000 square feet (4,600 m2). What’s more, they nourish a couple of sister companies, such as HostMonster, iPage, FastDomain, etc.

It’s hard not to fall in love with Bluehost. It has affordable shared web hosting plans for just $3.95 with free internet domain parking included. Bluehost’s average uptime is as high as 99.74%, which makes it the second option in our list. They also stand behind your speed-of-light website performance by offering cloud web hosting solutions that are swift and affordable. Moreover, they bring you SEO hosting for WordPress. It lets you install this CMS in one click and rejoice at the position of your website on SER pages. Needless to say, Bluehost has its knowledgeable in-house support team that’s available via chat, phone, and ticket system.

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#2: GoDaddy – Best Price and Lots of Hosting Solutions

The third position in our list is occupied by one of the largest hosting providers worldwide – the famous American GoDaddy company. The provider performs stellar in an Uptime Test, showing an awesome result of 99.96%. What’s more, they give you an uptime guarantee, claiming that your uptime will be no lower than 99.9%. When it comes to Managed WP hosting, GoDaddy is one of the pioneers, bringing you 100% uptime this year. The average response time of GoDaddy servers is around 400ms, which means that with them your website will load at the speed of light.

When it comes to pricing, GoDaddy offers you best pricing, with their Economy Plan costing you just $2.49/month. With it, you can host 1 website on PHP 7.0 or 7.1 servers. What’s more, you get unlimited bandwidth, a free business e-mail for 1 year and a free domain name (if you go for an annual subscription). On the other hand, if you need unlimited storage and place for several websites, you can get this without breaking the bank with their Deluxe Plan ($3.99/month).

With such a great uptime, response time and pricing plans, GoDaddy may seem worth being #1 in our list. However, being a large company, GoDaddy frequently makes changes to its plans and changes the terms of hosting provided. This is the thing that some customers complain about, and it makes GoDaddy #3 in our list.

#3: Hostinger – Cheap and Reliable

Hostinger pricing range starts with Single Shared Hosting that costs you $2.15 for a month. The Business Shared Hosting plan is available for $7.95 and allows you to have unlimited access to numerous websites, infinite bandwidth, mighty control panel, free domain, consistent & daily backups, Free SSL, and various other features. Business Hosting plans starts with the price range of $15.90.

The VPS hosting service they offer is a cloud-based hosting service that enables you to have access to virtual private servers. Out of 6 plans available on their website, the basic one starts at a price range of $4.99. The VPS SERVER PLAN 6 is available for $65.56 and enables you to get access to 6000 GB of Bandwidth. Apart from that, a customer gets 14.4 GHz CPUs along with 16 GB of Burst RAM and 8GB of regular RAM.

Hostinger brings you paramount hosting technology, brilliant tech support at the most competitive price available in the market. A domain name is available for free of cost in Premium and Business plans.

#4: SiteGround – Not That Cheap but Still Awesome

The fourth best web hosting solution, SiteGround would be great for those of you, who are not saving an extra penny. It delivers an average load time of 475 ms, which is really impressive. Moreover, you get the uptime of 99,95%, free internet domain parking, and support for all manner of technical issues.

The thing that makes SiteGround the third option is that they offer you less with the beginner’s $3.95/month plan. With it, you can host just one website and have just one internet domain. You get just 10 GB disk space and do well if you have less than 10,000 website visits per month. If you’re not pleased with this, you’ll have to go for a $6.45 GrowBig plan. However, if you don’t care about this difference in price, SiteGround is as good as the top 2 options.

#5: HostGator – Reasonably Priced & Flexible

HostGator is a trusted hosting company that does well by offering their clients affordable pricing options and the best web hosting flexible solutions. Their uptime is 99.4%, which is still great. The lead time is 657 ms.

The cheapest plan they offer costs the ubiquitous $3.95. If you need more speed, discover the $4.95 cloud web hosting, which loads two times faster than the former option. For WordPress SEO hosting that has advanced security and provides for free of charge migrations, you’ll have to pay $5.95/month. It’s worth mentioning that the offshore hosting of HostGator is as good as the in-country one. So, don’t worry that the website performance will decrease because of the server location.

#6: A2 Hosting – One More Great Solution

A2 Hosting is the last in our top 5 list. It’s a bit lower uptime of 99,1% is still great. The loading speed is less than one second.

Their beginner’s plan for $3.92/month has it all covered. Firstly, you’re granted free domain parking. Secondly, it’s WordPress, Joomla and Drupal hosting optimized, which gives you more freedom. Next, A2 Hosting boasts of its easy-to-use admin panel, which makes life simpler. Dedicated phone/chat/e-mail support goes without saying. A2 Hosting is a nice solution to start with if you’re a novice to the web design realm.

The Worst Providers: Your Biggest Mistakes

Looking for the best web hosting, you can stumble upon the worst. We’ve come to the point when we inspect your biggest hosting-related mistakes and reasons for avoiding them. This part of the article tells you the truth about 1&1 hosting and warns you against ever landing on free hosting sites. Read on to learn more.

#1: The Good Old 1&1 Hosting – The Flipside

Probably, you’ve at least heard about 1&1. It’s one of the largest web hosting companies (with its inceptions dating back to 1988). They work in more than 10 countries all over the world and currently employ 7000 people. However, a big brand doesn’t always stand behind the best web hosting services, and this is just the case with 1&1 hosting.

Unfortunately, 1&1 is a company that fails to deliver what they promise. Being a company that offers affordable hosting plans for small businesses and beginners, they fail to make hosting a website with them simple. Expect to be in trouble to find the tools you need. Don’t be surprised, when an automatic WordPress installation consists of 5 steps and seems harder than manual installation. Next, when creating databases with 1&1, people run into numerous errors and have to spend hours chatting with support.

What’s more, 1&1 is a company that uses aggressive marketing techniques. If you run into troubles, they’ll try to upsell you their website builder, claiming that with it everything should work fine. They also make tying a domain name purchased elsewhere to your 1&1 hosting very troublesome. For example, they hide DNS settings and strongly encourage purchasing a new domain name from them.

All in all, unless you’re a high-end developer versed in dealing with tricky hosting providers, you’d better forget the name of the 1&1 hosting company. Don’t be lured by full-page magazine ads and TV spots, as the service they offer is likely to disappoint you.

#2: Free Hosting Sites That Underperform

When you’re about to run your first website, you may be tempted by the offers of free hosting sites. That’s a big mistake unless you’re about to discard your website in a couple of weeks. There’s a number of reasons why free virtual hosts are not a good option even for a beginner:

• First of all, nothing is really free out there. Free hosting providers give you just some 50 MB of disk space and insufficient bandwidth. Once you use them up, they prompt you to upgrade.
• Secondly, you’re not protected and one day your website may disappear due to the service shutdown.
• Next, you get terrible control over your website. If it’s free, you get no admin tools, no cPanel, etc. Some free hosting sites even forbade the use of additional plugins, which is a must nowadays.
• Then, if you plan to start out with a free solution and then migrate, forget about it. It’s a true nightmare to migrate from free hosting. You may even learn that you’re not the owner of the website. It’s owned by your free virtual host!
• Lastly, expect your website to be down from time to time, get no support, put up with the crawling speed of your site.

We don’t see any reasons to name some of the free web hosting providers. They all won’t make you happy if you want your online presence to be, at least, decent. If you’re serious about running a website, you should find at least $4 per month for hosting it.

Wrapping Up

There are the best web hosting providers and there are the worst ones. Today, we learned, which providers stand for what they promise and which ones fail. The companies that made to our top 4 are Bluehost, SiteGround, HostGator, and A2 Hosting. Feel free to go for their hosting plans and you’re bound to build a life-long friendship with these wonderful providers. On the other hand, there are virtual hosts to beware of. Don’t be lured by free solutions and misleading claims of the big companies that lost their greatness over time.

If you want to explore the topic in greater detail, check out the things to look for on a good hosting website and a free guide to choosing your domain and hosting.

Are there any other companies that you consider the best web hosting solutions? Let me know in the Comments section below.

Stay tuned!