If you are willing to pay big money then you have nothing to worry about… your options are endless. My focus is finding that sweet spot where reliability meets affordability. I update this page with my findings on affordable WordPress web hosting solutions. Hopefully this information will be of some help to someone looking for a good WordPress web hosting company.
Little Background
I am very strict when it comes to the reliability of the web hosting company. Server uptime and the server response time is very important for anyone who has a website doing whatever business that they are doing. If your site is down when a visitor or customer goes to your site then you are losing traffic and business. In addition to losing temporary customers, if your site goes down frequently then there is a good chance that your customers will get annoyed and will try to avoid coming to your site in the future.
Most web hosting companies guarantee 99.9% Server uptime but in reality a lot of them do not deliver 99.9% server uptime that they guarantee. Most of the time you won’t even know that your site was down and you lost customers. None of your visitors complained doesn’t really mean that your site was up 100% that month.
I am particularly interested in a reseller account. A reseller account that allows you to create multiple cPanel based websites. The ability to create multiple cPanel based website is really useful as each website has individual cPanel control panel for administration purpose. Not many of the cheap web hosting companies offer reseller account with the ability to create multiple cPanel based websites.
When I First Started
I was with Surpass Hosting and even though they have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, recently my site has been going down frequently. When you complain to them they reply to you with the result of the UNIX ‘uptime’ command which shows the length of time the system has been up, saying our servers were up all month! The system was up all month doesn’t necessarily mean that your site wasn’t down (The CPU load could have been at 100% so it wasn’t processing any other requests and hence your site was not accessible).I have decided to change my web hosting provider and after doing some research I found that Web Hosting Buzz offers the cheapest reseller hosting solutions and looks reliable (from their server uptime data). So I decided to give web hosting buzz a try but it didn’t work out very well (read below for details).
Update (3 Months Later) – Migration to WebHostingBuzz
WebHostingBuzz offers Reseller accounts from $5 per month with some great features. They have 99.9% server uptime gurantee. You can check their server uptime history from WebHostingBuz Server Uptime figures. WebHostingBuzz website has Google page rank of 7/10 (Page Rank reflects Google’s view of the importance of the web page). I tend to use the website’s page ranking as a trust factor. A website with high Google page rank is less likely to be a fraud.Web hosting buzz offers pretty cheap reseller account but is it reliable? It looks reliable from the Server uptime data but I will have to see how I go with them to be sure.
Update (6 Months Later)
The reseller account wasn’t doing it for me so I decided to give WebHostingBuzz.com’s Virtual Private Server (VPS) a try as my traffic has gone up heaps since I first signed up with them. The VPS upgrade was a disaster… they probably put me on an overpopulated sever so my site response time was horrible. After having a chat with their support team they made it seem like it was my fault for using WordPress. Over time my site is going to grow so it is important that the hosting solution is scalable and Web Hosting Buzz’s VPS was just a mess not to mention that they were charging $8 per month extra for using cPanel! I knew it was time for me to look for another hosting solution.Update (7 Months Later) – Migration to InMotionHosting
I started looking and InMotionHosting seemed to be a good hosting provider so I signed up with them and now I am really happy with my site response time and InMotionHosting charges less than WebHostingBuzz for the same plan. I later upgraded my hosting plan to a dedicated server.Update (1 Year Later)
I am still with InMotionHosting and everything is going well. I have also signed up with MediaTemple to host some of my other sites and they seem to be really good too.Update (2 Years Later)
I needed another hosting account for one of my new sites so this time I signed up with West Host after taking Yoast’s advice and West Host seem to be good too.Update (3 Years Later)
My hosting needs continue to grow. This time I wanted to try the new cloud hosting solution mainly because it can be scaled very easily. Cloud hosting’s scaling and self healing abilities make it a very compelling solution for my needs. One thing to keep in mind is that the cloud hosting may not be suitable for people who are not familiar with UNIX systems (unless you go with a managed option which can become very expensive).Update (4 Years Later)
I have signed up for an account from WPEngine. It is not working out very well at the moment based on how much I have to pay and what I get. I might cancel this account.Update (5 Years Later)
I have singed up with Hostgator and Bluehost this year.Update (5 Years 6 Months Later)
I had to get rid of my hosting account with West Host. They were having a lot of outages on my server which brought the site up-time data below 97% and it went on for a few months. So I decided to move away from them.Update (6 Years 4 Months Later)
GoDaddy recently acquired MediaTemple hosting. I have a thing about Godaddy doing webhosting so I switched my site that was on MediaTemple to DreamHost.Update (7 Years Later)
I have created a test account with A2 Hosting. Their WordPress hosting looks pretty good. I particularly like how their SSD (Solid State Drive) hosting option is very reasonable.My Current Webhost Providers
Currently I have hosting accounts from the following 5 hosting providers and I am happy with them:- InMotionHosting
- Bluehost
- A2 Hosting
- DreamHost
- Hostgator
Short List of Cheap and Good Web Hosting Companies
Below is a list of web hosting companies that provide affordable and reliable web hosting solutions. If you are starting a WordPress site you should consider getting hosting from one of the following providers.- http://www.inmotionhosting.com
- http://www.hostgator.com
- http://www.bluehost.com
- http://www.a2hosting.com
- http://www.greengeeks.com
- http://www.vps.net
- http://mediatemple.net
- http://www.dreamhost.com
Which Hosting Do I Recommend for a Startup Business?
There are a lot of super cheap hosting packages out there but the hassle that comes with those will cost you way more money and time in the long run (don’t get sucked in by the *unlimited* promise). Changing web hosting is a tiresome task that you should try to avoid as much as you can. The amount of mis-configured servers that I encounter while troubleshooting our Premium WordPress plugins is just mind boggling.source: tipsandtricks-hq.com
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