Are you looking to build your own website and confuse as to which best web hosting provider you should go with?
With all of the available options nowadays and all the technical lingo, it can be a real pain to know which is the best option for you. Whatever the case may be the goal of this article is not only to list my personal recommendations for hosting companies out there but also to teach you how to choose the best hosting plan for you.
Now I do have a few options on my list that I’m going to go over and explain which I prefer and for those specific reasons but for those of you who are impatient at the end of the day my strong recommendation would be Hostinger for anyone who’s looking to build a simple small to the medium-sized website with good speeds respectable bandwidth and the most affordable price and I do mean the most affordable price it that’s all you were looking then cheers.
If you continue reading you’ll see the reasons why I chose this hosting provider as well as learn a lot more about how to choose your own hosting plan and not just take my word for it.
Before I start comparing plans I wanted to talk about some background information about web hosting so you’re up to date and able to decide for yourself which plan is right for you.
I want to talk about the different types of hosting plans that you can sign up for as well as the features to pay attention to when you’re shopping around or which plan. Now if you want to skip over all of this information and just go straight to the hosting comparisons go ahead and scroll down to the middle of this article.
BASIC HOSTING & DOMAIN TERMINOLOGY
When you’re looking at web hosting it’s important to understand the features that you’re getting for the price that you’re paying. I’m going to be going through the basics of how to at least understand what the web hosting company is saying when they’re telling you everything that they’re offering.
Am I making sense here basically by the end of this portion of the article I want you to be able to look at a pricing table like the one that you’re seeing now and be able to understand all gibberish that’s down below?
Now here’s the deal it’s time to be real with you again I mean I haven’t stopped being real with you but understand what I mean.
There’s is no way that I could go down this list and give you a full web developer course in just 5 or 10 minutes. Being able to tell you how each and every one of these features works would take hours to explain and people literally go to school to earn degrees about all of this but don’t worry your friend twin mark is here to save the day. I’m going to briefly go over the most important ones that are pertinent to someone looking to purchase a hosting plan like yourself. So let’s take a look.
AMOUNT OF WEBSITE
The first one is websites which are pretty self-explanatory with different plans you’re going to have a different number of websites under one account. This can be nice if you plan on having multiple websites that you manage.
AMOUNT OF SSD STORAGE
SSD Storage just means solid-state drive storage as opposed to HDD which is kind of a thing of the past now but basically means hard drive storage a hard drive is a physical disk that actually writes data onto whereas SSD doesn’t have a disk. They’re faster more efficient power and just better in every way than an HDD.
Now today pretty much every hosting provider out there offers SSD storage so you don’t really have to worry about it.
BANDWIDTH SIZE
Now bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can go through your hosting account basically think of it like it’s a water pipe. A larger pipe allows more water to flow through and a smaller pipe allows less water to flow through. The amount of bandwidth you have determines how quickly your website can deliver content to your visitors during peak traffic times. If you’re building a website that you plan on making really popular and running a lot of traffic with paid ads you might want to consider bandwidth. But if you’re creating a simple business website for people to get in contact with you then this might not be a big deal for you.
Free Domain Name
Free domain registration is always a huge plus because this is basically just giving you a discount on something that you already have to purchase no matter what.
A DOMAIN NAME
When you build a website you need to get a domain name which is like getting your own phone number and then you also have to get web hosting which is like signing up for a phone bill so you can actually call people with the phone you just got.
So free domain registration is just giving you 12 months free on your custom domain name. A free SSL CERTIFICATE is also a huge plus.
Most hosting companies will provide you with an SSL CERTIFICATE and some companies will actually offer you them for free no matter what you have to have an SSL CERTIFICATE nowadays. This is the encryption and security for your website and it also provides the little lock symbol up in the top left corner when you go to a website. If you don’t have an SSL certificate then it will show not secure and that would make anyone want to leave your website.
DAILY OR WEEKLY BACKUPS
Now daily backups mean that they’re going to be saving a backup of your website every single day. So if your website crashes or gets deleted by accident or something like that they have a copy of it so they can put it right back up for you. This is a huge lifesaver.
UPTIME GUARANTEE
The uptime guarantee is pretty important as well it’s widely accepted that you should look for uptime that is at least 99.5% or higher. This means your website is up and available for people to visit 99.5% of the time.
24/7 SUPPORT
Obviously, 24/7 technical support is big deal because there are always going to be things that go wrong with your website. Sometimes you forget your password or there’s a bug that you need to work out it could be anything but having technical support is really helpful.
The rest of these get pretty technical so I’m going to skip over them but this should give you a pretty good understanding of what to look for when you’re looking at your first hosting account and what you should expect.
The last thing that I want to cover is the duration or term of hosting. Most hosting companies have different pricing based on the amount of time that you pay for your hosting upfront.
This can be handy if you only plan on experimenting and you want a shorter term to just try things out. But honestly, I always recommend choosing the 12 months or higher. You not only save more money and get a bigger discount this way but also guarantee that your site stays live for the duration of your domain name’s life.
Generally when you get a custom domain name for your website you’re going to be paying for 12 months at a time so it usually makes sense to get your hosting plan that matches the domain term as well.
There’s nothing worse than having your domain name still active but your hosting is expired and your website visitors are greeted with a beautiful page that says this page cannot be found 404 error.
There are three important metrics to pay attention to when you’re trying to choose a hosting plan that I didn’t mention.
- SERVER RESPONSE TIME
- PAGE SPEED
- UPTIME
There are pretty technical so I made it easy for you.
Page speed is just referring to the time it takes for your website to load when someone opens it you want the lowest number possible uptime is the reliability of your website. Basically, it just tells you the percentage of time that it’s actually available to look at it. So you want this number to be as high as possible.
And lastly, you have severe response time which tells you how long it takes for your web browser to receive a response for the server that your website is stored on.
All of the hosting companies on my list are above the recommended standards for all three of these metrics.
All right enough of that it’s time to start comparing hosting companies so I can lay out the pros and cons of all of them and I’m comparing the features that we just discussed as well as a few others.
HOSTINGER
Now as I mentioned above in the article hostinger is my personal recommendation but it’s also the first one that I wanted to talk about because hostinger is actually becoming one of the top hosting providers out there in my opinion.
But don’t just take my word for it hosting you even got recognized by bitcatcha and pcmag as one the fastest growing web hosting companies in the industry.
Which is saying something. It does just about everything that all the other hosting providers do simply at a more reasonable price. It’s got great speed and has double the google recommended full load time for a website. Which are two seconds.
Its ability is also up to par having an uptime of 99.9%. That basically means that your website is almost up 100% of the time which is big deal. It’s got page load speeds hovering around 1.4 seconds which is under the two-second recommendation from google.
It’s also perfectly integrated with WordPress so they have a one-click installation process.
I mean look at this you’re going through the process of checking out your hosting plan and right before you choose your domain name you can install WordPress in the background with one simple click.
This is just super easy and saves a whole bunch of time. Now with all that tech stuff out of the way let’s talk about what you get with your hosting plan.
Now they have their low-cost plans starting at $1.99 which aggressively competes with all of the other hosting companies but I strongly recommend their premium plan at $2.99 per month. Because you can have a hundred websites under your account.
- You get 100 gigabytes of storage
- Unlimited bandwidth
- A free domain name for one year
- Free SSL CERTIFICATE
You also get weekly backups for your websites so you can rest easy and of course, you also have 24/7 support as well. Lastly, you get up to 100 email accounts set up under your domain name. So if your domain is something like mywebsite.com then your email could be example@mywebsite.com or support mywebsite.com.
And hostinger is perfect for the beginner to web design with its intuitive and clean h panel you can easily find everything you need and make the adjustments to the backend of your website.
And if you don’t know to do something or you get stuck on one of your settings. Hostinger support is always there to walk you through what you need. So it’s pretty fantastic.
Hostinger also operates in 40 different markets and you can get local language support if you’re from another part of the world.
Overall for the price that you’re paying you’re getting a huge deal with great service.
HOSTGATOR
Hostgator is another great option to house your website. I have nothing but great things to say about HOSTGATOR and the deals they provide for their cheaper planes save you a lot of money.
At $2.75 a month, you get unmetered storage and bandwidth within reason of course.
- A free SSL Certificate
- One-year free domain registration
- Unlimited Free Email Accounts
Now when I say within reason what I mean is in their term of service they say to only utilize disk space and bandwidth in the normal operation of a personal or small business website. So basically unmetered storage and bandwidth don’t mean you have unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth just keep that in mind.
But the free SSL Certificate is a necessity the free one-year domain registration is also something to look for and unlimited free email accounts are pretty nice.
NO SITE BACKUPS
They don’t offer site backup for your website but they also have 24/7 support which is a must in my opinion. So hostinger’s the premium plan you’re paying for about the same per month you’re getting a lot of stuff added on for free just something to consider.
BLUEHOST
Bluehost is another great option and fantastic hosting provider that cost a little bit more than Hostgator.
At $2.95 per month you’re getting 50 gigabytes of SSD Storage unmetered bandwidth which you guys all know what that means and a free SSL Certificate and domain registration but the SSL Certificate and domain registration are only free for the first year.
After that, you have to pay for both SSL and the domain.
So it’s a bit of a downside at least you’re getting the first year free but other hosting providers offer free SSL certificates indefinitely. So that’s another cost that you’re gonna have to take into account.
NO SITE BACKUP
Unfortunately with Bluehost, you don’t get site backups either. Now Bluehost is one of the most popular hosting companies out there. They did this by being one of the to have an affiliate program. This caused their popularity to grow exponentially since they were one of the first.
Bluehost is also one of the three hosting companies officially recommended by WordPress. So that’s also something to keep in mind.
Now if you looking to get started with Bluehost but you want to start small and just pay for a month or something like that rather than 12 or 36 months then you’re out of luck.
Blue host only offers a 12-month and 36-month hosting plan unlike many of the other hosting companies where you can choose a shorter package.
One thing I’ve noticed is that their services have also gotten a little bit slower for websites nowadays and I think it’s just because of how big the company’s gotten.
Keep in mind the larger a company gets many times can reflect how quickly they can get back to a simple customer services request as well.