Web hosting is critical to the success of any business. It is the first thing to consider once you have decided to take your business online. It is no surprise there are many below-par web hosting services around today whose intent is to prey on unsuspecting victims in search of free, cheap, and/or affordable hosting services.
Having been on the internet for so long, I have learned that neither the cheapest nor the most expensive is the best form of hosting to use on a blog, a forum, or a business portfolio website. You’d need lots of researches to pick a hosting company that will not let your business down. Good enough, I have tried – the free, the cheap, and the expensive web hosting options to make the right judgment and give advice to those looking for a reliable web hosting company to go with.
The Criteria
From Managed WordPress hosting, managed server, virtual private server, cloud hosting to dedicated hosting, shared server hosting, and even free web hosting; I have used these at one time or the other and so can give a perspicacious verdict based on experiences and judging from critical areas such as –
- Security
- Support
- Server Up-time / Down-Time
- Caching and Speed
- Server response and oversold servers
- Cost and user-friendliness
- Good infrastructure and overall Technical know-how of the technicians
The Best Web Hosting Providers
I greatly banked on my past experiences to develop this list of the best web hosting companies to use for your blog or business.
For me, they have withstood the test of time, have good server up-time, and are built with customers in mind. Here are the best hosting providers we recommend to every serious business.
- A2 Hosting
- MDD Hosting
- Squidix Hosting
- SiteGround Hosting and
- Linode VPS.
A2 Hosting
In principle, the A2 hosting servers use the solid-state disk type to serve your web files and come with the LiteSpeed server technology that improves your website load-time tremendously. They have been in the hosting business for a long time, and so far, we haven’t had a negative experience with them.
If huge disk storage space, a completely free SSL Certificate (HTTPS:// via Let’s Encrypt), and competent technical support is your driving force; then A2 hosting is one of the top go-to-guys for a stable hosting experience.
For their full features, automatic 51% Off discount, and more, visit their official homepage here to get any of their shared, WordPress, VPS, or dedicated server hosting plan.
MDD Hosting
MDD Hosting is hands down the most customer-friendly hosting company we have used to date. Their server is graced with the award-winning LightSpeed technology while the solid-state type disk powers their storage drives.
As an MDD hosting customer, You’ll be amazed at the speed the MDD hosting staff uses to resolve real hosting problems; sometimes, you’ll be attended to in less than five (5) minutes with the real solution and not just some random links that lead to nowhere positive.
In summary, MDD hosting servers are lightning fast, rock-solid, and give steady peace of mind. Their premium hosting plan (known as semi-dedicated in most other companies) is best for websites with huge daily traffic or that need higher resources.
You can use “WHT50” coupon code to get a 50% off one-time discount on any of their hosting plans or the “monster10” for a 10% off lifetime recurring discount.
Update: MDD Hosting is one of the first hosting companies to implement the FREE SSL certificate module for all account levels. You can secure your website with a formidable SSL certificate by clicking on the Cpanel’s Let’s Encrypt module.
For more features, Visit the MDD hosting homepage.
Squidix Web Hosting
Squidix web hosting is one of those web hosting companies whose sole aim is delivering awesomeness, dedicating more time to their service and customer support than they do on advertising and forceful promotions.
Squidix web host offers various classes of web hosting plans that are completely optimized for speed. At Squidix, you’ll normally get the value for your money. They have a good number of positive reviews from real users of their hosting services.
We have had only but stellar experiences with their semi-dedicated plans that are wholly optimized for high traffic websites like ours. We recorded a 100% service uptime and above 100% improvement in speed and response. You can hardly go wrong with a qualified Squidix hosting plan.
For new customers, you can use “7YWMBJR3N2” coupon code to get a 25% off discount for life recurring discount on their semi-dedicated plans or “TEN” for 10% off lifetime recurring discount on any other plans.
Visit the Squidix hosting homepage for more features.
Site Ground
Site Ground hosting is never in the business of playing Italian trottola with their clients. At SiteGround hosting, what you pay for is what you will get. Firstly, SiteGround wouldn’t promise you unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth, but what is really obtainable.
Our experiences with them over the years have been awesome and worthy of recommendations. Even their shared server hosting plans are fast as they are usually not oversold. Their security is top-notched, so is their infrastructure and technical support [See PROVE]. I’d gladly recommend Siteground web hosting services to anyone serious about committing his business’s longevity to a company that cares.
Update: SiteGround is now fully endorsed by WordPress and listed on their official hosting recommendation page. We actually thought that the move would spell an era of poor support for the old clients, but never experienced such till date.
Another area of improvement for SiteGround customers is the free SSL (Let’s Encrypt) certificate plugin inclusion that lets you HTTPS your website in a few seconds.
See More from SiteGround’s Homepage and take advantage of their over 50% off discount offer for new customers.
Linode
Linode is the developer’s favorite, even some of the top premium hosting services are either reselling Linode services or leveraging their fast DNS management API to deliver awesomeness.
They are ‘a perfect solution’ for resource-hungry web apps and high traffic websites. It uses solid-state type drives (SSD) in place of the slow-spinning hard disk drives (HDD) to deliver resources fast and smoothly. The support you’ll normally get at Linode is fast and should never be difficult to understand for an average web developer.
The only downside with Linode is the lack of Cpanel and managed plans for average users. But then, their resource page contains real help and solution for most of the challenges you’ll likely encounter on their platform.
Being an all-around “UNmanaged VPS hosting services” provider makes the platform a bit too technical for an average user. You can see all features from their official homepage at https://www.linode.com
The Average Hosts
The average ground is usually not a good place to be, but the hosting companies listed here aren’t terrible but do not just cut into our best web hosting providers list.
Mediocre hosts are best for new websites and SEO listing directories without many tasking day-to-day activities. Highly active websites would normally suffer on mediocre servers.
Bluehost Managed WordPress Hosting
If you use WordPress for your blog or business like us, banking on Bluehost’s superior servers and reliable infrastructure will be the best decision to take for your business’s success.
Bluehost managed WordPress hosting do not only come with a server greatly optimized for WordPress but does also give with each plan: a dedicated RAM (2GB for the starter plan), a dedicated IP address, a managed server, guaranteed backup, free domain name, enhanced control panel (cPanel) and top-notched support.
Even though we have a strong reservation for their shared server (that is usually over-sold) and below-par support, We have had a great time with their managed WordPress hosting plans. The plan is usually discounted for new users and works beautifully on high-traffic websites and apps. You can see more from Bluehost’s Official Website.
Add-in: We have made an improved version of this post (Best Eig Hosting alternatives) with a detailed review, a full list of EIG hosting services, and our not-so-great experiences. You can read all of it from here.
Hostgator
Hostgator, to us, is like a good bride that turned sour after being exposed to the wealth and unlimited assets of the groom. Their server turned out a far cry from what we knew them for; their support became epileptic as their server uptime.
We almost lost our business to their mediocre support crew until Bluehost came to the rescue.
Site 5
Site 5 was the 3rd web hosting company we used; the ability to create a separate account for another user on their regular shared hosting plan was what actually tempted us to their platform.
After using them for years, we realized they are no better than Arvixe. The resources are thin, and the support isn’t what we can describe as being awesome. For an average user, they are great and can serve well for low traffic websites; anything higher than that should opt for VPS or managed servers already reviewed above.
Dream Host VPS
Dream Host used to be one of our preferred choices for virtual private server hosting. With DreamHost, you’ll be getting virtual servers that are highly tailored to meet your needs.
Their support is one thing that separates them from Media temple and Inmotion hosting. The tech heads up there know what they are doing and work until their client’s satisfaction.
Dream Host is optimized for speed and comes with SSD hard drives that make your server respond faster and better than most below-par hosting services out there.
There’s more on the Dream Host HomePage.
Arvixe
Arvixe offers cheap and affordable hosting services that are superb, reliable but has moved down the pecking order as their support portfolio is becoming littered with incompetent staff.
We still recommend their services (Arvixe hosting is horrible at the moment and should be avoided at all cost.) but not as much as we did in our earlier Arvixe web hosting review post. Their official website is here.
Other Average Web Hosting Companies in our list
- Inmotion Hosting
- Media Temple
- NameCheap
- iPage (Best for simple HTML websites)
- Green-geeks
The Worst Web Hosting Companies
The hosting companies down here are the ones we can’t recommend to anyone; neither their support nor servers are fit for any real business.
We have had the worst experiences with them both as a business, individual developer, and freelancer. We strongly discourage hosting a serious website with these providers.
- AtSpace hosting
- Godaddy hosting
- Mocha Host
- 1and1 Hosting
Atspace
Atspace had clearly improved from what it used to be when we started out with them. Almost every young freelancer started out with a free host when trying to develop and/or improve their programming skill.
We started with atspace and can clearly tell that – nothing is free, even in Freetown. Free hosting at atspace.com is free until it starts getting visitors (traffic).
Your hosting plan at atspace will normally serve as a cheap advertisement for their below-par services once you start getting a good amount of visits.
They use many dubious tactics such as error page marketing (redirecting or advertising in your error pages); Hostgator does this as well but provides a complicated workaround to get over it.
Even when we upgraded to their paid plan, it wasn’t anything different from the free plan as one error message or the other is thrown here and there.
Almost 50% of the modern tools needed to run a fast content management system (CMS) website don’t work here; their WordPress hosting services are nothing short of celebrating mediocrity.
One funny thing is that their support crew will hardly see anything wrong with their server but will blame you, the plugins, theme, or even the WordPress software itself.
This host is useless for anything business except for learning and hosting low traffic static XHTML websites.
GoDaddy
In my humble opinion, I think they are better of selling domain names and should have absolutely no business with hosting.
Their support is non-existent, server time-out rate is usually alarming, their marketing tactics are extremely annoying, to mention but a few.
I have tried out their normal hosting services without a good story, got hoodwinked into their managed WordPress hosting with another bad story, and now trying them out again on a low traffic website to see if the reply sent in by a user turns out to be true about my bad experience with their managed wp hosting.
Mocha host
Mocha host didn’t really give us the chance to explore their services, although I am confident it won’t be any better than the epileptic support their sales team rendered to us.
Their server setup time is far from being reasonable, takes a donkey number of days to respond to support tickets, and was clearly a weak excuse for a hosting company.
We regretted visiting their homepage, and still does to date; our server was put in maintenance mode all the while we were waiting for their setup that never came through.
We shared a limited version of the story here and can’t recommend such incompetence not even for a free host.
1and1 Hosting
Our experiences with 1and1 hosting aren’t any different from what we had with Godaddy; their cancellation process was cumbersome. We had to let the 1-year plan expire without bordering about renewing it.
We understand their negative marketing tactics and won’t even border revisiting their homepage, except better news and reviews spring up.
In all, a cheap host isn’t always a bad host, but most bad and terrible web hosting companies use cheap marketing tactics to lure in their victims.
Others
Other awful web hosting experiences we’ve had is listed below for your learning:
- 000webhost
- Yahoo Small Business Hosting (Aabaco Small Business)
- Smartweb (a local web hosting company)
- Syskay (a Local hosting company)
To make this list as straightforward as possible, we omitted re-seller hosting services as all the hosting companies listed above offer re-seller web hosting.
There’s clearly no point listing worst reseller hosting companies, best reseller hosting company and all that. The worst, average, and best experiences we have had with re-seller hosting are from one or two hosting providers already named in this list.
What More?
We will advise you do not always go for the free domain name that comes with most hosting companies as that can make things really cumbersome when trying to move away from them.
Also, hosting your email accounts in the same host means that your email is down once your hosting provider experiences a prolonged downtime or makes some changes to their server infrastructure. This shouldn’t be an issue if your hosting provider experiences downtime seldom.
Are there other terrible hosting companies you have had your best or worst hosting experiences with? Please do list them below in the comments section.
Hello
If I want to start a server with a strong host that won’t cause any problems, what vps should I use that has IPs?
One of my friends suggested bulletvps to me and I think it was acceptable, but I still want to research
As a Canadian, I like to shop at home so I went to Canspace out of Toronto and Vancouver. However they got slower and slower to the point I could not get into the administration area or the front end for visitors, and that’s days. with no help. I went from a large visitor count to virtually none. No sales because you need people. I switch to another Canadian hosting and we are into 3 months of the same slow to no service. 3 minutes not seconds to connect to my account, if at all. If someone said they were owned by the same company I would believe it. But where do I go NOW?
Hi Dave,
Will you like to go with shared hosting or VPS?
I Recently purchased Domain and Hosting @1.33$ in CloudStonz. Great Offer and Good Customer Support.
i-choice sucks donkey balls big time! I’m surprised nobody mentioned them!
I have been with Servage for over a decade and their service has got worse by the day. Slowest support on earth and total lack of technical understanding plus the servers are down for hours every day.
Went to T.M.D Hosting they are even worse after 7 days had to get a refund from them and move back to my original host (better the devil you know) This bunch of clowns could not migrate a complete web site and get it working.
Hi Peter,
Thanks a lot for sharing your hosting experiences. Ours was similar only that we kept on trying until we got one full package in MDDhosting. Their uptime, support, and level of technical know-how are good enough for our business needs.
One pattern with most popular hosts is that their level of support dwindles with growth, time, and several positive reviews on the internet.
Pulseheberg is the worst hosting company because they tell you that you use CPU for mining and shut up your VPS even if you don’t use your VPS for mining
Hi Bertrand,
Thanks for sharing your negative hosting experience with Pulseheberg. We hope you find better hosts going forward.
I also try to avoid bad hosts because I don’t want to lose time, money and website visitors. It’s better to read reviews at first before choosing a host and migrate to it. From all of the posts which I’ve read so far, I saw that many people are complaining about most of the hosts, acquired by EIG. That’s the reason why I haven’t tried any of their hosts myself. Maybe they’re bad, or maybe they’re not that bad – I can’t say. My current host is called BGOcloud and, in fact, a friend of mine recommended this company to me. I haven’t imagined that their services would be so great – they are really fast and their prices are very reasonable.
Thanks for sharing your BGOcloud hosting experiences Ellan. Of a truth, reading hosting reviews from honest sources before committing to them is always a recommended practice.
Woothosting is by far the worst hosting provider. I’m using hosting companies from 1998 and they reach the “bad” in another level.
Thanks for sharing your experiences about “Woothosting” Stelios.
Bad hosts are to be avoided at all cost, the negative support we had with Hostgator dedicated server is still very fresh on our minds.
News and reviews always helpful for anythings thanks for sharing your experience regarding web hosting companies. I would like to recommend one creativeON.com
My bad, I switched from shared hosting to Managed WP hosting and believed what some of the forums’ recommendations were. I had just installed wordpress and just a few blank posts and thought about seeing how the server performed. The same theme at my shared host got 75 at google pagespeed insights, but here I got 57 with the remark “the server responded in 1 second”. I thought it may be some bottleneck somewhere and again tested after an hour, “Server responded in 2.8 seconds” and I furiously asked my hosts poweruphosting.com to refund (I was in my first week of hosting) but they started giving me figures of GTMetrix and other such sites, not answering why their server took so long.
When I found they were dilly dallying I thought it best to inform everyone around.
Problem is most reviews are paid and I now realize many forum members are involved like hand and glove. It is very difficult to believe. I thought since I am paying at least twice the amount I should get good service, but when your stars are bad, what can one do?
Anyway, I will definitely look from the list you have given above. The parameters appear very good. Thanks for the writeup. I just wished I could upload my screenshots to prove my allegation,.
Hi Milind,
Thanks for dropping by to share your PoweredUp hosting experiences. Do have a super-productive week ahead.
My current service provider has connected with Hostways. i cannot find any ratings of this company. Can you help? Thanks.
Hi Nita,
We haven’t had a personal experience with this company, but one of our lead developer opines that hostway servers are poorly equipped with bad control panel, sluggish load time and below-par services.
Just moved from Fasthosts ( terrible support, ftp problems) to SiteGround. A world of difference in quality of support. Nearly every response from Fasthosts on a ticket is along the lines of “I do apologise for the inconvenience this issue has caused you. I have taken over this ticket as the previous advisor is currently unavailable.” – need I say more !
Thanks for dropping by and sharing your honest review Aisling,
Poor hosting companies can be a dreadful nightmare anytime. Reminds me of my woeful experiences with Arvixe hosting support. I’m glad you’re enjoying your new host already.
Very comprehensive and helpful review, thank you for sharing. I have been with SiteGround for over a year now and I am truly impressed with their service and performance. I agree with what you said, you really get what you pay for with SiteGround. If anyone here is looking for a good company to host their site, I strongly recommend SiteGround. Many review sites name it as one of the best website hosts–and for plenty of reasons too. If you want to host at one of the best website hosts, you shouldn’t look any further than SiteGround. You won’t be disappointed.
Hi, backyllchosting.com is also a bad hosting company. Their support is very poor.
Thanks for sharing your experiences with Backllc Hosting. We hopes to update this content in future as more experiences pops up..
Whatever you do, DON’T EVER go with one.com
They are unfriendly, unhelpful, obstructive and awful. Their control panel has no option to cancel a domain name. I had to write to their head office but they ignored the letter(s) and renewed it anyway. Then they tried to sue me for the costs of something I didn’t want. In desperation I decided to transfer my three websites to a more reputable company. So now they are being deliberately obstructive and refusing to do as I asked, meaning that I am losing business.
Do NOT touch them with a barge pole. They are the worst of the worst.
Thanks for sharing your experiences about such fraudulent practices by one.com John. Hopefully, our readers would have a handful to learn from your negative review of their bad hosting services.
Nice post but I will like to know your experience so far with Bluehost optimized WordPress because am surprised you are recommending them.
Secondly after explaining your encounter with Arvixe am very surprised to see that you placed them on Average rather than worst. Those people are monsters, if there is a worst word to use. They should be placed in anything below worst. Their customer service is polite but lacks knowledge. My site has been down for the past 4 days, customer service keeps giving me BS, they don’t respond to tickets. No one cares . It’s so terrible. No one is telling you what the problem is such an epileptic service. The whole world should know how bad they are and keep away from them.
Thanks for dropping by Kech,
I sincerely do not recommend bluehost hosting services as clearly spelt-out in the third paragraph. Their managed WordPress hosting server is optimized for WP but comes with a below-par support.
Their support staff are only good at messing up with the functioning of websites, but every other thing works great and the price is good enough for a VPS server.
The story of arvixe is one that’s better forgotten already, but then, they aren’t as bad as the services in the worst section. I shared more about them in this Eig-hosting services review.
I am a current user of http://www.magicworkshost.com and it is one of the best web hosting companies i would say.
I have been using their services from last 1 year .
i had faced a minor issue and their customer staff resolved that issue within minutes literally. very happy with switching from a terrible hosting provider to MagicWorks.
Thanks for sharing your opinion about MagicWorks. Do have a great day ahead
To me, bluehost.com was the worst hosting company instead, as it always has the server problem when we need it working the most. And the support was terrible as the customer service always says they can not give an estimate time for the server back to be normal. For instance, I called in 5 hours ago and complained that our customers were calling in and telling us they are experiencing the problem of not being able to place an order since yesterday afternoon, I was told the support team has been made aware of the issue, and they are working on the server and hoping the problem will be fixed soon. But the problem happened yesterday afternoon, even from the time when I complained, that was more than 5 hours ago already, and the problem is still there! And nobody can give us an estimated time either besides saying they are being fixed now. But this is the busiest time of the year for us to be able to finally make some sales. So is there really somebody was working on it from bluehost? if it is going to take more than 24 hours, Is it possible for them to transfer us to another server or something? I can not believe the level of service I am getting after I have been paying them for the extra faster server for so many years and paying the extra $20 every month for their premium service, but there is not help at all after so many hours of waiting and no telling when it can be fixed either!!! either they got incompetent people or they are actually nobody is working on it at all and they are just BS us.
Hope you were able to move your website already?
BlueHost is gone awry, their support staff are no longer helpful. This is very bad for a company of this repute
Everything you are reading there is nothing but the truth. One of our website is currently running from one of the mirror servers pending a full migration from BlueHost to Siteground.
We are kind of surprise with how bad their once good WordPress support have dwindled in recent days, does seems like they employed some amateur freelancers to handle technical support on livechat
Sharing our personal experiences so far is to help our readers make the right choices when deciding to put their money in the line.
Our next post update will correct any misrepresentation as we did for the top best web hosting list here.
I’m surprised to see BlueHost at the top. I’ve heard so many bad things about them…
Hi Mark,
You are very correct with your assertion when it comes to Bluehost and so much negative reviews, the bad reviews you saw is not out of place as it is with all EIG owned web hosting companies.
The post by Michael of Research-as-a-Hobby here and here will give you some insight while there are so many dishonest reviews out there.
In this post, our listing is not Bluehost services as a whole but for their manage WordPress Hosting services alone. We have only had about two reasons to contact and wasn’t really disappointed with it.
It is normal to get EIG hosting support guys mislead you or refer you to programmers for their server-related challenges when they have no solution for your technical issues, as soon as this happens with their managed WP hosting services, we’ll sure uproot them from this list and run as fast as we can.
Thanks again for sharing your views on this Mark.
I’m pretty sure, I’ve found realible user reviews https://webhostinggeeks.com/user-reviews/bluehost/. Thanks for your reply!
The worst I have ever dealt with and it was not even mention http://www.brainhost.com
Thanks for sharing your experience with us Tucker, we haven’t used their services at any time yet
Great Article but you forgot to mention Network Solutions in the worst section.
You are right Robertale,
Our one time experience with Network Solutions Reseller Hosting wasn’t any different from that Godaddy.
Some one told us they already improved on their support and services which I’ll wish were true.
Do you mind sharing your experiences with them in detail?
Great article Obasi! I would suggest you to try https://www.rosehosting.com . They are one of the best hosting companies I’ve used in the past 5 years. Their technical support is what set them apart from others.
Thanks for dropping by Kris, we do hope to try them out in the future
One of the best Web Host I prefer is Cloudways
That’s good to know Fahad