Which web hosting to choose
In essence, web hosting is a service that you, as a website owner, pay for to your hosting provider. Web hosting companies possess all the technologies and hardware to provide their customers with storage and other capacities that a website cannot run without.
In order to choose a web hosting service, you have to know what kinds of hosting exist, which ones are more and which are less suitable for your website. The most popular ones can be broadly classified into shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud, and reseller hosting.
Choosing the right plan for hosting your website is crucial for its flawless performance, high ranking and, consequently, your profit.
If you are already familiar with that, let’s move on to choosing a provider to go with. What should you be looking for? We at eWeb recommend to pay close attention to these 5 things:
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Compatibility with other hosts and software
- Uptime > 99%
- Server location
- Cost
Regardless of whether you are a beginner or an experienced user, these 5 criteria will navigate you in your search. Take a look at the list above – you will find each of these indicators beside the name of all hosting providers from our list. To simplify it for you even more, we’ve tagged some hosting providers as the best as per their key feature like ‘Best uptime’ or ‘Best for business sites.’
What is shared web hosting
Buying a shared hosting package gives you the right to locate your website on a server together with many other websites. This is, by far, the cheapest and the most inelaborate type of hosting that exits. Yet, it goes with certain disadvantages as well.
Shared hosting only works for websites with low or medium traffic. It is used by the majority of websites out there. For what sites will the shared hosting option work best?
- personal blogs
- sites for small businesses
- sites with less than 5,000 visitors per day
- start-up sites
If you are a business owner, and you expect your business to grow steadily, shared hosting might only be a temporary arrangement. Once your website starts getting high traffic, the capacities offered by a shared hosting provider won’t be enough. Consequently, you will be paying money but the web host won’t be able to satisfy your needs anymore. Besides, it will affect the performance of the websites you share the server with and the hosting provider may ask you to upgrade your plan to VPS.
In a nutshell, we don’t recommend relying on a shared web hosting to owners of websites with high traffic. To all the rest, it is the solution for a reasonable price and with convenient installments, so that you don’t have to worry about technical issues.
What is VPS web hosting
The virtual private server is a type of web hosting that stands somewhere in between shared and dedicated hosting. It is cheaper than the latter, yet gives much more possibilities than the former.
VPS hosting provides you with both shared and private resources. Each website has CPU time and memory shared with other accounts, yet they are divided equally between them. Which is why it is a common practice for websites to upgrade a shared hosting plan to VPS as the number of visitors grows. It is also a convenient option to those who have more than one site to host.
If compared to shared hosting, private hosting is better for your site’s loading speed and performance since all the resources of the server will be used by your site only. Unlike with shared hosting, the sudden spike of traffic on your neighbours website will not impact your site in any way.
In addition, VPS plan gives you more freedom of expression due to extended customization. Just like choosing colors and furniture when designing your apartment, you have a final say when choosing the soft and tools you want to install.
Note that VPS hosting can solve your problem of bad neighbors that continually bring your site down, which is a solid reason to prioritize private server over the shared one.
What is dedicated web hosting
This type of hosting gives you complete control over a server that is ‘dedicated’ to host your website only. The best thing about it is that all server resources are yours and there’s no need to share them with other websites. As a rule, dedicated servers are stored in huge data centers. For the highest price of all hosting types you get
- unlimited bandwidth
- almost a 100% uptime
- the highest page loading speed
- full customization
- minimum risks
Usually, websites with really high traffic need a whole server to host their performance. Dedicated hosted plans are priced starting from $100 per month and may require to shell out for a system administrator or additional security measures.
ere is no sense paying a high price for a dedicated server unless you have or estimate getting 500-1m users daily. If the number is smaller, VPS will do perfectly well.
What is WordPress web hosting
WordPress hosting is specifically optimized for WordPress. WordPress is a content management system tool that allows people to create and manage some aspects of websites without the need to go into programming. WP is the most widely used CMS by far, and powers a considerable part of all websites on the WWW.
For this reason, the majority of hosting providers offer their clients packages that cater to the needs of WordPress websites. They are more convenient than ordinary shared hosting plans.
The pricing for managed WordPress hosting starts from $10 per month for 10GB of web space and one website. For $20, you receive twice as much of webspace and ability to work with it on as many sites as you want. What is more, this type of hosting is suitable for all types of sites, which makes it irreplaceable for newbies and programming geeks.
With managed WordPress web hosting you are eligible for automatic updates and bulletproof security. All your data is backed up, and the support works 24/7 to give you all the assistance you need.
What is reseller hosting?
Reseller hosting is a type of hosting with not two but three parties involved: hosting provider, a client and another client. Basically, the person who buys a reseller plan from hosting provider becomes a hosting provider to those who he/she rents the space to. This type of hosting is popular among firms and users who want to provide additional services to their clients or start their own web hosting. Reseller hosting is not offered by all hosting providers, so you have to pick those that do.
The reseller package includes:
- Bandwidth
- Disc Space
- Web host branding
- cPanel
- Configuration and support
How can you earn money using reseller hosting package?
Very easy. Simply choose a hosting provider that offers reseller plans. After that, create your branded hosting packages to your clients and earn profit. You can not only earn money but host your clients’ websites with consideration of business specifics and other peculiarities.
What is Cpanel hosting?
cPanel is a web hosting control panel that runs on Linux based servers. It is the most popular program of the kind and is used by the majority of hosting companies. The dashboard contains lots of graphical elements and is pretty straightforward – even a person with no technical knowledge can manage his or her server (website).
The majority of hosts add an “autoinstaller” to your cPanel so you can install any tool you need for building or managing your website. For instance, it is most frequently installed with WordPress as well as many other CMS. You can also register an email account using your unique domain name.
In a nutshell, here’s what cPanel allows you to do:
- adding domains and subdomains
- creating an email account
- installing CMS
- uploading files to the server
If you are looking for a control dashboard that will do all the work for you – cPanel is an answer. We recommend using hosting providers that include cPanel into the subscription plan.
What is Cloud hosting?
Cloud technology has become tremendously popular in recent years. In hosting realm, cloud hosting is virtually a counterpart of clustered hosting. Both kinds of hosting allow storing data on different servers, which grants much greater security than if it would be stored on one or two servers.
Cloud hosting is much more ergonomic than any other type. For example, with dedicated hosting you might not be using up all the bandwidth offered or, conversely, may need to buy more server storage as the website gets more visitors. When you do so, you will have to pay regardless of whether or not your website keeps getting the same amounts of traffic.
With cloud server, however, you can receive additional computing power from the cloud and release it back when you don’t need it anymore. So, what are the reasons of cloud hosting getting so popular lately?
1 – its scalability. It is much more reasonable to pay for web space or computing power that you know for sure will be used. Cloud hosting works on demand – you can expand it when you need it or shrink it when you don’t need it.
2 – its immediate response. You can get additional server space when you need it as easy as switching on the light. And, switching it off when you don’t.
3 – money saving. With cloud hosting, you only pay for the amount of space or computing power that you actually used. This way, no extra money is being spent and your website is running smoothly all the time.
Finally, you don’t need to worry that something might happen to the hardware. Even though one of million servers might go down, it will not affect the work of other servers and your website won’t go down when something of the kind happens.
How we rate hosting providers
Rating hosting providers include analyzing user reviews and testing the performance of a website. It allows us to opt for only the best web hosting sites that we, in turn, can recommend to you.
Things we pay the utmost attention to are:
- Uptime Guarantee
- Compatibility with website builders, control panels
- Cost
- Bandwidth (unlimited or of sufficient amount)
- Support
These indicators vary from provider to provider. However, as you can see, the best web hosting services we recommend have more than satisfactory results as per each of these criteria.
Apart from reading reviews from other hosting users, we ourselves have tried hundreds of hosting providers over the last 5 year period. eWeb has a whole team of experts who know all ins and outs of hosting. These pros have tested and then rated hosting providers that you can see on this page.
Demian San
Hosting Expert
Knows all ins and outs of online hosting. Demian has more than 7 years of experience consulting online businesses and hosting providers.
Michael Moore
Design expert
Evaluates the usability of hosting from design perspective. Michal rates design-related features offered by hosting providers – templates, website builders, etc.
Paul Green
Big Data Expert
Big Data analysis is Paul’s thing. We rely on Paul’s opinion as to how well any particular hosting plan suits for big data projects.
Victor Karpenko
SEO specialist
Victor knows how important adequate uptime is. Reliable hosting provider that guarantees superb performance due to the absence of downtimes is a key to high Google ranking of your site.
Mary Davis
Programming expert
Mary tests our hosting providers profoundly by checking which operating systems, control panels are supported and used by hosting. One more important thing is hosting support of popular programming languages and their updates.
Top 8 web hosting features you need
Unlimited Bandwidth
Unlimited bandwidth means that a provider is ready to give you a possibility of unlimited transfer of data to and from your site. Virtually all respected providers include ‘unlimited bandwidth’ feature to the list, even of their most basic plans. As a rule, the prevailing majority of websites don’t use up even a half of bandwidth they get as a part of their package. However, unlimited bandwidth is a safe way to go, so you won’t have to worry about it in the future, no matter how good things with your website will get.
Compatibility
Providers we recommend are perfectly compatible with all popular CMS systems like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, Bitrix, etc. The compatibility of web host with programming languages largely depends on the OS of the host. Virtually all Linux hosts support PHP, while Windows hosts are more compatible with .NET languages like ASP.NET or VB.NET.
Reliability
When you pay money for website hosting,you want to be sure that you can rely on your provider. Reputable hosting services will keep your data safe and backed up. Plus, you need to be certain that the prices won’t migrate drastically as soon as your sign-up plan is up. Sites recommended by eWeb experts have been on the webhosting market for decades so you can be certain they won’t let you down.
Security
There’s no such thing as redundant security measures. Best rated web hosting provider will offer you backups and restore points to ensure your data can be restored in case the server goes down?. Our recommended sites work in traditions of the best hosting security practices. You get regular updates of software and plugins installed as well as antivirus and malware protection.
Uptime Guarantee
You need a host that will guarantee your site will be available to users 24/7. The best value web hosting websites from our list have an uptime of 99% at the very least, while some can even boast with 99.99%. Not all hosting providers make uptime guarantees but we strongly advise to sign up for those that do.
Location
Physical location of servers matters. We recommend choosing the provider that has servers located in close geographical proximity to your target audience. Not doing so may negatively impact the loading speed of your website as well as your SEO rankings in Google. Servers of our top 10 hosting providers are located on every populated continent of the globe. You can easily pick a provider with servers located in the region you need to get the max out of your hosting plan.
Moneyback
The best web hosting companies from our list offer a moneyback guarantee to their users in case something goes wrong. Even though it is highly unlikely, you can still ask for your money back if something does not satisfy you.
24/7 Support
Poor customer support is one of the most common reasons users switch to a different provider. The best web hosting services you can see on this page guarantee each and every user will immediate responses to their questions and tech support needed.
