What hosting company should you use for your website?

There are always going to be opinion on this.  Those opinions are always gonna differ.  Things are going to change.  Companies that were good will go south.  New players will join the game.  Amazon.com is offering hosting.  I haven’t used it but it might be great and worth your time to investigate.

I have used Bluehost, MidPhase and StartLogic.

Bluehost has treated me great so far and their Cpanel is easy to use.  Plus buying and adding additional domains is very easy.

MidPhase and I went thru bad times years ago due to their technical support being abusive when I requested support.  They have since gotten much better but I still hold a grudge.  With MidPhase buying and adding additional domains to way too complicated.

StartLogic was a disappointment (that’s me being nice) and I migrated the website I was hosting there to MidPhase.  Tech support was unimpressive – and if you need tech support very often that itself indicates a problem.  Plus they had more down time than the other hosting companies.

That’s my opinion.  Before you spend money on a hosting package I suggest you find three people (not including me) who run their own websites or build websites and ask for their opinions as well.  A bad decision about web hosting is going to make the rest of your life difficult.

Here are some things you need to look for when shopping for a hosting company.

Unlimited.  You need to be seeing the word “unlimited” and you need to see it often.  It’s the year 2013.  What should be unlimited?  Here is a short list.

Email accounts, subdomains, parked domains, addon domains, FTP accounts, mailing lists, SQL databases, storage space and traffic to/from the site.  And email forwarders.  And auto-responders.  And unlimited installations of WordPress in any directory of your choice.

Some people are going to tell you to avoid shared hosting.  Shared hosting means your website is being hosted on one computer with other people’s sites on the same computer.  The problems with shared hosting are:  First, security related – someone else’s site being hacked could compromise yours.  Second, resources related – you are sharing RAM and CPU time with the other websites.

These are both 100% legit concerns.  If you have the money for dedicated hosting go for it.  Starting with shared hosting is perfectly fine however.  You can move to dedicated hosting when and if you need to easily enough.  Your hosting company will take care of that for you.

Hacking could happen to anyone, any time.  That’s why you back up your site regularly.  You are backing up your site right?  Plus Bluehost maintains daily, weekly and monthly backups as well.  But don’t count on those.

As for traffic, you just might be so popular that the traffic to your site is cratering the shared server.  I’m happy for you if that happens.  Burn that bridge when you get to it.  All you’ll have to do is upgrade to a dedicated server.  That will cost you more money but if you are getting that much traffic you should be monetizing your site so it will be worth it.

Here is a real life example of what you don’t want.  APlus.net.  I’m picking on them because I have a client who uses them.  This client paid me for 2 hours of dealing with APlus technical issues.  This is an example of money not well spent.  The first clue that  APlus is a poor choice is that when clicking on the “learn more” link about their hosting packages I get a 404 error.

Should you choose to ignore this red flag and purchase service with APlus amongst the surprises that await you are these.

When I went in to start work for the client I discovered that the package she purchased doesn’t include the ability to install WordPress.  I don’t just mean that there was not an auto-installer and I would have to do it manually.  I mean I couldn’t install WordPress.  At all.  Her package didn’t even include SQL database access which you must have to run WordPress.  So she had to upgrade to a new plan that cost more to get what Bluehost and MidPhase offer as part of the most basic plan.

You can only install one instance of WordPress.  And it has to go in a subdirectory called /wordpress.  Tho it can be moved if you know what you are doing.

Disk useage is limited to 15G and bandwidth is limited to 250G.

The cpanel interface is terrible.  You actually have to install PHPMyAdmin to your site if you want to use it.  I’ve never even seen such a thing before.  2003 is calling, do you want to talk to them?  With every other hosting company I’ve used PHPMyAdmin is simply there as part of the cpanel.

What about the MySQLManager?  Trying to use that I find that I have to enable Windows Services.  What the hell are those?  I don’t even know, I wouldn’t expect you to know.  Turns out that to enable  Window Services I have to go to another tab and enable ASP and ASP.net.  What are those?  Don’t know.  Don’t care.  Why doesn’t this just work?

With any reasonable hosting company all of these things work without you having to install them or enable them.  It’s all annoying and the truth is that I hesitate to mess with any of this out of fear of breaking the clients website.

Choose wisely when selecting your hosting company.  The future of your website depends on it.