There’s an overabundance of hosting providers with tons of features, special packages, gifts and lots of unique offers, aren’t there?

Your confusion is understandable when you have to pick the one that fits best hosting offer from among all that flood of offers – in theory, they all provide the same service.

The problem is that their proposals all seem so different to the untrained eye.

For those that are in a hurry and got no time to read a long article, right below you’ll find a summary of who the hosting providers that can bring real value to your money are:

*We only included here the packages we know can bring a lot of value to you. You can trust all these providers as we have selected them as being the best.

You’re not the only one confused, don’t worry. In truth, hosting is a neck of the woods with so many particularities that everyone gets lost, even experienced users.

Our team of experts has all gone through the same steps when we started.

We searched the entire web to find the best hosting solutions for us, acquiring an enormous database and lots of information about hosting providers during these several years.

And we decided to share our unique experience with you by writing the most comprehensive guide to help you choose the right hosting provider.

After reading this study you will learn:

First of all, let’s clarify what web hosting is:

A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. (as Wikipedia says).

hosting providers to choose from

Simply put, hosting is the space which your website occupies online. It is quite straightforward – if your site is huge and your online space is tiny… you got some serious problems!

Let’s analyze in-depth, a little more

Even if you are an advanced internet user or a beginner – it is quite hard to choose a hosting plan, because there are lots of reviews and a lot of useless blabbering that praise one hosting provider over another.

Lots of online reviews you see are mostly so woolly-headed and as tricky as they come, with so many variables that it becomes almost impossible to understand what the deal is with this entire hosting thing.

For example, you know there is a hosting metric known as uptime (a measure of how long a hosting machine has been up and running), the greater part of hosting providers will ensure you an uptime of >99,5%.

Of course, uptime matters, but we dare to say that true professionalism and the way the hosting company support service responds to different issues and unexpected situations counts for a lot more.

Let us explain.

How to find the best hosting provider out there?

best-web-hosting-provider

For us, professionalism is a crucial aspect, so that even when the problems appear, the way the hosting provider manages them is, by far, the most important part. Let’s say: there is a feeling of safety and trust which we expect to receive from a hosting provider.

Think about the hours you waste when something goes wrong (just relax about that, nobody can ensure you 100% security when it comes to the internet).

Imagine yourself arguing with hosting providers, developers, security professionals; now imagine that they are irresponsible and unreliable. Not a bright outlook, Is it?

The lack of professionalism leads to loss of revenue and time.

At this step, you already know that:

firstly – we care deeply about our website’s security;
secondly – we look for a highly professional and serious approach to our needs.

These are our priorities, and we recommend embracing the same caring approach to your website/s.
Lots of stuff for free (as free domains, more disk space, and so on) – are cool offers, but the core lies in the fact that your web hosting should perform extremely well while never impeding with your website’s performance. That will only lead to disappointed visitors and clients.

You should also consider the provided quality support and the ability of the provider to find a quick and efficient solution to any unexpected problem.

So, as soon as we’ve learned our hardest lesson by getting hacked, we didn’t just search for the most reliable provider – we hunted and tested, and… tested again… so that nobody could outsmart us in the future.

Over the years, we’ve tried lots of hosting providers and hosting plans.

But enough with the tip of the iceberg! Let’s discuss seriously now. Everyone is searching for the best ’price to quality’ ratio, looking for the most affordable, the fastest and the most professional provider all in one.

We will not beat around the bush as lots of reviewers do by telling you that it depends on too much undecipherable information. Of course, it depends a lot on your needs. However, dear reader, there are some hosting providers we do not recommend at all, even if they are well-known and their marketing team does marvels to sell a bad product to a huge range of people. Their customers are poorly informed and keep being patient to their hosting troubles, or… they’ve simply not been informed yet of better solutions.

We have an entirely different approach: we will review the providers which we tested during our long experience of being online (from 2009 till now) ranking them mainly by the most important hosting metric ever:

„Does the provider bring in an all-embracing solution (a right combination of trust, speed, security and price) that makes sense and gives tangible value to your money?”
good-value-hosting-provider

Let’s talk a bit about technicalities

As a secondary step, besides professionalism and security, you can take a look to additional services on offer. Some other services could cover backups, free CDN bandwidth, platform specific services (e.g. WordPress facilities), website builder/ visual builder, some special marketing offers, etc.

There is a thing you should know when it comes to several offers, promotions, and deals – some are worth it, and some are just dust in the eyes.

Best of the best Hosting Providers

All we’ve got here is the icing on the cake for you to compare the options of best hosting providers with your needs. Each of them corresponds to our main requirements: it’s reliable, highly professional and we can confidently recommend them, knowing that our reputation will not be affected, quite the contrary.

Let’s see who the best hosting providers are. Below you can see the top providers for each category of websites (small – medium – large)

Top Hosting Providers for beginners/ tiny sites

Shared hosting or WordPress Hosting

small-websites-hosting-providers
Here we talk especially about shared hosting, of course. This is far from being a brilliant solution, so if you built your website in such a way that you’ll receive a medium to a significant amount of visitors in a short period of time, please, avoid going for shared plans at all! If you are looking to launch a service with thousands of users, then you’re not looking for shared hosting.

*If you choose any of the shared hosting providers, make sure you get enough space on your plan – that’s why we strongly recommend that you choose at least a medium package of services!

Some of those all-in-ones and respected solutions of shared hosts are:
1. BlueHost – their medium plan comes with plenty of unlimited solutions: unlimited disk space, emails, and transfers. They put a lot of effort in their support department so that they’ve got 24/7 phone and live chat support and a help center with video tutorials. Moreover – they continuously update their knowledge database. They grant a bunch of quite comprehensive tools and excellent features for their shared plans (e.g. site builder with templates).

What makes them a good choice for a small website? They are intensely focused on shared hosting (and that makes sense as their services are used by over 3 million webmasters throughout the world and Yes! – It’s proved by numbers that the world prefers shared – ½ of all websites are caring a shared package). And Bluehost understood that – shared brings a good Return on Investment, so Bluehost set a goal to provide ridiculously great performance for this segment, by always improving their product.

2. InMotion Hosting – is a customization freak and highly attentive to keep their hardware up to date all the time. It comes with lots of “unlimited options” – disk space and bandwidth, free domain, site transfers, and data backups.

3. SiteGround – they’ve got some extremely fast and reliable servers along with easy management via cPanel, with 99.9% uptime and a free website builder. SiteGround has been proactive too by adding some beautiful solutions for their clients such as Free CloudFlare CDN, Developer features & Toolkits for WordPress.

Top Hosting Solutions for highly popular websites

Dedicated Servers / Cloud

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When you lease a dedicated server, you gain absolute control over all resources (to the applications, software and operating environment) and the way you use them. You are free to customize the server to your unique needs for CPU, RAM, disk space, and software. Thus, you’re sure that you don’t share your space with a potentially malicious website or spammer.

These are some top providers that can present you with :

1. SiteGround – SiteGround has been proactive too by creating some beautiful solutions for their clients such as SuperCacher, Developer features and Toolkits for WordPress. They provide high-class dedicated machines – they utilize just the latest hardware, which is regularly updated and they always improve their equipment whenever possible.

2. A2 Hosting – A2’s Dedicated Hosting can be truly named a user-oriented and performance-oriented product because they are highly proactive constantly working to make it better. They come with nice custom software solutions, excellent speed and great website security (FREE CloudFlare CDN and HTTP/2), and tons of optimizations (e.g. optimized caching tools).

3. Hetzner – Their Dedicated Servers are a good combination of stable technology, high-quality hardware, and data center facilities all these around with an attractive pricing and flexible support and services. Hetzner owns several data centers in Germany. Hetzner’s uptime over the 5 five years has been perfect (99.99%).

A modern and quite an intelligent solution for any website can be Cloud Hosting. With Cloud, you access what you need when you need it and pay for exactly the amount of space you’ve used. Its key areas are flexibility and scalability. And it is a great solution when you can’t predict traffic volume – extra resources can be accessed when required, and fewer resources can be used when your traffic decreases.
Cloud-based systems also have a much higher chance of protecting you against DDoS attacks.

cloud-hosting-providers-1

Some of the best providers for are:

1. Cloudways – a Managed Cloud Hosting Platform that sets out on a mission to simplify the complexities of cloud hosting for developers, designers, e-commerce stores, and web agencies.

Cloudways houses a feature-rich Web App Management Platform that can be used to easily launch cloud servers for the deployment of web apps. The Platform provisions from DigitalOcean, Vultr, Amazon, Google, and Kyup, with a user-friendly interface that offers integrated SSH, Git deployment, free SSL, CloudwaysBot, Cloudways API, and hosts of other features and add-ons.

In addition to the infrastructures, the Platform offers users with the liberty to deploy their favorite online web applications, including WordPress, Magento, PHP, and Drupal. Most functions on the Platforms can be performed with 1-click, including server deployment, deletion, app deployment and Free SSL. Pricing plans at Cloudways are designed to suit every pocket.

2. SiteGround – their managed cloud hosting (they use Linux CentOs5) is based on innovative virtualization technology, being fast, scalable and allowing customizing. It comes with a 24/7 VIP support. Their solutions will adapt to both a small development website or a big business website with high-traffic.

3. DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean is certainly the cheapest way to start testing cloud hosting, it’s a scalable solution and an SSD based provider that will ensure that your website will load as fast as you need. You can start with just $5 per month and check this! That’s the same price as a shared hosting account!

They crafted a “getting started” guide available on their website and an extensive knowledgebase. DigitalOcean offers backups and snapshots that can be used to save, restore, or duplicate your droplets (these are virtual private servers).

DigitalOcean is a great solution if you care deeply about security – as they store your snapshots and backups on separate hardware.

Speaking of WordPress

You can find providers who have targeted highly functional and handy solutions for WordPress all over the internet.

Some of the best WordPress hosting companies are:

hosting providers for wp websites

1. BlueHost – offers 4 levels to their WordPress hosting offerings, which allows you to match your hosting to your needs or budget. It comes with WordPress pre-installed, SiteLock CDN and Website Security, data backup options and much m.

2. WPEngine.com – A provider that excels at every aspect that matters: security, scalability, load time, and uptime. WPEngine has a vast experience of working with WordPress.

Always updated with the latest hardware to maximize server performance, WPEngine has got some best software built exclusively for WordPress users, that makes their product extremely competitive and their performance a ridiculously great one.

WPEngine is conceived for those that don’t want to care about technicalities but want their site to be up and to run well. It suits WordPress based websites like a glove. WPEngine’s hosting solutions are a bit more expensive than what their competitors bring in but don’t panic; it all makes sense because it comes with great security options.

But for many people, the extra investment will be worth it as WPEngine ensures a secure WordPress install and a speedy and well-performing website.

It hosts WordPress sites only, and it is worth it, as they focus mainly on making WordPress a more secure CMS. WPEngine provides best-in-class customer service on top of innovation-driven technology. This is why over 30,000 customers in 120 countries have chosen WPEngine for their critical WordPress hosting needs. Their complex solutions include high-speed, performance, and security.

3. DreamHost has some reliable hosting platforms, that are trully optimized for WordPress. At DreamHost, they let you take total control of your server or let their team of experts handles During the past decade, Dreamhost’s team actively contributed to the WordPress community. At DreamHost, they bring up 2 excelent solutions for new users and experts alike: they can let you take total control of your server or you can let their team of experts handles everything for you. DreamHost offers performance, value and reliability.

Need more inspiration? Check the following Hosting Guide to find even more about Top hosting providers.

We’d love to hear about your experience with different hosting providers and about your long way to finding the best, in the comment section below. Get in touch!

P.S.: The links above are affiliate links – if you purchase via this link, it will credit us as a referrer. Buying via our link doesn’t cost you more, quite the contrary – we’ve negotiated some attractive sales for you so feel free and enjoy.

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