Top Web Hosting Services for You to Use This Year
While choosing a web hosting service can be a relatively easy task, it requires a good deal of careful thought if you want to do it right. While it may appear obvious that a given hosting service should accommodate your needs, all too many website designers, developers, and owners don’t have a clear understanding of what their needs really are.
Three key elements you need to consider when selecting a host are page loading speed, information capacity, and reliability. All three are important, but reliability may be the most important of all. 99% reliability is on the low end of acceptable performance. You should be insisting on 99.9% reliability or better from your hosting service; particularly if you have a business-oriented website.
Pricing is important only in terms of what you can afford. Since you’ll typically get what you pay for, you should never base your purchasing decision on pricing alone. All 5 premier web hosting services listed here provide rock solid performance; while offering several pricing plans to choose from.
SiteGround
SiteGround was founded in 2004 by three university friends and has since grown to over 400 employees working from five data centers on three continents to support a global business. Their primary focus has always been the service quality and client satisfaction.
Their staff has never been reactive to problems, creating a delay in response. Rather, they rely on a unique proactive server monitoring system to nip problems in the bud. Users appreciate the fact that unexpected traffic spikes rarely, if ever, cause fluctuations in service thanks to the use of Linux Containers which are extremely resource efficient and provide excellent stability.
You can count on SiteGround to provide a service ensuring your website’s security. SiteGround runs the latest server software ensuring a staggering 99.99% Uptime. Besides, they have their own data backup system which ensures fast restore in times of need. The amalgamation of technology and smart employees has prompted WordPress.org to officially recommend SiteGround: “It’s one of the best and brightest WordPress hosting providers.”
A2 Hosting
If you, or your customers, have grown weary waiting for your website pages to load, you can put all that behind you, along with any other performance issues, by choosing A2 Hosting. A2Hosting has data centers in the United States, Singapore, and the Netherlands, and provides multiple server options. All that’s required on your part is to find the plan that best fits your needs; which shouldn’t be difficult.
The choices include private server options, managed VPS hosting, Cloud VPS hosting, and dedicated server hosting; both managed and unmanaged.
You can also expect “screaming fast” page loading when you sign up for this service. Or, you might want to look into their SwiftServer and Turbo Server options that offer page loading speeds 20X faster than what you’re apt to experience elsewhere. 99.9+% uptime is considered normal, and you can expect around-the-clock support, 365 days of the year.
WordPress VIP
If you’ve been troubled by sliding fee structures, or changes in fees as your website has grown or experienced a spurt in traffic, it may be time to consider WordPress VIP’s flat fee structure.
You should find flat fee hosting especially convenient if you have a high-profile or high-traffic website. WordPress VIP offers several other helpful services as well, including code checking for security and optimal performance.
Glowhost
Having a successful website can have a downside if it outgrows the hosting plan you’ve signed up for, especially if the plan involves shared hosting. If that happens, your host is likely to recommend moving up to a managed VPS service.
That won’t be necessary with Glowhost, and its Elastic Sites Plan. It gives you all you need in the way of a reliable and dedicated resource that you’ll find easy to manage.
Pagely – Managed WordPress Hosting
If you’ve got a large WordPress site and are looking for an innovative, flexible and best-in-class managed hosting solution, Pagely’s service is for you.
This 100% bootstrapped company pioneered dedicated WP hosting, and has doubled down on this offering alone to master the space for big brands. Pagely utilizes its own home-grown tools including a security suite, caching capabilities and CDN. If you’re running a smaller operation, look elsewhere.
Tips for Choosing a Web Hosting Service
Do you find one of the five hosting services to be especially appealing? Whichever one it is, it’s one of the very best. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to browse through the following tips, and answer any questions that are asked, to make doubly sure you’ve made the right choice. If you haven’t picked one yet, you’ll find these tips helpful.
- The first question you need to answer is this: What is the purpose of my website, and what are my expectations of it? Depending on your answer, you may find that one or two of the five services aren’t quite what you are looking for, while two or three provide exactly the services you need.
- What are your future for the website? If it’s a business or e-commerce website, and your online business takes off, you may eventually find a need to scale up your hosting needs, or even change your hosting service. By choosing the right hosting company, the latter issue can probably be avoided.
- What customer support options are available? If your website’s target audience is large and dynamic, and/or you’re experiencing or expecting to experience heavy online sales, the quicker the response should a problem occur, the better. 24/7 customer support is a must.
- Acquiring a general understanding of what a hosting service offers is generally not a problem. What you don’t know, is if the service lives up to the system performance or customer support claims it makes. You’ll benefit by checking out a few reviews. Customer’s pro and con reviews are preferable to testimonials, and reviews conducted by professional web reviewers will generally tell you what you need to know.
- It was mentioned up front that you shouldn’t base your purchasing decision on pricing alone; but it’s worth repeating. The level of service you receive generally correlates closely with its price.
- It’s not the most exciting read, but reading the Terms of Service is important. The TOS can sometimes be lengthy; partly for legal reasons, and possibly, to discourage customers from reading them in their entirety. Pay particular attention to what the hosting service says about its refund policy.
- Another thing to look for is the service’s backup plan. If one isn’t offered, or not clearly explained, look elsewhere. You should not encounter any problems in this area with any of these 5 services.
- Security breaches of one kind or another are in the news practically every day. Hosting services aren’t completely immune, but the best ones can be expected to do an excellent job of protecting your websites, customer data, transactional information, and so on.
Summing Up
By now, you should be in an excellent position to make a well-informed selection that will fit your website hosting needs to a T. While the 5 hosting services listed here are top of the line, we still suggest checking out customer/professional reviews before selecting any web-based product or service.
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