So what did you search on to find this page?
- Best Web Hosting For Beginners
- Best Web Hosting For Small Business
- What is the fastest and cheapest web host
- Best web host for beginning blogger
- Or just best web hosting!
The best web hosting for you
Are you a beginner? Are you a small business? Do you want cheap and fast hosting?
This is the problem everyone is faced with when it comes to choosing the best web hosting – so many things to think about.
There is no fit-all solution – and hence why there are literally thousands of web hosting companies out there hunting for your money.
So how do you resolve the question: How do I pick the right web host?
The best web hosting for you
There is no 'fit-all' best web hosting
If you are on this site you are obviously interested in page speed and probably have a WordPress website.
With this in mind, you’re probably not going to want to take a run at shared hosting on sites like Hostinger or Godaddy.
And seeing those sites (and ones similar to them) are all about the mass market, even their ‘dedicated’ WordPress hosting solutions are probably not going to hit the mark for you.
And you’re probably not going to want to be gobbled up by hostGATOR – another mass market web hosting company (seriously who would choose a crocodile as a brand name – do you know any friendly crocodiles?) 🙂
How do I pick the right web host for a beginner?
I have to admit – when I created my first website I did not think a monkeys-eyeball about site speed – I just chose the cheapest hosting I could find.
And you guessed right – I moved in 6 months to another web hosting company.
But again – I did not understand what I was really looking for – so in 6 months I jumped to another web host!
As you may know, it takes a lot of time and effort to migrate your site to a new hosting company.
These days though it’s a lot easier – web hosting companies will do the migration for you – or they provide easy to use migrations tools.
[ Both Cloudways and Kinsta offer free migration services and Cloudways has an easy-to-use migration plugin. I also offer a Cloudways migration and configuration fixed price service ]
Choosing the right web hosting is about knowing what you want
While I was joking above about Cloudways and Kinsta – like many jokes, there is some truth!
I have personally worked on site speed optimizing over 200 client websites in the last 2 years. This has exposed me to over 20 different web hosting companies.
And to top it off I have hosted my own sites on 6 different hosting companies in the last 5 years.
I’ve had to deal with all the normal server hosting issues like:
- server down time
- server support
- server speed
Ultimately these days though seeing most server companies now are 99.99% uptime and their support is usually ‘ok, to great’, what is left is server speed.
And with Google’s MASSIVE focus on page experience, mobile first and producing speed tool sets like Core Web Vitals, SPEED IS IN!
VPS Hosting
VPS or Virtual Private Server is a great web hosting solution because you have your own CPU and memory allocations that no one else shares.
Cheaper hosting – often called shared hosting – usually means you share the servers CPU and memory with other uses.
The down side is if another site gets busy you get less server resources affecting your page speed. It’s a rule-of-the-jungle hosting!
Having your own VPS – while it’s not a real server – it still behaves like a real server and you can access and control it like a real server.
5 questions to ask for best web hosting for beginners
Is the web hosting supported hosting?
If the hosting is supported, how the support is provided is something important to know – phone, email, chat or a combination of these.
And while you may think having phone support is a great thing if you are a newbie to web hosting, you will quickly find that having to wait on the phone for 20 minutes in a queue is not so good after all, especially if you have to call support two or three times.
I’ve personally found that live chat support is the best hosting support because it does not tie my time up as much, and I can share screen images to support my questions, and give the support person links if needed.
Email only support is the worst form of support because it can take you a few days to resolve issues if their support desk runs local office hours and not run 24 hours.
One additional consideration to note about any support options provided by hosting companies, is if the support staff are English first language speakers or not.
Having English first language support people of course is the best, but you usually pay a lot more for this type of supported hosting.
As a newbie it’s easy to get fooled by fancy marketing when it comes to supported hosting.
The only real way you will find out about the quality of a specific companies hosting support , is to ask a friend, search forums, or of course sign up with them and see how you get on!
Many of my clients have chosen Siteground for their hosting and they are a good option and their speeds are good for the price. Their support though, despite a lot of it provided by first English language speakers, only gets a 2/10 from me from my direct experience via client sites.
Out of the 16 support chats I have had with Siteground support over a period of two years, nearly 50 percent of the calls left me feeling frustrated or still not being able to resolve the issue.
My direct experience with Kinsta support via my client sites on the other hand has always been exceptional. I personally rate Kinsta support as 9.5/10.
My direct experience with Cloudways support has been a little mixed but in the 25 support chat calls I have made with them over the last two years I have always had a resolution to my problem.
I did have issues originally with Cloudways getting direct chat access to their support guys, seeing their robotic support system does not give you access to a ‘human’ that easily.
I resolved this access issue by typing human please in the chat line, and now if I need to chat with them about a clients site, I can get access to a live person within 1 minute which is impressive. I personally rate Cloudways support as 7.5/10.
Pricing is an important factor for web hosting, and usually the more you pay the better the support.
So with Kinsta you pay more per month than with Cloudways, but with Cloudways you can start at $10 per month for a full blown VPS server, which is more than powerful enough to run a site when you are just starting out.
All my sites are hosted on Cloudways because I like the price point, and their servers are fast and I can spin up a new server for testing or training work in 7 minutes to 8 minutes and pay by the hour, costing me around 1.3c per hour.
Is the web hosting help system well documented and does it included helpful videos
Having well documented hosting support documents is an important point when you are just getting started with web hosting.
Even if you do get on a chat or phone call with a support agent having a great step by step document to follow really helps.
And when the support documentation includes great videos that’s a superb bonus.
How fast is the web hosting and will it stay fast if a lot of people visit the site
Page speed is everything these days and it should always remain top of mind for you because Google now uses it as a top ranking signal.
Page speed starts off with selecting fast, stable and scalable hosting.
There are some fairly complicated technologies that go into making a web host fast. This is called the technology stack – or just stack.
A web host can use a combination of different technologies in its hosting stack. What is used and how it is used affects speed, stability and traffic scalability.
Cheaper hosting is usually fine if only five people are on your site. But if 500 people suddenly pop on your site, the hosting usually does not scale very well and load speeds can drop to a crawl, or worse still, your server starts throwing out 500 errors blocking access.
As a newbie with hosting, it can be super confusing working through all the tech material about hosting speed and scalability. You will read a lot of things like server side cache, reverse proxies, memcache, object cache and so on.
In the end as a beginner with web hosting, reading articles like this one, helps you to find the right hosting service for you that is fast and scalable and at your price point.
One thing as a hosting beginner though to make sure you have with your hosting solution is control over where you web site is physically hosted.
The location of your physical server is paramount to page speed.
The further away your server is from your target audience the slower the page speed because of something called latency.
Latency is simply the time it takes for website information to travel from server to web browser.
And while something called a CDN (content delivery network) can bypass many latency speed issues speeding up your website, it adds extra cost to your site hosting, and an extra layer of complexity that as a beginner you really don’t want to involve yourself with.
How easy is it to scale my web hosting as I grow
Scalability is something easily missed by a beginner.
How scalable your hosting solution is will mean you will not have to leave that web host for many years saving you time and energy.
When you start out with your first website it may not have e-commerce functions but over time you may want to start selling things on your site.
E-commerce sites are dynamically driven and require a much more powerful server than a site that just serves static content.
Some scalability questions are:
- Are there any CDN options that can be added with the flip if a button
- Can you increase memory or CPU capacity easily – memory and CPU capacity affect page speed and visitor scalability
- Is disk storage scalable and can you increase it without increasing memory and CPU at the same time. As your site grows it takes up more disk space (which is cheap) but may not need more CPU and memory (which is expensive).
How can I migrate my current site to the web host - can support do this for me and is it free
Moving to a new web host can be like moving house – a lot of work.
If you have an existing site you will want to be able to migrate to your new hosting company with ease and little or no site down time.
Two key questions to know about here are :
- Is there a migration plugin available
- Will the new server hosting support migrate my site for me and for free or for a fixed price.
5 questions to ask for best web hosting for small business
How much disk space is provided and how scalable is the system when my business grows
Many cheaper hosts have limited disk space and if you have an older business website there could be some old files in there that you don’t want to bother tidying up because its too time consuming.
There is nothing worse than running out of disk space on a web host.
Running on low disk space if left unchecked can cause database corruption, costing you hundreds if not thousands of dollars to fix.
I worked on a clients site several months ago who had disk space issues. They were trying to save money on their hosting by not upgrading to the next plan offering them more disk space.
They were running a very complex e-commerce site that required a lot of server resources, but they were unwilling to pay for better hosting.
In the end they spent around an extra 1000$ on the project with me. I could not complete my speed work with them in a timely manner because their database got corrupted.
I ended up having to migrate their site to Cloudways to fix up their site and give them easy access to scalable resources at a great price.
How is server bandwidth charged and is there a risk of getting additional traffic bills
Bandwidth or site traffic is usually not an issue for a small business website that has limited traffic.
As you grow though, and more people visit your site, you can end up with extra bills if you exceed your bandwidth allowances on some hosting packages.
It’s important to check in advance about your traffic allowances to make sure you will not have any surprise bills.
Can you delegate server access for other team members or contractors
If you are a one-man-band business and you never hire contractors like me to fix up your site issues, server access will not be an issue.
The average small businesses though will need to share server access from time to time.
And as they have a need for more of their staff to access the company hosting, sharing a single set of logins is a HUGE security risk.
Having the option to delegate access is key to site security.
Delegation allows anyone who you give permission the ability to create a 3rd party account with the web hosting company and then access your server.
The great thing about hosting delegation is that you are not sharing your important server logins with anyone – even your own staff.
Instead you can see who has server access and can rescind that access with a button click. So if someone suddenly leaves your company or a contractor has finished their work, you can lock the server back up.
With delegated access some web hosts also log actions on the server against the user, allowing you to track any suspicious activity.
Is there an easy staging server option
If you hire a 3rd party contractor like me – I do onsite site speed optimization work – you will often be asked if there is a staging site or staging server.
Certain types of site work can break your site.
Adding a new theme on your WordPress site for example, will completely break your site design.
The work I do can break client sites when I test different speed configurations.
Having a staging server means that testing can be done on a recent copy of your site without affecting your live site at all.
Not having a staging site is not the end of the world seeing I often use Cloudways as a staging site for clients who don’t have one.
I create a temporary server on Cloudways, use their migration plugin, have a coffee and then I can work on a server I know and trust.
However, having an EASY staging solution will make your life so much easier.
When I work on my clients Siteground hosting accounts I spit the dummy if I have to set up their staging because Siteground uses a complicated staging system involving having to create sub domains.
This means I have to play around and get access to a clients domain name hosting which is a hassle and extra cost for my client.
Will the hosting manage a surge in traffic if a web promotion is run
The last thing you want to find out after you have spent many hours and hundreds of dollars setting up an Adwords advertising promotion for a product launch, is that your server falls over when 100 people suddenly show up at once.
If you don’t do advertising campaigns, traffic surges are probably not an issue. But if you do, you don’t want to find out that your server will fail and you have to migrate your server hosting on a minutes notice.
Having the ability to scale up your server with a mouse click and with no server down time is a great server hosting option.