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CompanyDescriptionUser's RatingsOverall ScoreWebsite
GoDaddy Reviews

GoDaddy Reviews

By far the largest and most well-known website hosting service in the world, GoDaddy has been around since 1997. In less than ten years, they were hosting over ten million websites, largely due to their first Super ...

2 Bluehost Reviews

Bluehost Reviews

BlueHost was built upon open-source technology, and first appeared in 2003. They provide cloud-based hosting, at shared VPS, and dedicated levels. Their shared hosting plans are affordable, and include several extra ...

3 HostGator Reviews

HostGator Reviews

HostGator began hosting websites in 2002 from a dorm room, similar to many of the great websites of our day and age. It only took a few months for HostGator to pass 100 active customers, and five years later, they had ...

4 Hosting.com Reviews

Hosting.com Reviews

In the world of mega-hosting services like GoDaddy and BlueHost, Hosting.com is a small fish in a big pond. They currently serve just over 2,000 customers, mostly business websites for industries such as financial ...

5 InMotion Reviews

InMotion Reviews

While InMotion Hosting has awesome hardware, our true talent comes from our associates. Our team of web hosting experts average 4 years of professional hosting experience.On top of that, all our support staff undergoes a rigorous ...

6 Just Host Reviews

Just Host Reviews

We know that finding a cheap, reliable web host is not a simple task, so we've put all the information you need in one place to help you make your decision. At Just Host, we pride ourselves on our commitment to our customers, and we want ...

7 DreamHost Reviews

DreamHost Reviews

The year was 1997. The scene was a college dorm room. Four friends with a love of technology, open-source software, and a strong desire to help people get online banded together to create DreamHost.Built on open-source technology with ...

Web Hosting Buyers Guide

Having a website is often a vital step to owning a small business, or promoting yourself as a service provider these days. Even if you largely do business in person and through word of mouth, it’s still important to have a place to point people when they ask where they can get more information. Comparison shopping online has taught us to always check for websites before doing any other type of research into companies or services.

So with that in mind, you’ll need to decide where to host your website. Hosts are the people who provide the space where your site resides; think of them as landlords, giving you your corner of the Internet, for a price. Certain hosts are better than others, because they offer more features and more affordability, than other hosts.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is one of the most affordable ways to register a website, because it involves less dedicated server space. Basically, you share a server with other websites. The host coordinates the server’s ability so that you all get equal space, and ensures that the server is never overloaded, so that everyone’s website stays up and running.

Many hosts who offer shared hosting, such as BlueHost, claim to offer unlimited space for your website. Because you are on a shared hosting plan, this is physically impossible. The fine print generally includes a clause that explains that “unlimited” means “more than you really need, based on average customer data”. It simply means that you should never need the amount of space you’ve been allotted on the shared server.

Features

In addition to hosting your site on the servers, many hosts offer website building tools. If you don’t know anything about building a website, or you don’t wish to use an additional tool to build your site while you host it elsewhere, this can be a major time saver. GoDaddy, BlueHost, HostGator, and others all offer this feature.

Within a site-building feature are many other features that can be compared. For example, one service may offer email with great spam filters, while the other offers “unlimited” mail (again, check the fine print for the definition of unlimited). While hosts like HostGator are very basic and stripped down, others like GoDaddy offer contemporary themes and the ability to build contemporary sites that look like they were designed by a professional.

Pricing

Pricing among the big names in shared hosting is very similar. For the most part, you’ll be paying between $4 and $10 per month for a single shared site, and that price usually includes any other features like email and customer support. There are frequently tiers so that you can choose exactly what features you want and nothing more. While GoDaddy is probably one of the highest of this particular group, the list of features and reliability of its services have made it far more popular than many other web hosting services.

There are some services, like Hosting.com, that are marketed for large healthcare and financial businesses; these services cost more (well into the hundreds or thousands of dollars per month) largely due to their dedicated IT services for each client. These types of hosting services are not optimized for individual or small business use.

Overall, choosing the right web host is a matter of finding the right features, and looking through reviews left by previous customers. A reliable host that keeps your website running is the most important factor by far. If your website doesn’t stay up, your clients can’t reach you, and that means your site will be costing you money in two ways.


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