Today’s Top 5 Web Hosts
(Written by guest contributor Tim Golen)
There was once a man who built his house on sand and one who built his house on a rock. The winds came, the rain fell, and the streams rose. Once the storm was over, the house that was built upon the rock was left standing and the one that was built on sand was washed away.
That may be a little dramatic, but the same parable can be applied to choosing the company that will host your website. “Storms” for a web host come in many different forms. Malicious attacks, hardware failure, capped CPU usage, bandwidth restriction, and abysmal customer service are just a few. Choosing the wrong web host can lead to a huge distraction and waste of energy, which could have been used to increase the revenue of your site. I have put together a list of what I consider to be the top 5 web hosts on the Internet today. I evaluated them based on user satisfaction, costs, reliability, and features.
HostGator – $4.95/mo.
As you can see, web hosting is a very competitive business. I don’t see much sense in ever going with a web host that doesn’t provide unlimited space, domains, bandwidth or emails. However, price and features aren’t the only things that matter, you should also evaluate their customer support. HostGator claims that their support is so good that you can open up a support ticket, ask that it be assigned to “Brent,” and the owner of the company himself will help you with your problem. HostGator also has an excellent reseller program that is very simple to use.
Webhostingpad – $3.45/mo.
Webhostingpad uses state-of-the-art hardware to host websites. Instead of having a single server that is shared with many websites, they have a clustered environment and serve files via network-attached storage. This means less downtime and relatively non-existent hardware problems. The downside is that they are a very new company, so they don’t have a strong track record like some of the other companies.
Host Monster – $5.95/mo.
BlueHost – $6.95/mo.
Host Monster is a sister company of BlueHost which has been around since 1996. Their prices are slightly higher than the others, but their years of experience and professionalism make it worth it. They both offer up to 6 simultaneous FTP upload connections, which make uploading large amounts of files much faster.
InMotion – $5.95/mo.
InMotion is geared more towards professional hosting. Rather than having the most up to date versions of PHP and MySQL, they have opted to stick with the older, more stable releases. This might be fine for business hosting, but for personal hosting I feel that this is a large drawback.
We have looked at what I believe to be the top five web hosts today. By evaluating the needs of your website, the size of your budget, and the kind of the headache you want from a hosting company (hopefully you don’t want any headache at all), you should be able to find a proper host from the list I have provided. There are many other hosting companies out there, but you can’t beat these companies for price, customer satisfaction, and reliability.
