To recap what I wrote in my last post, a Web “host” or “hosting provider” is a company that runs the computers and networks that “serve” your Web site. There are three options for building your small business Web site: Website Builders, Shared Hosting Providers, and Cloud Providers.
For reasons I describe in that post, I generally recommend Shared Hosting Providers for small businesses, as it provides a level of flexibility that Website Builders lack, while being much simpler to manage than a full Cloud Provider. It’s also the most affordable of all the options.
If you’d like to skip ahead to start building your Web site already, you can go here.
What is a managed hosting provider?
A managed hosting provider (also known as a “shared hosting provider”) is a company that maintains Web servers and networks where they allocate capacity between many clients. To an individual client, in most cases it’s no different than if they had their own dedicated servers and networks, other than the cost being a fraction of what they’d pay to pay for a dedicated server.
How do I go about choosing a managed hosting provider?
This is where I’m going to depart from my fellow Internet professionals. You’ll hear horror stories about how awful companies like GoDaddy and BlueHost are, telling you not to touch them with a 10 foot pole. As I mentioned above, I have the same horror stories. But my suggestion is still to go with a bigger company. Why?
The reality is that unless you have a personal connection with a small, local Web hosting company, these smaller companies will face problems that are just as bad or worse than the big companies once they become popular and have to scale. Either they’ll get bought out by a big company (in which case you’ll end up at the big company anyway) or they’ll struggle to scale and need to reduce service levels or increase prices.
The good news is that as dysfunctional as many of the big companies have gotten, with most of these companies things go well 99% of the time. It’s the 1% of the time that things go bad and you need a customer service person that represent the vast majority of horror stories.
Are there any decent managed hosting providers?
I’ll be honest. None of them are stellar. Go to TrustPilot and Reddit and you’ll see horror stories from angry customers of these companies. The most common complaints are:
- The Web host changes or updates something on their infrastructure that crashes a client’s without warning, leaving the client on their own to try to fix it.
- The Web host outsourced its customer service to a country where English is not the first language and where you’re forced to talk with junior-level employees who you end up teaching.
- The Web host constantly tries to upsell you to products you don’t need once they have you “on the hook”
- If you have a very popular Web site, they’ll slow or shut down your site without warning. I should say this is a very rare occurrence (it assumes thousands of visitors per day) but when it does happen it can get annoying.
To put things in perspective, most of the complaints aren’t from individual small business owners, the vast majority of whom will have sites that don’t come close to the limits of CPU usage and bandwidth, but from power users—for example, Web companies hosting dozens of high traffic sites who push the limits of what a shared hosting provider is set up to do.
Also, there’s not one managed hosting provider that doesn’t do these things to some extent. Believe me, I had experience with most of them. It’s kind of the nature of the beast. Ironically, the more popular a shared hosting company becomes the more difficult it is for them to scale, and their oldest and most loyal customers usually end up holding the bag.
Out of the thousands of managed Web hosting companies, there’s only one that I’ve gone back to again and again: GoDaddy. I’ll explain why below. Yes, I’ve had my share of headaches with them, but they’re the ones that I’ve found to be the most reliable, or at least the “least bad”.
To paraphrase the famous quote from Winston Churchill about democracy, shared hosting providers are the worst kind of Web hosting you can buy—except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.
Who are the biggest and best (or worst) managed hosting providers?
So while I do recommend going with a “big” hosting company, not all big hosting companies are created equal. You need to be VERY selective about what “big company” to go with.
According to BuiltWith.com (as of March 2024), the shared hosting providers that power the most sites on the Internet are as follows:
#1 – GoDaddy – 16,988,485 Web sites
#2 – IONOS (formerly 1and1) – 14,240,968 Web sites
#3 – NameCheap – 5,267,244 Web sites
#4 – Newfold Digital (BlueHost, Bizland, Web.com, HostGator, etc.) – about 3,352,892
#5 – Hostinger – 2,300,335 Web sites
Again, I prefer going with companies that have a lot of sites because they’ve overcome problems that smaller Web hosts haven’t faced yet.
Recommend:
1. GoDaddy (7/10)
Go to sites like Reddit and Trustpilot and you’ll see Web professionals everywhere warning you not to touch GoDaddy with a 10 foot pole. I’ve been one of them.
I’ve been a customer of GoDaddy since they began in the late 1990s. In the beginning they were outstanding; if I had any question at all I’d call their customer service line, get an answer in less than 2 minutes, and be able to speak with an agent in their office in Arizona who’d understand my issue and solve it quickly.
That didn’t last. Most recently I noticed that my sites were slowing down to a crawl and even crashing. I called GoDaddy’s customer service and got a customer service agent for whom English was clearly not their first language. Worse, this agent had no idea how to help me and even started making things up. It took about four tries and about 3 total hours on hold before I finally found someone who could help me.
But after the emotions fade, I look back and see that in over 25 years of using them, I’ve only had about 2 or 3 of these incidents, and they were usually resolved within a week or two. Outside of that, my sites have performed pretty well and I like that GoDaddy allows you to access your site’s files and configuration through standard means like FTP and cPanel, in addition to their own interfaces,
As I write the tutorials on this site, I’m going to be using GoDaddy as my example, but if there’s demand I’ll write up separate tutorials for the other Web hosting companies.
On the fence:
2. Hostinger (6/10)
Hostinger is a company that began out of Lithuania in 2004 and quickly skyrocketed in popularity by building a solid Web hosting infrastructure, good customer service, a simple and straightforward interface, and the cheapest pricing of all the major players.
I am SURE that the four bigger companies above them have all attempted to buy them out, but to their credit they’ve resisted the urge to cash out and continue to be independent.
I haven’t tried Hostinger myself, so I’m “on the fence” on this one. I’m hoping to sign up for a Hostinger account so I can try it out; if I do, I’ll be sure to update this post with my honest opinion.
There seem to be lots of legitimate reviews for Hostinger from long-time customers saying that they’re satisfied for the service they received given the price they paid and they appreciate the simple, straightforward user interfaces. That’s basically what made them grow so fast.
But in recent years I can see they’ve been very aggressive in some shady marketing practices, including posting fake reviews on review sites like Trustpilot and Google. While they have stellar reviews, if you look carefully enough you can see what are clearly fake reviews on virtually all the review sites, which really hurts their credibility.
3. IONOS (6/10)
IONOS a hosting company out of Germany that was started in 1988 as an Internet Service Provider, but it got into the Web hosting space in the US around 2003, under the name 1&1. The ISP was spun off into 1&1 Telecommunications, while the Web host changed its name to United Internet, which later became 1&1 IONOS and finally just IONOS.
In addition to GoDaddy, I was an early customer of 1&1. GoDaddy is the #1 managed hosting company in the US, while IONOS is the tops in Europe.
I haven’t thought about 1&1 or IONOS in years, but I recently helped a charity with some pro bono work, and they were using them. Their interface is much clunkier than GoDaddy’s and there’s definitely less flexibility, but I was eventually about to figure everything out and get a nice WordPress site launched.
The main issue I have with IONOS is that they don’t really do a lot (positive or negative) that GoDaddy doesn’t do.
While some long-time customers appear satisfied with their service, they’re notorious for trying to sell you things you don’t need and sneaking in up-charges to your bill.
Here’s a breakdown of the pricing for the hosting plan that each of these companies recommends as their most popular:
| Company | Recommended Plan | Annual cost | Notes |
| GoDaddy | Web Hosting Deluxe | $167.88/year | Free domain, free backups |
| Hostinger | Business | $107.88/year | Free domain, free backups |
| IONOS | Plus | $144.00/year | Free domain, free backups |
Not Recommended:
Of the top Web hosts, I would not recommend either of these two.
4. NameCheap
I’ve used NameCheap as a domain registrar in the past, which is how they became popular (as you can tell by the name). Ironically, they are no longer even close to being the cheapest domain name registrar.
Naturally, they decided to jump into the Web hosting business, but unlike companies like GoDaddy and Hostinger hosting was always a secondary product for them.
While they definitely have one of the lowest prices for Web hosting (their most popular plan costs $68.88 a year), there are far too many horror stories of unresponsive or ineffective customer service, an outdated interface.
They may be a good option if you need to run a small Web site that isn’t critical to your business, but I’d steer clear from their Web hosting for your main Web site. Ironically, they do have some of the best prices for SSL certificates, so I’ll be recommending them for that later.
5.BlueHost or any other Newfold Digital company –
If you Google “best hosting providers”, you’ll find one name that comes up over and over again: BlueHost. Yet if you go to Reddit or TrustPilot you’ll read nothing but horror story after horror story, especially within the last few years. How do you explain this?
It’s simple. BlueHost pays upwards of $125 to Web sites that refer new customers to them, which is the highest affiliate referral in the industry (as comparison, GoDaddy pays a maximum of 10% of the purchase price, which at most comes out to $17). So if a Web site like Forbes (which is really “Forbes” in name only these days, nothing close to what they used to be 30 years ago) recommends Bluehost as their #1 pick, take that with a huge grain of salt.
BlueHost is owned by a company called NewFold Digital, whose business strategy seems to be buying up Internet hosting companies and domain name companies that were once the most reputable brands in the world, but have since plummeted in popularity. These companies include Network Solutions (the first domain name company), Register.com (once the top domain name company in the industry), Markmonitor (the top domain name provider for corporations), Web.com (once one of the top Web hosting companies), and other brands you’ve probably heard of like HostGator, Domain.com, and Sitebuilder.com.
While on paper this looks like an impressive collection of brands, the reality is that these companies are all dead or dying. While Newfold Digital does a lot to give the appearance that these brands are still as strong as they always are, behind the scenes you can read horror stories of how they’ve laid off staff, offshored customer service, and consolidated backend infrastructure not based on what was best for the customer but based on internal corporate politics.
At $263 a year their pricing is also at a premium. Their customers are basically paying for the brand name which no longer comes close to representing the quality it once did.
What are your “tricks” to working with a managed hosting provider?
1. NEVER lock yourself in to any single company.
The first rule I’ve learned is this. Never EVER lock yourself into a single hosting provider.
One of the beautiful things about using managed Web hosting is that you can build your Web site on completely open standards, meaning that the site you build on one hosting provider using WordPress can be easily picked up and moved to another one if for some reason you’re not happy with your service. If you use a Website builder site like Squarespace or Wix, your site goes away when you leave them.
One thing that has helped me a great deal over the years is learning the fundamentals myself. That way if you ever want to leave one hosting company you can move over to another one easily without any disruption to your Web site.
2. Learn how to DIY
Web hosting companies often offer so-called “wizards” and other bells and whistles to streamline things like setting up your domain name, installing and configuring WordPress, and so on.
These may appear to make things easier for you, but what they’re really designed to do is to lock you in as a customer because you get so used to doing things their way you can’t leave. That’s not to say you shouldn’t use their tools, but it’s important to understand the underlying principles and what’s going on behind the scenes. As I walk you through some of these tutorials, I’ll likely tell you how to use the tools that the hosting companies provide, but I’ll explain to you clearly how it’s working.
Once you learn the “right” way to set up your domain name, SSL, Web server, and WordPress installation, you can take that knowledge to ANY shared Web host in the future, should you ever find one with better prices, better support, or better performance. Even better, if you ever do want to hiring someone to help you with hosting (either on a shared hosting platform or a cloud service), you’ll know all the fundamentals so you can speak intelligently to the vendor you choose and negotiate a fair price.
3. Learn how to mix-and-match services from different companies
Web hosting companies will try to fool you into thinking that if you choose them for hosting, you have to choose them for everything else, from domain names to SSL certificates to email hosting (if you don’t know what any of those mean don’t worry, I’ll cover them on this site).
As you’ll see as I write this site, I mainly use GoDaddy for hosting, NameCheap for SSL certificates, NameSilo for domain names, and Google Workspace for email. GoDaddy, of course, wants you to think that you need to buy everything from them. Here’s what it would cost if you did that.
GoDaddy Hosting – $153.21/year
GoDaddy Domain Name – $21.99/year
GoDaddy Email – $119.88 for one user/year
GoDaddy SSL – $70/year
And here’s what it costs when you use different providers.
GoDaddy Hosting – $153.21/year
NameSilo Domain Name – $13.95/year
Google Email – $72 for one user/year
NameCheap SSL – $6.99/year
You see the game here? If you were to buy everything at GoDaddy, over 10 years you’d end up paying an extra $1,189.30 to GoDaddy for the exact same products you can get elsewhere. They’re counting on most small business owners wanting the simplicity of consolidating everything to one vendor, and most small business owners will just pay it (plus whatever overhead their IT consultant is charging on top).
GoDaddy’s not the only company that does this, of course. If you buy an SSL certificate at NameCheap or a domain name at NameSilo, they’ll try to upsell you to their hosting services.
What most people don’t know (because companies like GoDaddy don’t want to tell you) is you CAN buy services from other vendors that are equal (or better) in quality but much lower in price and connect them. It just takes a few minutes and a little education. Which I hope to give you here.
To be clear, I don’t think GoDaddy or any of the other companies are being nefarious here. And there are definitely some small business owners who won’t mind paying for the convenience of having one bill that contains everything.
4. AVOID companies that have offshored their customer service
Most of these hosting companies are exactly the same as far as the basic service they provide. There’s not a lot of differentiation from company to company in setting up servers and networks, and the ones that mess up this part go out of business very quickly.
The only real differentiator is customer service. The problem is, that’s considered a “cost center” by executives. The bigger a hosting company gets, the more likely that it’s executive team is filled with foolish executives who think that they can increase their profits by firing their knowledgable US-based customer service staff and replace it with cheap labor from countries where English is not a first language.
The vast majority of them have never even used their own product, so they think you as a customer are too stupid to know the difference between a knowledgeable customer service representative in Arizona and a clueless entry-level customer service agent 5,000 miles away.
Just to be clear, it’s not about their countries and it’s not even about their thick accents. It’s about the level of expertise these outsourced customer service companies have. There have been countless times that I have found MYSELF teaching hosting companies’ customer service agents because the hosting company is too cheap to train them themselves, other than maybe a short orientation session on how to use their products.
5. If you’re hitting the high end of your shared hosting quota, look into Cloudflare
This is one of those “secrets” that I only learned about recently, and it was a game changer for me.
As I mentioned above, recently I was reaching my upper limit on GoDaddy as far as CPU usage, memory usage, and bandwidth for one of my personal Web sites. GoDaddy started throttling my Web sites so that my visitors got server errors when they tried to visit. When I called their customer service to ask what was going on, I learned that I was still on an outdated plan (which they never bothered to tell me about). Their only suggestion was to pay a lot more money for a higher tier of service.
I discovered a relatively new company called CloudFlare that is changing the game. They’re not a hosting provider, but they’re a service that you can add on top of your hosting provider that will cache your site and serve it from their CDN, or content delivery network. It’s a service that makes your Web site much faster that’s normally available only to the top Web sites, but Cloudflare’s mission is to allow every site to enjoy this service.
Here’s how it works.
Normally your Web hosting provider will serve your Web site from its own servers, located at a single location. Each time a visitor accesses your site, that’ll use up CPU resources and bandwidth. If your site reaches a certain level of popularity (thousands of visitors a day), your Web site might start to exceed the limits that your hosting provider allows, causing your site to slow down or even be taken down.
A company like Cloudflare sits between your hosting provide (the “origin server”) and your Web visitors. Put a bit simplistically, instead of your Web site visitors coming to your hosting provider directly, they go to one of Cloudflare’s proxy servers which handles the traffic, cutting the number of people that access your Web site at your Web host dramatically, and decreasing the CPU usage and bandwidth.
Another nice thing about Cloudflare is that it gives you control over Web security that managed hosting providers can only dream of. I had a site that was getting huge amounts of traffic, which didn’t seem right to me. Like I said, my hosting provider would only tell me to pay more money to accommodate all the traffic I was getting. With Cloudflare, I could see almost right away that the bulk of the traffic was coming from malicious hackers in Eastern Europe and out-of-control bots in Asia. I blocked them, and my traffic shot down tremendously.
Cloudflare is free for personal and hobby sites, so that’s a good way to test them out if you think you might need them. The lowest business account starts at a reasonable $20/month.
