If you own an online business or a blog or are planning to get one, you surely know what web hosting is and how important it is. It is the second most crucial or one may even call it essential part of getting online, first being the website itself. While choosing a good web host one needs to consider lots of factors and make a decision accordingly.
Getting a reliable hosting that does not burn a hole in your pocket is the most important decision you will make when going online or shifting to a new web host. Why is it so? Because without good trustworthy hosting, even the best of websites can fail. No matter how beautiful your website looks or how much traffic you gain daily, if your web host isn’t good, you will face the consequences in terms of degraded quality, downtime, slow loading speed and lots of other problems.
So why go for paid web hosting when there are free web hosts? Well It might happen that you may come across free web hosts that provide hosting for free without any monthly or yearly charges. So why shouldn’t you chose these hosts? The short answer will be, these are not reliable at all. Free web hosts either put unnecessary advertisements on your website or do not provide the kind of flexibility and support that paid web hosts provide.
Good web hosts provide lots of features and plugins with their hosting packages such as website optimization tools and monitoring services which comes in handy when trying to improve the performance of your website.
So, since we have made clear how much a good web host is important for you, why not have a look at the 5 Best web hosting services providers 2018 – 2019.
Hostgator
Started back in 2002, Hostgator is one of the most prominent name in the web hosting industry. Hostgator specializes in website hosting, VPS and dedicated hosting services and has hosted over 9 million users so far. If you are looking for an all rounder in terms of web hosting, then hostgator is the one of the best option you can ask for.
With affordable prices and good quality services, Hostgator is a good choice for small personal blogs as well as big websites.
Plans & Features
Hostgator has three plans under it shared hosting segment, named as Hatchling, Baby and Business. All three plans comes with unlimited disk space, 99.99% uptime and 24/7 technical support. Moreover if hostgator fails to provide the aforementioned uptime, it extends your subscription by one month for free.
Talking about the hosting plans,Hatchling can host a single domain whereas Baby and Business plan provides hosting for unlimited domains. All three plans comes with unlimited bandwidth so that you don’t need to worry about exceeding your monthly transfer quota.You also get free SSL certification for your website to ensure that your website is flagged securely.
Hostgator provides latest cPanel control panel with all the hosting packages and over 52 scripts that can be installed with a click of a button. All the plans have the facility to instantly backup all the data and also provides 24/7/365 support in case you need any help.
The pricing of these three plans is comparatively low for the first year and increases at the time of renewal but that is same with all the other web hosts out there. The price variations of these three plans are as follows –
- Hatchling: $2.75 – $11 per month
- Baby: $3.95 – $12 per month
- Business: $5.95 – $17 per month
To get the best price for any of these three plans, it is recommended to get the subscription for a period of 36 months. Even if you are not happy with the services provided by hostgator you can get your money back with the 45-Day Money-Back guarantee.
As we can see from the server speed test results, Hostgator has very good ping times, which results in faster loading of web pages and websites. With a minimum ping of 38ms and a maximum ping of 339ms we can say that hostgator provides good server speeds across the globe.
Overall Hostgator is a good choice if you want a good, reliable and fast web host with affordable plans.
Bluehost
Bluehost is yet another web host well known for its high quality web hosting. Founded in 2003, Bluehost serves over 2 million users today. With its huge consumer base and good quality web hosting for affordable prices, Bluehost stands apart from other web hosts in its league. With extremely low pricing for most of its shared web hosting plans and free addons, Bluehost can be a great choice for people who are just entering into the online website world or are looking for a change in their web hosting provider.
Bluehost is also the official recommended web host for WordPress.
Plans & Features
Bluehost has three plans under its shared hosting portion. These are named as Basic, Plus and Choice Plus. The basic plan costs around $3.95/month which increases upto $7.99/mo at the time of renewal and it also provides 50 GB of storage space and unlimited bandwidth. This plan also provides one free domain which you can register at the time of buying the plan.The free domain can be configured to 25 sub domains and a total of 5 mail accounts where each account has an addition 100 MB storage space other than the 50 GB provided with the plan.
The second plan is called Plus costing around $4.95/mo and comes with unlimited storage space and bandwidth. You also get one free domain with this plan and unlimited number of sub domains and email accounts. You also get $200 worth free credits for marketing offers included in the plan.
The third plan is named as choice plus and costs $5.95/mo and comes with unlimited storage, bandwidth, email accounts and sub domains. In addition to all the features provided in the choice plan,you also get 1 Spam Experts, 1 Domain Privacy and Code Guard Basic add-on with this plan.
The last plan is the Go Pro plan which costs $13.95/mo and has all the features provided in the choice plus plan and additionally provides high performance servers and Dedicated IP facilities.
The Server response results show that the maximum ping was of 444 ms from the Japan server location and the minimum was of 33 ms from the western part of the US. The ping results are quite good and justifies the plans provided by bluehost.
Overall it can be concluded that Bluehost has a good combination of quality and price as far as web hosting is concerned.
Siteground
Siteground is a very reputed but somewhat new web hosting company. Siteground was started back in 2004 and is fairly new as compared to some of the reputable players but it has earned its name by providing good value for money.
Siteground is mostly famous for its security features. It provides a number of safeguarding features that most other web hosts don’t provide, at least not for free. Siteground has around 3,50,000 websites hosted on its servers as of now.
Plans & Features
Siteground provides three web hosting plans as of now in shared hosting. The plans are named as Startup, GrowBig and GoGeek.
TheStartUp plan is priced at $3.95/month and provides hosting for one website. It also provides 10 GB web space for storing your website data along with unlimited bandwidth. You also get some free addons with this plan such as Free website builder, free ssl and https along with free email accounts and free cloudflare CDN. This plan is suitable for websites having around 10,000 visits monthly.
The second plan is GrowBig priced at $5.95/month. This plan allows hosting multiple websites and provides 20 GB of web space. You get all the feature listed in the StartUp plan and along with those you also get some premium features such as free site transfer, priority technical support, Super Cacher for great speed and Free backup restores. This plan is suitable for approximately 25,000 visitors per month.
The third plan is named GoGeek and comes for a price tag of $11.95/month. It can host multiple websites and provides 30 GB of storage space. Along with all the features from GrowBig plan you get few additional features such as WordPress & Joomla Staging, One-Click Git Repo Creation, Free backups on demand and PCI compliant servers. This plan is suitable for websites with more than 100,000 visitors per month.
Along with all these individual features All the plans on siteground offer a free website builder which you can use to make new websites if you do not have experience in website designing or coding. The website builder uses drag-n-drop mechanism to create visually stunning websites without any extra effort.
Performance test conducted on a website hosted on Siteground yields an A+ grade with a maximum ping time of 114 ms from the Sao Paulo servers and a minimum ping time of just 1 ms from the US servers. This shows that Siteground servers are not only affordable but super fast also.
InMotion Hosting
InMotion hosting is a US based company and was founded in the year 2001. Inmotion is known for providing a wide range of web hosting services such as dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, business class hosting and personal web hosting for people who need cheap plans. Inmotion has been awarded many awards for its services such as 2011 best business hosting award, 2011 best small business hosting, 2011 dedicated hosting awards, 2011 best VPS hosting.
Plans & Features
Inmotion provides pretty affordable plans under its shared business hosting category. Basically these plans are for people who need good quality yet affordable web hosting. Inmotion web hosting has three plans under its shared web hosting plans named as Launch, Power and Pro.
The launch plan is priced at $6.39/month and provides a free domain and hosting for 2 websites. This plan provides unlimited disk space, bandwidth and email accounts.. You also get free marketing tools, security suit and free SSL with this plan.
The power plan is suitable for small business owners as it comes for a price tag of $8.49/month and provides a free domain and web hosting for 6 websites. You also get unlimited disk space,unlimited bandwidth and unlimited email, just like the launch plan. The performance on this plan is 2X as compared to launch plan.
Pro plan is specially made for growing business and developers. It costs $14.71/month and provides all the features of launch plan with 4X the performance and Pro level support.
All the plans have few things in common such as free SSD storage, free domain, 90-day money back guarantee, free data backups, free 1-Click installer which supports 400+ applications. You can also use SSH and secure IMAP email services along with easy integration to google apps.
This performance test conducted on a website hosted on InMotion hosting shows that it scored A+ grade. The ping times are very good too. The minimum ping being 1 ms from the US server and the maximum ping being 323 ms from the Bangalore test server.
From this we can say that InMotion hosting does provide quality hosting for an affordable price.
FastComet
FastComet web hosting has its initial roots in the early 2000’s but recently in the year 2013, they shifted completely towards cloud hosting to provide better quality of hosting. FastComet is a considerably large company with over 45000 customers and operating over 83 countries. FastComet specializes in providing packaged solutions. These solutions are helpful for those people who who want to start their websites for a particular category such as E-commerce, blogs etc, as the packages include features that are most helpful for that kind of website.
FastComet has a total of 8 data centers located in different parts of the world to provide seamless and uninterrupted services. FastComet also provides domain registration services if you want to buy hosting and domain both from the same provider.
Plans & Features
FastComet has mainly three plans such as StartSmart, ScaleRight and SpeedUp. All plans have their own features and additional goodies that comes with them but they do have a lot of things in common such as all the storage space provided in these plans is SSD based sot hat you get high speed access to your website and data. You also get free domains with all three plans with a lifetime validity and free domain transfer too.
The best thing about Fastcomet is that their buying and renewal price for all the plans is same irrespective of the duration that you buy the plan for.
The first plan, StartSmart is priced at$2.95/month which provides hosting for a single website with 15 GB of SSD storage space and unlimited traffic. This plans has CPU with 2 cores and 2 GB of RAM which is more than enough for small scale websites which get upt o 25,000 views per month.
ScaleRight is the second plan, and costs around $5.95/month and provides 25 GB of SSD storage along with hosting for unlimited websites and unlimited bandwidth. This plan comes with CPU with 4 cores and 3 GB of RAM and can accommodate a total of ~50000 visitors per month which is good for medium scale websites. You also get 3 website transfers which you can use if you need to migrate from or to another host.
The last plan is named as SpeedUp and comes for the price tag of $9.95/month. It provides hosting for unlimited websites and 35 GB of SSD storage. You also get unlimited Bandwidth and a 6 core CPU combined with 6 GB of RAM that can easily accommodate ~100000 visitors per month.
You also get 45 money days back guarantee and free DNS management with all the plans.
The performance test results show that a website hosted on FastComet servers secured A grade with a minimum ping of 1 ms from server located in US and a maximum ping of 686 ms from servers located in Bangalore. With these ping times we can say that FastComet servers are fast and have high performance.
Difference between Shared, VPS and Dedicated hosting?
You might have noticed multiple different hosting categories whenever you visit a web hosting site. Ever wondered what these actually mean? With so many web hosting types and categories it can be pretty difficult to understand how these categories actually differ and what advantages they provide over each other. Here we have explained briefly how Shared, VPS and Dedicated hosting are different from each other.
Shared Hosting
As the name suggests, shared hosting is a distributed/shared type of hosting where a single or group of servers are distributed between users for its computational power and storage space. Whenever a user buys a shared hosting plan, he/she is allocated an IP address on the server and resources such as RAM, storage space and computational resources are shared among all the users present on the server.
VPS Hosting
VPS Hosting is somewhat like Shared hosting only but the main difference between these two is that though the resources such as computational power and Ram is shared between users on a server, there is always a fixed amount of resources that are dedicated to each user that can not be shared with other users. This provides better flexibility and control over account for the users.
Dedicated Hosting
In Dedicated hosting, as the name suggests, every resource is specifically dedicated to the user’s account and none of the resources are shared among the other users. The amount of resources available for the account depends upon the plan bought by the user. Dedicated hosting is best in terms of performance as compared to the other two types but it is much costlier too.
Overall if you are looking for cheap hosting, shared hosting is the best option for you while if you need no resource downtime and highest quality of web hosting, Dedicated hosting is the option you should go for. If you need a mix combination of cost effectiveness and good resources then VPS hosting is the best option for you.
Why good hosting provider is important?
A good web host is the second most important thing that you can invest your money in,the first being your business itself. But why a good hosting provider is important? A good host is comprised of multiple qualities that in turn makes it “Good”. Here are some points which will help you understand why good web hosting is important –
- Avoiding downtimes – What if during the peak hours when your website is getting the most number of visitors, all of a sudden your website crashes and goes offline? These are called downtimes and are mostly caused due to server outage. Of Course you wouldn’t want this to happen to your website and therefore a good web host is must as good web hosts have no or minimum downtimes and thrive to give the best performance.
- Faster speeds – The next thing which users hate other than an unavailable website is a slow website. You want your website to be lightning fast and to load as soon as possible. Good Web hosts have premium quality servers and hardware that provide better performance and faster speeds.
- Support – Cheap web hosts particularly don’t care much about customer support. If you are inexperienced in technical stuff you might need to get help of a technician every now and then and doing so on a cheap web host is surely a very tough task. Good web hosts have multiple methods via which you can seek support from the customer support team and get as much help as you need.
- Backups – What if one day you decide to shift to another host or wake up to find that all your website data is gone because your web host decided to shutdown? Backup is what you need in such cases. Cheap web hosts do not care about backups or user satisfaction. So it’s worth paying a bit higher to get a good web hosting so that you can get timely backups and avoid unwanted data loss.
How to choose a good Hosting provider?
Choosing a good web host is a very crucial task. With all the fake reviews out there on the internet it becomes very difficult to find out which host is actually better and worth investing your money in. Though, there are few things you need to look for when choosing a web host to ensure that you do not regret your decision in the future. To make your work easy, here we have listed a few things you should look for while choosing a web host –
- Pricing – There is no point in buying something that you can’t afford.Pricing is one of the most important factors that affects the user’s choice in terms of web host. A combination of good features for a reasonable price is what you should always look for.
- Types of hosting – Depending upon, for what purpose you are buying web hosting, the type of hosting may differ. If you need cheap but quality hosting, shared hosting is what you should go for. While if you don’t care about price and need only the best performance, a dedicated web hosting is what you should go for.
- Customer support – Customer support is yet another factor that plays an important role in choosing a good host. Good customer supports not only makes your experience much better but also helps you get your issues resolved earlier. Though Web hosts may claim 24/7 customer support but it doesn’t guarantee that you will get your issues resolved fast enough. So not only 24/7 support is important but having a good technically knowledgeable team is also equally important.
- Reputation – If you come across a web host that fits all the above mentioned points but doesn’t have good reputation then it surely is not worth consideration. Reputation takes a long time to build especially when you are a web hosting company. Always check for the host’s reputation and do a background check to get a good insight of how good the host actually is.
Conclusion
Web hosting business is a tricky one, both for the customers and the hosts themselves. In this article we mentioned top 5 web hosts of 2018 that you should surely check out if you are in need of a good web host.
