How to Choose the Best Web Host
You've secured your domain name and now you're ready to find a place to build your website. This is the job of a web hosting company, and there and thousands of web hosting companies online. Let me warn you that shopping for a web host is worse than shopping for a used car. You'll find a whole lot of websites with a lot of nice looking front pages, promising 99.9% uptime, fast, reliable service. The reality is that most web hosts are poor. Over the past 10 years, I've worked with almost 30 different web hosts while setting up sites for others and trying to trouble-shoot issues. More times than not, hosting companies will run their server resources as high as possible, putting as many websites on one machine as memory will allow, and when activity becomes high during peak times of the day, your website will suffer. I won't get into list making, but I will tell you the absolute worst host I've ever dealt with was ThinkHost. In 2010, I tracked downtime for a particular client, over a two month period, and found this downtime to be an average of almost 40 hours per month! Can you imagine?! I had a furious client that couldn't get her business off the ground. She had opted for the lowest price host she could find and unfortunately, she found one of the poorest hosts out there.
So who's my pick for the best web host? If you read my review last year, I gave 1st place to WebFaction as the way to go. Unfortunately, WebFaction has lost some ground to my new favorite web host, HostGator. I'll still recommend these two as my favorite and here's the reasons why.
WebFaction is a solid host for those needing a simple WordPress website and are pretty technically savvy from the start. They're not a great choice for beginners and I would definitely recommend anyone creating a website for the first time to stick with HostGator. One thing I love about WebFaction is that they don't overbook their servers. I simply never have problems with my sites coming up. I have never had one minute of downtime and their servers are fast.
The bad? I had a few websites that utlized more MySQL resources that would a typical WordPress site. I started receiving warnings that I needed to look into reducing my queries and not utilizing the CPU so much. I tried working with a tech and the usual great support people at WebFaction were not much help with this problem. They simply had no ideas and didn't seem very eager to want to help. Ultimately, I made some changes that I thought might do the trick and unfortunately, they didn't. The result? I woke up one morning and WebFaction had suspended my entire account! Now to their credit, I emailed right away and asked them to please enable my account so that I could take my resource intensive sites elsewhere, and they complied right away. But the result of this was that I spent the next 3 days transferring these accounts to HostGator and guess what? I've not had a single problem since. That tells me that the techs at Host Gator might be a bit more on the ball than WebFaction, as they seem to have their servers better prepped for high resource usage. The other possibility is that the hardware is simply better, but from what I've read, this simply isn't the case.
The other problem is with WebFaction's email system. You can't utilize the php "mail" function, as they use separate mail servers for all their email. If you're good with servers, this is a bonus but for the rest of the world (the vast majority), it means installing extra plugins for all your WordPress sites and rewriting your php scripts in a much more difficult manner, as well as installing PEAR just to send mail. It's just not worth it. With HostGator, I installed WordPress and could instantly send email. I can also include a simple one-line command to email from any php script.
Overall, I still like WebFaction. They answer tickets quicker than any other web host I've ever dealt with and that's always a plus. But, I'll stay with HostGator for most of my sites as I simply have not seen one disadvantage yet.
Whether you choose WebFaction, HostGator or any other host, do your homework first. Check out hosting reviews and keep in mind that the first few listings for "hosting reviews" (when doing a search) are often sites owned by the hosting companies themselves, disguised as legitimate sites to promote themselves. Look for real reviews from real people and make sure your new host is someone that will take care of you for years to come!
Amy Kastner is a Web-Designer, Online Marketing and Search Engine Optimization Specialist.
You can usually find her on twitter, where she occasionally writes about interesting stuff.
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