What hosting company is best?

I cry inside every time I see someone ask this on the internet. You know you should just pass on by… but look anyway.

I cringe because no one is asking any questions to find out what the person needs. Many of the answers about staying away from company A are based on something that happened years ago and was quickly fixed. Depending on where you ask, you might just be met with a bunch of referral links. I often take replies about tech support with a grain of salt too. Often the perception of quality support is based on many factors including the caller’s skills. I have been fortunate and have not had to call support often, but the one time I got a bad egg, I just hung up and called back and got a different agent that communicated in a style more compatible with mine.

The best thing about WordPress is you can move hosts if you don’t like your current one. I wouldn’t change each month, but it’s not too difficult to do. Some hosts will do it for you if you are willing to share your credentials with them.

So what should you consider when evaluating what host to use?

1. How big is your website? Informational type of websites tend to be smaller, have fewer images and need fewer plugins and other tools that can use up space. On the other end a large e-commerce site will likely need more bandwidth and storage space. Likewise an image heavy site such as for an artist portfolio.
2. How much traffic do you expect? Be realistic! A plumber in a small town is probably light on traffic, where a nationwide retailer could be very busy. In between these two are sites with erratic traffic – a website for an annual event for example. It’ll have light traffic 10-11 months a year, then boom, the month of the event will see a flurry of activity as people buy tickets and check out the itinerary.
3. How much time and knowledge do you have about setting up the back end of hosting? Do you want the host to handle everything? Or are you comfortable with doing minor adjustments to files? Do you have the time and desire to troubleshoot a problem? Or do you want full control and want to set up your own servers?
4. What method of support do you prefer? Hosting companies have a variety of methods – some are email only, some chat only, some still offer phone support. My personal favorite is chat, followed by phone. But others want to just send an email and wait for a response. A lot of the “support sucks” comments are because of a mismatch in preferred communication or lack of the customer to be able to clearly explain the issue.

Once you’ve answered these questions you can compare different companies.

Keep in mind that each company will often have an assortment of hosting plans. Make sure you’re comparing apples to apples comparing plans.

Do look at reviews, especially recent reviews. The big companies will always have more reviews, and since people like to complain about website hosts more than the weather, consider the proportion of bad reviews to the size of the company.