Activate
Regular Member
- Jul 8, 2019
- 372
- 368
Hi everyone!
In the last couple of weeks I've dedicated hours in searching for the right hosting providers for my site. I was confused with the mixed opinions of BHW members and a lot of the "professional" terms like VPS, shared, managed etc. In this thread I'll try my best to clean the mess and tell you guys facts instead of opinions.
I've talked with dozens of literal experts in the field - those who have hosting companies or offer IT services for hosting companies.
The elephant in the room - Bluehost
If you did even the slightest bit of research you've seen a lot of sites saying that Bluehost is the best all around hosting out there.
Well, there's a reason why they're saying that, and it's not because their service is good - it's because of the affiliate commissions.
Bluehost gives a ridiculous commission of $65 per sale with the option to get a bump to $100!
So no, Bluehost isn't the best hosting out there, in fact - it's one of the worst ones in the industry at the moment, and I'll do my best to explain this later on in the thread.
The Meaning Of Shared Hosting
The term "shared hosting" is fairly simple to understand.
Unlike other types of hosting, with shared hosting you're sharing the server with thousands of other people, therefore with shared hosting you'll get the worst performance out of all of the other types.
But that doesn't mean that shared hosting is bad. In fact, shared hosting is great for most small projects. Here's why.
The meaning of "Unmetered Bandwidth"
Have you ever went to a hosting site just to see that all of the packages feature "Unmetered bandwidth?". A lot of people think that that means that you can upload a site and get unlimited traffic - even hundreds of thousands of visitors a day - without any problems. Well, obviously that's not true.
Hidden behind the meaning of "Unmetered bandwidth" is a huge dozens of pages long TOS that says that if you get enough visitors your site will get throttled and be slower. At some point if you're getting a lot of visitors, your hosting company may force you to upgrade a plan or will just make your site unusable by slowing it down. You can test it by yourself by sending 200 bots to your site, you'll notice that your site will get slower (depends on the plan that you've purchased).
In the other side of table you have honest hosting providers such as Siteground, advertising the exact amount of visitors that your site can handle per month according to the plan. You'll generally want to choose hosting providers that are honest with their customers.
The realistic amount of visitors you need for shared hosting
I've seen people in BHW saying that shared hosting handled a site that got 100k visitors monthly, or a site that handled 500k visitors monthly. Well, these are unrealistic numbers and their site was probably extremely slow for new visitors. If you chose a hosting provider that uses the "Unmetered bandwidth" lie, contact their support and ask for the recommended amount of visitors for each plan. They'll always give you the amount of visitors approximately before the site gets throttled. I can assure you that for cheap plans the 25k-30k visitors monthly count is on the edge of getting throttled and you don't want to pass that number (again, it all depends on the plan you chose).
VPS Hosting
VPS hosting can mean a couple of things, but for me, VPS hosting means purchasing a VPS from DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, or a different provider, and installing hosting there. This process requires a bit of technical IT knowledge and isn't recommended for complete newbies or beginners. Although there are a bunch of tutorials out there that will teach you what you need to do in order to install hosting on a VPS, you won't get any support from the VPS company in case something happened to your site. In fact, you won't get any support regarding your site at all, since the VPS hosting company isn't a web hosting company, so unless you know what you're doing, I won't recommend going to a provider and installing there.
However, there are solutions to these problems, and a company named "Cloudways" can do the hard stuff for you. (http://cloudways.com/)
They basically take VPS servers from the providers, double the price, and in exchange - they provide support, installation, a panel, and a bunch of cool features that you won't get with a regular installation. In short, unlike VPS companies, they are a real web hosting company, therefore you can expect the support and comfort of a web hosting company.
What's the difference between VPS hosting & Shared hosting?
VPS Hosting is much, much more powerful and faster than shared hosting.
Instead of sharing a server with thousands of other people, you get a whole server for yourself, which means that your site can handle a huge amounts of traffic before having to upgrade your server.
According to Cloudways, a $10 plan (which is a $5 server) can handle as much as 100k monthly visitors and 50 concurrent visitors without slowing down.
Keep in mind that Cloudways can be much less beginner friendly than most shared hosting providers. Their panel has a lot of technical terms for non-techies, and you can't compare their support to some of the best shared hosting providers like Siteground or Hostinger.
Managed Hosting
Managed hosting is like staying at a 5 star hotel. While it can be overpriced, you're getting the best experience in terms of everything - customer support, site performance, and a panel.
Examples of managed hosting providers:
https://kinsta.com/https://wpengine.com/https://il.wpx.net/
It's expensive, but if your site handles a lot of traffic, and you want to be sure that it has the best performance it can ever get, managed hosting can be a really solid choice. I'd recommend managed hosting providers to big ecommerce site owners.
So.... Which hosting plan do I need and why?
Here's my opinion.
If your site is small - AKA 10k-25k visitors per month and not a lot of concurrent visitors, go for shared, it's more affordable than the others and is way more convenient than VPS/Cloudways since you often get 24/7 support and a very convenient panel like cPanel or hPanel.
If your site is large, but isn't ecom - go for Cloudways/VPS. If you're getting more than 25k+ visitors a month and a lot of concurrent visitors, a VPS can handle these kind of numbers easily without any problems.
If you have a large ecom site - go for managed. With ecom it's important that the site runs smoothly and managed hosting pretty much guarantees that. With managed you're getting the best speeds and the best customer support, which is exactly what an ecom site needs.
Whatever you do - stay away from EIG hosting companies! (AKA Bluehost, HostGator, iPage etc...)
EIG is the largest hosting company in the world, it has dozens of brands, some of them are the biggest in the industry, and it is known for having shitty servers, bad customer support, bad performance and overall a very bad experience.
You can find the list of brands here: https://hugotonhosting.co.uk/who-are-eig-hosting-and-why-do-you-need-to-know/
Please, whatever you do, never choose Bluehost, HostGator, iPage, or FatCow. All of them are under the EIG umbrella and these companies are notorious for having problems, downtimes, performance issues, bad customers support, and very outdated hardware. There are a bunch of great shared hosting companies out there, these are not one of them.
My recommendations
This is solely my opinion. I've tried dozens of providers out there and these are my favorites.
Shared:
https://www.hostinger.com/ - great performance, great customer support
https://www.siteground.com/ - the best in terms of experience but recently they raised their prices, so they're a bit too expensive in my opinion
https://a2hosting.com/ - great performance, has a cpanel
https://www.interserver.net/ - underrated but very good
https://www.dreamhost.com/ - only has US datacenters, but still very good
With managed hosting I can't really recommend since I've never tried more than one company.
In terms of VPS hosting, Vultr's high-frequency servers are way better than any other servers at the moment, they're also supported in Cloudways.
In the last couple of weeks I've dedicated hours in searching for the right hosting providers for my site. I was confused with the mixed opinions of BHW members and a lot of the "professional" terms like VPS, shared, managed etc. In this thread I'll try my best to clean the mess and tell you guys facts instead of opinions.
I've talked with dozens of literal experts in the field - those who have hosting companies or offer IT services for hosting companies.
The elephant in the room - Bluehost
If you did even the slightest bit of research you've seen a lot of sites saying that Bluehost is the best all around hosting out there.
Well, there's a reason why they're saying that, and it's not because their service is good - it's because of the affiliate commissions.
Bluehost gives a ridiculous commission of $65 per sale with the option to get a bump to $100!
So no, Bluehost isn't the best hosting out there, in fact - it's one of the worst ones in the industry at the moment, and I'll do my best to explain this later on in the thread.
The Meaning Of Shared Hosting
The term "shared hosting" is fairly simple to understand.
Unlike other types of hosting, with shared hosting you're sharing the server with thousands of other people, therefore with shared hosting you'll get the worst performance out of all of the other types.
But that doesn't mean that shared hosting is bad. In fact, shared hosting is great for most small projects. Here's why.
The meaning of "Unmetered Bandwidth"
Have you ever went to a hosting site just to see that all of the packages feature "Unmetered bandwidth?". A lot of people think that that means that you can upload a site and get unlimited traffic - even hundreds of thousands of visitors a day - without any problems. Well, obviously that's not true.
Hidden behind the meaning of "Unmetered bandwidth" is a huge dozens of pages long TOS that says that if you get enough visitors your site will get throttled and be slower. At some point if you're getting a lot of visitors, your hosting company may force you to upgrade a plan or will just make your site unusable by slowing it down. You can test it by yourself by sending 200 bots to your site, you'll notice that your site will get slower (depends on the plan that you've purchased).
In the other side of table you have honest hosting providers such as Siteground, advertising the exact amount of visitors that your site can handle per month according to the plan. You'll generally want to choose hosting providers that are honest with their customers.
The realistic amount of visitors you need for shared hosting
I've seen people in BHW saying that shared hosting handled a site that got 100k visitors monthly, or a site that handled 500k visitors monthly. Well, these are unrealistic numbers and their site was probably extremely slow for new visitors. If you chose a hosting provider that uses the "Unmetered bandwidth" lie, contact their support and ask for the recommended amount of visitors for each plan. They'll always give you the amount of visitors approximately before the site gets throttled. I can assure you that for cheap plans the 25k-30k visitors monthly count is on the edge of getting throttled and you don't want to pass that number (again, it all depends on the plan you chose).
VPS Hosting
VPS hosting can mean a couple of things, but for me, VPS hosting means purchasing a VPS from DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, or a different provider, and installing hosting there. This process requires a bit of technical IT knowledge and isn't recommended for complete newbies or beginners. Although there are a bunch of tutorials out there that will teach you what you need to do in order to install hosting on a VPS, you won't get any support from the VPS company in case something happened to your site. In fact, you won't get any support regarding your site at all, since the VPS hosting company isn't a web hosting company, so unless you know what you're doing, I won't recommend going to a provider and installing there.
However, there are solutions to these problems, and a company named "Cloudways" can do the hard stuff for you. (http://cloudways.com/)
They basically take VPS servers from the providers, double the price, and in exchange - they provide support, installation, a panel, and a bunch of cool features that you won't get with a regular installation. In short, unlike VPS companies, they are a real web hosting company, therefore you can expect the support and comfort of a web hosting company.
What's the difference between VPS hosting & Shared hosting?
VPS Hosting is much, much more powerful and faster than shared hosting.
Instead of sharing a server with thousands of other people, you get a whole server for yourself, which means that your site can handle a huge amounts of traffic before having to upgrade your server.
According to Cloudways, a $10 plan (which is a $5 server) can handle as much as 100k monthly visitors and 50 concurrent visitors without slowing down.
Keep in mind that Cloudways can be much less beginner friendly than most shared hosting providers. Their panel has a lot of technical terms for non-techies, and you can't compare their support to some of the best shared hosting providers like Siteground or Hostinger.
Managed Hosting
Managed hosting is like staying at a 5 star hotel. While it can be overpriced, you're getting the best experience in terms of everything - customer support, site performance, and a panel.
Examples of managed hosting providers:
https://kinsta.com/https://wpengine.com/https://il.wpx.net/
It's expensive, but if your site handles a lot of traffic, and you want to be sure that it has the best performance it can ever get, managed hosting can be a really solid choice. I'd recommend managed hosting providers to big ecommerce site owners.
So.... Which hosting plan do I need and why?
Here's my opinion.
If your site is small - AKA 10k-25k visitors per month and not a lot of concurrent visitors, go for shared, it's more affordable than the others and is way more convenient than VPS/Cloudways since you often get 24/7 support and a very convenient panel like cPanel or hPanel.
If your site is large, but isn't ecom - go for Cloudways/VPS. If you're getting more than 25k+ visitors a month and a lot of concurrent visitors, a VPS can handle these kind of numbers easily without any problems.
If you have a large ecom site - go for managed. With ecom it's important that the site runs smoothly and managed hosting pretty much guarantees that. With managed you're getting the best speeds and the best customer support, which is exactly what an ecom site needs.
Whatever you do - stay away from EIG hosting companies! (AKA Bluehost, HostGator, iPage etc...)
EIG is the largest hosting company in the world, it has dozens of brands, some of them are the biggest in the industry, and it is known for having shitty servers, bad customer support, bad performance and overall a very bad experience.
You can find the list of brands here: https://hugotonhosting.co.uk/who-are-eig-hosting-and-why-do-you-need-to-know/
Please, whatever you do, never choose Bluehost, HostGator, iPage, or FatCow. All of them are under the EIG umbrella and these companies are notorious for having problems, downtimes, performance issues, bad customers support, and very outdated hardware. There are a bunch of great shared hosting companies out there, these are not one of them.
My recommendations
This is solely my opinion. I've tried dozens of providers out there and these are my favorites.
Shared:
https://www.hostinger.com/ - great performance, great customer support
https://www.siteground.com/ - the best in terms of experience but recently they raised their prices, so they're a bit too expensive in my opinion
https://a2hosting.com/ - great performance, has a cpanel
https://www.interserver.net/ - underrated but very good
https://www.dreamhost.com/ - only has US datacenters, but still very good
With managed hosting I can't really recommend since I've never tried more than one company.
In terms of VPS hosting, Vultr's high-frequency servers are way better than any other servers at the moment, they're also supported in Cloudways.
