At ALL:Digital, we offer website hosting for our customers’ websites. But if you’re in a position to start hosting it yourself, there’s a lot to consider.
Shared vs dedicated hosting
First, unless you’re an expert in the world of web servers, stick to shared web servers. This basically means a company will host it for you, you pay them a monthly/annual fee, and you get all the support you need if things go Pete Tong. You will have to share the space and resource with other companies, so depending on your plan you could find you’re competing for “airtime”. But if you pick a decent company, you should be fine.
Which web hosting company is best?
When I first started this line of work, my first job was to source web hosting for an agency. It was a minefield. They didn’t have a set budget, they just wanted decent hosting that would be flexible for their needs at a decent price.
It was a mine field. There were so many opinions out there, and so many people said the company they used was the best as they could then offer a refer a friend code. I spent hours researching, looking at reviews, and came up with the following…
SiteGround
This is what the agency went for in the end. It was quick, had excellent reviews, and with the cloud hosting you could custom fit your server to your needs. It was fully managed, shared and very fast. It was also incredibly user friendly, and the support function was second to none. We paid about £40/m for it, which was a good price considering the amount of storage it offered. It was big enough for 15 website – including 6 WooCommerce sites.
Hostinger
That’s what i use. It’s good, fast, had positive reviews, and it’s half the price of SiteGround – great for a startup like myself. Unfortunately it’s not quite as fast or user friendly as SiteGround, but i’ve yet to experience a problem with it. It seemed to be the best for a smaller budget. I chose it because there were a lot of indepent people who compared SiteGround to Hostinger, and said it was a good alternative.
BlueHost
This has a lot of excellent reviews and purports to offer great up-time, but digging beneath the surface i found too many negative reviews on social media. It’s probably fine if you’re just looking to host your own website, but I’d steer clear if you’re an agency or have a large enterprise website.
Kinsta
If you have the budget, this is the Bentley of the web server world.