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Recommended Web Hosts
Hello everyone,
I thought I’d start a thread where we could discuss our experiences with different web hosts. Here’s what I have used personally for WordPress-based sites:
I used Arvixie.com several years ago. I chose them at the time because monthly billing was available and the pricing was straightforward without any promotions that expired. It uses cPanel which is standard but may be intimidating if you have not seen it before. Here is what it looks like to install WordPress on their hosting.
I have also used Bluehost and it has an extremely beginner-friendly interface for managing WordPress installations. It would still be my choice if I were running multiple sites. They have some promotional coupons that may help you if you are ready to start running advertising for the first time.
I just migrated my WordPress site to namecheap‘s EasyWP plan instead of renewing at bluehost. I like their EasyWP tool and recommend it over web hosts that use cPanel if WordPress is all you’re doing. I like the one-click backups. I did have to contact support to get the included SSL (for the Turbo plan) added to my site. Support was prompt and helpful, although clearly offshore, and resolved the problem within a day but it made me a little annoyed since without the security certificate browsers label you as malware so that’s worse than downtime to me. EDIT: I’ve been helping a family member set up a namecheap site this week and this time they did not send the login information until prompted through a support ticket (waited 24 hours, checked all spam filtering). I would not recommend them as a host, because I feel that I should not have to proactively contact support to activate services this much, I’m used to hosts setting things up when I pay for them.
Finally I recommend making a free site on wordpress.com if you are undecided about using WordPress itself as a tool. The post content is very easy to back up and move with their export tool and you can try it out and see if any of the topics you’re talking about have connected with people enough to get search engine hits.
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5 Replies
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I use and adore LyricalHost. They are a host predominantly geared towards bloggers, small business and creative, though their packages are certainly large enough for those with high bandwidth and space needs, to.
Their sites are fast, and they offer a lot of advice (or will fix it for you) in regards to increasing site speed. They have really stable servers (way less downtime than when I was with GoDaddy – I think Lyrical was down for 30 minutes, once, in about two years!), free security certs installed, and are super pro-active when it comes to threats. For those of you who knew of the plugin issue a while ago, it was a popular wordpress addon hijacked to steal… i dont know. Stuff. It wwas really bad. LH jumped right on, notified every customer using any of the affected plugins, walked them through installing replacements or did it FOR them if they requested. All free.
I’ve had a squarespace site imported to WP manually. Their support team has set up my emails, redirected stuff, installed stuff, reset stuff, even done minor coding tweaks to my theme so I could get a specific result. All free. They have a super interactive facebook support group where Jenny, the owner, is constantly helping people with advice even down to aesthetics, or content, or stuff a web host isn’t really involved with.
I love them like family even though they are total strangers and I don’t know them at all apart from through their hosting. I know I sound like a loon, but they are THAT good.
Plans start at $10 a month and they do all the setup for you.
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I’m using Hostgator.com and like many other “good” hosts, have some nice easy features.
Just remember. The specials they list when you join are usually good for ONLY 1 YEAR. Then the prices return to their regular level. So at Hostgator, I can get a basic account, plenty to work with, for $2.75/mo. After that it goes up, forgot what. I pay every 3 years now. So find one that you really like and want to stay with a while. Sometimes they’ll have discounts for long-time members as well.
Whatever you do, GoDaddy.com should not be your first choice. I’ve heard sooo many complaints about them, and I didn’t care for their sexist advertising on TV (a few years ago, still, only a very few). Most complain about crummy customer service. Because let’s face it, at some time or another, you’re gonna have a problem. But it’s up to you, of course.
I also use AlphaHosting.com for my business website customers. It is less “beginner friendly” but very good and the prices is on the nose with the industry (it can vary, depending on what you need). They’ve been very good to me over the 20 years I’ve been with them.
HostUpon.ca is also good.
I don’t know if y’all have noticed. Those who made their website at WordPress then pointed it to an external domain are having problems. WP has new DNS records. WP has instructions. Good luck LOL
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Only use cheapo hosting (AKA: anything that’s just a few bucks a month) if you can’t afford something better.
The cheapest host I know of that’s actually very good is Lightning Base ($9.95/mo). I used to host some of my own sites there, until I migrated over to WPX (overkill for what you all need).
Long story short: good hosting is impossible at a few dollars a month. That price requires that they stuff thousands of websites onto each server, and all it takes is a few hogging resources to slow everyone else’s site down. You might get lucky for periods of time, but it’s not something I’d recommend to anyone who is taking their author promotional activities seriously.
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Site slow? Leave the bums! I’ve had “mystorydoctor” on GoDaddy for years. People complained that it was slow, so we tried plug-ins that helped, but finally moved to Bluehost–and it was still slow. Just switched it over to a Google Cloud host, and it increased the speed by 500%. So we’re switching all of our sites to the cloud.
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a lot of it depends on how large the site is. but some recommendations I have are siteground (small- medium size), cloudways (medium size to large).
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