- We've all been there, (upbeat ambient music)
you're trying to decide where to buy web posting,
but you're not sure which features to look for,
which plan to pick and if you're getting a fair price.
In this video, I'm covering my top recommendations
for web posting for all budgets and use cases.
I've tested a lot of web posts over the years
and I've seen it all.
Cheap web posts, expensive web posts,
host with terrible customer service,
host with world class customer service.
But each host comes with a different price
and a different set of quirks.
Hold up, does the web post I pick even matter?
Why can't I just go out and purchase the first plan I find?
Well, it affects your website's entire experience,
everything from the setup process, speed, reliability,
ongoing management, customer service
and even price increases.
Some web hosts,
(coughs) GoDaddy
like to just jack up the price after the first year.
With all this in mind,
I wanna walk you through my top five hosting recommendations
for all budgets and use cases.
(tranquil ambient music) First,
we're gonna take a look at low cost web hosting.
So this is for anyone
looking to pay the absolute bare minimum for hosting
that functions well enough,
but is definitely not ideal for a lot of use cases.
This is for someone who's got a small personal blog
or you're tinkering with WordPress
or you say, you know what?
I just need a website to be online,
but I don't really care about reliability
or uptime or speed.
This is not for someone
who relies on their website being up to make revenue.
This is also not for anyone who's got an e-commerce store
or a membership plugin,
or a forum plugin on their WordPress website.
Anything that's dynamic that takes more server resources,
the hosting in this category
is not gonna be a fit for what you're doing.
Also, if you're looking to start tinkering with WordPress,
you may not even need to pay for web hosting.
There's a program called LocalWP,
I did an entire video on it over here
and it allows you to run WordPress
on your computer with no web hosting account required.
If you've determined, you do need lowcost web hosting,
I would recommend Namecheap.
They have a shared hosting plan that's $3.88 cents a month.
And I feel this is the cheapest month-to-month hosting
you can reasonably get
that's not gonna give you problems and headaches.
It runs on cPanel
and they have a one click installer for WordPress
and other programs.
For those of you who are unaware of cPanel,
it's a common management panel
used by shared web hosting companies.
It's not my favorite,
I think it can feel a little bit intimidating.
It's definitely cluttered
and a little bit confusing at times,
but it gets the job done and it is standard.
So seeing a cPanel hosting option
that's this affordable definitely is a good sign.
The speed is going to be on the slow side.
This is not something
you wanna use to host an e-commerce store
or a membership site or anything like that,
but it should be fast enough to host your personal blog
or little project.
It's definitely gonna be able to keep your site online
so friends and family can view it.
Namecheap support is all right.
They have a 24/7 live chat support, and overall,
they're pretty helpful, but they do take a while to respond,
and I've had times
where I just have to keep repeating the issue
or wording it differently,
because the support rep may not understand the problem.
Overall, the biggest con with Namecheap's shared web hosting
is that this plan does not include automatic backups.
I am a huge advocate for daily automatic backups
so that if you accidentally mess up your website
or something goes wrong, or it gets hacked,
you can just go and restore the backup from the day before.
With Namecheap's shared web hosting,
you're not gonna get that benefit on this starter plan.
They do have more expensive plans
that include automatic backups,
but if you're gonna spend any more money,
I would move away from Namecheap
and focus on the host in the next category.
Next up is the tier I'm calling the balanced category.
This is where the majority of users are going to fall.
This is the person who says,
Christian, I need more reliable web hosting than low cost.
I need something I can count on,
I want the speed to be a little bit better,
I want good customer service,
but I don't need to spend $30 a month on web hosting.
So who is balance hosting for?
Well, this is for anyone with a personal site
or a local business or a landing page.
Maybe you're a bakery
or a coffee shop or a landscaping company,
or maybe you're a startup with some landing pages.
This category is definitely for you,
but as a disclaimer, if you are an eCommerce store
or you have a membership site or an online course,
anything within WordPress
that the user is interacting with a lot,
I definitely would recommend the next tier of hosting.
But if your needs are not as complex,
then this host is for you.
DreamHost is the best lowcost
month-to-month shared web hosting.
I like their plan that they have for 7.99 a month.
I think it offers a great value and it's not cPanel hosting,
which can be a good thing.
I personally am not the biggest fan of cPanel.
I think it's confusing and hard to use.
And DreamHost is breaking out of the box
and offering their own proprietary management panel.
And I think it's a whole lot easier to use.
DreamHost has great customer support,
and most importantly, they include automatic backups.
They also have great speed, great reliability
and all around are a great experience.
The thing I really respect about DreamHost
is they offer a 97 day money back guarantee,
and yes, that even applies to monthly billing.
So if you've paid for three months of hosting
and you're not feeling it, you can go in and cancel.
And this is what I really like,
they automatically issue a refund.
You don't have to talk to a support person
and ask for a refund
and get hassled asking why you wanna cancel,
and you automatically get a refund issued back to your card.
In the last tier of web hosting
that I'll be covering is premium hosting.
This is the best of the best.
Premium hosting options can range high in price.
They're usually as low as $15 a month,
but you can spend 100s of dollars a month
on premium hosting.
This is because they focus on scalability.
If you need to be able to scale your site up
and handle more traffic quickly,
this is the category for you.
If you're an e-commerce store
and you're having a Black Friday sale
and you're expecting a surge of traffic,
premium hosting has the infrastructure
to just click a button, scale up to a better server,
handle that demand, and then when it's over,
scale back to the server you were on before.
If you have a high traffic blog or business website,
if you've got an e-commerce store, online course,
membership site, forum site,
these are the hosts you'll need to be using.
So what do I recommend for premium hosting?
Well, I've got two options
and the first one really excels in scalability
and ease of use.
And for that, I would recommend WP Engine.
WP Engine offers managed WordPress hosting
that's fast and reliable.
Their plans start at $30 a month for a single website,
but their sister company Flywheel offers a $15 a month plan
that's very similar in features and quality.
WP Engine just works.
Whenever you're dealing with managed WordPress hosting,
it's the host's responsibility
to keep your site running smoothly.
WP Engine does this by limiting page views per plan.
So the more page views your website has,
the higher of a plan you must purchase.
This may seem like a bit of a racket
or like you're getting overcharged,
but it's how managed web posting works.
In order to ensure that quality
and reliability and speed, you're gonna pay for it.
But with WP Engine,
you have powerful features like daily automatic backups,
a staging environment, a bunch of other advanced features,
and you're also going to get world class customer support.
I think WP Engine has the best customer service
of any web host I've ever tested.
They've got a live chat and any issue or question you have.
You can just jump on there and they're super responsive.
WP Engine is great for single websites
or multiple websites if you have a big budget,
but what if you need something more advanced?
Maybe an entire instance to yourself
where you can host multiple websites.
That's where Cloudways comes in.
Cloudways is technically a hosting platform.
And that's because they're not actually
hosting anything for you on their servers,
instead, they're providing a management stack
that goes on top of a server from a cloud platform
like Vultr, Linode, DigitalOcean, or Amazon Web Services.
For example,
I personally have a two gigabyte Vultr instance
that I pay for through Cloudways
and they provide a fully managed experience.
I can easily install WordPress,
I get automatic backups of each website on my instance,
I can have a staging environment for every website
and I have customer support in case anything goes wrong.
It's a very similar experience to something like WP Engine,
but it's my own instance
and I can put as many websites as I want on my server.
However, that comes at a cost.
This is a more advanced solution
and you have to know what you're getting into.
Sure, you can get a two gigabyte instance
for about $22 a month,
but if you're gonna put a 100 websites on it
that are high traffic, your instance is going to crumble
and it's gonna crash and your websites are gonna go down.
With a solution like WP Engine,
you're guaranteed to have good performance
up to that page view limitation.
With Cloudways,
they're gonna give you a lot more flexibility
and it's more affordable if you have multiple websites.
But you also have to know your stuff
and you have to know
how to size your instance appropriately.
I also wanna point out that Cloudways customer support
is definitely not up to the level of WP Engine.
This is again, consistent with the fact that Cloudways
is for more advanced users who know what they're doing,
and WP Engine is for people who say,
I just want my website to be up, fast, reliable,
and I'm willing to pay for it.
(upbeat ambient music) So which hosting
is right for you?
Well, if you're looking for the absolute bare minimum
just to get you by, a great low cost option is Namecheap.
They have affordable month-to-month pricing,
and it's certainly not gonna be world class service
but it's just enough to get you started
with a personal blog or small website.
Now if you're looking for something a bit more balanced,
something that's middle of the road,
I would definitely recommend checking out DreamHost.
They have a plan for 7.99 a month,
that's a great fit for most users.
I say most users,
because it's still not going to be powerful enough
for an e-commerce store or something of that nature,
but if you have an e-commerce store
or a really high traffic website,
that's when you want to pick from a premium host.
WP Engine is a great pick if you want scalability
and world class customer support,
and Cloudways is wonderful for advanced users
who want their own instance to host a bunch of websites.
Now you might be wondering,
Christian, which web host do you use?
I personally use Cloudways.
I have a two gigabyte Vultr instance
that has a bunch of my websites hosted on it.
And I find that Cloudways is a great fit for me
because it allows me the flexibility
I need to spin up a new website for testing
or create staging environments
on multiple different websites.
And it's something that fits with my budget.
And another thing to keep in mind
when you're looking for a web host
is also where you should register your domain name.
I've got a whole video over here you can check out.