» Web Hosting Review

In my tenure as webmaster, web designer and search engine marketer I’ve had the opportunity to work with a lot of different hosting companies. In most cases it’s been in a share hosting environment, but I’ve had a chance to work with a couple of dedicated and VPS (virtual private servers) accounts as well. What follows is my top 4 picks for website hosting.

#1. MidPhase / ANHosting
I found MidPhase / ANHosting about a year ago via the Wordpress website, and what a find! Will run you $7.95 a month (shared hosting), but you get everything and their support is top-notch… whether it’s on the phone or via the support ticket system. I can’t say that I’ve ever waited more than an hour for a ticket update… it’s usually more like 30 minutes. There was one time when my entire server crashed so hard they had move everyone to a new machine (250 hosting accounts).. was back up in about a day, and all the kinks worked out in a couple of days.

I highly recommend MidPhase for everything mentioned above, but here is the icing on the cake for me. It is so easy to upgrade with these guys. If you outgrow your shared hosting account.. you can step up to a VPS and they’ll handle the full migration for you.. FREE of Charge! You can be a new server within a day without lifting a finger. Need more than VPS.. they also do dedicated servers.

#2. GoDaddy.com:
For a long time GoDaddy was my favorite web hosting company. This was back when all I needed was a place to post HTML pages and run a few PHP form processing scripts. I outgrew them once I started to have out of the norm requests like special apache rewrite rules. I have clients that are totally happy with GoDaddy, but for my personal needs I had to look elsewhere.

If you are looking for bare-bones basic web hosting at a very affordable price then GoDaddy might be the perfect web hosting platform for you. They offer both Linux and Windows environments. I’ve run several Wordpress installs at Godaddy as well as a Joomla site. One downside is that they don’t offer Fantastico Deluxe for installations and upgrades. They do offer one click installs but the upgrades are manual.

#3. BlueHost.com
BlueHost offers you and unlimited package for just $6.95 a month. That means unlimited addon domains, subdomains, databases, bandwith etc. They’re support is better than most and can be accessed via a ticket system or by phone. Bluehost is a great choice if you have a small website with little traffic.

I hosted a blog at bluehost and within 6 months we outgrew them with an average of 100 visitors and 200 page views per day. You might be OK if you’re not running a lot of photos or YouTube videos. The issue I ran into was, we were hitting CPU limits (which are set very low) and if you have a fair bit of traffic that is trying to load a video or something someone is going to see an error page. We outgrew them inside of six months but we were not notified of the issue. We found out after seeing the errors ourselves while working on the website.

#4. Yahoo Small Business
I worked with one client who loved Yahoo. This was back in 2004 and back then, they had little support for PHP and MySql. For hosting basic web pages.. no problem. Today, they’re feature list explicitly says PHP and MySQL but I have no idea as to what extent. I’ve heard of people running Wordpress at Yahoo but there are issues and some special fixes are needed in order for things to run smoothly. Yahoo! hosting packages start at $11.95 a month.