Website Hosting Recommendations

Often people who are new to creating and hosting websites wonder which hosting option they should choose. In this article, I’ll give you some information on three hosting companies I recommend and I use for over 500 websites. And, we’ll look at some essentials for purchasing a shared hosting account.

Linux or Windows Hosting?

Some people get confused about which type of hosting to use. This is often due to people thinking that if they’re running Windows on their home PC that they will need to have Windows hosting. Actually, what your home PC is running doesn’t matter. It’s only connecting to the host over the Internet and the Internet doesn’t care which PC operating system you’re using.

Most people should select Linux based hosting since it offers access to scripts like WordPress, Joomla and other common and well support blogging, content management and ecommerce scripts. This kind of hosting is often referred to as LAMP which stands for Linux Apache MySql PHP

Windows based hosting is great if you want to develop your own web programs using Microsoft .NET and SQL Server technology but the ‘out of the box’ solutions tend to lag behind those available for Linux based servers.

What is a Shared Hosting Account?

A shared hosting account is a web server account where you share space on a huge server or cluster of servers with 100’s of other customers. In the past, this could be a problem because both server management and search engine algorithms weren’t as good as they are now. Thus, if someone on your shared host misbehaved in some way, it could bring you down too. This situation is very rare these days and shared hosting is one of the best web host values on the market.

What is Reseller Hosting?

Reseller hosting is a shared hosting account where your can ’sub lease’ your space to others and make a profit or you can have your own collection of multiple domains running as separate users rather than under a single user. This kind of hosting is preferred by many niche marketers and those who sell web hosting services in their local market.

What is cPanel?

cPanel is an easy to use web hosting control panel that includes a graphical interface (GUI) as well as automation tools. It is designed to make the process of hosting a web site on a Unix based host easier. There’s also a script called WHM that’s an extension of cPanel just for reseller account functions.

What is Fantastico?

Fantastico is a script installation and maintenance script that helps users on LAMP servers install and maintain certain scripts. It can greatly simplify keeping your scripts up to date and installing new ones.

HostGator

HostGator has worked well for me. They have an up-to-date CPanel installation. They have Fantastico to help you easily install scripts like WordPress. They also work well with a wide variety of PHP scripts. I’ve only had a problem with a few scripts and their support staff has been quite helpful in getting issues resolved.

Are there downsides to HostGator? Like any shared hosting arrangement, there can be unexpected problems that come up from time to time. Sometimes HostGator hasn’t been on top of these problems as quickly as they ought to have been. While many of their plans are ‘unlimited’ there are limits so far as the load you can put on their server.

HostGator has standard shared hosting and reseller hosting available.

HostNine

I’ve been using a HostNine reseller account for a few months now. They have an interesting reseller plan since their servers are distributed over several datacenters in the US, Europe and Asia. This gives you geographic diversity which can be helpful in several ways.

Their standard hosting includes the usual cPanel and Fantastico and several other typical hosting extras. On the reseller accounts they use their own script, not WHM, since their distributed server arrangement require something custom. The reseller accounts do include cPanel and Fantastico though.

I’ve found their support to be good although their distributed servers often have them overloaded with work keeping up with everything.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy, I don’t really recommend except it’s a good third option, especially if you buy a lot of domains and get free hosting credits. Unfortunately, GoDaddy’s interface is non-standard and consist of one upsell after another. This gets rather annoying after a while. Also, they have a number of limits when it comes to setting up sites. For example, IONCube PHP scripts require a special setup, if they’ll work at all. Changes to WordPress permalinks can take a hour or so to be accepted and installing a WordPress is rather slow. It’s kind of annoying

On the flipside, it does work well for simple HTML sites such as Adsense niche sites, squeeze pages and sales pages. And, it always helps to have diversity in your hosting plans if you plan to operate a lot of niche sites. GoDaddy’s hosting has been reliable for me for over 2 years. I just wish it was more standard and was less annoying.

Website Hosting To Avoid

I recommend that you avoid hosting with Dreamhost due to the problems described here: Dreamhost Review – DO NOT BE SCAMMED BY DREAMHOST!