Website Hosting Plans – Which is best for you?

If you do a search for website hosting plans you will find that there are lots of companies providing this service at different prices and offering different levels of service.  The aim of this website is to help you choose and offer our own recommendation (click this link if you need background information on Web Hosting).

The first question to consider is will your site be used for any purpose that might be considered commercial?  If not, you might consider using a Squidoo Lens or a blog on WordPress.com, which are free, instead of buying your own domain name and researching the many website hosting plans available. If you want to own your own domain, and to be fully in control, then you will need to consider website hosting plans.  There are a number of cheap deals around and you can get hosting free (although I would not recommend this). As well as the price you need to consider:

  • Do you pay monthly, annually etc?
  • How long are you locked in for?
  • Is there a money back guarantee?
  • How many domains are you allowed?
  • Is a domain included?
  • How many databases are you allowed?
  • How much bandwidth are you allowed?
  • How much disk space are you allowed?
  • How fast  and reliable is the service?
  • Do you want Linux or Windows hosting?
  • Is there an upgrade path in case your site becomes very busy?
  • Does the Control Panel have all the functionality you need?
  • How good is the support (very important!)?

Please see our Hosting Facts and Web Hosting Services pages and the video below for more information about the above.

Website Hosting Plans

Bear in mind that it is actually easy to become a “reseller” of hosting services which means that anyone can set-up in business selling website hosting plans.  If you sign up with a reseller the infrastructure will be provided by a large provider but your agreement will be with the reseller who will be responsible for their own pricing and customer support (often a weakness).

Having considered the above points we have decided to keep it simple and make a single recommendation for website hosting plans – HostGator (see our page on HostGator Coupons). 

They have been in business since 2002 and are now one of the top 10 website hosting providers.   We believe that it is preferable to be with a reputable company who are actually providing the hosting service as they are not likely to disappear.  Their services meet our criteria for website hosting plans (see Hosting Facts) and they have a very good reputation for customer support.

If you are planning a WordPress powered site HostGator and WordPress make a good combination, indeed, this is a good way to get the best WordPress Hosting.

Another benefit of using HostGator is their partnership with CloudFlare. You can access Cloudflare from the HostGator control panel and using this service has major benefits in terms of site security and loading speed. For more information on this service Click Here.

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