Update: I've had a run in with a couple of hosting providers, but I'm now hosted by two different UK2Group labels: VPS.net and WestHost, and so should you be, read more about WordPress hosting here!
One of the most important things when you're starting a new blog is to consider where'll you host it. This decision also relies on smaller choices like which platform you will use, how much bandwidth you will be using, how much disk space you need, etc. etc.
This post should help you decide what you need hosting wise, to prevent you from having to move your blog when it get's popular.
Update: After reading this post, please, please, share your experiences in the comments. To make this post truly valuable, we need to be able to draw from your experience too!
WordPress.org itself suggests that you host with one of the following companies:
- Dreamhost (keep reading for a big discount!)
- AN Hosting
- Host I Can
- BlueHost
- MediaTemple
- Laughing Squid
The stats I've compared them on, and some of my findings:
Maximum disk size
With Laughing Squid offering a meager 300 MB, they disqualify themselves almost straight away, as the rest of the hosting parties offer 100 GB upwards of storage. Unless you plan on doing a photo blog with loads of pictures every day, I doubt you'll reach the 100 GB limit soon, so other then Laughing Squid, there are no real losers here.Included bandwidth per month
Other than what a lot of people think, the internet isn't free. It seems to be almost free though, as most parties include decent amounts of traffic. Be aware though that if you are going to host your own video or a lot of images (and why would you want to do that?), you'll have to take a good look at this.Number of email addresses and aliases included
While I doubt this will be the breaking point for you in a hosting decision, it IS important to know upfront.Whether you can access your hosting account through FTP and SSH
Not everyone will need SSH access, everyone will need FTP access at some point. Well everybody provides for FTP access, but if you need SSH access, be sure to check the table.Does hosting party have a One Click Installer for WordPress?
You can safely live without it, but if it saves you a couple of minutes (or hours) work, it might be a reason to "go for it".Is a free domain included?
Really important? Probably not, but they are contained in the price, so it needs to be here for an honest comparison.The price when you prepay this package for 1 year
In all cases I've gone for the cheapest package, prepaid for 1 year, so that the comparison is honest.How many issues there are on the WordPress.org support forums?
Probably one of the best measurement of both how many people use a host and how much trouble they give is the number of cases for the hosting party in the support forums. This number has two sides though, you'll probably want to check for yourself how the cases are handled if you think you'll need a lot of support.
The results:
| AN Hosting | bluehost | Dreamhost | Host I Can | Laughing Squid | Media Temple | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Disk Size | 500 GB | Unlimited | 500 GB | 2 TB | 300 MB | 100 GB |
| Bandwidth | 5 TB | Unlimited | 5 TB | 20 TB | 20 GB | 1 TB |
| ? | 2500 | Unlimited | Unlimited | 5 | 1000 | |
| FTP access |  | | | | | |
| SSH access | | | | | ||
| One Click Installer | | | | | ||
| Domain included? | 1 free | 1 free | 1 free | 1 free | No | 1 free |
| Price with 1 year prepaid | $83.95 | $95.40 | $69.40 | $76.32 | $106 | $200 |
| Issues on WP.org forums | 18 | 463 | 371 | 25 | 11 | 100 |
To be honest: if you're not TechCrunch, you'll probably do fine with every hosting party as far as disk size, bandwidth, email is concerned, as long as you don't go for Laughing Squid. What's left is pricing, and with my discount code ($50 off for the first year if you use promo code "yoast"), DreamHost is by far the cheapest.
If you look at all of this the biggest question is: which of these hosts can survive a Digg frontpage. Honestly: I can't test that. MediaTemple boasts that their GridService is the best service for this kind of situation, and I can tell you that it does indeed work, but the pricing is high.
So, currently, my advice would be to go to Dreamhost, or, if you think you'll hit a lot of big social media sites often and you can afford the somewhat higher price, Media Temple. If you choose cheap hosting, you might want to consider getting some proper email hosting on the side to prevent loosing email...
Whatever you choose, good luck with your WordPress blog, and remember to sign up for my WordPress newsletter!
What a joke. If you search across the web you'll find enough 97$ coupons for dreamhost.
Additionally, they simply SUCK. They do not stand a single week without an outage somewhere and I had my sites down for a few hours regularly each week. They would not stand a single digg frontpage.
@Ricardo: $50 is actually the max off one can give for a yearly subscription, the rest of that 97 is in free domains and stuff like that. Your other remarks are more serious though, hate to hear that, but also glad to hear it! Let me update the post to ask for your opinions, because I really think these opinions are very very useful to people!
Cool to hear that. I thought they prolly give 97$ off on a 2 year subscription. BTW: check dreamhoststatus.com (I think thats the domain) and look at the time they usualy take to get a server up again..
I only know DreamHost but they are much better than some people actualy say. I host several sites (40+) with them and they are up and running. Their support replies really quick and there is always a solution for my problems. Contact them and they'll find a solution for your problems too! And for DIGG-lovers - there is always is good cache plugin that does its job and serves your site - even on DreamHost. And to be honest, their are better than several german hosting companies.
I'll have to chime in on DreamHost. The price is right, but at a huge cost. I have a large number of friends and associates who have used DreamHost, and they've all left because of outtage issues, databases going down, etc. I've never used them myself, but I've not heard anything good about them from people I know. Sorry.
Stay away from Dreamhost they are a nightmare. I speak from personal experience. In the few months that I was with them my sites were constantly going down. The last straw was when they had a major outage which they blamed on the L.A. power grid that lasted for days. When my sites did come back up (WordPress), the databases were ruined. Their response: "we don't support 3rd party applications". No offer to restore from a backup, no apology. The previous times that I had contacted support were also less than helpful. And unless their support has changed it is via email only.
Many prominent people in the design community have promoted these guys because of their genereous commission program but have stopped using them. The latest I know of is designer and author Dan Cedarholm of Simplebits. I now use Bluehost and Hostgator and have been extremely satisified with both companies.
While not on the list, I thought it warranted some feedback...
I use 1and1 form my domain registration and hosting. They have proven to be pretty reliable over the past few years but they do not give you access to error logs (a biggie when problems occur). Other than that, they have good prices and decent customer service. - .com, .net, .org domains are $7/yr and a basic hosting packages start at $4/month.
Link for more info - 1and1
I was on Hostgator for almost a year and suddenly I received an email saying I am hitting their inodes limit of 50,000. Inodes simply means no. of folders, files and similar stuff and this term is buried within their lengthy TOS, not on the sales page when I signed up. If you own more than just a handful websites, you're going to hit this number pretty quickly.
BlueHost has got no real big restrictions so I decided to move to BlueHost and this is when I started seeing downtimes reported by my web monitors. This is something that rarely happening on Hostgator and rather worrying as each downtime would take 1-2 hours every time. I have written to BH without response.
Moving to yet another hosting is not at all appealing for now as I will have to transfer huge amount of files and databases across. I can just hope that the downtimes were just isolated ones.
I shared how I moved all my WordPress, Drupal and other sites together with their databases to the new hosting at my blog.
I've been using dreamhost for a couple of years now. I'm not on top of outages and I only host personal / family sites. I must say I'm very satisfied, good support and all. I think they offer a good price-quality ratio.
i'm also a dreamhost user and have to say, considering the amount of money you pay and the service and solution you get it is by far the best solution. I host several domains and the best thing about Dreamhost (which I do not see in the table btw) is that it let's you host unlimited domains. Something that is restricted by some of the other hosting providers (if i'm not mistaken ).
Yes I have to admit, that I experience some downtime as well but as long as my websites aren't high profile or core of my business I must say that getting Dreamhost is getting your bucks well spent.
I've been with dreamhost for about 5 years now, and sofar i've had 3 outages, which didn't last that long (less than 8 hours). Support is good, which is almost nonexistent with some hosters, and they even help you with issues out of their reach (like errors in WP-themes).
Downside is that they are "not in" 24/7, so living in Europe, it can take a whole night before you get someone to address your problem.
Upside is they have automatic site-checkers, so you can verify the problem is not on your side (of the Atlantic).
So far it's been a great value for my money, and the one-click-install/upgrade is a great feature.
I did try Dreamhost for a year. Simply because it's cheap and some well known websites were hosted by Dreamhost. After a year, however, I have to say that the downtime is ridiculous. Sometimes downtime for some of my websites was more than 6% per month (pingdom check)
For smaller websites I guess dreamhost is ok, but if uptime is somewhat important to you I would go for Media Temple. After Dreamhost I switched to Mediatemple and there's no downtime up to now (migrated 3 months ago).
I'm on Mediatemple since 2002 and I'm really happy with them. I considered switching to Site5 once, but after a quick test I quit my Site5 account and went back to MT: it's faster and easier to manage (you can find a more details on the comparison in my blog ).
Mediatemple email hadn't an efficient antispam, so I bypassed it with google for domains one year ago. I don't know if it has improved in the meanwhile, but I don't see any reason for missing the power of gmails on your domain. Separating the mail provider from the hosting one makes also you save bandwidth and disk usage on the first, so I really recommend it. For example, I created a gmail only for receiving automatic database backup.
About issues with WordPress on MT I just happened to see one database down in a year, but it went back working in a few minutes. I hadn't any trouble with WordPress, and I always succeed to use the plugin for WP automatic upgrade (even if MT control panel doesn't recognize updates made in this way, but who cares...).
About support by MT I cannot complain about anything. I had few requests, but even for moving one domain from one account to a new one I had everything solved in less then 24 hours. For a designer like me MT control panel really rocks, it's so easy to manage everything. For example, in a few clicks I created some sub-domains and I installed other WP clones of my site for testing plugins or previewing themes updates.
The only drawback for using MT is that from Italy is noticeably slower then using servers in Italy, even considering the cheapest provider. At the beginning I had the italian blog on an Italian server and the English one on MT. The first one was almost two time faster in response time and transfer of big files, but it was so bad the administration that I gave up and moved everything on MT.
Anyone has a direct experience in comparing hosting solutions in Europe against the USA and accessing times from both of them? Has anyone tried services form amazon hosting: http://aws.amazon.com/ ?
I have been using Dreamhost for 1 year now and I must say that the ease of adding unlimited domains is a dream indeed. However Dreamhost does happen to deal with a lot of outages. Therefore I don't use this host for the real moneymakers, but only for the domains with little traffic and revenues.
I agree with Ruud. I never use Dreamhost for sites that need to perform (speed and uptime wise). I am a Dreamhost user for almost two years now (back then the deal was 97 dollars for 2 years of service) The Dreamhost Control Panel is great, i like it better than cpanel and Directadmin, they give you more space then you'll ever need, and have friendly (and in my cases fast) support. But my experience with their site speed is horrible. A regular WordPress on average loads in 10 seconds. I believe it has to do with the shared server CPU capacity, because plain file download (without any required PHP/MySQL parsing) is acceptable. Ofcourse you can start using WordPress cache modules to speed it up, but my choice almost a year ago was to go to a faster php/mysql service provider. I have no experience with the other hositng providers, but as yoast.com always loads up perfectly i'd go for MediaTemple the next time i need to switch hosting providers :) Or go for the Dreamhost Private Server service and have an entire CPU for myself, anyone got experience with that Dreamhost service?
I am currently with AN Hosting and have to say that I've not had any serious issues with them whatsoever. The issues I have had were minor and have always been resolved very quickly. There was one day in the past 6 months when I was having intermittent issues accessing my database. Not only did they resolve the issue, they told me what the issue was, what they were doing to resolve it, and how long it would take for the issue to be completely resolved. Unlike many other companies, they lived up to the expectations they set. I was impressed.
I will admit that with the exception of GoDaddy, AN Hosting is the only provider I have used. I currently host several domains with my single hosting account with them. That's one advantage that Joost didn't mention specifically in his post - AN Hosting allows you to host unlimited domains, as well as allowing you to create unlimited MySQL databases...they also offer unlimited e-mail addresses. Again, this could be a feature of many other hosting providers as well, but I figured it's worth mentioning just in case it isn't.
Without realizing how easy it is to install WordPress, a big part of the reason I chose AN Hosting initially is because of the "One Click Installation" the offer - not only for WordPress, but also for Joomla and Drupal. AN Hosting also offers a great control panel that provides access to virtually anything you'll probably need - from domain and e-mail management to software applications like Ruby on Rails and Perl modules. Again, I have no real comparison as AN Hosting has been my provider of choice.
Well, I got Freehostia a while back as they are cheap. The service is actually pretty good; they respond to emails in a matter of minutes, and generally solve problems in a matter of a couple of hours. Having said that my blog has been down for a couple of hours as I write this, and small outages are quite common.
It's also worth bearing in mind that they only offer 10 MySQL databases with their most expensive package. So not bad (and good value) for single sites, but I wouldn't use them for anything major.
I tried UK2 net. They were truly dreadful - outages of days, no responses to support requests and generally incompetent. I think I'll try Media Temple as they seem to host some pretty prominent blogs and I generally hear good things about them.
I'm with bluehost at the moment and cannot complain. There have been outages, but they have been resolved in a matter of 3 to 15 minutes (YMMV, though). It heavily depends on which machine your blogs are installed and what the other people on that machine are currently doing. Support is pretty responsive. Again, can't complain about bluehost.
I personally use Servage for my webhosting. After being with them for a year and a half I have not noticed a single major downtime. They allow unlimited mysql databases, as well as over 500gb of webspace, 5TB of transfer, and a really great helpdesk.
Servage.net
I'm on Bluehost, and so far am enjoying my stay. Sure, I did experience some downtime but most if not all have been back to normal withing 30 minutes, as was reported by serviceuptime.com.
Hmmm, I've been with Dreamhost for going on 8 years now and have had a very positive experience with them. I'm sort of a "hosting old-timer" since I've been hosting sites for 10+ years now and have been around the hosting block a time or two. They have always been very responsive to any need or question I've had and my uptime has been better than average to say the very least. I'm siding with Joost on this one...Dreamhost hasn't been a dream in that I've experienced so issues ever, but they've been the best host I've used and I've tried many. They are also incredibly upfront and disclose issues before you even realize they've had one, so what someone characterizes as many outages and downtime may just be because Dreamhost is actually telling the truth about their service and owning up to mess-ups proactively. They've got character there and I trust them. Just my two cents.
Wanted to share an opinion. Lemme know yours.There is this great free internet connection from http://www.gonuts4free.co.uk which works in the UK United Kingdom England. It was free of charge, fast, secure and very stable. Just by using my normal ordinary modem i managed to install it fast and easy. Great service, no fees and no extra charges.
I changed my hosting about 2 months ago. After a lot of looking round, I went with Wesh.co.uk
The main factor for me, being in the UK, was that they have a real person on the end of the phone, even on a Sunday afternoon (UK time), and were very quick and friendly answering any questions. They transferred my entire cPanel account across from my previous host (including databases) within 20 minutes of signing-up for an account and submitting a transfer request.
Only 2 months of usage, but so far, highly recommended
Cheers, Jon
I use hostmonster.It is good
isn't it also possible that the number of issues depends on the number of users? In other words, the more users a host has, its likely that they'll get more complaints and problems. The $69.40 price with one year prepaid applies only the first year with Dreamhost. This is what their staff told me when i asked them.
When it comes to web hosting, you get what you pay for -- I believe this holds true to just about every industry. At the end of the day, you can't really expect truly reliable & stable service for pennies a year.
It also helps to look at web hosting offers from a technical standpoint. Look at the disk space and data transfer (bandwidth) they claim to provide and then take a deeper look.
Some web hosting providers are offering an entire hard drive and data transfer limits found with that of dedicated servers for only a few dollars per month. Such isn't possible to provide, even with the deep discounts that some bigger name providers receive on carrier transit and hardware.
While offers of 100GB->1TB of disk space and XXXGB->XTB's of data transfer per month may sound appealing and like a great deal, the chance of you being able to actually secure that much is in the lower .01%.
I've checked quite a few hosts during the last week, because I want to move out of GoDaddy (feel free to laugh at me, but I was young and it was a long time ago).
So, a short summary:
I wanted a fast server which also allows multiple domains. Fast means both from Israel and from the USA. Price and reliability were also a factor, so Media Temple was ruled out almost immediately, because of their being too expensive.
The reliability issue ruled out DreamHost without checking them; I simply found too many comments about them not being a very reliable one.
The reason I'm leaving godaddy is mainly their "support" (they don't even deserve being called support without quotes). They kept answering my questions with answers taken from their FAQ without even reading the question. Simply not what I asked. Then I called them about another issue with the robots.txt file, which I thought they put as a phantom file that disallows all search engine bots. I got a misleading answer from a tech support person I called. That was about it, and here starts my quest for a new host:
GoDaddy: Tech support sucks, I was amazed by nodaddy.com's stories.
Media Temple: Too expensive
DreamHost: Allegedly unreliable
Site5, BlueHost, HostGator: Not very good tracert results from Israel.
I finally came to the point where I bought hosting at three different hosts to check them out.
Doreo: Say that their "LiteSpeed" technology speeds things up, but I saw no proof of that. Their service was fast, though - both the sales and support answered me really quickly.
The thing that bothered me about Doreo was that I had to take the expensive 11.95$ program to allow multiple domains, and with their average speed, I saw no justification for that.
LunarPages: My Favorite (but not the chosen one). They have a really nice control panel, good response time for tech support and certainly good speed. Their price is really ok (6.95$ if I'm not mistaken).
They were about the same speed as Doreo, and cheaper, so it ruled out Doreo.
WestHost: I got here through Yoast's recommendation and fell in love. Professional all the way, with good price (6.95$ through Yoast's link) and reasonable speed (they fall short of LunarPages in about all the tests I've made, but not enough to rule them out.)
The thing that convinced me was that they are extremely reliable (won NetCraft's test a few times) and their tech support is definitely the best I've encountered. They have live tech support with very kind technicians who know everything, and are very patient.
The speed issue bothered me, because when loading a very heavy page (tons of images), it loaded in 16 seconds where the same site from LunarPages loaded in 12secs. However, when I loaded a single post with up to 10 images, it loaded at the same speed on both hosts. Being in love with WestHost's reliability and service, I decided to go with them.
Another important thing is to read the TOS! Some servers state that storing "personal files" on their servers - files that are not directly related to your hosted site - will violate their TOS and cause immediate termination of your account. I'm used to using my account as a backup, so that was not a nice thing to hear.
If you've read so far - then thank you for reading! I hope you find it useful.
Great to hear you're liking WestHost!! I'll point them to your comment about the speed, maybe they can do something about that too ;)
Thanks for the review! Our customer service is our focus. You will often find great customer service in the smaller guys, but it's hard to find in the bigger plays. With over 70,000 domains and 25,000 clients over 11 years we've managed to grow effectively to always provide top customer service.
Let me know if you ever need anything!
I can not belive anyone could be so niave to not see that 2TB diskspace is blatant overselling, why not compare these 'wonderfull' shared hosting packages to the cost of a dedicated server with a real hosting provider, I think you'll find that they don't quite match up.
I hope that doesn't sound rude but you really need to wake up if you belive you're getting 2TB and 10TB bandwidth for £7 per month etc.
I tried MT when they first came out with their "Gridserver" offering. It was awful. Their response and "customer service", and lack of a responsive tech support team was even worse. Never again!
Thanks for a great post Yoast! I've spent a couple of days looking for the ideal host for my WP blogs when I came across your post. The answers here also provided much information - especially the godaddy.com exposure! (godaddy WAS on my list of possibles).
I buy some of my domain names through godaddy (although I host elsewhere) and I find their control panel almost unusable -> it is just one upsell after another.
I made the rookie mistake of going where the masses where recommending.
Yoast: may I ask - it looks like you host your domain at moniker.com - I just looked them over and they look superb. I take it then an ideal combo would be: domain hosted at moniker, website hosted at westhost / similar?
I'll go check westhost now (I'm already almost sold on them!) and of course, I will be using your link (in kind repayment for the education).
Cheers
Jose
I use DIY and Hostgator. DIY (Canada) have been very good. But in the UK I recommend Intrahost - I doubt they are the cheapest but they have >99.99% uptime, Fantastico will install WordPress. tech support really is 24/7 (I know they supply PC tech support to some of the largest UK companies so they have lots of engineers. They have servers in 5 UK data centres and redundancy built in so your website is always going to be available. Basic web hosting has unmetered bandwidth and starts at £4,95 per month. http://www.intrahost.co.uk.
I set up my friends VERY small site on LaughingSquid and it's ... okay. I don't like Cloud Hosting, but it works well for her. Personally I've been using LiquidWeb for almost a decade and I'm really very fond of them. Just moved to a VPS and running 4 domains off it is a snap.
As a rule of thumb, anyone who says 'Unlimited space' or 'Unlimited bandwidth' is a lying filthy liar and should be avoided.
Hi! I have used A Small Orange for several website hosting projects including one where we use the unlimited sub-domains for providing not-for-profit organisations with cheap hosting (see U3A Network NSW). The "Tiny" plan is US25 per year and allows you to install WordPress (and lots of other apps) via Fantastico.
ASO has proven to be quite reliable over many years.
Regards,
Peter