You need a website and you are asking ‘what is the best web hosting company?’ Let’s look at some of them, and why I use the one that I do.
Choosing the best web hosting company all depends on what you are looking for and what you need for your website, and what your web hosting company needs to provide for you for your online business.
What Is The Best Web Hosting Company For A Small To Medium Online Business?
Why Do You Need A Website?
One of the first things that a small business must do in order to be successful and meet operational goals is to build a strong client base through the use of an active website.
Nothing beats a well-developed website with strategic ads, good search engine optimization, content, and smart graphic design.
Your website can attract new clients, retain existing ones and increase website traffic, as well as increase sales for your business, whether you do online or offline sales. In fact, no business, big or small should be without a good website.
Types Of Hosting Available
However, before developing a website, it is important to identify a good website hosting service. When doing your research on what is the best web hosting company, you need to look at what type of hosting you would need for your business.
There are four primary types of website hosting services:
- free or low-cost;
- shared;
- dedicated or
- managed cloud hosting.
FREE OR LOW-COST HOSTING:
The free hosting option is the best method to quickly establish a website on a secure server with reliable technical support. This option will enable a business owner to determine their specific business needs related to bandwidth, disk space, and/or memory with minimal effort.
Further, once a business begins to grow, the owner can then decide if more features are needed such as storage or domain capability.
With free hosting, there are always limitations. For instance, you may not be allowed to put affiliate links on your site, or maybe you can’t choose your own domain name. If starting out, free is the best way to get your feet wet and you can always upgrade at a later date.
The easiest way to start a free WordPress Website right now is to click here.
SHARED HOSTING:
Shared hosting is one of the most common and popular forms of web hosting services out there.
Shared hosting is where a hosting service provider maintains multiple servers and offers space and storage to multiple website owners.
A shared hosting service is referred to as shared because the provider shares storage, bandwidth, and other features with other website owners. Shared hosting is recommended for smaller or new start-up websites as web traffic is lower and security needs are minimal.
Shared hosting is also one of the more cost-effective solutions for website hosting rather than dedicated hosting to meet small business needs. You also have more options open to you than with free hosting and the cost per month is minimal.
Bluehost is a popular choice for instance to get started with. Prices range from $3 to $14 a month.
DEDICATED HOSTING:
Dedicated hosting is the opposite of shared hosting since website hosting services are provided under a service agreement with a customer and a sole service provider which offers website services to individual clients.
A dedicated hosting service provides technical support, software upgrades, and security systems similar to a shared hosting service. However, a dedicated hosting service may also provide custom firewalls, a dedicated IP address, and more access control policies. For most small businesses, shared hosting may be preferred to avoid the higher costs associated with dedicated hosting or the bother of securing a service agreement.
Click here for an example of a company that does dedicated hosting. The prices here you will notice are not cheap ($200 and up a month) and dedicated hosting services are more popular with large websites with a lot of traffic.
MANAGED CLOUD HOSTING:
Managed cloud hosting is similar to shared hosting as the website provider stores multiple websites on various servers to provide customers with more storage, technical support, and automated application updates.
Cloud hosting is where your site is stored on multiple servers, which lets you pull resources from a variety of different places. This makes cloud hosting a very scalable, reliable, and flexible type of hosting, perfect for sites that experience hikes and dips in things like traffic.
The primary difference between shared hosting and managed cloud hosting is that cloud hosting offers more computing power which is important to businesses that anticipate higher traffic levels or adding a point of sale component to their website.
Further, more space customization and added security are also available on cloud hosting at an affordable cost.
You can read more about cloud hosting here.
My Favorite Web Hosting Company and Why
I have used the services of really good web hosting companies in the past such as Hostgator, GoDaddy, and D9 Solutions. (shared hosting)
They are all good, but you need to be quite technically savvy to get into most hosting types.
If you ask me what is the best web hosting company that I have used and are looking for ease of use, automatic website setup, training, and domain names all in one place then the best Web Hosting Company for this is Wealthy Affiliate. I have been using them for more than five years now, and am really benefiting from all their services.
Wealthy Affiliate falls under shared hosting but is as close to dedicated hosting as you are going to get for the price.
You can read my review of Wealthy Affiliate here.
Wealthy Affiliate is much more than a hosting company because:
- Wealthy Affiliate hosts your websites for you on the WordPress platform.
- You can set up a WordPress site in less than five minutes using Site Rubix which is great for the technically challenged.
- You can see all your websites, their health, and stats from the dashboard, and log in quickly and easily.
- No complicated site setup steps to learn.
- Full training is provided with easy-to-follow videos.
- You can host 2 websites for as long as you like for free.
- A keyword tool is provided for your SEO efforts.
- You can easily transfer your websites to other hosts if you ever need to.
- Domain names can also be purchased here and integrated seamlessly into your site.
- Sites are fully protected from spam and hackers.
- Site speeds are really fast, which is very important if you need to get indexed on Google, as Google loves sites that load up quickly.
- Perfect for any affiliate marketing business.
- Support gets back to you really quickly if you have any issues with your site.
So do your research, but I hope that I have answered your question “what is the best web hosting company,’ so that you can make an informed decision.
Selecting a good website host is one of the most important steps towards obtaining higher levels of traffic and ensuring the long-term success of your business.
Please leave your comments below on your choice of website hosting companies, as I would love to hear from you.
This is great.
I have heard a lot about WA over the years being good, but I personally always thought that they were a affiliate marketing company. I did not know that they hosted and provide so much support. I will have to look into this a bit more when. I have time.
How do you say they compare to Hostgator?
Well I actually joined them because of the hosting, and they were far easier to use than Hostgator. You can get cheaper packages at Hostgator, but all my sites were running out of space there as they were growing, so the prices went up quite a bit.
This is a really great business concept. I, too, was unaware of WA’s venture into the web hosting industry, but they have created an interesting WordPress Hosting platform in their specific niche. Thanks for shedding some light on this topic of what is the best web hosting company.
I to was unaware when I first joined up, and when I saw how easy the platform was to use, I instantly went premium so I could host all my sites there with ease.
A great review – I didn’t know the four types of website hosting services myself so I am glad you have brought it to my attention.
I use WordPress and Wealthy Affiliate, and agree that it is a fantastic service and would recommend it to anyone who wants to create a successful website.
Would you recommend WA premium to get a maximum of 50 domains? Also, do you think it is more constructive to work on a single website, or create multiple at a time (so at least one of them has a chance of success)?
Thanks for the post,
-TBonki
I think one should concentrate on one until it is successful. But it all depends how much time you have on your hands.
As a small business owner myself, I like you have identified a need to get up and running with an active website quickly and easily. I never fully understood what the different formats of hosting were, so your explanation of the four types was very useful. The Wealthy Affiliate site hosting sounds like a great option for starting out and I really like the idea of keeping everything in the one place – including domain names. Thanks for opening my eyes to this.
Only a pleasure Mara. Hope that you find the best web hosting company for you.
Hi, thanks for that indepth analysis on web hosting and what is the best web hosting company. Some of them look great; like that of wealthy affiliates. It’s always important to host your website on a trusted and secured hosting platform that can help with security issues due to hackers and unscrupulous people. As recommended by you, the wealthy affiliate is indeed the best platform to host a site.
I agree with you Nyaaba. I only use Wealthy Affiliate now, for all my website hosting as well as my domains.
Hi Mergie
You have explained different type of hosting services really well. I personally would not go with the free or low cost since it comes with lots of limitations. I would recommend Wealthy Affiliate since they offer great services for a reasonalble price. I hope people will end up going with WA after reading this on your post. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for the comment Kien, I appreciate.