Hosting reviews

How to find the best hosting provider?

First of all, we don't believe there's such a thing as “the best web hosting.” The best web hosting is something personal that depends on the type of website (small, large, hobby project, business website, etc.), support needs, technical knowledge, and available budget.

At WebsiteGecko, we try to explain as clearly as possible which hosting provider is the best match for whom and who should avoid them completely. For each web host, we explore their strengths while also addressing their weaknesses. Ultimately, no hosting service is perfect, and our goal is to present as balanced a picture as possible of each company.

How do we review hosting providers?

The hosting industry is incredibly confusing. By employing a rigorous, objective, and repeatable testing methodology, we aim to shed light in the darkness. We evaluate hosting services based on the following characteristics.

Speed

For several years now, website speed has been a Google ranking factor. This isn't surprising. Slow websites frustrate users and make them more likely to click away from your site. As a result, your site will miss out on conversions and lose potential revenue.

Website speed is determined by a number of factors (including your site's coding), but hosting is typically the factor that has the greatest impact on it.

Website speed consists of a large number of elements. We provide a 360-degree overview of hosting speed by examining factors such as:

• Time to First Byte (TTFB) – how long it takes for the server to begin loading a page after a request (such as clicking on a link)
• Page Structure Score
• Full page loading time

We use tools like GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed for this purpose.

Uptime

Fast websites are useless if they're not accessible. Uptime refers to the amount of time a site is operational. Good hosting providers guarantee at least 99.95% uptime.

Uptime can be difficult to assess precisely. An individual test doesn't tell you much because it only involves a single site on a single server.

That's why we dig through user reviews for complaints about downtime, scour the internet to find any extended outages (and see how the provider handled them), and check the provider's status pages for incidents (if they have them).

Customer service

Customer service is something you usually don't think about. Until you need it. If you're reading this, chances are your website serves an important business purpose. You can't afford to have something as crucial as your website without excellent support backing it up. Support that you can reach immediately and that resolves your problem as quickly as possible.

In the past, we've dealt with hosting customer service where every issue turned into a days-long game of email ping-pong. Trust me, you don't want that.

That's why we assess customer service accessibility (which channels you can use to make contact), test response times (how long you have to wait for a reply), and fire off technical questions to support staff to evaluate their technical expertise.

User-friendliness

Some hosting companies are easier to use for beginners than others. This often relates to how the dashboard works. We examine factors such as how simple it is to install a website, how easily you can restore backups, and how straightforward it is to install an SSL certificate.

Security

Security is an incredibly important component of web hosting. Users of providers that don't invest in this area constantly deal with malware issues and website downtime.

We examine which security techniques a hosting provider uses (such as firewalls), whether it properly isolates websites from each other on shared servers (through solutions like CloudLinux), and whether you receive a free SSL certificate.

Features and extras

Some cheap hosting can end up being quite expensive because you have to purchase all sorts of add-ons. That immediately makes the hosting no longer cheap.

We examine hosting features and extras such as:

• SSL Certificates
• Automatic backups
• Staging environment (where you can safely test new themes and plugins for your site)
• Free migration service
• Website Builder

Pricing

Hosting plan prices should accurately reflect the quality of service. We evaluate how the hosting costs relate to technical specifications (CPU, RAM, storage space), the monthly visitor capacity the hosting can handle, performance, and other factors.

User reviews

Online user reviews are always a double-edged sword. On one hand, they can provide a good indication of the average quality of a product. On the other hand, online reviews are relatively easy to manipulate, they rarely go into depth, and they're often written by people without a frame of reference (meaning people who have never tried a competing product).

Online hosting reviews are often characterized by a certain naivety – in both positive and negative reviews. You'll frequently see one or two-line reviews either praising or condemning customer service. These are typically based on a single experience, and a 5-star review might simply result from someone getting help with a basic problem from a friendly staff member. However, such reviews tell you nothing about the actual technical capabilities of customer service regarding difficult issues, let alone aspects like hosting speed or features.

Conversely, there are countless reviews from people who just need to vent about a problem that, in many cases, they caused themselves (such as setting up automatic payments, then acting surprised when they “unexpectedly” receive an invoice).

You need to take these kinds of reviews with a grain of salt, of course.

Nevertheless, we often include online reviews in our assessments. Despite their limitations, we've noticed that there is more often than not a positive correlation between positive user reviews and quality web hosting. Additionally, online reviews can sometimes fill gaps in our own review process. Although we test and research all our hosting providers as thoroughly as possible, it's still different from being a customer somewhere year after year. We sometimes encounter patterns in online reviews that we couldn't have picked up ourselves, and we incorporate these insights into our evaluation.