Best Web hosting reviews, advice and other essential information

One of the most important decisions you need to make when setting up a new website, is: which is the best web hosting company I should opt for? 

The choice of host for your website can make a significant difference to the success or not of your website. While most hosting companies will provide the bare minimum functions required for hosting a website, you should consider more than that, especially if your business is going to use your website as a prime lead generation mechanism, or it will give the business a good chunk of revenue.

Let's discuss a few things you need to consider when looking for a good website hosting service.

Hosting software stack

This is essentially the software which the servers will have installed on them such that your website can function properly. Most companies will have the standard stack, called a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). This is typically enough if you will be using standard software such as WordPress or Joomla.

However, if you are going to use other CMSes, possibly something which requires ASP and SQL Server, you'll need to confirm whether the hosting company actually provides that particular stack.

Moreover, you need to determine whether the website you will put up requires specific versions of the software stack. For example, you might find that the CMS or some plugins, require a specific version of PHP or MySQL to work correctly. 

These are subtle nuances you'll need to consider before making a purchase.

Hosting Configurations available

Another thing you'll need to consider is the configuration of the hosting you'll be purchasing. While most people typically opt for a shared hosting, there are many other configurations you can opt for. There are various options for shared hosting plans, with the cheapest plans, typically being very busy and crowded servers. You could then opt for other configurations, such as Virtual Private Server, Managed hosting, Cloud hosting, or others. The top tier of hosting is typically a fully-dedicated server, but these are typically for very specialized cases and scenarios.

These are the typical options:

• Shared hosting plans
• Virtual Private Servers
• Cloud hosting
• Dedicated server
• Reseller hosting
• WordPress hosting
• Managed hosting

Security

Another element you should consider before purchasing webhosting should be security. This is quite an important topic, despite it not getting enough attention from many website owners.

If your web host does not take security seriously, your site is bound to experience hacking attacks, creating significant problems for your site.

If your site is not well-secured, it could be subject to spamming, hacking and malware, and possibly getting black-listed by such companies as Google- which is exactly the opposite of the reason why a website exists.

Price

While we don't believe price should not be a determining factor when choosing hosting, the reality is that people will always take the price of the hosting into consideration.

The problem with basing your choice based on price is this. Simply put, the cheapest hosts are the worst. The cheaper your hosting service is, the worse it will be. To keep prices cheap, the only option is to overwhelm the server with accounts, just to be able to stay profitable.

It's much better advice to ignore the pricing completely, and chose based on other features. Really and truly, would a difference of a few dollars per month break the bank? 

I didn't think so. 

Choose wisely, don't choose based on price. Hint: most times, you'll find we've gotten our readers a special offer (available from CollectiveRay only). So do grab a bargain while it lasts.

Hosting Speed

We do strongly believe that speed is one of the most important considerations when choosing your hosting services. The take it times for your website to load has been proven to improve conversions: fast websites convert better.

Whenever we are choosing where to deploy a website, we run several different tests to check how fast a website will load on this particular services.

We do this not just with a brand new website, we do it with larger sites, with lots of content. We try different mechanisms such as caching. We check whether CDNs are part of the service or not, and whether they can be integrated seamlessly. 

We check whether the service supports gzip and other types of compression and speed optimizations. We also check whether HTTP/2 is available and whether there are specific features and functions which are built-in specifically to optimize the website loading speed.

Only when we are happy with all of the above, do we actually make a recommendation and choice.

Hosting Reviews

The following section of the CollectiveRay website is meant specifically to review the various web hosting services available. We don't just review any company, before we write a review, we check a company's reputation. Only if we feel that this company is a reliable host, do we attempt to review the services.

When we do, we typically have a look at the following:

• Availability of such features as CPanel or WHCMS
• Which services can be automatically deployed using such services as Softaculous
• Whether the hosting supports automatic updates
• What security features are built-in
• What speed optimizations can be enabled
• Whether the services supports HTTP/2 and Let's Encrypt, or how much it costs to procure and install Secure Certificates
• Hosting resources available, bandwidth, storage, email addresses and other options
• What freebies are available with the services, such as domain, maybe AdWords of Facebook
• Pricing and whether it changes following the first year
• We also typically have special offers from the vendors for your readers

Web hosting reviews you can trust

When you're making a choice about the hosting for your website, you want to be sure that you're not going to be taken for a ride.

We only recommend services we truly trust and are paying customers of.

We've been in this business for more than 15 years and can tell immediately when a service is great or not. Have a look at some of the reviews we've done below and do let us know whether you feel we should include something else in our reviews.

Web Design articles and blogs for web designers and anybody who works with websites

At CollectiveRay, we started off this website as a learning mechanism as we entered into the world of web design. As we were acquiring our skills and mastery of the Joomla CMS, we documented all that we learned as web design blogs, for those who were in the same position as us - trying to improve their web design skillset.

The site was hugely successful in the initial years of Joomla, when it was still competing with WordPress for the domination of the world-wide-web.

The web design world was very different back then, there were fewer websites doing great tutorials around. We were one of the first writing extensive useful content (before it became a trend) and our articles ranked nicely without any SEO.

As the dominance of our original CMS subsided, we wanted to make sure we didn't lose our influence on the web design world, so we started shifted our focus from Joomla to other frameworks such as WordPress.

We also started writing about things which were not strictly one framework or another, but pure web design, opinions, tutorials and generic articles about web design, web development, hiring designer or developers, concepts around web design and much much more.

We decided to share these informative content in their own section on this site - and the Web Design > Opinion section was born.

Here we share stuff about web design, which is generic in nature sometimes, or more specific to a certain technology, but for which we don't have an appropriate home on this website.

But what do we write in this section, let's call it the web design editorials section?

It would be best if we discuss some of our most successful web design articles and why they are so popular.

Hiring Web Designers and developers

Finding the right people to work on your web design and development projects is never an easy task. Today, with offshoring, remote jobs, freelancing and contracting becoming the norm, there is an ever-growing pool of great web designers.

But, there is a negative side to all of these resources. There are plenty of charlatans out there. The ones who are not able to tell the difference between Java and Javascript, the ones who don't get the difference between client-side and server-side scripting.

So how do you separate the wheat from the chaff? In these articles discussing hiring and or finding great designers and developers to work on your various kinds of projects, we discuss such things to look for, certain things you should avoid when reviewing candidates, which marketplaces and companies are reputable for hiring, and plenty other essential information.

Web Design Blogs, Trends and other changes in the industry

Few industries evolve as rapidly as the worlds of web design and web development. New technologies emerge on a nearly daily basis, what was cutting-edge today, could be dead in the water in 6 months time.

It goes without saying, that if you don't keep yourself abreast with the current developments in the web design world, you'll soon be left behind in the dust, never to be hired again.

So how do you make sure you're on the ball?

You follow the industry's influential web design blogs of course, with CollectiveRay becoming one of those voices you should be following.

We've gone and worked on finding the absolute greatest web design blogs to follow. But not only that, we've also made it easy for you to get a firehose of articles to read - by creating an OPML file with all of the RSS feeds of all of the major web design blogs.

But not only that - each year we look at emerging trends and discuss the evolution of the web design industry - what's been popular in the past year and what we believe will be the next big things in the upcoming months.

Particular aspects of web design or similar niches

As part of this section, we also sometimes dig deeply into one specific topic. For example, we've featured an article about how to go about creating a dark web design which combines dark colors into a design to a winning effect. 

We've also discussed User Experience, what will happen Post Flat Design, i.e. what will have after the Flat Design trend passes, and we've analyses Responsive Web Design deeply, with respect to how it actually works, from a technology point of view.

Generic website stuff

The web design niche touches and sometimes overlaps with plenty of other industries. So of course, if we've got a burning itch about something, you can rest assured we're going to be writing about it.

We've written about Email Outreach, including things you definitely should not be doing! We've also spoken about how to fully setup a website for ecommerce. We also discuss stuff such as how to find web design clients, protecting your business from a legal perspective, and how to start a career in web development or design even if you're not young.

If it's in or around the design industry, or is interesting reading for web designers, you'll find it here.