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.
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- Category: Web Hosting
Web hosting is one of the unavoidable costs of running a website. Alongside domains, they are the only expenses you cannot do without. And if you've been around hosting, you surely know about one of the biggest names out there, GoDaddy who has a global presence and a huge customer base. This GoDaddy hosting review will tear this host down so that we can answer some questions.
Are they any good? Does the company provide reliable services for a fair price?
As GoDaddy will likely appear in many ‘best web host’ comparisons, we thought we would take an unbiased look at their pricing to see if they are genuinely worth the cost.
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Who is HostArmada? If you’ve heard about them and are not sure what to make of this company, you’re in the right place. We’ve done a full HostArmada review and can see that the company is already making its presence known in web hosting and punching above their weight.
Launched in 2019, we can find many 5 star HostArmada reviews and some glowing recommendations. That’s reason enough for us to check them out.
As we have reviewed other web hosts such as SiteGround, WebHostingPad and Liquid Web, we thought we would give Host Armada the CollectiveRay treatment too.
It’s only fair after all.
So who are HostArmada? Are they any good? How do they compare to more established hosts and are they worth using?
Let’s find out!
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- Category: Web Hosting
In Cloudways vs WPEngine, we put two top tier hosts head to head to see which is worth your money.
If you’re looking to start a new website and can't figure out whether to use Cloudways or WP Engine as your host, this post provides the answers from our years of hosting with these two companies.
Both are worth checking out but which is best? Which should you use to host your website? We've done the full reviews so you don't have to.
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- Category: Web Hosting
Cloudflare, a CDN service, has been supporting multiple web projects in improving performance and security since 2010. But with it, Cloudflare has brought the Error 522 connection timed out. So how do you fix this?
The message ‘Error 522: Connection timed out’ is a well-known HTTP status code that happens often with sites on Cloudflare. In fact, this problem is also known as a ‘Cloudflare error,’ but, from our experience with error 522, the issue is not coming from Cloudflare itself.
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- Category: Web Hosting
Here at CollectiveRay, we've used both Cloudways and SiteGround for many years to host both our own and our clients' websites.
According to TTFB tests, SiteGround’s servers have become slower than they used to. They’ve deteriorated due to price increases, lesser support, and irreparable CPU issues. We've used them for several years before outgrowing their GoGeek plan. Even after upgrading to their cloud hosting for $80/month, we were still exceeding CPU, despite having written a tutorial on it.
So we increased the CPU/RAM until we were paying $180 per month.
That's when we decided that enough was enough.
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- Written by: David Attard
- Category: Web Hosting
Have you heard about Convesio WordPress hosting? It's a relatively new kid on the block that dares to do things differently.
It's a managed WordPress hosting provider for agencies that offers next-generation WordPress hosting.
It has exceptional features that set it apart from competitors, such as automatic updates, quick and dependable service, high-performance, and free domain registration with every plan purchase (no matter how many domains).
It’s on a mission to change the way people think about managed WordPress hosts.
It may have just created the perfect solution for managing or growing an online site with cost-effective solutions unlike any other out there, thanks to the unique management tools, high availability features, and scalable infrastructure!
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- Written by: David Attard
- Category: Web Hosting
SiteGround comes up a lot in website reviews. We often wondered whether those reviews were accurate and whether it’s a web hosting company worth your time and money. This is why we've written our own Siteground review.
Because, what better way to find out than to use the host for a while and add our own opinion into the mix?
We’re going to discuss all those things we need from a hosting provider. Fast hosting, simple user interface, good response times, ease of migration or WordPress installation and effectiveness of SiteGround’s customer support.
This is what we found.
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The following are the GreenGeeks nameserver (DNS) settings:
ns1.greengeeks.net
ns2.greengeeks.com
Your domain name's DNS settings can be changed at the registrar where you bough it from. They should offer a control panel where you can modify your domain's name servers. The option is commonly referred to as "custom name servers" or something similar.
Above is an image of how to change Godaddy name servers.
Use the first two name servers in the above list if your name server settings only have two fields (main and secondary name servers). Not that the name servers use Anycast technology which routes DNS traffic to the closest name server, to reduce any latency.
There is sometimes a field for an IP address when changing name server records. If that's the case with your registrar, the name servers' IP addresses are listed below.
- ns1.greengeeks.net: 75.2.69.7
- ns2.greengeeks.net: 99.83.188.187
If you have trouble updating the name servers for your domain, contact the registrar or hosting firm where you bought the domain and ask that they do the name server updates for you.
Check out our reseller web hosting article if you wish to use your own custom name servers.
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- Category: Web Hosting
WebHostingPad is a US-based web hosting company with a growing reputation for offering value for money. They don’t have quite the profile of other web hosts but do they offer the same quality?
If you’re looking for a new web host and value freedom without limitation, WebHostingPad seem worth checking out.
But is their web hosting worth your money? Is performance and reliability up to standard?
Read the rest of this WebHostingPad review to find out!
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- Category: Web Hosting
Liquid Web is a business class web hosting company that has designed its services around individuals and organizations who need more than just shared hosting providers. In fact, Liquid Web doesn’t even offer shared hosting. So what will our Liquid Web review say about this hosting? There's plenty to say in reality!
If you’re running a WooCommerce store, enterprise website, Learning Management System (LMS) or something that requires dedicated server resources, Liquid Web are one of many hosts that deliver.
But are they any good?
In this Liquid Web review, we use our many years of experience to assess the strengths and weaknesses to consider whether the web hosting is worth your money.
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