The Best & Worst Web Hosts for WordPress

The Best & Worst Web Hosts for WordPress

April 4th, 2010

Having been in this web-development biz since 1997, I’ve worked with many of the major web hosting companies (Earthlink, AOL, Mindspring, 1&1, GoDaddy, Media Temple, HostGator, etc), but none have ever matched the quality of service I’ve enjoyed with my good friends at Bluehost.

DISCLAIMER UP FRONT:
Yes, I am totally a Bluehost affiliate. (ie: if you click on any of the links to Bluehost from my website and end up signing up for their hosting services, I will receive a commission payment from them). However, all of the hosting companies offer affiliate programs, so that is most certainly not the reason I’m promoting Bluehost over any of the others. This is indeed my real-life experience, not just some affiliate sales page.

Why Bluehost is my hands-down favorite:

1. Their 1-click WordPress installation is the fastest and the easiest. While many of the other popular hosts offer a 1-click install, they usually involve you sitting around and waiting up to 30-ish minutes (worst case scenario) until the hosting company emails you to let you know that the installation is complete. Bluehost uses a system called Simple Scripts, which is by far the fastest I’ve seen. It takes literally, 20-ish seconds to install WordPress, so no waiting around for an email to show up. Many hosts use a system called Fantastico (which Bluehost offers as well), which is still be pretty good, but not as fast as Simple Scripts.
2. Their phone support is amazing. While the other companies usually offer you a few minutes of hold music before getting to talk to a tech support rep, with Bluehost, a real, live, human being answers the phone within 1-3 rings, no matter what time of the day it is. Their reps are patient, well-informed, and U.S.-based, which is nice for U.S.-based folks like myself only due to the language barriers as well as timing delays of overseas tech support.
3. Their servers are super-fast. When developing a site on a live server, what separates the “big dogs” from the “puppies” of web hosting is upload speed. Building sites using Bluehost saves me so much time because unlike the other hosts, Bluehost’s FTP connection doesn’t “go to sleep” after a few minutes forcing me to wait 1-2 minutes just to upload an itty-bitty little micro-file.
4. Their user panel is intuitive. Bluehost uses the popular C-Panel system for their back-end administration. Many of the other hosts I’ve worked with use their own convoluted, proprietary systems that can add tons of additional time and frustration to a web project. In fact, C-Panel even allows you to export all of your website settings so that if you ever move your hosting account, even to another company, you’ll be able to take your site settings over with you as long as the new company also uses C-Panel. There’s a reason a multitude of hosting companies use the C-Panel technology instead of re-inventing the wheel themselves.

WordPress.org agrees

As of the writing of this post, WordPress lists Bluehost at the top of their list of recommended web hosts. Click here or simply check out the graphic below:

Popular Web Hosts to Avoid…

…despite the fact that WordPress.org recommends them.

GoDaddy (aka SLOWDaddy)

• When you install WordPress on your GoDaddy hosting account, if you elect to use Permalinks (highly recommended, the SEO-friendly, intuitive page URL’s that WordPress is known for), you will see that all of your pages other than the homepage will be broken. I’ll be sharing the workaround for this in a future blog post, but nonetheless, it’s very annoying and quite scary for the WordPress + GoDaddy newbie.
• The slowest FTP time (both upload and download) I’ve ever experienced.
• Any changes you make to their control panel take at least a few minutes, and sometimes a few hours to take effect. Not the case with most other hosts.
• Totally convoluted, confusing, and just plain stoopid user control panel. A massive unnecessary time-waster.
• Weak phone support. I’ve seen worse, but hold time is anywhere from between 2-20 minutes, usually around the 3-minute mark.

Media Temple:

• Horrendous hold times for phone support. The least I’ve ever waited is 8 minutes, but it’s usually around 20-ish minutes, sometimes up to 40 minutes. This is one of those hosting companies that loves to steer you to the online forums or email support any chance it gets, as its phone support staff is insufficient to handle the amount of users in need of assistance.
• Difficult domain management. I recently had to build a site on Media Temple using a temporary staging domain until we were ready to move the actual domain over, and this was a major pain to figure out. With effectively no phone support to back you up, this makes for another big time waster.

Until something better comes along, Bluehost is where it’s at for me. Pricing and feature-wise, they’ve about the same as all of the other major players. Perhaps some of the others could come out to be a few bucks cheaper over the course of a year, but hosting is certainly not one of the areas you want to skimp on when working on a web project.

I’m curious to know what your experiences with web hosts have been. Do you agree, sort-of-agree, think I’m the spawn of Satan, etc?

Category : Blog & Cool Tools & WordPress