Design your way

If you’re looking for the best hosting plan to accommodate your personal website, or one to provide the ideal environment for reselling purposes, you need to exercise caution so that you will get the ideal service for your hosting needs.

My purpose is to help you gain a broad perspective, by outlining the potential benefits of signing with any of these designated industry titans.

KnownHost

KnownHost ranks as number one in my preferences, mostly due to their outstanding reliability. Their 250 servers vouch for a 99.9% Network Uptime Guarantee, and the clients are eligible for an SLA credit in case the company does not meet these expectations in any given month. All they need to do is submit a ticket to the helpdesk within 5 days of the recorded downtime. Hence, the value of the Service Level Agreement Credit increases exponentially as the guaranteed uptime drops in percentage: its maximum is reached if the uptime decreases to as little as 99.0%. That’s confidence.

KnownHost offers fully Managed VPS plans, which come with the power, flexibility and resources that shared hosting could never dream of providing, at an affordable price. Backups and migrations don’t cost a thing. Besides, by punching in the coupon code KH15LIFE at checkout, customers get 15% off over the course of their entire lives for VPS-2 or larger, a rate that will simply increase when future upgrades are enacted. In addition, going the route of Managed SSD-powered VPS will propel the website’s performance to unimaginable heights.

The KnownHost email/ticket support team is quite famous. Apart from hardware and network monitoring, they ensure initial account migration and security, together with providing free installation and initial optimization of control panel, and managing all aspects of the operating system. All new users are entitled to receiving their money back in a window of 30 days after activating any hosting package – save Dedicated Servers – so nothing is lost.

WebFaction

WebFaction is one of the topmost hosting companies. They claim that their mission is to provide hosting specifically tailored for web developers, and it is my contention that they’re doing a very good job at that. WebFaction’s profile is based on offering a shared web hosting service which retains many of the perks associated with a VPS or dedicated server. You should definitely go with them if you’re a developer who needs to host small to medium sized websites, because it doesn’t get any better than this. Besides, you can rest assured knowing that there’s a 60-day money back guarantee to tap into, if you don’t get along well.

If you give WebFaction a try via their free 48-hour trial, you’ll see for yourself that their acknowledged excellent services aren’t too good to be true, as you probably deem them to be if this is your first experience concerning the company. Everything is ideal for developer meddling, with full SSH access, and pre-installed developer tools such as Python, Django, and PHP. Additionally, more than 50 applications are ready for 1-Click installation, because WebFaction knows how much you value your time. And these applications run like wildfire.

Moreover, the users are in safe hands with WebFaction’s responsive 24/7 support team, who stands put to assist in any issue. Their system administrators are committed to configuring, monitoring and backing up servers, applying security patches, and updating tools. In terms of pricing, WebFaction is really affordable, seeing as signing up for a whole year is $8.50-a-month, and going from month to month is $9.50 per month.

(mt) Media Temple

(mt) Media Temple doesn’t just make the grade; it is an excellent web hosting company. Having launched in 1998, Media Temple has come to be one of the elite hosting providers in the world. They’re turning 15 this year. At the moment, the company hosts 1.5 million websites in over 100 countries worldwide, and their 150.000 clients testify to their provider’s unfaltering reliability and downright awesomeness.

(mt) Media Temple’s diverse customer line stretches to encompass both creative-minded professionals – web designers/developers – and small to medium-sized businesses. As such, they’ve come to be associated with ringing brands and the likes of Red Bull, Volkswagen, Sony, Adidas, and Starbucks.

In essence, their philosophy is grounded on the premises of hosting great ideas. Not only do they support endeavors with a high potential, but indeed they come up with amazing ideas of their own. (mt) Media Temple’s employees are perfectionists, and they seek to devise updates on a continuous basis, which are then enacted immediately for all customer accounts. Their most recent installment is the upgrade of their flagship hosting plan, the GRID, which now works 6 times faster.

Customer experience ranks highest among (mt) Media Temple’s priorities, and as a result, the company has an outstanding cross-platform customer support. In fact, they even have an award to show off for that. So if you go with their Shared Hosting plan, their Managed VPS, or Developer VPS service, you’re in good company all the way.

DreamHost

With more than 16 years of experience in web hosting, DreamHost has over 375.000 customers and 1.2 million blogs, websites and apps hosted on their servers, offering a wide spectrum of web hosting and cloud services including Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Dedicated Server Hosting, Domain Name Registration and supercharged WordPress hosting.

Another detail that I like about DreamHost is that as a newcomer, you have a 2 week free trial and 97 day money back guarantee, which allows you to really get familiar with this web hosting solution. Furthermore, their support has been recently vamped up to 24/7 email and chat support, with an option for phone support if needed.

They are celebrating their Sweet 16 Anniversary, so for a limited time, DreamHost has a special offer at just $1.60/mo for a year of web hosting, including two free domains with your hosting plan. You can check out the latest offerings by clicking the image above.

Flywheel

Flywheel is one of my favorite hosting companies, great for designers, freelancers and creative agencies. What they do is take the pain out of launching and managing multiple sites for clients, and let designers get back to what they do best, which is designing awesome websites. Flywheel makes sure that the WordPress sites run incredibly fast, are always safe and secure, fully backed up and updated.

Flywheel also makes it incredibly easy to manage multiple sites for clients, and work with developers and designers as collaborators – all without the need to share usernames and passwords – and makes it dead simple to transfer sites to clients for payment. All of this stands true, plus the reality of a team of WordPress experts ready to assist you if anything goes wrong. By all means, take Flywheel for a spin by setting up a free demo site in a matter of seconds.

Pixeno

We couldn’t put together a top web hosting list without including Pixeno. Pixeno is a fantastic provider of personal, reseller, cloud sites, and cloud server-based web hosting. The company is run by a group of web designers, developers and technicians, and primarily accommodates creative customers, freelancers, agencies and small businesses. Pixeno has no limits on essentials such as subdomains, email addresses and MySQL databases.

Even more notably, Pixeno provides 4 external account backups per day. That information is kept for 2 weeks, which means that customers have 56 possible restore points at any one time. Pixeno’s infrastructure is based on the latest technology and state of the art hardware. Pixeno also offers a one month free trial, with no payment details required, if you wish to try them risk free.

HostGator

Another noteworthy provider of web hosting is HostGator, who launched back in 2002 and presently commands an ‘army’ of approximately 12.000 servers. Their services include Shared, Reseller, VPS, and Dedicated server plans, which are designed to be equally accessible for beginners, as well as liberating for professionals.

As far as their Shared Hosting packages are concerned, each one includes a reliable 24/7 support, the promise of 99.9% uptime, and a 45-day money-back guarantee. If you seal the deal with HostGator now, you receive 20% off the first invoice for any monthly or annual plan, an offer which stands for either of three Shared Hosting options: Hatchling, Baby, or Business.

HostNine

HostNine has a 99.9% uptime guarantee for their reseller, shared, cloud VPS and dedicated services, and if the user perceives any shortcoming of that value, the company’s policy states that one day of free service is assigned to compensate for each hour of downtime. What is more, should a problem arise during the first 45 days with HostNine, the users are guaranteed full refunds.

A compelling offer is currently displayed across their homepage, which favors existing clients who are bent on upgrading. According to this, a 50% discount to the first invoice is applied to shared/reseller/cloud plans via code H9LUV13, and to Dedicated Hosting with DEDILUV13.

WebHostingBuzz

WebHostingBuzz offers a 50% discount during the first month for any Dedicated Plan, and most importantly, attaches a cost of $1 for the first month of a Reseller service using the code “resellerdeal”. Regarding their affordability, I’d say they have a pretty good stance: Shared Hosting starting from $4.95 per month, Reseller from $9.95, and VPS form as little as $14.95. I also need to emphasize the fact that WebHostingBuzz has a prompt and helpful support service, which I heard no one complain of so far. All in all, going forward with WebHostingBuzz would be an excellent choice.

Bluehost

Bluehost has been around since 1996, and they boast of a 24/7 support team, reachable by mobile, email, or chat. During the first 30 days of hosting with Bluehost, the users are eligible for full refunds if incompatibility ensues. However, if the first month is exceeded, Bluehost pays you back the exact value attributed to the existing payment term. Professional Web Hosting plans come with a sizable discount for the first month ($4.95). Similarly, the VPS Standard, Enhanced, Premium, and Ultimate plans are accompanied by notable one-time discounts. You can try their live demo for a first-hand experience.