Top 10 Best Web Hosting Services of 2015

The top performers in our review are Arvixe, the Gold Award winner; InMotion Hosting, the SilverAward winner; and Just Host, the Bronze Award Hostnine Guide For Dummy winner. Here's more onchoosing a service to meet your needs, along with detail on how we arrived at our ranking of thebest web hosts.

If you are considering owning any online real estate beyond a simple blog, it comes with a price.Thankfully, the price is minimal. Many people think that owning their own sites only has to do withowning the names themselves. Before you sign up for a domain name, take some time to consideryour options. We recommend that, before you ever plan your unique site name, you analyze thefocus of your online business and how much storage you need.

In our experience, standard landing page sites only require the most basic shared hosting package.If you want to make an active site complete with images, blog posts and video content, you need aservice that provides unlimited disk space. If you are planning on having an exorbitant number ofviewers, then you should also look to find a package with unlimited bandwidth. Having sufficientbandwidth keeps your site from throttling if many readers flock to your site at once.

Annual and Monthly Payments

The second step to take is to create the right domain name. Web hosting plans typically include afree domain for one year. A domain often requires an annual payment, but Arvixe actually includes adomain for the life of the service. Popular services like Go Daddy are known for being go-to spots ifyou are looking to purchase a domain name.

At this stage, you are offered promotional rates on several hosting plans, depending on the storageand bandwidth your site requires. Look past the promotional prices that each host offers. We noticedthat several hosting services baited us with affordable plans, only to triple the monthly price andcharge nearly $30 for a domain when renewal comes around.

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Our sister site, Business News Daily describes the pros and cons of web hosting. In this article, theydescribe that the purpose of web hosting is to help small business owners. Even novices can buildsomething once and let the website take care of itself. These shared hosting services are easyenough for anyone to create something unique.

The web hosting industry is inundated with competition. In our extensive comparison, weresearched, tested and ranked each service to find the one that best fits your business or personalwebsite. For more information about this industry, take a look at our articles about web hosts.

Web Hosting: How We Tested, What We Found

To test our web hosting lineup, we purchased month-to-month hosting subscriptions. These plansauto-renew as long as you let them and in most instances come with a free domain name for a year.For each provider, we used the basic shared hosting packages, and the numbers we gathered for thedisk space and bandwidth are all based on the introductory plans for each service.

Plan Offerings

Shared hosting should be flexible. As your business grows, your online presence should have theability to grow with you. We measured that flexibility by how many plans a service offered and byasking its support staff how easy it is to upgrade in the middle of a contract.

Three is the standard number of hosting plans under a company's shared hosting umbrella. Threedifferent options give you room to grow if you're feeling unsure about initially investing in a higher-priced plan. Still, many web hosts offer only one shared server plan. In our testing, we found thatthese plans often do not provide enough bandwidth, storage and domain capability for the value.Upgrading from one of these single-offering shared plans requires paying significantly more with aVPS or dedicated server.

Control Panel Usability

With each service, we built a landing page for a business using images and content. A number ofemployees here at Top Ten Reviews tested each cPanel and downloaded apps like WordPress to testcompatibility. While each version of cPanel is similar across the board, the best web hosts providemore features, simplifying the creation process. We arrived at the usability mark by testing thehosting interface, scoring the cPanel and proprietary website builder.

We first tested usability through our experience creating an account. If a service used a one-stepprocess, which entails easy account verification through email and approval of the domain and hostpackage at the same time, we gave it points for immediate usability. Half of the products wepurchased wouldn't let us create an account without a copy of an identification card and a creditcard statement. We side with the new user in these cases. If a service is difficult to sign up for, thenmost people would move on to the next available host.

Once we accessed our accounts, we test each dashboard. The standard interface is called cPanel,and some services like iPage use their own control panel, which allows for more customization. Weevaluated which tools are available in the basic shared hosting plans, taking into account featureslike simple email creation, a disk usage meter and access to create cron jobs. Many services in ourlineup don't have the option to back up a site manually or utilize a one-click install section.

The majority of the hosts on our lineup use a standard cPanel and for good reason. It is the industrystandard. While the dashboard isn't much to look at, it provides every tool, and then some, you need

to create a site, manage the hosting and market it to the online world.

Support Quality

Customer support is an important factor when searching for the best web hosts. As site owners, werely on each service to have solid uptime. When, not if, a server fails temporarily, services shouldhave a support team available 24/7 by both phone and live chat.

We called multiple times at all hours of the day and night, testing the quality of the support given.We reached a percentage score by ranking five criteria. A representative needed sufficient productknowledge, without sending us links to the FAQs page. In support calls, we wanted a problem solvedand dinged points when the service tried to upsell us instead of solving the issue at hand.Personability, in both chat and phone support situations, is a major factor. Also, we took into accountthe initial wait time and the wait time between responses.

We also brought up live chat during busy business hours and after normal business hours. To get arepresentative number of how long it took to reach each support team, we took an average of ourattempts. The service with the fastest response time is WebHostingPad.

The average wait time overall was just over 10 minutes. The longest we waited to reach a live chatrepresentative was 45 minutes. Testing the support staff of each service was essential to the processbecause it's truly what sets most of them apart. Often, a company boasted about its live chatsupport, but the team was consistently offline or unavailable. Other times, the staff could only helpyou with sales and upgrades but not technical support.

Additional Considerations: Picking the Right Web Host for Your Business

Web hosting is a very competitive field, and the best companies perform the same task with a similarrange of site management tools. Each company offers promotions to get you to sign on with them,but we looked at few features that are important to consider in the long run.

What Does Unlimited Really Mean?

Web hosting companies throw around the term, "unlimited" as if it's their slogan. As a consumer, itis important to know that unlimited does not mean infinite. Instead, the term technically means, "notexceeding regular use." While the companies claim that 99.5 percent of their customers will neverhave a throttling problem, if you store large amounts of media on your site, you still may get awarning from the hosting provider informing that you will be slowed down or temporarily shut off. Itis a shared server, which means you are at risk of taking other customer's allotted unlimited space.

Flexibility

Most hosts boast about the unlimited data transfer and disk space they offer, but it's important tofind each service's definition of that word. Every host provides different allotments for domains,subdomains and parked domains. There are services like iPage who don't have expandable shared

hosting plans, but don't truly need to provide the option because they offer unlimited boundaries intheir basic plans. Each of these plans comes with the option to create email accounts with your URLattachment; although the number you are allowed varies.

All of the web hosts we tested offer limited money-back guarantees. Even further, a handful ofcompanies allow you to cancel at any time without penalty.

Downtime Responsiveness

Each company claims to have 99 percent uptime. Technically, they're not lying. There is typically alower priority on shared servers and many sites could go down. Usually, a service can get it back upin 20 minutes, but that time could mean lost income or traffic if your site is built for those purposes.Technical problems can happen at any time - and there's not much you can do on your end,especially when you're running off a server in a remote unknown location. Responsive tech supportis critical.

Compatibility

Investing in a reliable web host is a big decision because it impacts how your site runs for the nextyear or two. If you find a concern with a host, there is no reason to stick with them just because youhave a bundle. We looked for services that not only made it easy to migrate to but also export oursite content. One service that made domain registration and content migration easy is InMotionHosting.

Security

Security is always lighter when using a shared server, but that doesn't mean your site should be leftvulnerable. The best hosts use shared SSL and SSH. Many of these hosts backup and restore yoursite without incurring an additional fee. Some of the web hosts also protect your email account fromspammers free, while others offer advanced anti-spam protection at a cost.

If you plan to sell products or services online, there are several shared web hosts that also offereCommerce solutions such as shopping cart systems and the ability to accept credit cards. Nearlyevery web host we tested offers advertising credits to help jump-start your marketing effort for yourwebsite or business online.

Our Verdict and Recommendations on the Best Web Hosting Plans

Finding the right web host suited to your site is important, especially with sohttps://www.pagedesk.com/reliable-hosting/ many competitive companies looking for your business.In our tests of the basic plans of each web hosting service, we were surprised at the level of controland site creation capabilities available for a low monthly cost. The best service we tested was Arvixe,for its emphasis on the user. InMotion Hosting came in second place for providing superior featuresin a starter plan. Just Host ranked third, not only because of its high reputation but also for itsquality cPanel. Each of these companies provide great ongoing support, intuitive interfaces and

extra security features.