If you’re planning on building a business online, sooner or later you’re going to need good web hosting. Unless you’re using an all-in-one solution like Shopify, you’ll need a place to host your website. The best web hosting companies will have all ten of the properties listed below as well as outstanding online reviews.
Because web hosting is such a profitable business model, there are tons of web hosting providers in the marketplace. Unfortunately, many of them are unreliable and provide very poor service.
Avoid web hosting companies offering "lifetime hosting". It's meaningless. For starters, you’ll never know whose lifetime they’re talking about. Yours? The web hosting company owner’s? And for a one-time fee, there's no way they can offer on-going support. Like a Ponzi scheme, they can only keep going while getting new members continuously. How long will that last?
No one really knows. This is not one area where you want to pay the least and cut corners.
With a poor web hosting service, your site may crash often or be slow to load. It may get hacked due to low security or even disappear overnight along with the web hosting provider. There are countless horror stories when it comes to web hosting services.
So, you’ll want to go with an established brand that thousands of other marketers are using and swear by. Such as the ones I've listed below. They are among the best web hosting companies.
5 of the Best Web Hosting Companies in 2021
There are hundreds if not thousands of companies offering web hosting services. The future success of your business will depend in part on which one you choose. The five that I've listed here all deserve their 5-star rating and you will be well served by any of them. They do each have a unique offering and one may be more suited to your specific circumstances than the others. Or one might be more suitable now but another might be better further down the track when your business has grown.
Wealthy Affiliate (5 Star Rating)
Wealthy Affiliate is different from the other 4 listed below but it's still one of the best webhosting companies.
It is a learning platform that teaches you how to build an online business but which also provides one of the fastest, most reliable web hosting platforms for the online businesses you create.
It has 3 levels of membership and is ideal for the beginner.
Starter membership is free and allows you to try out all aspects of Wealthy Affiliate to see if it's right for you. You can check out the first 10 lessons of both the Core Certification and Affiliate Training courses, get live 24/7 help for the first 7 days and 1 website install on a fast server. And you can stay FREE for as long as you like.
But if you're serious about building an online business, you'll want to go Premium or Premium Plus as quickly as possible.
Wealthy Affiliate Premium membership offers too many benefits to list them all here. To see them all, go to Wealthy Affiliate and work through the menu items.
WA Premium costs $49 per month and Premium Plus $49 for the first month and $99 thereafter. Both options offer discounts for yearly payment as well as Black Friday sales. Both plans allow you to build and host up to 50 websites.
Best for:
Those looking for thorough training in all aspects of building an online business through affiliate marketing.
Those looking to be part of a world-wide community of amazing, helpful people.
Those not wanting to pay extra for web hosting (WA members get it for free).
SiteGround (5 Star Rating)
SiteGround is another 5-star rated web hosting service. I have websites hosted at both Wealthy Affiliate and SiteGround, as they target different requirements and have different pricing models.
Although Wealthy Affiliate's main services are video based training and 24/7 support from both its own support desk and thousands of its global members, it also provides world-beating web hosting to its members at no extra charge.
But if all you need is fast web hosting and possibly the best support in the business, you can't go past SiteGround.
SiteGround makes it very easy to start off cheap and scale up your plan as your businesses grow and start to turn a profit.
The best-selling GrowBig plan costs $24.99 a month for an unlimited number of websites but if you act right now and pay for a year in advance, you will get it for the equivalent of just $6.99 a month!
You can find out more about SiteGround here and why it's one of the best web hosting companies.
Best for:
Those looking for good, reliable web hosting at a reasonable price. A good starter choice if you don't need the sort of training provided by Wealthy Affiliate.
Liquid Web (5 Star Rating)
Liquid Web has a 5 star rating because of its blazing fast speed (arguably the fastest in the business), 100% reliability and excellent support. Its dedicated servers generally provide a faster speed than a shared host.
Liquid Web may not be for you if you're just starting out. It's dedicated services are more expensive than shared hosting but once you've tasted some success and are ready to upgrade to a superior service, then it could be just what you're looking for.
With shared hosting, such as that provided by Wealthy Affiliate and SiteGround, you have a single server (or a cluster) hosting a number of companies and their websites. Specialized software splits the server into separate areas so that each website operates independently, but physically they are in fact sharing a single computer cluster.
Dedicated hosting is an Internet hosting option in which a physical server (or cluster of servers) is dedicated to a single business customer. The customer has complete control over the machine, so they can optimize it for their unique requirements, including performance and security. The hosting provider supplies the physical server and environment, the associated services and technical support.
Naturally, this is a faster solution than shared hosting.
Liquid Web Dedicated Hosting starts at $199 per month but there's a Black Friday special at 50% off if you act fast. This provides your website with a dedicated Intel Xeon 1230 v5 with 16GB RAM, 2 x 240GB SSD (Solid State Drive) a 2 TB SATA Backup Drive and 5TB of bandwidth.
You can find out more about Liquid Web here.
Best for:
Those looking for the sort of speed that you can only get with a dedicated server and understand that such a service is more costly.
WPX Hosting (5 Star Rating)
Like Liquid Web, WPX Hosting is fast. In fact, it's arguably the fastest shared hosting available.
You do pay a premium for that speed, but nothing like what you have to fork out for dedicated hosting.
This means that WPX can be a great solution for when your sites are starting to pay their way, but you feel they could use a performance lift.
WPX's hosting plans start at $24.99 per month (with 2 months free if you choose to pay yearly) for up to 5 websites, 10GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth. Their popular Professional Plan costs $49.99 a month (with the same 2 months free deal) for up to 15 websites, 20GB of storage and 200GB of bandwidth.
Given WPX's site speed, this is great value.
All plans include free malware detection and removal, site speed optimization and 30-day money-back guarantee.
You can find out more about WPX Hosting here,
Best for:
Those looking for the fastest possible speed without going to the expense of a dedicated server.
A2 Hosting (5 Star Rating)
A2 Hosting has a lot going for it at a very reasonable price.
In many ways, it's the ideal balance between cost and performance for someone just starting out, with between 1 and a few online businesses.
You can host one website for:
- $10.99 per month, paid monthly
- $6.99 per month, paid yearly or
- $2.99 per month, paid 3-yearly
OR, by moving up to the next plan (Drive), unlimited websites for:
- $12.99 per month, paid monthly
- $9.99 per month, paid yearly or
- $5.99 per month, paid 3-yearly.
My Recommendation
If you've just created your first website and are looking to turn it into an online business at minimum cost, you should buy one month's hosting for one website at $10.99. That's minimum outlay for excellent speed and reliability. If at the end of the month, you believe that you will keep going with more online businesses, upgrade to the Drive plan and pay for a year in advance at $119.88. Then you've got a year to build and host 5 online businesses with no extra outlay for hosting.
You can read more about A2 Hosting here.
Best for:
Those looking for good, reliable web hosting at a reasonable price. If that's you, look at both SiteGround and A2. You will be happy with either.
