Hosting – The whys and whatfors

Finding the right hosting provider for your website can be challenging and there are a number of choices out there. Some web designers provide their own hosting and if you are working with them long term I recommend it, but always make sure you have access to your hosting account and you have the ability to migrate the site if and when you part ways. Your website should always be in your control, if your web designer will not give you access to both the site and the hosting account you need to run, not walk away.

Some designers require this as part of doing business with them, don’t buy into it, there is no good reason to prevent you from having access other than to prevent you from leaving. And trust me, when you’ve invested thousands of dollars in your website only to find you can’t take it with you and have to start over, it’s decidedly unpleasant. When looking for a hosting company you want to know what they provide, their price and most importantly their support. I rank support the highest for one simple reason, if and when you hit an issue (and you will, this is technology after all), you want support to know what they are doing and to resolve your issue quickly and thoroughly. After way more research than I care to admit I can recommend three solid hosting services.

1. MDDHosting – They are my go-to hosting service. I can rave about them for a while but let’s dive in:
   1. Uptime – Damn near 100%. I’ve been with them for many years now and it’s been at least 4 years since their last outage. They had an issue back then that the owner of the company was very transparent about, explained exactly what happened, what they were doing to fix it and processes they were putting in place to prevent it from ever happening again. He may have lost business back then because of it, but I can honestly say the service has never been down since. 
   2. Service – Mostly by a ticket system but you can call or live chat during business hours. Their service personnel are all top tier, you aren’t “elevated” to the next service tier, the person you talk with handles your issue. I can say I have yet to run into an issue they haven’t been able to resolve. Their ticket system is extremely fast, I have submitted a ticket, refreshed my screen and had an answer. I have never gone more than an hour before getting a response, and the response was to notify me they fixed the issue, not bad. 
   3. No additional upcharges for SSL certificates, emails, etc. 
   4. Any type of site can be hosted here – Wordpress, Joomla or pretty much any other platform. 
2. Siteground – Top notch service and support. They are the top dog for Wordpress sites. They can be a bit on the pricey side, but you do get what you pay for. They are a solid second for me. Other sites can be hosted on sIteground, but they do specialize for Wordpress.
3. Happy Camper Hosting – This is another solid hosting company. Service and support is excellent, pricing is excellent and they offer a lot of bells & whistles with no upcharges. If I wasn’t using MDDHosting for my hosting I would be working with Happy Camper.

These are my recommendations and my only recommendations for hosting. I’ve worked with Bluehost, Justhost, Arvixe, Network Solutions and plenty of others. The above are the best of the best in terms of what you get for the price, the number of services they provide, the quality of service and the knowledge, expertise and speed of support. When you need hosting, look at the above, in that order and you won’t be disappointed.