Bob Schecter • Difficult question to answer Stuart as few likely have experience with all of them, hence your poll is more of a – what’s your favorite host.
I started on GoDaddy, and then split my sites on Dream and Gator and both were great. When I started using iThemes products, (admittedly I never really gave Dream much time) I shifted everything to Gator and I’m a happy camper.
Stuart Nuttall • I’ve used GoDaddy for a while and had been moving over to 1and1, but they really don’t seem as accommodating of WP as others. I’ve set up an account with bluehost so it will be interesting for me to see which of them turns out to be the better experience. For now, for me, the jury’s out!
Sridhar Katakam • GoDaddy does not deserve to be in the poll choices.
Personally I avoid GoDaddy, 1&1, Yahoo and DreamHost hosting.
ElShaddai Edwards • Of those choices, I’d say HostGator, but I prefer InMotion to all of them.
Joshua Hoffman • Depends what your experience level is. For beginners I think GoDaddy.com is a great choice. But as you move further into the space your needs will change.
Hans Koevoet • I’m wondering, what should a hoster do to qualify as a ‘WP hosting provider’? As long as the hoster offers PHP and MySQL (which I guess any paid hoster nowadays does), what is the ‘extra’ that we WP users want form our hosting service?
Susan Bearman • I’m on Bluehost, at the recommendation from someone in this forum. Seems to be doing great with my WordPress sites, but we’ve had several glitches with email. On the upside, they support has been pretty responsive.
Peter Abraham • May I ask what drives consumers to chose commodity hosting providers (who often throttle resources) vs. value providers who might be a few bucks more per month?
A recent example is HostGator suspending a customer for a valid PCI Compliance Scan – http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1172265
Bluehost regularly throttles accounts. If someone is trying to buy from your site, and they are throttled, how many do you think come back to try to complete the purchase or move on to a more reliable site?
Casara Drury • I agree with Peter, but I haven’t found a great WP host yet. I would love to go local in St. Louis where most of my clients are. However, anyone with fantastic customer service in the US would work for me. Any recommendations?
Peter Abraham • Casara, I’m biased towards the company for whom I steward and work — Dynamic Net at http://www.dynamicnet.net/ (this is our 17th year in business).
Stuart Nuttall • GoDaddy seems to inspire some really strong reactions (is that the elephant in the room?). On the positive side, they are cheap and they have a quick-install WP feature. Personally I have had some problems with their email 9but not hosting per se). Does anyone have any objective evidence of why their are a poorer choice than another provider?
(for the avoidance of doubt I am neutral on this issue)
Susan Bearman • Thanks for the feedback on Bluehost. Hope we don’t run into that problem. I’ve heard GoDaddy does some shady things—like if you search a domain name, but don’t purchase, they purchase it a their lower rate, then charge higher rates if you go back and try to purchase.
Peter Abraham • The one click installations can be dangerous as they often include ZERO security considerations.
Stuff like http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress and http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_File_Permissions are ignored.
Jay Wren • Had Yahoo. No WordPress support. Have 3 domains on iPage. Love it.
Jennifer Paganessi • I’ve had lots of permission issues with GoDaddy and I agree with Peter on the one click installations. I used to be a reseller for them but feel there service has gone down that last few years.
I have switched many of my sites to Hostgator and so far I have really liked them. I like how their reseller program is set up better too.
Peter Abraham • Authorized PCI Scan causes HostGator Account Suspension – http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1172265
Hostgater, like Bluehost, is part of Endurance International Group that does use throttling.
This means zero true reliability as your customers may not be able to access your site.
Sridhar Katakam • “Does anyone have any objective evidence of why their are a poorer choice than another provider? “
http://ithemes.com/2010/03/26/ithemes-doesnt-recommend-godaddy-hosting-heres-why/
Henry Perkins • I would recommend none of those services. Try Zippykid.com or WPEngine.com
Rick Lell • none of the above… http://fatcow.com is my pick.
- 1and1
- bluehost
- Dream Host
- GoDaddy
Scott Frangos • Looks like it’s down to BlueHost and HostGator. We also use http://WPsiteHosting.com a lot. They are global and have NOCs in five locations. We have about 30 clients with them — and also a marketing agreement. About 3 of our own sites are there — very prompt on the ticket service.
Peter Abraham • Since Endurance International Group owns both of them, I would agree.
Since Hostgater started throttling (which appears to have started after being acquired, not sure)… hmmm.
How are either reliable when you have http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1172265 and other accounts of both either suspending accounts for VALID activities or throttling accounts?
i.e. someone goes to your site to BUY, and cannot because they are being throttled and you don’t know it.
Follow Pieter
Pieter Hartsook • +1 for WPEngine when performance counts, and by that I mean page-load times. If performance is not so important, and cost and ease of setup and maintenance are more of an issue, then Bluehost or Fatcow are what I have my clients use.
Be aware that Bluehost will throttle your site if you get too much traffic, even with their Pro shared hosting account. Happened to a client of mine. Page-loads, even with W3 Total Cache and other optimization, went from 2-4 sec to 8+ sec! And what’s worse about 70% of the time during peak traffic the page load ended in a 500 database connection error. Bluehost had no option to scale to meet the traffic, they just throttled the site without notifying the account holder. Needless to say we will be switching hosting providers for that client,
David Skarjune • NONE OF THE ABOVE.
It doesn’t take anything special to support WordPress. Best to go with a smaller, independent web hosting firm that you can work with for ALL reasons. I use a small competitive firm in the Midwest, because they answer all my questions within 24 hours, and I can even get them on the phone when needed.
Better for YOU to learn how to manage WordPress. What’s more important is how you manage backups and restores, independent of your web host.
Pieter Hartsook • @David I’d disagree that “It doesn’t take anything special to support WordPress”. Sure almost any host with current Apache, MySQL, and PHP can host WP, but to get great page-load performance that scales under load is not trivial. Some things like css minification you can do with plugins almost anywhere, but some optimizations like Memcached require support at the server-level and none of the common shared-hosting providers will install it. (but WPEngine has it in as a default). Same is true for CDN, not trivial to implement on most shared hosting plans, but built-in at WPEngine.
And how about built-in WordPress backups, and one-button staging-site creation? Never seen that offered on general hosting packages. It’s kind of like using the SimpleScript one-button WP installer vs. manually setting up a MySQL database and manually installing and configuring WP. One only takes 90 seconds to set up a new WP site and the other 10-20min even if you’ve done it before. I’ll take the host that’s focused on WP and makes it easy for me to get my client’s site up and running and performing optimally.
Check out what a WordPress-only managed service can do for WP: http://wpengine.com/fast-page-loads/ (plain non-affiliate link)