Tech-Tamer

Making the Web Work for You

Hosting recommendations

Last reviewed and updated: July 18, 2017.

In early 2015, we decided it no longer made sense to offer hosting ourselves,1 and set out to find the most appropriate hosting to suggest to our clients as we eased out of the hosting business. Happily, we found very good, even excellent, hosting options available at a full range of price points. Below are our suggestions. We will keep this page updated as time goes on and we gather more experience with these and other companies.

Criteria

We were looking specifically for plans that were appropriate to an average small- to medium-sized business or organization — these choices are not right for really high traffic sites. Our criteria were simple: a host must first and foremost be able to keep your site online reliably. Beyond that, it must offer excellent support, so that someone without technical expertise can get meaningful help quickly; and it must offer daily backup — the first line of defense against almost all ills, including malware, updates gone wrong, and the inevitable mistakes all humans make.

We don’t pretend for a moment that these are the only good choices available; they are just the ones we’ve had enough experience with to feel comfortable recommending.

Recommended Hosting Plans

A note about prices: hosting companies love to offer introductory teaser rates. We’ve listed the full renewal price below, but you’ll almost certainly find your first year’s bill significantly lower than what we quote, and can often sign up for multiple years at the intro teaser rates.

Siteground’s “GrowBig” level, $15/month

SiteGround offers above-average technical geeky excellence, and good, knowledgeable support. Thirty days of automatic daily backup is included for free. This level also allows you to host more than one website on your account and offers a reasonable amount of storage.

  1. Click here to open Siteground’s signup page in a new browser tab or window3
  2. On that page, click the large orange Get Started button in the Grow Big box.
  3. Choose “I already have a domain,” and enter your website’s domain name (just “mysitename.com,” no “http://” or “www” needed).
    NOTE: If you plan to use the account for more than one site, just choose a single one of the planned domain names when you sign up (you’ll add the additional domain(s) after the account is set up). It really doesn’t much matter which domain you use to sign up.
  4. Fill out the form, but UNCHECK the “SG Site Scanner” option,4 and click Submit Order to create your account.

Siteground’s “Startup” level, $10/month

The major difference is that, although you get the same automatic 30 days’ backup, you have to pay $40 to actually use a backup. You also get less storage and a potentially slightly slower website, and can only host one site.

  1. Click here to open Siteground’s signup page in a new browser tab or window3
  2. On that page, click the large orange Get Started button in the StartUp box.
  3. Choose “I already have a domain,” and enter your website’s domain name (just “mysitename.com,” no “http://” or “www” needed)
  4. Fill out the form, but UNCHECK the “SG Site Scanner” option,4 and click Submit Order to create your account.

GoDaddy’s Economy or Deluxe levels, $7.99 or $10.99/month

We are surprised to find ourselves recommending GoDaddy. GoDaddy is a controversial company and has a history of lousy web hosting. However, our recent experience with them has been very good. They don’t have quite as strong a reputation for geeky technical excellence as SiteGround, but they appear to be aiming for it.

They offer 2 kinds of hosting: regular, and a special WordPress managed hosting. The pricing is very similar, but what’s included differs. It’s worth a conversation with us before choosing, but some top notes:

  • Email offerings differ. If you have a WordPress site and you use G Suite (formerly Google Apps or Google for Work) for your email, then you won’t care about the hosting account email, but be sure to know your email situation before choosing.
  • Regular hosting does not include free backups so you may be well advised to spent the extra $2/month to add backup.
  • If you have more than one site to host, you’ll want regular hosting, at Level 2, “Deluxe.”
  • The WordPress managed hosting is potentially slightly faster hosting for a WordPress site, but probably not meaningfully. It does include some very nice free tools for managing your site (backups and updating via ManageWP), however.

Click here to open GoDaddy’s signup page in a new browser tab or window

Notes

1We began offering hosting because it was convenient—for us, and for our customers.  But as the hosting industry, and the web at large, have changed, that convenience is no longer worth it. Hosting is not our core business, and we realized we were no longer offering a compelling hosting experience.  It takes more attention and expertise than ever to keep a hosting server performing optimally, and in the recent past, many hosting services have improved markedly, and now offer a better experience at a lower price. In addition, a dedicated hosting company offers help 24/7 if your site has problems, something we have never been able to offer.

2How will you know it’s necessary? Well, occasionally it may be as obvious as the plan not having enough disk storage, but that’s not often.  More likely, you may notice that your site is sluggish.  That’s a sign that the server resources for your account are being taxed, either because your traffic is heavy, or the resources just aren’t sufficient to run your site (for example, if you’re running a Drupal site — Drupal tends to require more server horsepower to deliver an acceptable end user experience).

3An affiliate link means that if you click this link to sign up, we will receive a small kickback from the company. Virtually all hosting companies offer affiliate agreements, and they did not influence our choices.

4We do not think this option is effective, or at best, it is minimally effective. If you actually want security, we recommend Sucuri.  If you’re a Tech-Tamer client, please let us know: we offer subscriptions to Sucuri‘s basic service at a price lower than you can get individually.