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By: Christina Lewis
Editor: Lillian Castro
Reviewer: Cristian Lopez
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★★★★★
If speed and performance, partnered with support and security, are at all priorities in your web host shopping, hosting.com should be a leading contender. When hosting.com first launched as A2 Hosting in 2003, the company was focused on serving developers; it was among the first providers to offer PHP 5 and to support Ruby on Rails on shared servers. As the company grew, the focus shifted toward performance, following a customer survey that revealed loading times trailed only support and reliability as top priorities. As such, it was also one of the first to offer hosting with high-speed solid-state drives, which now reside across the company's entire portfolio of services. Hosting.com's full-stack optimizations unlocked a 300% increase in page load speeds The company took performance yet another step forward when it launched its Turbo hosting platform, which boasts fewer users per server, pre-configured caching options, and twice the allocated physical memory. With the Turbo Server option, caching tools, and other optimized software, sites experience page load speeds up to 20 times faster than average. Whether you want a dedicated server, standard shared hosting with cPanel, VPS, or anything in between, hosting.com can offer the services to meet your needs. With expertly-tuned servers that house fewer accounts, the company promises uptimes of 99.9% or higher, with Guru Crew customer support available all day, every day. Overall, you can't go wrong in choosing hosting.com as your web host. The company's inventive hosting solutions, impressive performance and security measures, and the constant thought put into the user experience warrant our high praise for their services.
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★★★★★
GoDaddy is exceptionally well-known in the hosting space, typically serving as site owners' introduction to the world of web hosting. The company makes it incredibly easy and affordable for folks to choose a domain name, sign up for hosting, and start building their online business or personal web property. While known for its domain, email, and shared hosting services, GoDaddy offers options for virtual servers as well. Pre-built templates come with the hosting company's basic WordPress offering, or upgrade to managed WordPress services for top support or help with your online store. The company makes the migration process as seamless as possible, so you shouldn't shy away from scaling your site as your business needs grow; GoDaddy is a hosting home that will grow alongside you. The user control options are pretty popular in the hosting space: your choice between the easy-to-use cPanel or Plesk control panels, plus root (administrative) access for more tech-savvy customers. If you're particularly interested in webmail, GoDaddy offers an intuitive interface for keeping up with the unlimited email accounts you have available to you as a customer. Each email account comes with 256-bit encryption and enhanced privacy protection. Customer support has been a focus of the GoDaddy team of late. Today, the team has an award-winning collection of experts on staff, readily available to handle customer phone calls and messages 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Luxury services like WordPress Premium Support and Website Security also add support ticketing functionality. While GoDaddy is on hand to talk you through any issues, the team is also keeping an eye on your server (as well as other clients sharing your server). The hosting provider's around-the-clock security monitoring enables GoDaddy to guarantee uptime rates of 99.9% or better. This uptime rate is by no means outstanding in the industry, but for most end users, it's all that's required. The bottom line is this: GoDaddy is a go-to domain web host for millions of users worldwide for a reason. The company maintains an ever-expanding network of users by offering blazing-fast load times, award-winning security and support, and a free domain registration when you sign up for a year-long plan. It's a great hosting deal, particularly for first-timers and small business owners, at a really great price point.
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★★★★★
#9 out of 10 in Cheap Hosting reviews There are plenty of excellent cPanel shared hosting providers out there, so what sets hosting.com apart from the rest? Not only does the company offer a ton of features, but it has custom-built its packages for enhanced performance, speed, and security — putting your priorities above pricing. Hosting.com packages include a free Cloudflare content delivery network, 24/7 Guru Crew support, and multiple SSD speed boost solutions. Within the comfortable cPanel control panel, users will find Softaculous — featuring easy, 1-click installations of popular web applications. With hosting.com's Perpetual Security features, users receive free HackScan protection and KernelCare, which runs rebootless auto-updates to kernels daily. The company promises 99.9% uptime and 24/7 network monitoring, plus virus scanning and defense against brute-force attacks. Not only was hosting.com one of the first to offer SSD hosting — featuring three times the page load speeds of standard hosts — but the company also invented its own Turbo hosting platform. Hosting.com's Turbo Servers yield 20 times faster page load speeds, using less CPU and memory, with fewer users on each server. We appreciate how hosting.com spends a great deal of time and effort on performance testing and ensuring its giving customers the best speed, security, and support available at a price users can afford. The highly optimized solutions make getting started easy, and the usefulness and reliability of hosting.com's products make them extremely cost-effective. With 24/7 support, including a WordPress-specific department, we're confident hosting.com can provide the assistance you need to get an affordable site launched and thriving.
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★★★★★
A major pull factor for GoDaddy's hosting services is certainly the cost. It's hard to beat web hosting for just a few dollars per month, especially when the company includes a free domain name, control panel, impressively fast load times, and unlimited websites with most plans. The company makes it not only affordable but super easy to get started on a shared hosting plan — for first-timers, bloggers, business owners, and others. You can choose a GoDaddy hosting plan based on your exact needs, with a range of options for disk space, email, processing power, and other resources. If your site grows to need scalable and/or dedicated resources, the company's team makes that transition easy — but with most plans coming with unlimited storage and unmetered bandwidth, you should have plenty of room. Virtual servers can be provisioned in minutes, with root and cPanel access, and no re-provisioning is required for upgrades. All GoDaddy plans are equipped with the user control of cPanel (or Plesk, if you prefer). From cPanel, you can easily install and set up popular web applications for blogging and/or ecommerce. A big name in the budget web hosting space, GoDaddy is consistently improving the performance of its servers, website, and services to offer a great customer experience. With cPanel control and 1-click installations for standard web apps, you can get your website up and running quickly. The company's 24/7 security monitoring and DDoS protection allow you the comfort in knowing the professionals are making sure your site is online, loading quickly, and hacker-free. We do wish the web hosting provider would include a free SSL certificate with each shared plan, however. All in all, the web hosting service comes with incredible power and peace of mind, at such a low price point, making GoDaddy quite a value deal.
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★★★★★
Whether you're looking for managed or self-managed hosting, hosting.com offers three extremely reliable dedicated server plans to meet your needs, depending on your levels of comfort and experience. With hosting.com's Unmanaged Flex Dedicated Server plan, users get administrator-level control with root access and their choice of Linux operating system. Your server will be ready for configuration with an optional cPanel license available. Plus, the company offers 24/7/365 server monitoring and maintenance for hardware. We found this package to be most useful for experienced developers who are familiar with the command line. The Managed Flex Dedicated Server service removes the operating system choice and root access — along with any of the hassle or stress of server maintenance and management. Blending the best of both worlds, hosting.com also offers a managed server with root access as part of its Core Dedicated Server plan. Hosting.com's dedicated servers feature its proprietary SwiftServer platform — expertly-tuned hardware with performance enhancements. The company was one of the first to offer SSD hosting, a perk passed down to all dedicated server customers that unlocks page load speeds as much as three times faster than those of standard web hosts. Servers are never overloaded, and hosting.com notifies you of targeted server occurrences, such as high load volume or when a filesystem becomes full. With four data centers strategically located on three continents, hosting.com offers high redundancy and global distribution.
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★★★★★
#6 out of 6 in VPS Hosting reviews While hosting.com's turbocharged shared hosting platform gives site owners ample room to grow, the company's tech prowess is on full display with its portfolio of VPS options. Ranging from unmanaged, bare-metal environments to stress-free, fully managed space, hosting.com is sure to have the perfect option for your expanding online presence. No matter which option customers choose — and there are many — hosting.com allocates ample storage, bandwidth, and memory to VPS customers. Site owners or app developers can customize their hosting package to include root access, cPanel, or high-performance solid-state disks. We highly recommend the company's Core VPS packages, which combine managed services with root access to provide the best of both worlds. The configurations start with a whopping 4GB of RAM, 4vCPUs, 75GB of SSD storage, all well above average elsewhere in the industry. Experienced developers who are comfortable with the command line and willing to spend the time managing and maintaining their VPS will find a great deal with hosting.com's unmanaged servers, which also enable customers to select from a staggering 15 different operating systems. Beyond the myriad of management and operating system options, customers can also select cloud-powered VPS options to receive the ultimate redundancy and reliability, custom-fit servers, and flexible resource monitoring and scaling. When it comes to speed and performance, hosting.com pulls out all the stops. The company's Turbo option, paired with its exclusive Site Accelerator software suite, produce page load speeds up to 20 times faster than competitors. Hosting.com holds a breadth of opportunities for flexibility, cost control, and custom solutions built for VPS customers. With an emphasis on performance and a commitment to solving customer problems, you won't regret going turbo with hosting.com's VPS packages.
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★★★★★
If you're looking to grow and scale your website, GoDaddy has you covered. Developers and web enthusiasts will be pleased to hear that GoDaddy offers root access, making it easy to install PHP modules, applications, stacks, and various customizations to fine-tune your virtual server for peak performance via the command line or remote desktop. Plans also include a variety of control panels, led by cPanel and Plesk, so you can easily manage your hosting service with an intuitive graphical interface. The surprisingly powerful virtual servers can have up to 32GB RAM and 400GB of SSD storage that boasts three times faster page loads. In addition to unlimited bandwidth and KVM virtualization, GoDaddy boasts global datacenters on four continents and tons of modern operating systems. Choose from platforms like CentOS, Ubuntu, and Windows Server. Meanwhile, the GoDaddy team will monitor your server 24/7 to alert and ward off traffic with malicious intent. Customers will have to patch their operating system as needed, but GoDaddy provides around-the-clock hardware monitoring with failover solutions and snapshots to minimize downtime. Panopta monitoring is also included with all semi- or fully managed VPS accounts, giving you a window into network and application services via easily configurable alerts and notifications. The GoDaddy name may not immediately bring VPS hosting to mind. Nonetheless, GoDaddy's virtual server offerings include the security, support, worry-free fully managed services, and value combination that embodies the GoDaddy reputation in the hosting space. For those who may not quite be ready to make the jump to a VPS plan, the hosting company's Business Hosting packages combine the best of both worlds: the amped-up power of a virtual private server with the ease and simplicity of shared hosting.
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★★★★★
#7 out of 9 in WordPress Hosting reviews As experts in performance optimization, hosting.com is a top choice for powering resource-heavy WordPress websites. The company offers shared or managed plans for the ultra-popular content management system, with the benefits extending to Joomla, Drupal, and other platforms. Hosting.com's shared web hosting plans come with cPanel control panel, where users can access Softaculous auto-installer. Easily install popular web applications, including your choice of CMS, with one click. Alternatively, hosting.com experts will pre-install and configure WordPress for you, complete with PHP7 and HTTPS protection. While the company's all-SSD infrastructure enables sites to fly, hosting.com's enhanced Turbo Servers and proprietary Site Accelerator particularly shine with WordPress plans, enabling 20-times-faster page loads and automatic compression and caching options. To boost security and protect customers, the company build another custom program that auto-hardens WordPress sites for proactive protection against malicious attacks. Additionally, hosting.com offers virus scanning, a firewall, and brute-force attack protection — not to mention spam filtering for emails, which are also IMAP, POP3, and SMTP supported. Hosting.com offers 24/7 customer support and tons of optimized features made with WordPress users in mind. Whether you're an online retailer looking to launch a fresh site with WooCommerce or a moderately web-savvy WordPress user looking for speed and security excellence, we'd highly recommend hosting.com.
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★★★★★
#9 out of 9 in WordPress Hosting reviews As champions of low-cost, high-impact hosting, GoDaddy understandably offers a slew of services geared for all levels of WordPress users. Starting with the company's basic shared hosting services, which start at $5.99 per month, each GoDaddy customer who signs up for an annual plan receive a free domain name and the power to control their site via the cPanel or Plesk control panels. From either of these interfaces, you can quickly install and set up the WordPress environment in one click at no additional cost. GoDaddy's improved cPanel is configured with CageFS to protect your content and uses CloudLinux to keep your site's resources truly balanced. While you're busy adding content, photos, or products to your WordPress site, GoDaddy ensures that your web pages are loading quickly. More serious WordPress users may prefer to step up to the web host's suite of optimized WordPress hosting plans, which feature an automatically installed SSL certificate, backups, and daily malware scans. Users can create and launch unlimited websites with most of these packages, and you can choose to automatically upgrade your plan as you need extra resources. Even higher up, GoDaddy Pro Managed WordPress Hosting starts site owners with a delightful onboarding experience and one-click migration tool to make it easier than ever to get started. Once you configure your free CDN and built-in caching, you can take advantage of daily backups, automatic core updates, pre-built sites, and a staging environment to ensure your WordPress website is picture perfect.
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★★★★★
When it comes to site-building, hosting.com sets users up with all the tools they need to get a website built, launched, and thriving. The company's own drag-and-drop site builder offers total simplicity for those without coding experience, or users can opt for design tools from Microweber or RapidWeaver. Additionally, the inclusion of the cPanel control panel and Softaculous script library means dozens of other blogging, eCommerce, and content management systems are just a one-click installation away. Hosting.com strives to make these setup processes as simplistic and intuitive as possible, and the company has built optimized plugins to configure each application to its specific infrastructure advantages automatically. While we appreciate the wide range of site builder options, we're a little surprised to see relatively simple website elements, such as a blog, SSL certificate, or eCommerce store, are held out of hosting.com's introductory site builder plan. Upgrading to more expensive plans probably means the company is pricing itself above many first-time site owners' budgets. That being said, we appreciate the company's focus on providing an above-average experience for all types of customers. An emphasis on modern, high-powered hardware is combined with personalized and responsive support to help users learn about how to design, launch, and grow a website.
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★★★★★
GoDaddy uses a custom website builder and easy access to dozens of content management systems to offer a user-friendly site-building solution to customers. Most of GoDaddy's hosting plans include these options at no additional cost. Plus, if you sign up for an annual hosting plan, this world-leading domain name registrar will include a GoDaddy domain for free. The company's Websites + Marketing plans combine the GoDaddy website builder with built-in marketing tools to seamlessly integrate your website, social media, and online reviews to attract the most visitors. Even better, you can get started for free! To unlock the full publishing power, though, plans start around $10 per month. You can save money by signing up for a shared hosting account, which will point you toward easy-to-use content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. You'll still get a lot of options for customizations and one-click installations but not quite the same drag-and-drop simplicity you'll find on most site builders. Regardless of which you choose, the GoDaddy team is working around the clock to ensure your site will remain online and performing speedily while you worry about making your website beautiful and professional-looking. The company's award-winning security team keeps an eye out for downtime, hackers, and other security threats. The end result is their uptime guarantee of 99.9%, which does the job for most users. The bottom line is that you can get started with multiple GoDaddy's website builder options for a dollar or less per month and choose from hundreds of theme options to start designing the site of your dreams.
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