Best Web Hosting
The Good: Superior reliability, excellent support, and options…many options! They offer shared hosting, virtual private servers, and dedicated servers.
Want to add 1GB of ram without upgrading to the next (tier) package? Maybe you want to upgrade the processor, or add a gigabit uplink port? No problem. Liquid Web offers the best scalability.
The VPS, dedicated servers, and upgrades are competitively priced.
The Bad: Their shared hosting packages are expensive and don’t offer as much as you’d expect at those price points.
The Ugly: Hell, we can’t think of anything. Liquid Web has a solid reputation.
The Good: Host Gator is by far the absolute best in the shared hosting industry. Fully managed servers, fast, reliable, great prices, and the best support we’ve seen. Call, or use the online live-chat feature and get a response within a few minutes.
Host Gator is very fair, and unlike other shared hosting providers, will not bother you over minor issues such as wordpress plugins that command too many queries.
The Bad: Although we’re a fan of their shared hosting, they don’t offer any virtual private servers. They do have dedicated servers available, but the options and scalability are severely limited.
The Ugly: Again, they are the best as far as shared hosting goes, but that doesn’t mean shared hosting doesn’t come with its trade-offs.
Since you’re sharing a server with others, if you go over the resource limit, you’re going to effect everyone on that server. Therefore, they reserve the right to take your site offline and even ban you if you’re causing other sites to slow down.
Host Gator is pretty lenient; allowing you to use up to 25% of server resources for 90 second bursts. Some claim to have had sites with near 100,000 uniques per month running on a Host Gator shared package.
However, large traffic spikes are what you need to worry about. If you’re constantly hitting the front page of Digg, you’re going to want more than shared hosting.
The Good: Awesome control panel, and the ability to do just about everything through the iphone enabled panel. Media Temple offers something that no other provider can at the moment. The ability to handle traffic spikes from sites like Digg, for only $20 a month on their grid service.
The Bad: Going from their $150 a month DV server, the next tier available is the Nitro package, at $750 a month. That’s quite a big jump. Sure they offer ala carte upgrades in between those two packages, but you’ll pay way more than you should for them.
The Ugly: Their grid service experienced a very significant amount of downtime earlier this tear. Many sites were down, and email unavailable for hours (some report days). Everything seems to be under control now, after they upgraded the system.
The Good: Great prices, very reliable, good customer support, and sky-high approval ratings. They offer many packages including hybrid servers, which are a lot cheaper, and even outperform some dedicated servers. Click a button and upgrade your packages instantly.
The Bad: Some upgrade options are limited, but not a big deal for 99.9% of webmasters.
The Ugly: We say “good” support and not “great” because they don’t offer a phone number on their website. All support is handled via email.
Arturo Tena
November 4, 2009