The Best Hosting Providers According To 14 Small Businesses

The Best Hosting Providers According To 14 Small Businesses

More and more people are working with the Internet and their business is vitally dependent on their connection and service features. This is why every serious a business owner needs a quality hosting provider that he/she can trust. The fact that there are thousands of companies offering hosting services is not making the task any easier. This is where we come to help!

It is always better to ask current clients about the qualities of a specific hosting provider than just trusting their ad campaigns. For example, if you are incline to use Hostpapa for your website, make sure to first read some Hostpapa reviews. This is why we asked 14 marketing specialists and company presidents who are dependent on their hosting provider for their personal advice. Their recommendations are valuable and might give you just the information needed to conclude your decision.

What You’ll Learn

  • What is the preferred hosting provider for 14 specialists that depend on that service – we can trust their opinion.
  • What are the best hosting providers globally – we live in a connected world after all.
  • What are the benefits of all offerings – that way you will know which services suit your needs.

What Opinions Did 14 Presidents & Marketing Specialists Share With Us

We used HARO (our guide to this amazing tool) to gather information using just a simple question about the best hosting provider one would recommend.

Best Hosting #1: GoDaddy

David Waring, co-founder of Fit Small Business said:

Godaddy is the best hosting provider because they are stable, easy to use,
inexpensive, and offer great customer support. We can call 24/7 and a
knowledgeable representative is on with us in short order with patient and
informed help. If you have a huge site or are a technical person that wants
to admin your own server they may not be for you, but for everyone else
Godaddy is great.

Best Hosting #2: Atlantic.Net

Dan Roberge, President of Maintenance Care said:

In my opinion, the best hosting provider currently is Atlantic.Net.
They’ve been around since 1994 and they are
industry experts. Aside from their great pricing and customer service,
another factor that sets them apart from a lot of competitors is the fact
that they offer HIPAA-compliant hosting. Since we deal with a
lot of healthcare organizations for our product, there are compliance
issues that arise. Atlantic.Net helps us stay compliant in our day to day
business.

Best Hosting #3: Wix

Edward Thomas, Managing Director of East Devon Automotive Ltd said:

After using three different hosting sites I personally think that Wix is the best hosting provider. Easy to use if you require a hosting only package and their self build templates are excellent. Their hosting management system is a delight and the staff are polite on the very rare occasion you need to get in touch. Overall costs are minimal, bandwidth is excellent. Very impressed with their continued theme developments and will continue to use Wix for the foreseeable future.

For more info, check out this Wix email marketing guide.

Best Hosting #4: WP Engine

Jeremy Schaedler, President of Schaedler Insurance Agency, Inc. said:

Hands down the best hosting provider we have found for our WordPress based
site is Wpengine.com. We have tested out several hosts over the years and
have inevitably switched, usually because our site was either down an
unusual amount of time or it simply would load slow if our server bandwidth
became overloaded.

What makes Wpengine truly exceptional is they continually evolve their
technology to have not just a very fast and stable platform for WordPress
users, but built in security technologies as well. They also have some of
the most knowledgeable and friendly technical support people I have
encountered from any business. As a small business owner, wpengine has
helped us make more money and removed hosting from the long list of items
we need to monitor on a daily basis.

Best Hosting #5: Bluehost

Stephen Gibson, Founder of Vyteo said:

Although they have their shortcomings, the best hosting provider is
Bluehost. Yes, their shared hosting solutions aren’t the snappiest, and
they’re always raising their pricing on existing customers, but they get
the job done for a lot of people. When I have time to migrate to a faster,
more robust, separate virtual machine of my own, I will. But for now
Bluehost keeps my site online and makes setting up databases, deploying
applications, and setting up email addresses easy.

Best Hosting #6: HostGator

Cristian Rennella, VP Marketing & CoFounder of MelhorEmprestimo said:

In the last 9 years, we had 6 different hosting companies, from local to
international companies like AWS.

But at the end of the day, we stayed with HostGator. Why?, Because when we
have a problem they are the only ones who pick up the phone.

Thanks to them we were able to solve problems that helped us save a lot of
money. They are excellent and I recommend them.

Best Hosting #7: PhoenixNAP

Bradley Shaw, CEO  at SEO Expert Brad Inc. said:

Being in the online industry since 1997 I have dealt with more hosts than I
can remember. From my experience, the best host currently is PhoenixNAP.
What sets a host apart in my mind is support, 24/7/365 support. For example,
one of my colocation servers died late on a
holiday weekend. I was immediately able to get support on the phone and
have the failed power supply fixed and back online within 2 hours. Downtime
can be expensive. One missed customer or one missed opportunity could be
six figures in my business.

Best Hosting #8: Prgmr

E. William Horne, Editor at The Telecom Digest said:

Prgmr.com is the best hosting provider I’ve used.
The company gives its customers the freedom to install their own softare,
to be responsible for maintenance and patches, and to act responsibly and
compently without arbitrary rules or restrictions.

Best Hosting #9: SiteGround

David Dietrich, Web Developer at Fair Angle said:

In my opinion the best shared hosting provider is SiteGround. The main
reason for this is their customer service. Not only are they available 24/7
but their agents actually have the knowledge/skill set to help you and
resolve any issues whilst chatting to them.

Because of their customer support, once I have built a website for a
client, I feel comfortable handing over the website to the client, knowing
that if the they do not have the required technical skills they will be
able to get great assistance from Siteground directly.

Best Hosting #10: The One That Suits Your Needs & WP Engine

Marcus Miller, SEO & Digital Marketing Strategist at Bowler Hat said:

The best hosting is always the hosting that is most fit for the task at
hand. If a client is super budget sensitive then a cheap hosting provider
is probably the best as price is the main factor in their decision. For
most businesses who will care about uptime and the speed of their hosting
something a little more professional is suitable.

At my agency, Bowler Hat, we build a lot of WordPress sites and we use WP Engine to host these sites. This hosting
gives us a staging site to make and test edits, fast, robust, resilient
hosting with great security and at a very reasonable price. The hosting is
also fine-tuned for the needs of WordPress – it’s perfect for the majority
of our SME business customers.

Some of our clients need more scalability though and for this cloud
based systems with dynamic scaling are key. So resources scale as needed
and then dial back down.

There is a lot to consider and we cover this in our small business website 
planning guide but the key message here is that the best hosting is the one that fits your
specific needs. Be that speed, scalability or something that fits a
specific CMS or platform.

Best Hosting #11: Amazon/Digital Ocean

Mark Tuchscherer, President of Geeks Chicago said:

We use Amazon Web Services for many of our projects but we also have a lot
of clients that don’t need this level of hosting. For them we only use
Digital Ocean. The pricing, features, and hardware Digital Ocean offers
can’t be beat.

Best Hosting #12: WP Engine Again

Jason Parks, President of The Media Captain said:

We build a lot of sites on WordPress and WP Engine is geared specifically
for WordPress based sites. Especially with e-commerce sites that can have
thousands of pages, this WP Engine keeps the site fast, scalable and
secure.

Best Hosting #13: Elliptical Hosting

Perryn Olson, Marketing Director at My IT said:

I prefer boutique web hosting companies that offer managed hosting solutions like Elliptical Hosting because they take care of everything.
Even with the technical expertise to do it myself, the time I save not trying to configure a website and troubleshooting DNS issues is well worth paying a managed hosting solution a little more each month.

Best Hosting #14: Rackspace

Harrison Doan, Director of Analytics at Saatva said:

Rackspace is by far the best hosting provider we’ve found. Their servers
haven’t once let us down, and the security features are great, so we know
our data is safe. It’s not without flaw, but their support is 24/7, so
we’ve been able to minimize troubleshooting time when issues come up and
instead keep the focus on our business goals.

Summary

Choosing the right hosting provider is a crucial task because more and more businesses depend on their network connection. The options are numerous and this decision can prove to be as hard as it is important. We think that the best approach is to discuss the options with their current clients because this is how you get the real picture.

We used this approach, spoke to 14 marketing specialists and company presidents who gave out various options. They mostly recommend different providers and the single option that is mentioned more than once was WP Engine, but this sounds quite normal if we take into consideration how many WordPress sites we can find out there. The important facts from this survey are why every company chose their hosting provider. That way you might find an answer for your own needs – as easy as that!