Comments on: The Problems With WordPress Hosting Reviews

By: Franky

Franky — Wed, 20 Jul 2016 06:00:47 +0000

The problem with hosting reviews is that most cater in the space of shared hosting. With shared hosting as a general only two factors decide:
* YMMV: Every hosting company oversells/overbooks. It’s normal, it’s standard, and it is done in pretty much every business sector. Your experience will very much depend on how trimmed down your default config is, whether you know how to increase the memory for your setup, and how many smarter clients like you push the server to its acceptable limit level.
* Customer Service: Pretty much all that matters to be honest. If all above is poor, a good CS team will do miracles and improve anybody’s experience with their services. Also here again… YMMV.

I’ve been with Hostgator for more than 5 years now, also have BlueHost accounts, as well as a bunch of other accounts. As a general rule of thumb… if it ain’t broken, I don’t try to fix it. Unless CS performance becomes abominable often for me the time required to move is too much and too costly to actually bother.

A great, dare I say secret, tip nowadays is to check employee reviews for a company before actually buying services from them. Have a look at the company’s Glassdoor profile and you get a decent insight in what you can expect as Customer Service. A company with poor employee satisfaction will often lack in delivering excellent CS too – not because the reps don’t want to be great but often because their work environment and climate doesn’t allow them to excel as a customer driven employee.

Which in turn will affect the all-encompassing YMMV.

By: Rachel

Rachel — Sat, 23 Jan 2016 21:03:21 +0000

In reply to Alexandra.

Strange! I have been with site5 for many years and simply love them. Anytime I have had questions, concerns or specific requests, they have always replied within 5 to 10 minutes and were always able to fix whatever little bugs came up… And unless GoDaddy, they never ask you to add something extra to your cart or try to have you upgrading to a larger service…

By: LaShonda

LaShonda — Fri, 08 Jan 2016 23:02:54 +0000

I’m late to the party here, but what would you recommend for a personal blog from for a first-timer who is, although young, not *gasp*, at all tech savvy?

By: Laura

Laura — Mon, 14 Dec 2015 05:34:29 +0000

I appreciate not only your knowledge but the great way you have of telling the story! I designed simple (static) websites for small businesses many years ago and back then, I utilized Hostgator. I had no problems with them whatsoever but as the internet changes so, I’ve been checking hosting reviews and have been disappointed in the “catch-all” info I’ve been reading. Your article was a definite breath of fresh air. When designing sites, the best thing I could do for a potential client was to find out exactly what they expected from their website, and recommend accordingly if what they wanted was more than I was willing or able to provide. Now I’d like to design my own site once again. I’m retired and want to blog about my passion in dollhouse miniatures. At some point, I plan to produce tutorial videos and also sell the miniature items I make. Depending on what all is entailed these days, the videos may come sooner than later and I figure I can always resort to YouTube. What direction can you give me? (It may come down to WordPress, YouTube and Etsy.)

By: Alexandra

Alexandra — Fri, 13 Nov 2015 20:51:55 +0000

Site5 = bollocks and rubbish.

They’re like GoDaddy, but w/out any name recognition: Steer clear.

By: Dandelion

Dandelion — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 02:21:18 +0000

Im looking to start an almost blog like website where I post about different health, gardening, and wellness tips, as whole as wholistic and outdoors type of info. I’d also like to be able to sell homemade products that I’ve made (soaps, chapsticks, etc…). I’d like to have my own domain and have the web host be fast, secure, and efficient. Hopefully reasonably priced too as I dont expect to have a huge amount of traffic right now. What do you guys reccomend?

By: Anita Anderson

Anita Anderson — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 01:14:00 +0000

Thank you for such a humorous yet completely truthful take on web hosting reviews. I was one of the ‘ones’ who followed Joost and was breathing fire when 3 out of 3 client sites got attacked and getting follow-up was painful.

By: Kenneth

Kenneth — Wed, 26 Nov 2014 02:37:00 +0000

Hi Ryan,

What would you recommend:

1. a blogger who has both a food blog (with 20GB of photos) and a personal blog with modest space requirements?
2. a blogger with only the personal blog?

By: WP Site Care

WP Site Care — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 03:14:00 +0000

In reply to One Epiphany.

Thanks for chiming in!

I’d look at two different providers. SiteGround, or Pagely. They’ve both been excellent. Pagely doesn’t host email so that’s a consideration to make, but they are on a platform that scales incredibly well, so if you want amazing performance on bleeding edge hardware, Pagely is a great choice.

If you want something that’s a step up from what you have now, but maybe not quite to the level of Pagely as far as infrastructure goes, take a look at SiteGround. We wrote a full review about our experience with them here https://sitecare.com/siteground-wordpress-hosting/

By: One Epiphany

One Epiphany — Tue, 23 Sep 2014 19:52:00 +0000

Hello Ryan, good article. I’m on the hunt for a new host server. I have a small business website that is currently for informational purposes. However, I’d like to have a host that can grow with me as my service-based business grows. Future functionality or features: blog, client/member only area, event calendar, and online payments. Which service provider do you recommend?

Oh, I’ve been debating if having server space so I can “host” website development on my side makes sense. This is versus using the client’s or the vendor/freelance developer. I don’t have too many projects in this area, but I do hope to grow it over time. Thanks in advance.