Ok, I’ve spent a decade moving between hosting companies. Basically the answer is “they all suck”. I’ve not found a hosting company that offers WordPress hosting without something about there support that fails. Lets go through them all:
Recommendations:
For the average small business with multiple websites
**A2Hosting is currently our primary recommendation. We have had clients successfully host sites with them for 12 months with only a few minor issues quickly fixed by the support team.
http://kahunahost.com/packages/ $50 a month package would likely meet our needs. Only 10 domains, but most our domains are sub-domains. Why? http://yoast.com/synthesis-managed-wordpress-hosting/
https://www.zippykid.com/pricing/ – several people have recommended them to me. This is mix of Rackspace quality network and zippykid configured (and managed) cloud servers. Managed hosting is naturally more expensive, but starts at $70… not sure how they consider subdomains.
http://www.dreamhost.com/web-hosting/ – $9 a month… I know it seems like its too cheap to be any good but I’ve not had a person who used it give a bad review…seems like a great savings of money with options to upgrade to VPS/Dedicated if shared doesn’t provide enough resources for our websites.
Pitfalls
- Bluehost (Downtime excessive, missleading “ulimited” is VERY limiting, make sure you buy sucuri.net for security supplement)– for the longest time this company offered no reseller, VPS, or dedicated servers. Now they do, but support is horrible. They have so few support agents that it takes 10-30 minutes to get a chat agent on and then they most often have to transfer you to a different tech, and if its not something basic (that I could fix myself) you have to create a ticket. Tickets take between 20 hours and 4 days to get a response, and sometimes the response is garbage, leave you out in the cold for another 4 days. We also had a horrible time with getting hacked through their shared hosting WHM/cPanel security vulnerabilities.
- WPEngine (No backup buddy 🙁 otherwise a win) – no reseller functionality, limits you based on plugins “they allow”, you might as well host with WordPress.com and save the $30 a month. Backupbuddy fails to work forcing you to use WPEngine backups…see the issues of relying on host services backups in the “A Small Orange” review.
- Page.ly – hacks core, limits plugins, expensive… who wants to host their WordPress on a version that is not even official? Same price as WPEngine but far fewer features. They do use Firehost which is a BIG plus… but too many downsides to hosting with Page.ly for a developer to be comfortable here.
- MediaTemple (FAIL) – No good! No support… after trying to get them to help me with permissions issues on their server 3 times, I finally gave up. Everytime they blamed WordPress, but I migrated the same site to another host and NO ISSUES! The control panel offers a lot to be desired, no file editor, no reseller control. Like Dreamhost, needs some features before we can even attempt trying their hosting.
- Site5.com (FAIL) – Sales techs clearly don’t know capabilities of the servers. I asked if it supported Apache ASP, they said yes, then came back and said no. Asked of SOAP and PHP mod_headers was support, they answered yes, but then they have disabled the ability to view/print header information, making development impossible… Cloud hosting gives us a similar environment to Rackspace Cloudsites except site5 knows WordPress. They sponsor most WordPress events. I’ve met these guys, a good crew, they just need to get their crap together.
- Rackspace (Cloudsites FAIL, VPS Managed is a win but over $150 a month) – expensive wow, $150/month just to get get started. Had tons of issues with PHP/xcache config, support is slow and answers are horrible. Then they fixed the xcache issue but never told us. I found out through a random blog post. FTP permissions issues galore. Their “solution” is to create a sub-account for every domain we add… horrible solution. Rackspace DNS and Rackspace Files in the cloud are actually fantastic tools, I highly recommend them. Would also like to try out their VPS hosting at some point. All in all I consider Rackspace to be “one of the best” of these horrible hosting options.
- One&One: lots of marketing, makes you feel like a big company with big service. Their hosting platform fails on all counts of service, hardware, and functionality.
- Godaddy – lets just say, yes, it really is as bad as everyone says it is. No cPanel, Godaddy Control panel sucks, everything on Godaddy.com loads slow as hell, setting up FTP accounts often fails, when it does work takes hours, MySQL setups take hours, latency of website loading is horrible, configuration issues with certain PHP functions required to run your favorite WordPress plugins… need I go on? I could but I won’t.
- Dreamhost – no cPanel, hard to move hosting accounts in and out because of this, no File Manager requires FTP to edit files (very challenging from say an iPad or cell phone). Besides that, our experience was actually pretty good. Wish they would enhance their control panel so we could actually give their hosting a college try.
- HostGator – VPS = fail, this is definately not a managed service as they won’t really help fix anything. Support techs (over 400 now) may know as little as you or be experts, you have to get lucky to find somebody that can help (wasting lots of your time trying to get help), simple things like “cpanel errors” take weeks/months to fix, time to first byte is horrible. Service Uptime low around 95%.
- A Small Orange – first 4 months of hosting, uptime was really low around 90%, sometimes down for days at a time. They finally fixed their network issues only for me to run into an array of cPanel errors. Then the final straw, their backups are “not guaranteed”, not even when you pay them $150 a month for hosting, which is when sethmatics.com lost 1 year of images due to the WordPress uploads folder vanishing from the server and they offered no backup because THEY did not notice the “kernal was causing an issue with R1Soft backups”.
- Namecheap hosting – we buy all our domains from namecheap, but their hosting solutions are still horrible. I won’t go into detail, just don’t try hosting with a registrar company.
- VPS.net – these guys are trying to “do everything” at the same time. As such your product/service you end up with will be “half assed” in my opinion. We prepaid for some hosting, tried like 3 different solutions all which failed for one reason or another, ended up just leaving our $100 credit on the platform never to be used… oh well.
- Webnethosting.com – (FAIL)
Sales rep requested 48 hours to provision and setup our cloud VPS. While that seemed like a long time for a VPS, I agreed. I ordered on Friday, and on Monday, there was still nothing. Then I received information that Monday they started working on it. It took all day monday to simply provision our VPS… not a good sign. — Next the ticket was responded to saying that the VPS install was complete. However after trying for 10 mintues to access my VPS at the IP address listed in my billing account, I could not access anything. I called in to find out… he was still working on the setup! Wow, scary, so the ticket was a lie, it was not setup. He did finally keep me informed of the progress and late afternoon Monday we finally had a standard VPS with WHM. However, the ticket CLEARLY asked for an SSL certificate to be installed. The ticket response was that the SSL was installed… it was not, yet another lie. — Finally, at end of day yesterday I emailed a support ticket in simply to test the responsiveness of your support department. The ticket was a legitimate ticket, asking why the SSL certificate was in fact, no installed. I did not get a response until today. Clearly you are not setup to properly host a businesses VPS.
Some reviews on hosts we haven’t actually tried yet:
- Linode – looks very interesting, pricing is good for VPS, however basically requires a full time Linux System Admin to manage your hosting here. DNS manager also looks cool. Disc images looks awesome for duplication and backup as well as balancing between multiple nodes.
- websynthesis.com – Synthesis hosting… looks interesting. Managed services provider like WPEngine and Page.ly. We want to try them but don’t see a trial and have never been offered a chance preview their hosting. Their features page looks very nice. If the truly offer and service everything listed, I would think this would be a great place to host your website. No reseller hosting here though, which means service providers like Sethmatics will never move to them.
Got a company we haven’t seen yet? Feel free to contact us. Better yet, if your a hosting company and think your the perfect fit for WordPress? Tell us why and give us a trial, we will get the real story out. Better yet, support your local WordPress conference!
A great resource for learning the “types of hosting” you can find, which should help you determine which kind of hosting to look for at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_hosting_service.