Choosing a hosting provider requires an understanding of your resource needs and estimated traffic. Additionally, making sure that you have a service that provides excellent customer service and competent support teams ensures an efficient and trouble-free web hosting environment. The cheapest hosts generally cut corners by severely limiting server performance or stacking large amounts of users on a single server.
GoDaddy is popular for their Danica Patrick commercials, and always have a godaddy promo code to drop the price, but they tend to overstock their servers and site speed can fluctuate greatly depending on the time of day. So while they work for many users, they might not fit your needs. Here is a list of solid companies, that should be able to fill just about any hosting need you have.
Related: Choosing a domain name
Hostgator: Most Reliable Service
Hostgator provides users with some of the best customer service in the industry. Plans range from shared hosting to fully managed dedicated servers. With shared hosting plans, limits are often placed on maximum concurrent connections and bandwidth. Hostgator provides users with 25 maximum concurrent connections, which provides enough resources to run intensive applications such as Joomla, Moodle, Drupal, WordPress and other applications.
FatCow: Best Value Hosting
FatCow web hosting offers two simple plans for people who have simple websites that don’t need large amounts of resources. Beginners and users that don’t need high-performance individually customized servers benefit from the simple and extremely affordable web hosting platform FatCow offers. Two web hosting services are offered: parking and hosting. The hosting package provides enough bandwidth and disk space for most hobbyists, beginners and those that host static web pages. Parking a domain allows you to park your domain or open a domain without posting content and provides the user with branded email services.
Amazon Web Hosting: Best Cloud Services
Amazon Web Hosting provides cloud-based hosting services. The plans can get expensive, but the user only pays for the actual time that the host stays online. Cloud hosting provides incredible security, reliability and provides extreme data protection. Cloud servers are extremely scalable and provide users with maximum resources to ensure that all applications work seamlessly. One disadvantage to cloud hosting involves the setup process. Website owners need to have a good understanding of how to set up a website from scratch. Cloud servers also fail to provide options to control firewall settings and are not always the best choice for owners that need complete control of their security settings.