3 Hosting Great Options for Beginners
The backbone of every good website, from Amazon to your favourite blog, is a good hosting server. So it seems pertinent that you do some research before deciding on one. The process of finding a hosting provider can be a daunting one though. With so many names on the market, how are you going to narrow down your choice?
I’m here to share with you the 3 best web hosting providers for beginners. I’ll be taking a look at their starter packages and putting them through our performance test.
This performance test measures server uptime and average response time (in milliseconds). For uptime, we are looking for at least 99%. For response time, below 250ms is great, and 250ms-500ms is acceptable. After that I would be concerned as it will impact your SEO and bounce rate.
Hostinger
First up is Hostinger which is a great option for beginners. Their basic plan, the ‘Single Shared Hosting’ is a great start. It provides you with ample storage space, a domain email, and a free SSL certificate.
Also, their customer service is one of the best in the industry and they are available 24/7, 365 days a year.
They have a very beginner friendly hosting dashboard. One thing to note is they use an ‘hPanel’ instead of a traditional cpanel. For a beginner both of those would be new to you, meaning it won’t matter much. But for someone experienced with Cpanel, it is worth taking note of.
The prices for their hosting packages are among the lowest in the industry, starting at $0.99 per month. Even after this affordable promo price, the renewal rate is very low compared to their peers.
It is not just a low price point that makes Hostinger an attractive option. They provided 100% server uptime during our one month test. This means that our server was always available and operational.
For response speed, Hostinger servers are also quite fast. The average server response time was 256ms.
Bluehost
Next up on our list is Bluehost,
another well known hosting provider. Bluehost has been around since 2003, and pride themselves on providing valuable tools to their customers.
Their basic shared hosting plan starts at $2.99 and is a great choice for beginners. You receive a large amount of SSD storage space, a free domain for the year, and an SSL certificate. They may not be the cheapest provider, but they certainly give you a good amount of value for the price.
Just like Hostinger, Bluehost provides around the clock customer service. In my personal opinion, I found that not all support team members were very knowledgeable in regards to handling my problem.
In terms of their backend, Bluehost uses a custom dashboard. This dashboard is easy to use and to learn. They also provide more experienced users with the option of using Cpanel. Options are always a good thing.
Their uptime was 99.98%, as it went down momentarily on a single day. A slight downtime is almost always unavoidable.
Additionally, we found the average response time to be 487ms. I would consider this good, certainly not great though.
Dreamhost
The final option we are going to be talking about is Dreamhost.
Dreamhost has a few different hosting plans, but their WordPress hosting and shared starter plans are the most popular ones by far. Both of these plans start at $2.59 per month.
Both of these packages offer the same features. They give you everything you need to get started, including a domain name, SSD storage, and a free SSL certificate. One important thing to note is, they don’t provide you with a free email. The other listed providers give you a free email address.
If you peruse through their website you will see that they guarantee 100% uptime. We were happy to find out that our servers did have 100% uptime during our month long test.
However, this came with a price. The average response time for Dreamhost was significantly slower than the other 2 providers. It had an average response time of 627ms.
One last comment to make on Dreamhost is this. While they offer fair plans and their custom control panel is very straight forward, the customer support can be a hassle to reach.
Conclusion
If you have a website idea in mind, the first step to making it a reality is getting a hosting package. In this article we have highlighted our 3 favourites, but don’t limit your search to these 3. We do encourage you to remember the factors we were looking at in this article though. Always check to see what is provided in the hosting plan. The important factors to us are: cost, dashboard, server uptime, response time, and the customer support teams. As a benchmark for your search, I would encourage you to compare other packages to that of Hostinger.
