DinDesign's Guide to Website Hosting

Posted on:January 21, 2023 at 05:17 AM

For every web design project you will need two things always. A domain name & website hosting.

We will cover both in this guide. Domains are more straight forward while hosting can be a little more complex. If you are looking for the guide to websites you can find it here.

What follows is an in depth analysis of multiple web hosting providers to find the best service among them. If you would like to skip to our web hosting company recommendations please check here!

Table of Contents

Open Table of Contents

Introduction

When considering hosting, you should ask yourself and your web developer these crucial questions. Even if your hosting is not coming through your web developer, they will likely be knowledgeable in this area and able to help answer any questions you may have and get everything set up.

  1. Are the servers fast?
  2. Is the hosting company reliable and recommended by independent reviewers, and do they have happy customers?
  3. Do they offer automatic backups?
  4. Will the hosting server be in a similar area to my target audience?

Keep in mind that this is a very competitive industry with narrow margins & cut throat competition that leads to some less than pristine business practices. Many untrustworthy providers may appear to be professional but behind a sleek-looking website you may find a cheap & useless service.

Domains

What is a domain name

If you read the section on what a website is (if not you should!) you probably already have an idea of what a domain name is. But for clarity I will explain:

A domain name is simply your website address. It allows people to find your site, just like your address allows people to find your house or office. Examples include fiverr.com, google.com, etc

How to choose a good domain name

Choosing the right domain name for your company is so important — ultimately, it’s how your audience will find and remember you.

It’s like choosing the right location for your in person store. If you pick something out of the way & hard to remember no one will visit your site.

However, I warn you. Almost all good short domain names are taken. Some are in use, others are sold for thousands… So it might take quite some hours of work to find one that you like and doesn’t break the bank.

Here are some important tips so you can purchase the best domain possible:

1. If possible use a .com extension.

Its the best domain extension for SEO & trust. However, it might be hard to find the name you want in which case you might be forced to compromise.

The following domain extensions are also acceptable as a second choice:

2. Keep it short and simple.

If your domain name is long, it’ll be harder for people to remember, which could spell out less traffic for you. 6-14 characters in length is ideal.

3. Avoid hyphens, numbers, and doubled letters.

Each of these elements is another hurdle for users to attempt to jump just to access your website.

4. Stay unique, specific,and on-brand.

The worst experience a potential customer can have is to get introduced to your brand through some other means, enter your website & see that there is no brand cohesiveness. I am sure you have felt it before. Also, be careful with the domain name, you never want to be the guy that named his business Analtech

5. Ensure it is memorable

This will enhance the word of mouth & decrease the friction necessary for someone to go into your website & purchase your product, service…

6. Add keywords (if posible)

Without going overboard — remember, we want something short and sweet here — do some keyword research to help direct your domain name.

When you hone into keywords, you’ll also benefit from an SEO boost from your domain name and your brand. As you brainstorm keywords, look for options with low- to medium- competition so you have a chance to rank, and make sure the keywords will reflect your brand.

Best domain name providers

There is very little difference between domain name providers. Due to legislation, they all must provide similar domain services. Therefore it really doesn’t matter who you choose, except for the price. Generally speaking a better hosting provider will charge you a little more for the domain than normal. However, this is not a problem because if you want to save those extra few bucks you can just purchase the domain a cheaper site and use it with your hosting (You must point the domain to your hosting provider first but this is not too difficult).

So what provider do I recommend? Depends on your case:

You don’t mind paying around 18$/year instead of 9$ or 10$ to have everything in one place?

Purchase the domain with your hosting.

Want to have the cheapest long term domain service?

Go with Cloudflare they work mostly with big companies but just rolled out domain registration and they charge the lowest rates (because they make 0 profit on each domain sold)

want to get the cheapest domain possible for the few years?

Go with ionos they have a great offer for new customers I have used many times which is first year of any domain at 1$ (I know incredible right!). Afterwards they are a little more expensive than cloudflare but not that much.

Hosting

What is Website Hosting

If you read the section on what is a website (if not you should!) you probably already have an idea of what a website hosting is.

Just like when you build an office you have to rent a room or apartment for it, when you build a website you have to rent a server or a part of a server. If the domain name is your address, the server is the actual building where your website lives.

What makes “good” hosting?

Your website’s performance hinges on a fundamental factor: web hosting. But what truly defines “good” hosting? Let me unravel the intricacies of this critical aspect of your website design project.

Speed

In the fast-paced digital landscape, speed reigns supreme. A good hosting service ensures that your website loads swiftly, captivating your audience from the very first click. Rapid loading times enhance user experience and keep visitors engaged, contributing to lower bounce rates and higher conversions. It is very difficult to find out which is the fastest hosting provider (which is why we did a test, you can find more about it later). Good things to look out for are: ssd or nvme storage drives which help the server be faster.

99.9% Availability

Imagine your website as a 24/7 storefront in the global marketplace. Good hosting guarantees an impressive 99.9% uptime, ensuring your site remains accessible around the clock. Downtime spells missed opportunities and frustrated visitors, making unwavering availability a cornerstone of reliable hosting. For reference that means your website will be down 1h per year (generally during the night so it doesn’t impact your visitors).

Customer Support

Navigating the intricacies of hosting can be daunting. That is why customer support is so important. Whether you’re a tech-savvy guru or a digital novice, responsive and knowledgeable support can swiftly resolve issues, offering peace of mind and keeping your website running smoothly. If you purchase good web hosting, when you, inevitably, have an issue at 10pm it’ll be resolved by 12 and you may go to bed. If not, your site might end up down for an entire day…

Good Customer Portal

Managing your hosting shouldn’t feel like deciphering an ancient script. A user-friendly customer portal empowers you to take the reins effortlessly. From domain management to account settings, an intuitive interface is the compass guiding you through the labyrinth of hosting intricacies.

Hosting Location

Although you can access a site that is anywhere in the world, physical distance matters. A hosting location close to your target audience minimizes latency, ensuring swift data delivery and fast website loading times. Whether you’re catering to local markets or a global audience, proximity lays the foundation for a seamless user experience.

Storage Capacity: Debunking the “Unlimited” Mirage

Many hosting companies will offer you “Unlimited Storage” whilst this might be true, in practice, it is not. They will grant you unlimited storage on the hard drives, HDD, SSD, or NVME, but you will be restricted through the number of files you can upload into the drives… this may be 150,000, 200,000, or 600,000, but you will quickly fill up those files if you were thinking to add lots and lots of websites.

Large Sites can take up between 3GB and 10GB of space. The backups of your website will take up room, but you can keep these on a cloud drive to cut your need for hosting space; this will allow you to be safer as the backup will not be in the same location as the website.

You will need to ensure you have enough space for your website and plenty of space to allow it to function correctly.

What are the best hosting providers? There are so many that it is hard to decide and to know which is best.

That is why we aimed to find out the best hosting providers there is, not through marketing or listening to customers but through our own experience and more importantly, through testing.

So we took every single reputable web hosting provider we could get our hands on and uploaded the same website to each. Afterwards we tested their speeds. And these are the results.

Hosting Services Speed Comparison

There is actually another web hosting provider that is missing here. Our friends at Ridaly Hosting (we actually offer you a huge discount on our services if you choose them). They are tied with A2Hosting on our tests, but they are a newer hosting, formed after this image was taken (I’ll get around to updating the image at some point).

Anyway, SiteGround, which I had used for many years and is recommended by many, is actually the slowest web hosting. Can you believe it?

So after all this what do we recommend? Well, here are the options:

Ridaly Hosting

You can get insane discounts on our services if you choose them due to our partnership!

They are the fastest with a2hosting & also provide some really cool support for WordPress Premium Plugins (They purchase large packages of premium WordPress plugins and either give them away to customers or resell them on the cheap).

However, they are a newer web hosting and still don’t have cpanel access or other common hosting provider utilities. But, if you don’t plan on touching the server (which really you shouldn’t if you don’t know what you are doing) this is not too much of a downside.

A2hosting

The same as Ridaly except without the perks. But they are a much more established website hosting provider so you can expect all the common services such as cpanel login, etc. Their prices are a little high but its well worth it.

Siteground

Yes we still recommend SiteGround. Please don’t try to kill me. Let me explain.

It’s the slowest hosting service BUT in my experience the best support. So, if you don’t care about your website’s speed (which would generally be a mistake in my book) but want the best customer service on the market. Go with siteground

The other top hosts

You can try them they can work fine.

Hosting to avoid

GoDaddy

They have fantastic marketing! But not much else 🙃 They had a data breach of over 1.2 million customers’ emails, admin passwords, SSL private keys, and FTP account details. Bit of a disaster really…

Their hosting is not fantastic, and they have been known to stack old servers with lots of accounts, bringing down the performance of all the sites there.

Namecheap

This is another similar case to GoDaddy, they have good marketing. And are a fine provider for domain names. But for hosting, I would recommend you avoid them. They have had their emails hacked & used for phishing attacks & are generally not the best.

Hostgator

Honestly, this servers are so slow, even editing a simple WordPress website is a pain. I really dislike this host.

WordPress.com

Unnecessarily expensive and restrictive. They offer managed hosting and run everything through a layer of their own creation which can often cause confusion for people as there are essentially two systems to access everything. They also force you to run several unnecessary plugins, which are their own products. They do have good support who will do almost everything for you, so if you don’t want any responsibility for your website you can check them out.