I know it can be frustrating looking for the best blog Hosting company and seeing nothing but the same bullshit recommendations, even from WordPress.org themselves. I’ve been in the web services industry for over 8 years, and have personally used over 33 web hosting companies to date. To say I’ve experienced some frustrating situations with a ton of web hosting companies, that would make any sane person throw their computer out the window, would be the understatement of the century. In this article, I’m going to help you figure out how to choose the right blog host for you and your budget. There is a lot of nonsense out there, and a ton of these blog hosting review sites are obviously biased toward what makes them the most money, and sponsorship deals directly with the wordpress hosting companies. In this no bullshit blog hosting guide, I’ll explain why you should choose certain blog hosts at different times of your blogging career, and by the end of this article, you’ll easily be able to decide which hosting service is right for you. If you have any questions, ask them in the comments at the bottom of this page.

Cliff Notes – The Top 5 Best Blog Hosting Companies In The World

I’m sure you’ve seen every review site on the planet recommending Bluehost, or maybe even your favorite blogger saying Bluehost is the cat’s meow. Really though, they have a financial incentive to say this, and even though I recommend Bluehost to some beginner bloggers who are on a tight budget, they are far from the best solution for a lot of people. (insider tip: I have a love hate relationship with Bluehost… on one hand, they offer cheap wordpress hosting and are one of the only companies that has native English speaking support techs for phone support, which is hard to find at $5 bucks a month…. And on the other hand, they are notoriously slow as fuck about a year later once your blog starts getting traffic and is making money. I talk about this more here and here.)

The 2 Best Blog Hosting Services For Beginner Bloggers

• Siteground – perfect for beginner bloggers who want fast fast affordable hosting for their WordPress blog
  • Cheap – pricing starts at around $5/mo
  • Fast – one of the fastest shared hosting plans for WordPress you’ll find for the money. Their built in SuperCacher makes it so your blog will be snappy and load fast, without having to configure any complicated caching plugins like W3 Total Cache. If you’re currently with a blog hosting that’s loading slow, you won’t have that problem where.
  • Flexible – I would recommend their VPS service if you start making headway with your blog and need to upgrade… saves you the hassle of having to migrate somewhere else in the future
  • Easy – Automatically installs WordPress for you when you checkout
    • Only Gripe – if you choose the 1 month trial pricing, they charge a setup fee of $14.95. But the Start Up plan is one of the best deals you’ll find @ $3.95 for 12 months for a fast shared hosting plan. I would recommend signing up for 12 months to friends and family with no hesitation.
• Bluehost – good for first time bloggers who want good Native English speaking phone support
  • Inexpensive – standard pricing is $8/mo… Clever Leverage readers get it for $2.99/mo when they’re running a special
  • Good Phone Support – I’ve been surprised on more than one occasion at the level of professionalism over the phone by the support staff… it rivals what I get at LiquidWeb paying $200/mo for a dedicated server, which is hard to find.
    • Gripe 1 – Bluehost is owned by EIG, which is obviously on my shit list. However, it’s pretty damn hard to find 24/7 phone support that’s this good for this price… actually almost impossible. So if you are a newbie blogger that’s going to need a lot of hand-holding and would like to be able to call in and get your issues fixed over the phone, this is probably still the best option for you.
    • Gripe 2 – Notoriously gets slow after a year or so. I talk about why no one explains to you why this happens in this honest Bluehost review, and what to do about it in this WordPress migration tutorial

The #1 Affordable Fastest WordPress Host You’ve Never Heard Of

• Lightning Base – one of the fastest loading WordPress hosts I’ve ever seen for the money
  • Ridiculously quick – uses server side Varnish caching, and will configure Cloudflare with Railgun enabled for you, which means every account is CDN enabled, for faster load times around the globe, not just where you are.
  • Price – You won’t find a faster host for your blog at this price. Highly recommended if you’re on a tight budget and need some speed for your project
  • Support – great support, and Chris the owner really cares about providing a good product to the end user.
    • Gripe 1 – not really a gripe per se, but the reason I don’t recommend Lightning Base to really green beginner bloggers, is because they don’t offer phone support of any kind at all. So unless you’re familiar with opening support tickets and knowing what to ask for, this can be pretty frustrating to not be able to call the company to get help with something.
    • Gripe 2 – email is enabled separately, and isn’t hosted on the main plan. Not a deal killer in any way, and email is still included… you just have to ask for it to be setup.

The Most Reliable Managed WordPress Hosting With 24/7 365 Phone Support

• LiquidWeb – super reliable, personally tested and vetted for many years by me (long time shared (retired), vps, & dedicated customer)
  • Reliability – I put mission critical projects that drive the majority of the revenue for my company on LiquidWeb. If you have a tier 1 project that you need to be able to count on for your business, this is the hosting company for you. No bullshit, good support, excellent phone techs, tier 3 techs, NOC techs by request, they own their own data centers, and nothing is farmed out ever.
  • Speed – not the absolute fastest server side caching setup I’ve ever seen compared to other configs on the Google Cloud Platform, but pretty damn quick compared to the top benchmarked managed WordPress hosts. Would choose LiquidWeb over WPEngine, Flywheel, Pressable, and Synthesis any day of the week.
    • Only Gripe – my only bone to pick here (and I’m still a customer of LiquidWeb btw), is that if you get into a situation where you have high traffic spikes and need a mirrored load balanced server configuration to handle the load, they’re not the best when it comes to setting up complex configurations like that. This is beyond the scope of WordPress hosting, but I’m just sharing my experienced from being a dedicated hosting customer as well, since you’d likely run into the same issue if you’re handling millions of pageviews a month on your blog.

The 2 Best High End WordPress Hosting Companies For Higher Traffic Blogs Making Over $1k/mo

• Kinsta – excellent stack pre-configured on the Google Cloud network to give you everything you need for a high traffic WordPress site
  • Speed – ultra quick
  • Setup – slick setup that’s already deployed for you
• Pantheon –

Good Cheap Blog Hosting Services For The Experienced Blogger Who Doesn’t Mind Admin Responsibilities

Some of us just want a good cheap blog host, that has low overhead and snappy performance. But we all know that good and cheap don’t usually go in the same sentence without some kind of compromise right? In this case, the compromise is support. The below blog hosting options offer great performance, but limited support (if any in some caeses). These ARE NOT a good fit for newbies, but for a blogger specifically looking for specialized WordPress hosting running a specific stack, these would be good options to look into if you want things like NGINX, Varnish, Redis, Opcode Cache, Fast CGI, etc…

• Cloudways – awesome flexibility in account deployment on multiple platforms
  • Flexibility – I love the fact that you can deploy on Vultr or Digital Ocean, and run whichever config you prefer at the time.
• Linode –
• EasyEngine.oi – you can use this simple install script to automatically deploy a preconfigured wordpress install on any cloud hosting provider of your choice. (note – you won’t have a control panel by default, this is only for the cms end)

How To Know Where To Host A Blog Without Getting Ripped Off

I know a lot of bloggers are telling you a lot of different things, and everywhere you look all you see is a bunch of horseshit reviews telling you to “sign up to Bluehost at my exclusive deal for our readers”…. But the truth is, Bluehost emails all of us with that same exact offer, in an effort to try and gain more market share. Sure, they’re a great fit for super green bloggers that have never setup a blog before, but they’re an awful choice for the guy or gal who’s making a couple hundred bucks a month from their blog, and keep having issues with the admin loading slows, or visitors complaining that the comment system won’t load, etc…

I’m going to add a cliff notes section to the top of this post, so it’ll make figuring out which blog host you should use a little easier… and without reading through a long ass article that contains more information about hosting companies than you ever cared to know. 😉

The Bottom Line – How To Choose A Blog Host For Your Blog

There are really only three things that matter when it comes to hosting your blog, and it boils down to how much blog income are you generating, how much traffic do you need to handle, and how tech savvy are you determines how much support you’ll need.

Blog Income

Traffic

Support

Most of the blog hosting reviews you see out on the web, should really be recommending blog hosts to you based on your budget, nothing more. Case in point: there’s no reason for a brand new blogger to go out and spend $50/mo on a super fast VPS account just to host a single WordPress install that no one is currently reading. (meaning you’ll have zero traffic when you start out)

You would be much better off to save that extra expense, and apply it toward some blogging tools that will help you grow your blog faster, or maybe even toward a course that will expedite your learning cure and teach you what you need to learn even faster.

Point being, the right blog host for you is going to be determined by where you’re at on your journey. There is no one size fits all “best blog hosting for everyone” company like most people portray. There’s a good fit for every part of the cycle of your blogging journey, and below I’ll give you the cliff notes on how I would tell friends and family which company to use if I were in their shoes.

If You’ve Never Had A Blog Before, But Would Like To Start One Today – Pick One Of These WordPress Hosting Companies

If You’re Making Zero Dollars From Your Blog, But Have Social Traffic You Need To Support In An Effort To Make Monet – Choose These Blog Hosting Companies

If You’re Making $100/mo From Your Blog, And Are Tired Of WordPress Loading Slow – Try These Blog Hosts With Built In Caching

If You’re Making $500/mo From Your Blog And Have Over 10k Pageviews A Month – Use These Blog Hosting Services

How To Find A Reliable Host For Your Blog

Don’t fall for the scams out there… if it seems to good to be true, it probably is. (I’m talking about these stupid ads that promise you world class blog hosting for $1 dollar a month… come on!!!)

Stay with the big reputable names, and avoid the below web hosting companies at all costs. These are the companies that have either lost my websites, been hacked due to poor security measures, or have improperly billed me or not allowed me to cancel.

STAY AWAY WITH A 10 FOOT POLE!!! – List Of Bad Hosting Companies

• Namecheap – great for affordable domain names, awful choice for web hosting. Slow, lack of security, cpanel accounts hacked, injected malicious script into my wordpress admin. Won’t use again for anything other than domain names.
• Godaddy – poor security, server side account hack, websites lost completely without local backup… no notification, support sucked when trying to figure out what happened to my sites.
• A Small Orange (ASO) – went offline for days with no notifications. Even their cloud hosting didn’t reboot, and is not redundant at all. Lost a bunch of revenue because this host sucks donkey balls.
• Arvixe – terrible, terrible, terrible. Oversold, slow, awful for everyone.
• Site5 – same as Arvixe.
• 1&1 – some people love this company for domain names, but I absolutely hate them because their cancellation process is absolutely insane… they keep charging you after you cancel something, especially if you don’t follow their “cancellation policy” to a T.
• Hostagator – raised my monthly price to $11.95/mo without upgrading service in any way. Forced to buy Sitelock, which is a bullshit upsell service they use to extort more money from hosting clients.

A Warning About Free Blog Hosting Sites (if you want to make any money with your blog)

A lot of people ask about starting a blog with no investment, but with the intention to make money. This is counter-intuitive to me, and I’ve never understood why someone wouldn’t want to pay the price of a hamburger or a coffee for a month of blog hosting. It’s literally the cheapest thing you could ever start.

But I digress. The answer is as you would guess… yes, there are tons of companies that offer free blog hosting for your wordpress site. The problem with most of them, is that they make money off of you in some way or another… think about it… who is going to pay for YOU to have a blog, without it benefiting them in some way? No one in their right mind, that’s who!

Most blogging sites that are free blogs, either run ads on your behalf, or simply use user generated content to grow their asset. Neither of which is good for you long term. Sure, if you just want to have a hobby blog you screw around with for shits and giggles, go for it. But for the people asking which blog hosting sites to use if you want to make money from your blog? No way in hell!

You need to own your asset that you’re going to put time, effort, and money into. The only way to do that is get your own domain name and blog hosting. I would never, and I mean never as in NOT IN A MILLION YEARS, ever use WordPress.com’s free blog service on a subdomain for anything I wanted to succeed. (you would be reading this on cleverleverage.wordpress.com instead of cleverleverage.com if that was the case!)

There are cases of people who have started a free blog on platforms like Blogger, Tumblr, and WordPress.com, but why would you want to gro through the hassle of having to import your content to another platform later on… just to save $3 bucks a month? Give me a break with this advice being thrown around out on the web already!!!

User questions I still need to answer:

• What’s the best hosting service for wordpress blogs if you’ve never started one before? I don’t have a lot of money
• Is Bluehost the best blog hosting for photographers? I want to be able to upload my portfolio which is big
• Is there a go-to best blog hosting platform for beginners you recommend? Cheap??
• Which are the best blog hosting providers for bloggers already making money Matt?
• What’s the best blog hosting company to use in order to make money form your blog?
• Can I just use a free blog host like blogger? (note – issue A Warning About free blog hosting sites)
• (note – kind of already answered, but I think she was talking about joomla vs wordpress)  What are your top 5 blog hosting sites for making money? Thanks!

Guys I’m still updating this post to add all the extra stuff I said I would. This is going to be the new url where I put everything since there are so many questions about finding a good blog host. If you have other questions I missed or skipped over accidentally, ask them in the comments below on this page and I’ll add them to the queue…

The post The Top 3 Best Blog Hosting Companies In The World appeared first on CleverLeverage.com.