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If you're looking for shared hosting plans, the "best choice" is not an easy decision. We all know that a webhost who claims to offer unlimited everything is going to have slow and non-responsive servers. As prices have fallen for VPS and dedicated servers, more and more people are offering space without having the necessary skills or resources to support their customers.
Requirements while choosing a shared hosting company
Test the response time of the support department by sending them a technical question. After the first response, ask another question. The response time should be shorter than 24 hours, even on the weekends if the webhost claims to offer 24x7 support.- Find companies offering SSH access for your hosting account. While most of the hosting features can be handled via a control panel, is the SSH access very useful for advanced tasks like rSync backups, CRON jobs, huge database imports, etc.
- Ask them about file permissions when files are uploaded by your web application. Read further information below (Before you install...).
- A web server is only so good as the network and the data-center were the server is located. Look for redundancy in connectivity, power and storage. Most better hosting services will use load balancing and other optimization techniques.
After you've found a few promising companies, search Google for reviews. Don't believe everything you read, there are some reviews which are not for 100% objective.
How-to recognize good hosting reviews
- Search for "negative" reviews, it's much harder to find them than positive reviews. Again, don't believe everything you read. Quite often, former customers unfairly blame the hosting company for something that was actually the customer's mistake.
- Check the date of a review, it's possible that a good or bad company has optimized their services since the review was written.
- You need to be careful if a review is only about "how great" a company is.
- Most reviews are published using Wordpress or some other blog software, check if there are comments and maybe you can ask your own question too.
- Twitter is also a great source to learn about the quality of a hosting company.
Before your install your website
Write access is required if you need to upload a file or for editing templates files using the CMS or backend. On a poorly configured server you need to raise the file and directory permissions to give the application the required write access. This is a potential risk for your websites or application. After you got the hosting account, check that files have at least 0644 and directories 0755 permissions after a file was uploaded to the server. Don't go further if this is wrong and don't waste any time with that company.
Great hosting companies I've used before
Webfaction - Smarter webhosting
We think Webfaction offers one of the best shared hosting plan we have ever used. They offer fast and secure web hosting with a lot of freedom for an affordable price. With WebFaction you get a shared hosting account with full SSH access to your Linux user account. Run PHP, Django or Rails without extra costs. We hosted several Wordpress sites with them and also some bigger web applications. You will get a hosting account that includes a specific amount of memory reserved just for your use. Their professional shared hosting plans gives you features like a virtual private server, but without the need to manage a server on your own. Most of the features, like the number of databases and websites are unlimited. However, Webfaction will limit the number of sites you host based upon your memory allowance and usage.
The last time I used their services, the control panel was very basic and you need to do a lot of stuff using the command line (SSH). Creating a secondary user for a website is not a job for a beginner. On the other hand, they have a great Wiki and the support team is very helpful. If you're looking for cPanel hosting, you need to look for something else.
MediaLayer Application Hosting
I recently started using MediaLayer. They offer great shared hosting plans featuring Litespeed, SSH access, a DirectAdmin control panel, accelerated PHP 5 and the Percona MySQL Server. Their servers are very fast and stable and they offer some great support too. You can get a hosting account in the USA, the Netherlands or Singapore. They offer a number of starter plans where the smallest one allows only 3 websites and 500MB of web space.
MediaLayer is not a "standard" hosting company, they offer a high-end hosting service but it will cost you more. They offer 3 shared hosting plans that are enough for smaller sites. They are a great webhost for Wordpress sites. However, for larger sites, they will advise you on which of their larger plans would best meet your needs.
If you decide to try WebFaction, you can enter "finalwebsites" as referrer code. It will help us to write more great content and scripts for this website, thanks in advance.
Is shared hosting not the service you're looking for? Check out our cloud hosting review or compare VPS hosting plans.