Room: Dedicated

HostGator – rugge

HostGator Introduction

HostGator is an American hosting company founded in Florida in 2002. It has two offices in Texas in the USA, and two additional offices in Brazil. HostGator was independently owned until 2012, when it was sold to the Endurance International Group. The CEO prior to the acquisition was Brent Oxley, who still owns some of the buildings that the company operates out of.

HostGator has always been about low prices and generous resources, and it offers every type of web hosting that a business is likely to need. In 2013, HostGator passed a new milestone: 400,000 active customers, and still growing.

HostGator Package Details

HostGator offers shared, cloud, reseller, VPS, and dedicated hosting. It also markets cloud packages, special application hosting, and plans for Windows. This huge catalog of different hosting types ensures that it’s got a service to suit pretty much any use case or website.

The top two shared hosting plans run on Linux servers and offer unlimited bandwidth and space, within fair usage guidelines. The lowest cost plan is limited to a single domain, and is most suited for people who only want to host one site, or need a shared hosting account just to learn the basics. There’s also a cloud version of shared hosting which is slightly more expensive, but HostGator promises better speed and more generous resources on its cloud plans, so they are worth considering for growing businesses. Additionally, HostGator sells two shared hosting packages on Windows servers with similar specs to the Linux plans.

If you simply want to run a WordPress blog, its WordPress cloud hosting is probably more suitable. You can install one, two, or three WordPress websites, depending on the package you choose, and HostGator provides free migration from your old provider.

Reseller hosting is not a cloud package, but includes unmetered resources and cPanel. You can set up private nameservers so that your reseller business presents a fully branded image to its customers.

VPS and dedicated servers offer good value for the money at HostGator. If you need a VPS, there are fully managed and semi-managed options. Dedicated servers are managed, with a choice of CentOS Linux or Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2.

HostGator’s Control Panel

If a control panel is provided with your HostGator account, it’ll likely be cPanel on Linux, or Plesk on Windows. Cloud hosting plans include a proprietary dashboard instead.

If you’re used to using something like cPanel, note that semi-managed VPS hosting doesn’t include a control panel at all. You could install one yourself, if you know what you’re doing, but there won’t be any control panel out of the box. You should only opt for this kind of plan if you know your way around a Linux server without assistance.

HostGator Infrastructure

HostGator’s datacenters are split over two states. Some are located close to its offices in Houston, Texas at CyrusOne West. The Houston facility is located 20 minutes from downtown in a cluster of three facilities. The host also has servers in the Ace Data Centers facility in Provo, Utah, which has multiple Tier 1 and Tier II carriers.

HostGator does not allow customers to choose the datacenter used for their websites, and it does not allow customers to switch datacenters. In hosting terms, its facilities are relatively close together, and will offer the best speeds to customers located in North America. Its CDN service may help to improve speeds if you are further away.

Technical Support

HostGator provides support via live chat and phone. It doesn’t disclose the physical location of its support team. HostGator’s busy forum is a useful resource if you need to look up FAQs or see comments from other customers.

Support is provided 24/7, 365 days a year, so you should never have an issue getting hold of someone if you have a question or problem. If you prefer to write your queries in an email, it has a full ticket system for this purpose.

Uptime and Money-Back Promises

HostGator runs a 45-day money-back guarantee offer, and this applies to shared, reseller, and VPS hosting accounts. To be eligible, you must not have paid by check, money order, or bank wire, and you must cancel by filling out the correct form.

Its uptime guarantee is 99.9% on shared and reseller accounts. HostGator’s Terms of Service document says that downtime “may” result in a credit of one month’s service, although it isn’t exactly clear whether there are incremental credits or one blanket credit. Dedicated servers have a separate network uptime guarantee, which is detailed elsewhere on the site.

Summary

HostGator is one of the world’s biggest hosting brands, known for its massive scale of operations, and broad range of hosting services. HostGator really excels in offering unmetered resource on low-cost plans, but take care to get a managed solution if you aren’t technically proficient. Some of HostGator’s competitors allow customers to choose a datacenter, and this is one area where HostGator could probably do more for its non-US customers. But if you just want solid all-round hosting from a very well known brand, HostGator will give your site, and your business, room to grow.

Pricing

Shared Hosting

hostgator shared pricing

WPEngine – rugge

WP Engine Introduction

WP Engine is a relatively young hosting company, founded in 2010. It’s based out of Austin, Texas, and it was started by Jason Cohen. He now serves as the company’s CTO.

The company offers managed hosting plans for any number of WordPress installs.

WP Engine Plans

WP Engine’s pricing model is slightly different to competing shared hosting providers. It’s based on a combination of factors: the number of WordPress instances, the number of visits per month, and the amount of disk space you need. All plans, except the Premium and Dedicated packages, are based on a shared hosting infrastructure in a Xen virtualized environment.

The Personal plan covers one install, the Professional plan lets you create 10, and the Business plan has capacity for 25. If you need more than 26 installs, WP Engine will discuss a custom pricing for its Premium or Enterprise plans. A CDN is included with all plans except the Personal tier.

These plans assume that your usage is average for the size of your site. If you experience a traffic spike, or your site is very popular, you may need to pay more for additional monthly visits. WP Engine says that one IP address in one 24-hour period is a “unique” visit, and that’s how your bills are calculated. Bandwidth on all plans is unmetered. You won’t get a traditional control panel like cPanel, and there’s no root or SSH access. Instead, you get a web dashboard with access to account controls and phpMyAdmin.

WordPress Features

Because WP Engine is a WordPress-only host, it’s able to offer specialized hosting features that are not always offered by rival hosts. It provides extra control and a degree of automation, without changing the experience for your visitors.

WP Engine gives you a tool to create snapshot backups, which is handy when trying a new plugin or theme. WP Engine also takes its own daily backups, and adds its own menus to the WordPress admin section. All plans include the ability to spawn a staging site, so you can work on a clone of your live site, and then set the clone live if you’re happy with the changes. This avoids messing up your live site if you’re testing something out.

The dashboard supports transferable installs, so you can move a finished site to someone else’s account. This feature is designed for web developers who need to push completed sites to their clients’ WP Engine accounts.

WP Engine does not provide free migrations with new signups, but it does have an automated WordPress importer plugin. This does a good job of transferring content from another server.

Finally, note that WP Engine does prohibit some plugins on its servers. You can ask support if you want to check that all of your plugins are allowed.

Infrastructure and Datacenters

WP Engine’s datacenters are located in the USA, the UK, Belgium, Ireland, and Asia. You can choose the datacenter closest to you and your customers for the fastest page load times.

The host also has its own caching plugin, Evercache, which it claims will load WordPress content 4-6 times faster than rival hosts. Its CDN — available on all but the cheapest plan — is provided by NetDNA.

One quirk of WP Engine is that it prefers customers to point CNAME records at its WP Engine domains, rather than changing nameservers. It recommends that you use CloudFlare for your DNS, as it support CNAME flattening.

If you need help, WP Engine offers support by live chat, phone, and ticket, although the ticket system is more difficult to locate. It also has a library of help documentation to cover frequently asked questions.

Uptime and Money-Back Promises

WP Engine provides a 60-day money-back guarantee. This guarantee applies to core services, and not additional services like domain names or paid migration.

It’s important to remember that other hosts are unlikely to help you to move away from WP Engine, so you’ll need to do this manually if you decide not to continue with its service. You will need to obtain your site backup file, adjust the file structure, and replace some core files. This isn’t a tough job, but just something to bear in mind.

The company guarantees 99.95% service availability. It offers a 5% credit for downtime exceeding 0.05%, providing the customer writes in within 30 days.

Summary

WordPress is one of the most powerful CMS applications on the planet, and has earned its place as the web’s favorite blogging platform. WP Engine takes some of the headache out of using WordPress in a business or corporate context. Jason Cohen believes that WP Engine has been instrumental in promoting WordPress as an enterprise platform, and that is probably why. It handles updates, caching, security, and backups, so you can get on with important business tasks instead.

Remember that migrating out can be trickier than usual, and make sure your site doesn’t rely on any prohibited plugins. For the fully-managed WordPress experience, WP Engine is by far the biggest and best known host out there today.

wpengine

A2HOSTING – rugge

A2 Hosting Introduction

A2 Hosting was originally launched as Iniquinet in August 2001, and was renamed in 2003. The company is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan (hence the ‘A2’ in its name). Its datacenter is close by, and it is privately owned.

At A2 Hosting, you can view packages in six different currencies, and you’ll be billed in that currency when you buy. The site content is provided in English only, as is its technical support material.

Hosting Plans

A2 Hosting offers a number of interesting features for developers. For example, it provides multiple versions of PHP, along with an easy-to-use version switcher, so you can change the version used on your account without the need to ask support to get involved. The company’s also very keen to promote its green credentials: it has partnered with Carbonfund.org and promotes recycling and hardware reuse.

Hosting is provided in four categories: shared, reseller, VPS and dedicated. It separately lists a range of green hosting packages too.

  • Shared hosting is based on an unlimited resource model with a low monthly fee, although the lowest cost plan comes with a long, 36-month contract attached. A2 Hosting offers shared packages on CloudLinux or Windows. Customers can create their own site by hand, or install a one-click package with Softaculous. On sign-up, you can also choose from datacenters in the USA, Europe, or Asia. Most shared plans include Server Rewind, a completely customized backup tool that offers restore points for files and databases. You can pay to upgrade to offsite backups if you want additional peace of mind.
  • There are three reseller plans available, all with WHM and SSD storage. Resellers can host up to 100 client accounts.
  • VPS and dedicated hosting is split into three categories: Managed, Unmanaged, and Core. Unmanaged VPS is very attractively priced, but you’ll need server admin experience to use these plans securely. Core VPS plans are similar to managed VPS plans at A2 Hosting, but Core includes root access while Managed does not.
  • Cloud hosting is similar to VPS hosting, but with the added advantage of a cloud infrastructure and dynamic capacity scaling. All cloud plan resources are completely customizable.
  • Dedicated hosting is available in four flavors. There is one that semi-dedicated and three that are fully dedicated.

Uptime

A2 Hosting’s main datacenter is located in Michigan and boasts a redundant network, uninterrupted power, diesel generators, static-free floors, air conditioning and SSAE16 certified security: that includes a gated parking lot and key-operated entry to the premises and servers. As part of its eco-friendly initiative, it tries to re-use old hardware when it’s practical.

In 2015, A2 Hosting added two more datacenters. The company now allows customers to choose between the Michigan datacenter, a facility in the Netherlands, and a facility in Singapore.

A2 Hosting provides a 99.9% uptime guarantee. If downtime exceeds 0.1%, and A2 Hosting verifies that figure, it will credit you with 5% of your monthly fee for every hour that your website is offline, up to a maximum of 100% of your monthly fee.

Support

A2 Hosting’s technical support is provided via phone, live chat, and ticket. It provides six different telephone numbers for different locations. You can also contact the support team via Skype, which is great if you’re outside its main territories and need to control long distance call costs.

Guarantees and Money-Back Offers

A2 Hosting operates an Anytime Money-Back Guarantee. In effect, this is quite similar to guarantees offered by its competitors: customers benefit from a full a 30-day money-back guarantee, but cancellations after that results in a prorated refund on unused months. If you cancel 120 days or more after signing up, you’ll be refunded by PayPal. The policy also doesn’t cover domain registrations, setup costs, migration costs, or SSL certificates that are more than 7 days old.

Summary

A2 Hosting has moved away from offering geeky hosting features, and towards a more general purpose attitude to hosting. It’s made its entry level packages more appealing to novices over the last couple of years, but without losing the sophisticated technical features that made it attractive to developers, such as the ability to choose a VPS with or without root access. The Server Rewind tool is also a massive plus for people who are just starting to experiment with coding, and its support for multiple currencies makes billing easier for people outside the United States. The choice of server locations makes A2 Hosting a good all-round choice, offering plenty of room for your website to improve and grow.

a2hosting

InMotionHosting – rugge

InMotion Hosting is one of the largest independent web hosting companies in the world. They’ve been around since 2001, and have tried to develop a brand around being the “nerd’s choice” that businesses also love.

They’ve also positioned themselves as the one of the few large, stable hosting companies that is not owned by Endurance International – a holding corporation for many well-known hosting brands (including a few that I use for sites like HostGator, Bluehost and eHost).

There are a lot of InMotion Hosting reviews online – usually with user-generated reviews based on anecdotes and personal experience. That’s fine but I take a different approach with pros and cons. Since 2013, I’ve done several side-projects on InMotion in addition to consulting for clients who run projects on competitors. In August 2015, I actually moved ShivarWeb.com to an InMotion VPS server, though several projects remain with other hosting companies such as HostGator and InMotion’s sister brand Web Hosting Hub – both of which have more “unlimited” plans and a support focus on beginner / small sites.

Customer Service

InMotion Hosting puts their customer service front and center in their marketing. They boast about US-based tech support via phone, chat, email, or ticket system. Their service thus far has a had a few key strengths.

First, the reps that I’ve talked to seem to actually know what they are talking about, and aren’t just following a trouble-shooting script. That’s allowed me to skip the “yes, I’ve already tried all the basic troubleshooting steps” to discussing the root cause problem.

Second, InMotion has a ton of resources in their knowledgebase and in their comments. A knowledgebase isn’t uncommon, but what I’ve found useful is how a knowledgebase article kicks off a conversation so that users post their related problems to that thread, and InMotion reps respond on their. It makes self-directed troubleshooting a lot easier.

Third, all the channels are equally responsive. For some companies, you basically have to call because email isn’t quick. Or chat will be down so you have to email, etc. InMotion’s support channels (again, that I personally have experienced) all function well and serve the right purpose. I’ve sent in email support tickets that have been solved very fast; and had phone calls returned quickly.

Lastly, InMotion has great “onboarding” – which is jargon for the process that new users go through to get up and running. Their email sequence is useful; they customize support articles based on how to plan on using your account (ie, WordPress users get WordPress related emails). The onboarding process proactively solves a lot of would-be support problems.

Cons of InMotion Hosting

And here’s what I’ve found to be the cons of InMotion Hosting.

If you find a hosting company that fits your goals, I’m not a huge fan of counting pennies – but paying the right price for the features you get is still important, especially if you are just starting out and on a budget.

InMotion Hosting has several very affordable plans (see them here), but they have limitations which I’ll cover in the “Limitations” section. For unlimited plans comparable to other shared hosting providers, their price point is a bit higher than other shared hosting providers.

They are still a good deal overall, and are very affordable. However, they are more expensive based on an equal comparison of account features than competitors to call their pricing out as a con. In fact, they have a separate brand called Web Hosting Hub (review) that focuses on “unlimited plans” at a slightly cheaper rate.

That’s the extent of my InMotion Hosting review. They are a solid, well-respected web hosting company. I’ve switched to them for this specific website and love it. I think they are the best fit for someone who is only looking to host a couple websites on their account, and is willing to pay a bit of a premium for great support and performance.

inmotionhosting