Room: Wordpress

ideahost – rugge

If simplicity is what you’re searching for in a shared host, ideahost is a great choice. Using their drag-and-drop website builder, you can choose from thousands of pre-made templates to construct up to six webpages for free. Additional pages are available for purchase as add-ons. For the slightly-more-advanced user, their cPanel hosting allows you to easily install your choice of CMS, including WordPress.

What truly makes ideahost stand out, however, is the price factor. They offer three shared hosting packages to help you meet your website needs cost-effectively. Like most shared hosting providers, ideahost offers unlimited bandwidth for all plans, and their storage options range from 500GB to unlimited disk space. Users also receive an email address, 1GB of cloud storage, and domain name registration for the first year of service, for free.

With free online setup wizards for blogs and photo galleries, step-by-step tutorials, and 24/7 customer support, ideahost is a reliable, low-cost resource for stress-free shared hosting. If you need a basic website made easy, if free advertising sounds appealing, or if you’re new to the online scene and are looking to make your debut on the Internet, ideahost is certainly a web host you (and your wallet) should consider.

Free Domain, Email, and Unlimited Bandwidth

  • With any of ideahost’s shared plans, you’ll receive a free domain name for the first year. They also offer a courtesy transfer service within the first 30 days of signing up for their hosting.
  • Users receive a free email address, with emails supported by IMAP and POP3. Virus checking and options to set up auto-responders, email forwarding, and spam filters are also available.
  • All of their shared hosting packages include 500GB of storage, with two out of their three plans supporting unlimited disk space.

Free Site Builder and WordPress Install

  • A drag-and-drop, template-based website builder is included in all but their most basic package. The first six pages are free, with additional pages available for purchase.
  • All ideahost users are equipped with cPanel, a premier control panel in the hosting community. Plans also include 1GB of free Cloud storage.
  • For added flexibility, you can easily install your favorite CMS, including WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal and choose from thousands of free and paid templates.

Marketing and eCommerce Solutions

  • With ideahost, you can get up to $300-worth of credits towards Google AdWords offers, and paid advertising with Bing.
  • Users also receive a free Yellowpages.com listing and a US-based, toll-free phone number.
  • PayPal integration and your choice of shopping carts are also available for online retailers, as well as the online store available with cPanel.

Guides, Setup Wizards, and Support

  • Easily get your blog or photo gallery up and running with ideahost’s free setup wizards.
  • They offer step-by-step tutorials, an online help center, and free marketing guides.
  • Promising to answer your call in two minutes or less, ideahost offers customer support 24/7 via email and chat as well.

To recap, here’s a rundown of what ideahost has to offer

If you need a low-cost shared hosting provider to make setting up a site simple and stress-free, ideahost is a leading option to consider. They offer a free email address and domain name, with cPanel included. With their shared hosting plans, you can get up to unlimited storage, domains, and emails, and up to $300 towards marketing your site with Google and Bing. If it’s a simple website-building solution you’re after, ideahost is a cost-friendly host worth knowing.

To recap, here’s a rundown of what ideahost has to offer

If you need a low-cost shared hosting provider to make setting up a site simple and stress-free, ideahost is a leading option to consider. They offer a free email address and domain name, with cPanel included. With their shared hosting plans, you can get up to unlimited storage, domains, and emails, and up to $300 towards marketing your site with Google and Bing. If it’s a simple website-building solution you’re after, ideahost is a cost-friendly host worth knowing.

ideahost

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

BlueHost – rugge

Bluehost has their bells and whistles, they do offer simple, easy to use standard services for non-techies. People all over world are joining this program, of which Bluehost paid out over $5 million in commissions in 2015 according to the company’s affiliate page. With a generous program like that, who wouldn’t want to boast glowing reviews?

Like every company, Bluehost has their pros and cons. As being one of the largest hosting providers in the world, it proves many have faith in them. According to Consumer Rankings Bluehost review March 2017, Bluehost is ranked at 9.7 out of 10 by users.

Some highlights were that Bluehost is easy to use, easy to signup, and their cPanel makes it easy to install WordPress and is very well organized. The reviews make it seem like Bluehost is, well, easy.

With so many affiliates out there recommending Bluehost, it’s hard to find out the truth – meaning any negativity the company has. So below are more of the good, the bad, and the ugly of Bluehost.

Pros of using Bluehost

Bluehost has a couple of really good things going for them.

Really cheap hosting: Bluehost has some of the most inexpensive initial hosting plans around. Plans start at $2.95/month at the time of this writing. They’re a really cheap web host.

Endorsed by WordPress: One of the largest hosting platforms, WordPress, recommends Bluehost. It is, of course, a paid endorsement (at least indirectly as Bluehost sponsors lots of the WP conferences), but nonetheless it’s an endorsement.

Generous money back guarantee: Contrary to negative reviews, Bluehost is sticking behind their product and service by offering a 30-day full refund policy. Even after 30 days, you receive a prorated refund of your plan. Since this is a monthly plan, there are no term commitments. You also won’t find pesky penalties or hidden fees.

Good uptime: I’m monitoring the uptime of 5 random websites that are hosted with Bluehost. 4 out of 5 websites have had zero outage, i.e. a 100% uptime, over the last month. 1 out of 5 has had a 99.6% uptime (this would equate to an approx 4h outage during the month).

Cons of using Bluehost

Bluehost got loads of positives, but they do have their drawbacks as well.

No automatic backups: While Bluehost does offer backups, the backups are a courtesy so you can’t depend on your data to be backed up daily – so no guarantees here. You must set up and run your own backup via the cPanel and to your own local device. Another bad feature here is that any data Bluehost backs up within the past 30 days is overwritten. Bluehost’s Terms clearly state that they will hold no responsibility for this. Site Backup Pro is a paid add-on offered by Bluehost. It creates regular and automated backups of your site.

‘Unlimited’ really means ‘limited’: Bluehost’s Plus, Prime, and Business Pro plans boast of their unlimited number of websites, and “unmetered” storage, email accounts, email storage, and subdomains given to clients. However, their User Agreement, Clause 7 Usage Policies and Definitions, explain otherwise. It’s only unlimited up to a certain level. Their unlimited plan is comparable to most providers (i.e. Bluehost isn’t the only web host that promises “unlimited” web hosting).

Conclusion

Bluehost is a great web hosting option for personal and small business websites and blogs (i.e. for creating your own first website). Because Bluehost is cheap (very cheap), reliable, secure and comes with a free domain name. Plus Bluehost is endorsed by WordPress and Bluehost is very easy to get started with, which is great for beginners. Also their generous 30-day money back guarantee lets you “try before you buy” and extras such as a free domain name are are solid features worth considering.

Bluehost

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