Best Website Hosting Companies

If there is one thing I want you to take away from this lens is that PLEASE do not choose GoDaddy.com for web hosting. I know if you're new to building websites, you read and hear a lot about Godaddy through its commercials and other advertisements. I know they use a lot of celebrity endorsements. But believe me, (I learned this the hard way) their hosting is absolutely horrible.

I always had constant problems. Problems that ranged from incredibly slow load times to constant server errors. On top of that, whenever I called their customer service I either got somebody who was incredibly rude or just flat out ignorant. When you're using the internet as a form of income, this is completely unacceptable.

Unfortunately I didn't do my due dilligence when researching website hosting companies. I just chose GoDaddy simply because it was the only web hosting company I was familiar with. Boy, was that a mistake! So if you remember anything from this lens, please remember JUST SAY NO to GoDaddy. You'll thank me later.

That being said here are the 8 best website hosting companies:

5 STARS OUT OF 5

Hostgator is considered by many internet marketers as the best website hosting company, especially for beginners. It offers so many advantages that are perfect for someone who is just starting out and is a little nervous building sites.

It offers the cPanel/Fantastico combination so you'll be able to load scripts for blogs and forums if you wanted to. It also has the website/blog builder called Wordpress that is one of the most accessible website building platforms on the market, and its absolutely free. Just load wordpress on your domain and you've got the perfect template for a website.

Hostgator also offers Unlimited Domain Hosting Only $9.95 a Month
so you can build as many websites as you could possibly think of and it will only cost you $9.95 a month. How it works is that each domain that you purchase after the first one is an add-on domain. So technically its a subdomain of your first domain, but as far as the internet world is concerned is its own domain.

There are no contracts to sign or setup fees so you're free to try it and see if you like it. There is even a 45 day money back guarantee so there is no risk.

What really makes hostgator stand out is their unbelievable customer service. Its available 24 hours a day 7 days of week. The customer service is ALWAYS warm and friendly. They bend over backwards to fix whatever problem you may be having. You can tell they have been trained extremely well and are extremely knowledgeable with hosting issues. If they can't solve the problem over the phone, they'll create a work ticket, so it can be fixed by the tech department. Usually these tickets are resolved within a couple of hours and you'll get an email letting you know that the problem is fixed.

5 STARS OUT OF 5

Blue Host offers a TON of web hosting features that make it a real steal. Out of all the hosting companies, Blue Host may have the most bang for the buck.

One of the great benefits is the unlimited hosting space allowed in their hosting as well as they allow you put in as many domains as you want. So, literally, the sky is the limit. If you really see yourself building a huge internet portfolio, then its perfect for you.

It also offers cPanel with all the scripts you need to build top-notch sites as well as great tracking features to disect the kind of visitors you're receiving.

If you want to get an idea of the features that Blue Host offers you can even set up a demo account with them and get a sneak preview of how you'd use the Control panel and play around with all the tools that you'd get in the real version.

Their customer service has won many awards from various companies so you know the customer service is going to be top-notch 24/7.

Blue Host also gives you a Free Domain With $6.95 Hosting Package They also give new clients and transfer clients free $50 credits to both google adwords and yahoo paid ads. So its the perfect hosting for people that just want to build their first website without having to spend much money on their first website with the domain name and hosting.

5 STARS OUT OF 5

A hosting company that has really grown to be popular is the Omnis Network. What makes them really standout is that they not only have the cPanel/Fantastico combination which is full great website scripts, but Omnis also has its own custom Do-It-Yourself Sitebuilder.

With the Do-It-Yourself Sitebuilder you get more than 15,000 template options that you can play around with. It will take you years to go through all the different options they provide. With its incredible accessability, you can set up a complete online store, within a day. Its also perfect for those that want to build photo heavy websites as you can create & manage an online photo album as well as retouch and edit photos.

Web hosting is also dirt cheap as there are no setup fees and you can choose between different billing cycles. The longer the billing cycle the cheaper the cost per month is. They also offer unlimited domains for your hosting account, so you can build as many websites as you want.

They even have their own team of professional website builders, who offer very reasonable pricing. You get discounts for hosting your account with them. You can even get a free quote from them so you have an idea what the costs would be for somebody building your professional website.

4 1/2 STARS OUT OF 5

iPowerWeb offers real cost-effective shared domain hosting. If you're looking for more bandwith or more options with your hosting, than you might want to look somewhere else. But if you're looking for an inexpensive bare-bones web hosting platform than iPowerweb might be right for you.

At the current time, they have a deal where you can host unlimited websites for only $4.95 a month. Its going to be hard to beat that kind of deal nowadays. They have a great 99.9% average uptime. They even have deals right now for free web domains.

So, as long as you don't care about all the fancy bells and whistles, then Ipowerweb is a solid thrifty option.

4 1/2 STARS OUT OF 5

HostMonster has the combination of great prices and fast servers. Most users don't experience any problems with them, but if you ever need to contact support, you'll always get a prompt response from a very knowledgeable customer service.

Hostmonster allows you to Host Unlimited Domains On 1 Hosting Account for as low as $6.95 (including a free domain). You also get many bonuses when signing up with them such as free advertising credits from yahoo and google as well as free search engine submission for your domain(s).

4 STARS OUT OF 5

Web Hosting Pad offers Award Winning Web Hosting. They currently have one of the best deals going on. At the time I wrote this, you can get unlimited hosting space and bandwith while hosting unlimited domains for $3.96 a month. There are no setup or hidden fees involved. They even have free professional consulting, where you can get a free website evaluation and unlimited email consulting.

I would rank Web Hosting Pad a little higher, if I hadn't heard that they have had some issues with downtime. I have heard from some people that had their sites go down for a couple of hours on and off for about a week. I haven't heard too many issues being reported by webmasters for quite a while now, so it appears that Web Hosting Pad has corrected whatever issues they were having with their servers.

4 STARS OUT OF 5

Easy CGI offers Professional Business Web Hosting through a variety of different advanced shared web hosting packages as well as dedicated servers.

They have great customer service. They are not a "big name" hosting company, but that is really good in one aspect. Because the majority of the time, when you call their call center, you don't have to wait in the queue.

Only real downside that Easy CGI has is that their basic shared web hosting packages are somewhat limited in that you only get 350 GB of disk space to work with, which is fine for a beginner but if you've got some really popular websites, that disk space will be used up pretty quickly, so you will need better hosting package (which they offer).

4 STARS OUT OF 5

If you are looking for your own personal dedicated server instead of having a shared hosting package them you might want to look at ServerPronto.com. They have to have one of the best deals for dedicated servers starting at $29.95.

The only real knock on Server Pronto is that they don't offer a lot of extras. For example you'd have to pay $40 a month in order to have cPanel, which seems a bit excessive. But if you have your heart set on getting a dedicated server, you'll be hard pressed to find a better deal.