Web Locomotion invested a lot of time and effort researching web hosting companies. We wanted to find the best deals for our company and for our clients. But this was not an easy task.

Google search results for the term “best web hosting 2019” found the whopping number of 1,320,000,000 results (in only 0.77 seconds!. Wow, Google, you are awesome!). The first 4 positions in the search results page were paid advertisements. We do not mind paid advertisement, but usually they do not provide objective solutions.

For this reason, we focused in the organic search results. The next 10 positions of the first Google results page, were organic results.  Most of them were websites like blogs or magazines that wrote an article about the specific subject. These websites provide original content and supposedly they are an authority in the subject.

We started the research of the pages in the top 10 positions of the organic Google search results. We read all the recommendations they provided and follow along to each hosting provider website to see what they had to offer. Some of these providers were already familiar to us. Others were unknown.

Keep in mind one thing: no matter the position, organic or inorganic, that websites are granted in the Google search results, most of them are going to recommend you hosting providers in order to make a commission. Most of these websites are affiliates of the hosting companies and they receive succulent commissions for sending potential clients to them. This is a common practice on the web. Sometimes it is beneficial to the visitor that clicks on an affiliate link. Visitors don’t have to pay any money for clicking the link and they might get a discount coupon code.

With so many “recommendations”, you must be able to read in between the lines to make sure that the recommendations are truly honest. There are several ways to break the barrier: just follow your intuition and your sixth sense, lean on somebody that knows about the subject and you believe is honest or experiment by yourself. We have used for this report a mix of all three options.

We did all this research work for you. There are many options to choose from. There are so many features that hosting providers have. There are so many to compare.

We think we found, at least, the 7 best hosting providers in the ocean of hosting providers available. These hosting providers are at the top of our list. The list began very big and we have been eliminating candidates for the reasons specified below, reasons that matter to us and probably to our clients.

We follow the steps below as arguments to select the 7 best hosting companies:

The web hosting company’s website can give you a wealth of information. We look at all the multitude of offers they have. Each company has their own offers with their own labels. They all have very different hosting packages.

Most of the options that they offer are classified as:

• → Shared Hosting
• → Cloud Hosting
• → VPS Hosting
• → Dedicated Server Hosting

And inside each offer they have different packages at different prices levels.

In order to make a fair comparison, we had to look at packages that offer similar prices and similar features. We we need to put them all at the same level, or at least, as close as possible. You need to compare apples with apples, otherwise the comparison would not make any sense. Some hosting provides excel in some packages. In our case, we were looking for cloud hosting under $20/month.

We also have to keep in mind that the introductory price that they offer is only good for the first year. They will give you huge discounts just to get you as a client. You need to look at the long run, not only at the first year. This is why we specified the introductory price and the regular price for you.

For us, the price point is very important. But of course, we need to take a look at what we are getting for that price. We love to get something that is “Bueno, Bonito y Barato” (“Good, Nice and Cheap”) or something has has a lot of value (which is the rate of the price versus what is worth).

It is important to actually read their terms and conditions page. Most people avoid this step. The importance lies in the fact that the terms and conditions page is like a contract between the website and their visitors. All the visitors that access the website are subject to the terms and conditions specified in that page.

In the terms and conditions page you would find all sort of things: hidden fees, small letters and sometimes, unfair practices to consumers. Most of the unexpected surprises could be found in this page: fees, clauses, small print and conditions.

We looked at the support they provide and their support methods: chat, phone, submission ticket, email, etc. It is extremely important to discover the average time it takes to get a useful response from them.

The best way to evaluate the support they provide is to sign up with them and open a support ticket. Of course, for most people, this is not practical. In this case, you have three options:

• → ask somebody that you know that have used the services about their experience.
• → believe somebody that you think knows about the subject.
• → experiment yourself by signing up for the cheapest account and test them throughly.

We tell you, support is extremely important. Everything is beautiful until something goes wrong. Sooner or later something will go wrong and this is the moment when you will be glad you did your homework. A bad support can ruin days, weeks, or months of dedicated work.

Great support and immediate assistance is one top factors to make a decision when choosing a hosting provider. You want a serious company that will cover your back during the bad moments.

When comparing hosting providers we evaluated their response time and the accuracy of their solution. There are other factors to consider, like friendliness, communication channel, and easy to use, but these are not as important as the previous factors.

This is the real experiment and the one that will provide you the facts that you were looking for. There is no other way around. It is like deciding to buy a car. Are you going to believe all the paraphernalia that the sales person is going to give you?. The only way to make sure you like the car and it fits for you and your needs is to test drive it!.

Like any other salespersons, make sure the hosting provider does not use deceptive language and marketing techniques. There are some keywords that indicate that they are using deceptive language to attract customers. We are not saying that they are going to scam you, but let’s say that they are not accurate in their explanations or they don’t tell you the whole truth.

When you sign up, not all hosting providers give you immediate access to the account:

• → some require an identification card to activate
• → some may take 1 or 2 days to activate
• → some may require 1 or 2 hours to register the new user, and
• → a very few providers let you access your account immediately

The control panel the hosting provider gives you is like the cabin of an airplane, where you control everything, so you can have a smooth ride. The control panel gives you access to almost everything you need to work with: files, databases, software installations, user accounts, domain manipulation, etc.

The most popular control panel in the market is called cPanel. The other popular control panel is vDeck. Other control panels are mostly custom made by the hosting provider.

We looked at the software to install WordPress and other frameworks. One of the most known software installers is Softaculous, but there are others like Installatron. We looked at the easy of installation and how everything worked together.

We set up some test websites to measure its speed, uptime and performance.

The performance of the website is tremendously important. Website visitors do not have the patience to wait for a website to finish loading. When the website does not load fast, the visitors are gone!. Slow page loads are the “visitor’s serial killers”.

When the website is up and running, it is time to make comparisons. This crucial step shows if the hosting provider promises were correct. Some hosting providers promise you the world. You want to make sure the numbers corroborate the claims. Performance monitoring is the way to go.

To monitor performance, there are some professional websites services that you can use. These metrics a neutral tools and they give you accurate results. You just type your domain name and they give you the performnace numbers. They calculate several metrics in real time: average up-time, load speeds, etc. They also allow you to monitor load speeds in foreign countries or on specific device formats.

We have rated each hosting provider based on crucial factors, like price, features, up-time, page load speed, and customer support. The rating of each hosting provider is done by assigning a specific value for each factor and then getting the average of these factors. The weight of each factor is the same, although some people may disagree that the weight of some factors might be more important than others. This is the way we did it.

We created a table with the same row labels to make a fair comparison. In the table you can see all the different features and the rating for each hosting provider in our research.

We have tried to be as much objective as possible. We hope that this research will help you to select your perfect hosting provider and keep you happy for a long time.