The goal of this post is to help you understand what web hosting is and how the web hosting industry works so you can be sure to align with a quality web host that is going to be there for your long term success.
Now, there is a lot of misunderstanding about what is going on in the hosting world and you have affiliates who are promoting what I would consider subpar aka bad web hosting companies because they pay out big time commissions.
Let me explain how I know all of this and kind of dig a little deeper.
What Is Web Hosting?
First and foremost, what is web hosting?
It is like the virtual real estate that your website lives on.
So if you are building a WordPress website, you are going to need to have a web hosting.
Web hosting is the space on a server, in a data center, that is maintained and managed professionally and it is online 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
If someone goes to your website at 3:00 in the morning and your home computer is off, your website is still online because it is living on a computer in a data center that is always online.
These are not just regular computers, this is not like your laptop or your desktop at home, these are highly efficient web servers.
They are designed to be incredibly fast and really have a lot of resources compared to what our home computers have.
The way it works on a web server is generally you are going to start with a shared web hosting.
What this means is they will partition out one web server and they will give maybe 500 or a thousand websites and an equal amount of said web server so you are effectively sharing the resources of that computer.
Now, the benefit of this is it is incredibly inexpensive to start but the challenge with this is that you get kind of stacked on there with other people.
If someone might be a resource hog or someone might be spamming or doing something a little bit shady and your IP address will be similar since you are in such close proximity to where their website is stored and that could negatively affect you.
About The Big Bad Boys You Should Avoid
I know all of this because I worked in the web hosting industry for about a two years from 2003 to 2005 range.
I did sales for the one company and while I was there something really interesting happened.
My little kind of mom and pop web hosting company that I was working for got bought out by this larger conglomerate known as EIG.
Right now, there are two big conglomerates in this industry buying up every little and big web hosting company they can and they kind of squeeze them to maximize the profits.
GoDaddy is one of them. I do not recommend them for domain names and especially for hosting, better stay far away from them.
The other one is this company EIG.
Here is what happens:
So mom and pop start a web hosting company, they build it up through great service, they do not overload the servers, everyone has a really good experience and when they submit a ticket, mom and pop are there to take care of their customers.
All the problems get resolved quickly, everyone is happy.
Until one day Mom And Pop get a multi-million dollar offer for their web hosting company and they get a deal and they cash out.
The EIG moves in. They do three things almost every single time and I witnessed this because I worked at a company that went through this.
The number one thing what had happened is they gutted the support staff.
The fastest way for a bigger company to make more money off of a smaller company is to reduce the amount of staff.
You see it in hostile corporate takeovers, all over the world and this is exactly what EIG does.
So support wait time can go from seconds and minutes to hours plus.
When I started working with the one company, your tickets would be answered within about five to ten minutes.
When I left that company, it was literally an hour wait time to speak with someone in support and that is not even getting your problem resolved.
That is just to explain your issue.
So if your website went down, it would take you an hour to get on the phone with someone who would then be able to potentially research and rectify the problem and get your website online.
The number two thing that EIG does every single time and GoDaddy, every time they do it with their own servers, they do it when they do a buyout, is they double, triple or quadruple the number of individuals on every single shared server.
What this allows them to do is service the same amount of customers with a lot of less resources and they are saving more money.
So you, the end customer, get less resources allocated which means your website slows down and the chances of you being cuddled up with a spammer and getting your website blacklisted because of the action of others, goes up significantly.
They walk in the door and pay a million dollars and they are going to go get their money out as quickly as they can.
Labor costs and servicing the customer fees are the first two things to go.
Number three, what they do is they increase the affiliate commissions to a point that is absolutely ludicrous.
You might notice and maybe you have seen some of these income reports by people like Pat Flynn and he is so proud of the fact that he makes 34,000 dollars a month from BlueHost.
BlueHost is a terrible host at this point in time.
They used to be the mom and pop hosting company that cared about their customers and offered good service.
They have been bought out by EIG and now for a 70 dollars sale, they will pay Pat Flynn a 125 dollars to a 150 dollars.
They are paying him double so he is financially incentivized to recommend this company that has a shitty service and really is not there for the customers, it is a big numbers game.
When he is rubbing in the fact that he is making over 40,000 dollars a month referring hosting clients to this subpar thing, he is literally rubbing it in people’s faces that he is promoting something that is subpar.
He is doing it solely for the money and he does not really care about you but he is making his money so everybody should be in awe of what he is doing.
That just frustrates me so much to see that going on because that puts you potentially in a position where you are getting on with a company that is kind of shady.
Another one is HostGator. They used to be great and I used them back in the day as well as the PowerHost.
They are all falling apart because they have been bought out by these big companies and the squeeze is on.
My Recommendation For You
Let me recommend the one company that I use.
247-Host specializes in virtual private servers and shared servers.
VPS is essentially a way they cut down to like instead of hundreds of people on a single server, there are maybe four people on a single server so you get a lot more resources and you always have a high volume of dedicated resources.
A dedicated server is what I am on, it is literally like my own computer.
There is no one else on that server, it is just me and I pay a lot of money for this but my website delivers 15-20 million page views a month.
I server over 10 million visits and my site has over a thousand pages on it and we have a lot of plugins so I have a heavy site.
I have grown naturally into that.
I started with a shared hosting and as my site grew and I started seeing spikes of two hundred, four hundred, seven hundred visitors on my website at the exact same time.
I had to expand from a shared hosting to a virtual private server to a dedicated server where I am at now.
If you are just starting out and you are looking for a host to build your WordPress website on, 247-Host has a system that costs literally like four dollars a month.
It is incredibly inexpensive and when you buy it, they install WordPress for you which just saves you a few confusing steps and they do something that is called hardening your site installation.
It is essentially doing some security patches to your database names and they just make sure it is locked down to make it as difficult as possible for hackers to try to get in and get access to your website.
247-Host is still owned by a private company and they are in it for the long haul.
They have a decade of great service under their belt, their support answers quickly and they will help you out with problems.
They are just one of the good guys and that is who I recommend.
I use affiliate links in this post but I am in no way, shape or form promoting them because of the financial incentive.
In fact, if I went with another company like some of these “passive income” sites out there who are just pulling your leg to make a buck.
I could make more if I would promote them.
I am personally, consciously, choosing to recommend a company that is in your best interest, not my best interest.
It is a shame that very few people seem to be doing that online.
If you are going to use the WordPress, you need a web hosting.
It is pretty amazing how inexpensive it is to build an internet business in this day and age.
Now, one last thing. You only need their base version which is good for one website, you do not need to upgrade right away for anything.
You can always upgrade with a phone call in the future.
With the web hosting side of things, be sure you are in alignment with a company that has integrity because that means they are in it with your best goals, needs and desires in their best intentions.
A lot of companies do not do that and it is kind of shady.
It is interesting that I used to work for a company that went through this and I saw it happen.
It was a very frustrating experience to go through as an individual when I was a part of them.
If you are experiencing any problems with your current hosting provider, you have downtime with them and they are not responding to your tickets in an effective manner, that is why you should move your site to 247-Host.
It is not that big of a deal and they will move your site for free.
That is my little ditty on web hosting and if you have any questions, then leave me a comment.
I am happy to answer your questions.