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Best Web Hosting Provider

February 10, 2024 | By David Selden-Treiman | Filed in: hosting.

What Is The Best Web Hosting Provider?

Finding the best web hosting provider for your needs is an important step in optimizing your website. There’s a lot to consider. Here are our basic recommendations:

Simple Websites

For simple websites, you have a lot of options. Most web hosts will do acceptably for a simple small-business website or blog.

That said, we recommend avoiding website builders so that you maintain control of your website.

VPS Hosting

If you just need a simple VPS, most providers will work well. Different providers have different downtimes, but the big differentiators are cost.

Providers like AWS and Google Cloud tend to be much more expensive than more specialized providers.

We recommend Digital Ocean and Hetzner if you’re looking for a good VPS provider at a good price (it’s what we use.)

High Performance Hosting

If you’re looking for high performance web hosting, you’re going to need something more specialized.

You can’t just expect a simple cPanel host to give you what you’ll need. You need a custom configuration.

Generally, you’ll need either a managed host, or you’ll need to get your servers configured with custom configurations.

If you’re looking for a high performance hosting provider, we offer hosting designed for high-availability and high-traffic.


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What Is The Best Web Hosting Provider?

Finding the best web hosting provider for your needs is an important step in optimizing your website. There's a lot to consider. Here are our basic recommendations:

Simple Websites

For simple websites, you have a lot of options. Most web hosts will do acceptably for a simple small-business website or blog.

That said, we recommend avoiding website builders so that you maintain control of your website.

VPS Hosting

If you just need a simple VPS, most providers will work well. Different providers have different downtimes, but the big differentiators are cost.

Providers like AWS and Google Cloud tend to be much more expensive than more specialized providers.

We recommend Digital Ocean and Hetzner if you're looking for a good VPS provider at a good price (it's what we use.)

High Performance Hosting

If you're looking for high performance web hosting, you're going to need something more specialized.

You can't just expect a simple cPanel host to give you what you'll need. You need a custom configuration.

Generally, you'll need either a managed host, or you'll need to get your servers configured with custom configurations.

If you're looking for a high performance hosting provider, we offer hosting designed for high-availability and high-traffic.

WordPress Hosting

What WordPress Hosting Should You Get?

There are many considerations when getting a WordPress hosting provider. Focus on the performance needs of your website.

WordPress Hosting Setup

When setting up your WordPress hosting, or switching hosts, there are a number of steps to complete. These include:

WordPress & Security

There are a number of WordPress security threats to contend with. We recommend using a plugin like WordFence to help secure your site.

WordPress Backups

Make sure to also back-up your site. It's absolutely essential, and ideally use an off-site backup provider that's different from your hosting provider.

WordPress Speed Improvements

There are a number of ways to improve the speed of your WordPress site on its hosting.

There are a number of plugins that can help improve your site's speed.

DNS

DNS Records

There are many different types of records, each with their own purpose. These include: SOA, A, TXT, CNAME, PTR (reverse DNS), and more. On some servers, you can also set up wildcard records.

The records you need will depend on what you're doing; WordPress sites require different records than mail servers, for example.

Propagation

The process of your records transmitting to DNS servers around the world is called propagation. It normally takes 48 hours, but you can speed it up a bit with some planning.

Testing

To test your DNS records, there are 2 main tools: dig and nslookup. Each is very helpful in its own specialty.

Reliability & Security

There are a number of ways to improve your DNS reliability and security.

  • Split Horizon allows you to separate networks, either for intranets or for separating by geographic region.
  • GeoDNS allows you to give different records to different locations based on the requesting IP address. This allows you to create your own CDN, speeding up your site.
  • DNS over QUIC speeds up your DNS requests and gives you better DNS security by encrypting your DNS connection.
  • DNSSEC allows you to sign and encrypt your DNS connection, ensuring that nobody is changing your records.
  • DNS over HTTPS allows your visitors to request your DNS records over an encrypted connection.

Internationalized Domains

Internationalized domain names allow character encodings other than Latin characters. They have their own methods for backward compatibility.

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