If you are planning to buy a Shared WordPress Hosting plan or planning to switch your hosting provider, you can relate to this post. If you already have done what I am sharing here, may be you can share your experience to help my readers make a better decision.
I first started to use GoDaddy when Snigdha decided to start her self hosted WordPress blog. We bought the domains we needed and got started. Since GoDaddy readily provides WordPress Shared Hosting, we got started with the Shared Economy Plan.
[note background=”#D8D8D8″]UPDATE: My website is complex and it has grown to the level that shared hosting providers can't handle the resource needs. Therefore, my Krishna World Wide's Managed WordPress Hosting is the perfect place for me to be at.
You can check out more about our managed hosting solution through my service announcement post.[/note]
GoDaddy was the cheapest option in the market that time and I think from the price perspective, They are a bit cheaper than everybody else due to various options we get to choose from.
As things started to move, we decided to host our business website and also my this very website. Therefore, we upgraded to their Delux plan and we contineed to use the same service for a few years in the beginning.
However, as we continued to mature, we started to host more of our websites and that of our clients. So, we started to research more about other hosting services.
Major Shared WordPress Hosting Providers
What I noticed at the time was, there I was only finding three major players who seemed to compete when it came to WordPress Shared Hosting:
1. BlueHost (#1 WordPress recommended service)
2. HostGator
3. GoDaddy (This is where we started out journey)
As I continued to research online, talked to other web developers and website owners about their experiences, most of them seemed to favor BlueHost when compared with HostGator or the GoDaddy (where I used to host my website).
Later, I found that InMotion Hosting is another premium service provider in this space that provides really high end services for shared WordPress hosting. They also have the scalability to help you with VPS hosting and dedicated servers when you need. So, I moved all my websites to them for a while before moving all of them to my own managed WordPress hosting company Krishna World Wide Hosting.
Speaking of GoDaddy, I did not have any major bad experience with the customer service or GoDaddy in general. I didn't notice any major server breakdown or days of performance slowdown with GoDaddy hosting. But had instances when occasionally, my websites go slow or become unavailable for a few minutes.
But I tend to think that when we buy shared hosting plans, we inherently take risk of other websites hosted on the same server occasionally consume the resources on the server. This overloads the server slowing down everything.
I tend to think these situations also happens to the people using BlueHost or HostGator shared plans.
BlueHost seems like The Winner when it comes to the number of people who admire the BlueHost as a shared WordPress hosting service provider on budget. BlueHost has done some great work to establish themselves as a leader in the marketplace WordPress Shared Hosting.
There are really too many success stories shared by a number of bloggers and website owners on BlueHost. People have shared their satisfaction with BlueHost in numerous forums and it is sometimes really amusing.
Many times I decided to switch to BlueHost when my sites loaded slow. But everytime I thought to move, I researched a little bit more since transfering a number of websites to a new hosting service is not as easy as getting a brand new site.
Amid all the excitement, I also found a few testimonials from people who did what I wanted to do and didn't see much difference in performance of their websites.
Until the news came that the loading speed of my pages were going to play an important role in how Google will rank my website. Now I needed to take this seriously, and I did.
I did extensive research and boiled down to choose between BlueHost or InMotion Hosting. When I compared the features and aligned those with my long term goals, InMotion Hosting became my choice and I moved all my websites on their servers and I was there till the end of shared hosting era of my life.
If you are looking for a good shared hosting service provider for WordPress, here is my take (and recommendation). I hope this helps you make a good decision for your website hosting:
Option 1: If you are just starting to buy a popular and reliable shared WordPress hosting service and you are budget cautious, Blue Host should be your choice.
Blue Host might cost you a dollar or two more a month when compared to GoDaddy. But they also provide that much more in value.
If budget is not a challenge, InMotion Hosting is the best shared WordPress hosting service provider especially when you know that you are serious about growing your website's traffic going forward.
Option 2: If you are having running websites with GoDaddy, BlueHost, InMotion or HostGator and you are having issues, that means your websites have grown. That means you online footprint is growing. So, congratulations!
If you are in that situation and you can afford to have a managed service, I invite you to check out the premium Managed WordPress Hosting service offer by Krishna World Wide. If you choose us, we will amaze you!
Have Some Thought?
If you have used any of these service providers (Or you switched from one to another), have you experienced any significant performance gain?
Would you share your insight and experience on this subject in the comments below?
A thoughtful post Kumar.
Perhaps a straw vote through Twitter might be an idea and see how the numbers stack up.
“Do you use ‘Blue Host’ as your web service? On a scale of 1-10, how do you rate it?”
I do not use BlueHost, Bill. I have been using GoDaddy so far and I haven’t found a compelling reason to switch yet. However, I do recommend new people to use BlueHost as it seems to be popular among the WordPress community.
My website was a very good experimentation and we learnt a lot in the process. The number of plugins, the way the website theme is coded, the way images are used in the posts and the pages and third party tools being used on the website have all a major role to play.
We tend to think it’s only the host that makes all the different. But that isn’t true. The host is important, but how the website is coded is also important as much.
My website was a very good experimentation and we learnt a lot in the process. The number of plugins, the way the website theme is coded, the way images are used in the posts and the pages and third party tools being used on the website have all a major role to play.
We tend to think it’s only the host that makes all the different. But that isn’t true. The host is important, but how the website is coded is also important as much.
If you want a blazing fast website, you may have to go for dedicated server. That will cost you way more than a shared hosting. But it gives you full control. Just a thought…….
That is a a valid point Harish. I have that in my plans. Thanks for the suggestion.
Thanks for your insight. But how about for the domain name, do you buy the domain in godaddy and do hosting elsewhere?
Or do it together at one place?
Mayank, all of your domains are on GoDaddy. GoDaddy comes up with some really great Domain deals and therefore, we have been using them for domain registrations.
The confusion comes when we talk about Hosting. Blogging world loves BlueHost and personally, we are having “not bad” experiences with GoDaddy. Therefore, we are still with GoDaddy and wondering if BlueHost or HostGator have any magic bullet that we are seriously missing by not switching…?
Hi Kumar,
I have used both BLuehost and Hostgator and cans ay that Bluehost is ideal for newbies as it is cheaper and gives a free domain. However it must be said that Hostgator has good customer support. Never used Godaddy and the way you presented your article it seems a very valid alternative. Thanks for the info
Yes Joseph, GoDaddy is a good alternative if somebody is looking for a cheap option. However, when it comes to performance of the servers, BlueHost is definitely a quality alternative with cheap hosting costs.
Very great post Kumar,
I have Godaddy hosting and I think it’s really good, however I’m wondering so far about the pros of bluehost and hostgator over godaddy which make one migrate.
I’m puzzled about this, I can’t decide whether to keep going with godaddy or change to bluehost. I hear about many opinions saying that bluehost and hostgator are much better specially for wordpress-based website/blogs.
Yes Ahmed, BlueHost is better than GoDaddy for sure. However, if you can afford it, InMotion is much better choice as I found later and moved all my websites to their servers.
Thanks for dropping by and taking time to share and ask.
Nice Sharing, its really helpfull and informative and also you site is really helpfull, keep it up.
Thank you Aamir.
I currently use GoDaddy and HostGator. I had a bad experience with BlueHost and will not ever use them again. Out of the three, I like HostGator the best. Easiest to use and best customer service. And, no down time.
Alan,
Among the three you mentioned, I tend to agree with you as we’ll. Thank you for sharing your experience.
I moved from godaddy to webhosting hub since about 2 weeks ago, I think WHH is very great and promising, in addtition to an excellent support system.
Hi Gauraw
All the 3 hosts you mentioned above are very reputed in the market and thus choosing one is difficult.
If someone wants to choose only 1 website can consider GoDaddy or Hostgator because both offer such kind of plan in affordable price. BlueHost offer unlimited domain hosting plan which is costlier.
Hi
I’ve been a customer of Godaddy, really good hosting services but unfortunatly not that good customer support but still i’m happy with them.
If you’re looking for an amazing host provider that specializes in WordPress then you should check out SiteGround. They have amazing products and their customer service is the best. Servers are also up and running, regular software and equipment updates and never an interruption during peak hours.
Good post bro, because of my site loading problem I was looking for information on shared hosting and now its clear. Thanks for your guide.
I never tried hostgator and godaddy, but I’m a happy BlueHost customer since 4 years. Reading online real people reviews, it seems BH is better than Hostgator, and Godaddy is not so good. In last few years, BH was acquired by EIG, and seems it’s service is worse.
Probably, as you said, InMotion Hosting is a better solution at the moment!
I am not a bluehost user but now i am planning to change to bluehost because of its features. Am very much excited to work with it.
Bluehost has the worst customer service especially when it comes to tech support. Long wait times to reach tech too. If your planning to host with them for WordPress hosting they use VSp which on their system is a draw back if u have more then one site and need dedicated ip addresses for each one they do not offer. Once you make one domain a primary you can’t change it ever to another one. Truly sucks with them.
Some hosting companies reserve popular domain names in order to price them higher. I’ve witnessed of “such” companies reserving domains if many people are searching for it. I’ve used host gator and godaddy both hosting packages. And both are the same, instead I used an Australian hosting provider which i quiet happy about. Thanks
Bluehost has really gone downhill in the last 6 months. InMotion is now the best hosting company for WordPress sites. Bluehost was bought out by Endurance International Group so they are no different from HostGator or HostMonster now.
Hi Justin
Thanks for droping your valuable comments. I am glad that you visited on my blog.