Who is the best web host? Which web hosting company is the best?
This is such a common question and people keep asking it. Why? Because there is no 'best' company.
Best is pretty well defined, but human perspective and opinion is not. Every company has many properties that define its service. Some examples of those properties might be customer support, price, uptime, hardware, software, sales people, and engineers. There are a few very defined properties like price. But price is meaningless without the greater context of 'What am I getting for that price?'
So really, we're left with a large set of hard to quantify and compare properties that make up service companies.
So let's throw our hands up and give up. Not quite. Some companies are definitely better than others. Some are definitely worse. Most occupy a middle ground of being ok. The larger the company, the more opportunity for variance in experience. With web hosting companies, most people's experiences are either touch the technical side or human side of the company. The technical side of webhosting (at least in the shared market) is quickly becoming commoditized. So that really leaves the human side to impact opinion of a company.
I have a personal opinion that you can attempt to quantify the somewhat intangible human experiences with big data. If you are able to collect enough opinions about multiple companies, you could compare people's average experience. That is the entire basis of Review Signal.
Check Out Review Signal's Web Hosting Review Data and Compare Web Hosting Companies
So we're back to the question of what is the best web hosting company? Based on the hundreds of thousands of opinions Review Signal has collected the answer is, it depends. No company is close to perfect. That seems like a reasonable outcome. People are going to have bad experiences and encounter problems with any service company. The highest rated company we are tracking right now is WebSynthesis at 84% (source: WebSynthesis Reviews - Updated May 2014). That means 16% of people expressed an unfavorable opinion of them. The lowest rated is MochaHost at 19% (source: MochaHost Reviews - Updated May 2014). So even the least liked company has 19% of people expressing favorable opinions.
So you could end up happy or angry with any company. All you can do is hedge your bets by picking a company that a greater percentage of people like, relatively speaking. The other issue is information and experiences change. Companies get bought/sold. They move. They make personnel changes. Opinions of a company can be fluid. However, there is rarely titanic shifting of opinions without a catastrophic event (for example: Post Mortem of the EIG Outage (August 2, 2013) That Affected BlueHost, HostGator, JustHost and HostMonster). You're more likely to see slow changes over long periods of time.
So what's the best web hosting company? It depends. But we've built a tool to help you make smarter hosting choices based on what everyone else is saying. Just check out the data we've collected.
Kevin Ohashi
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Having spent several years providing support in the web hosting industry particularly in the shared hosting/proprietary do it yourself cms area it seems that quite frankly the industry largely has little to be proud of.
Small business owners seeking affordable web hosting are likely to be disappointed most of the time.
They should outright avoid all of the large players, EIG, godaddy, 1&1, and netsol like the plague.
In shared hosting support, the last mile of the service is always provided on the cheap. It is an exercise in frustration from the outset. It is a zero sum game and a catch 22 for the customer. “Let the buyer beware” and “You get what you pay for.” don’t even begin to cover it. Previously in another life I spent years in retail customer service. It is human nature that people do not read signs and they do not really listen to what they are told until after they have a problem. This being the case most tech support organizations do a profoundly poor job of crm and managing customer expectations.
After having spent years speaking with thousands of customers in a support role there are unfortunately few success stories from the customer’s side of things to report.
If a small business owner is not inclined to learn and understand the underlying technology then they must place their trust in a third party who will build their site for them and choose their host and most customers do not do their due diligence.
I personally see little hope for the shared hosting industry. I guess there will always be an endless supply of suckers who will end up being disappointed but I guess that too is just the undeniably essential state of human nature.