Another year, another mountain of data added to the largest web hosting review site. This year we added over 49,000 new reviews (a slight increase from the 45,000 last year). We added two new companies in Arvixe and Site5, both of which are now owned by EIG. We published our first WordPress Plugin WPPerformanceTester. WPPerformanceTester was built for our WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks which we performed yet again with our largest batch of companies ever. We even got some outside validation from LiquidWeb which published its internal NPS benchmarks which matched very closely to their Review Signal Rating.
But the year ended on a somewhat sour note with The Rise and Fall of A Small Orange. It tells the story of ASO and how they've played such a huge role on this site. Including winning at least one of these awards every year since inception. But not anymore. So without further ado...
Best Shared Web Host: LiquidWeb [Reviews]
Best Web Hosting Support: SiteGround [Reviews]
Best Specialty Web Hosting: FlyWheel [Reviews]
Best Unmanaged VPS: Digital Ocean [Reviews]
Best Managed VPS: LiquidWeb [Reviews]
For the second year in a row FlyWheel [Reviews] has set the bar in terms of how high a company's rating can be. They won the best specialty web hosting award with their managed WordPress hosting.
For the first time ever someone besides A Small Orange [Reviews] has won the best shared web hosting. A huge congratulations to LiquidWeb [Reviews]! They also managed to pickup the Best Managed VPS hosting award.
Digital Ocean [Reviews] continues its massive growth and popularity, they have won the Best Unmanaged VPS provider for the third year in a row.
Finally, SiteGround [Reviews] returned to our awards and won Best Web Hosting Support, an honor they last received in 2013.
Kevin Ohashi
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Hello
Firstly thanks for your superb post.
My problem is confusion between two hosts. I want to host my two domains and finding a multiple domain hosting service so that i can host my both of the domains and also can able to host my upcoming domains in future . I can’t understand which company i select.After lots of wandering over the internet and people’s suggestions i’m confused over Hostgator and Bluehost.
Both of the sites are claiming that they will give me unlimited domain hosting, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited space.But after reading your post i get to know that there is no unlimited like thing in hosting field but as there services looks reasonable and after talking to their customer representatives , i think to give a try to there services
Sometime i think as hostgator has indian customer support service and also they have toll free no,, they are better than bluehost which has only us based customer support office and also their customer support is not as responsive as hostgator. but my friend told me that hostgator is not good for their services.
Is his saying true?
One more problem is that as i’m beginner in the field of web development i’m thinking of a website builder coming with most of the hosting providers. but when i talk to hostgator customer representative they said they haven’t any kind of host builder… but when called them the next day an another representative of hostgator told me that they do have a website builder. i’m totally confused by their two faces words, sometimes “yes” and sometimes “no”.
It will be better if you’ll tell me the real fact of hostgator that do they have website builder or not..
and want a final conclusion from your side.What do you think which provider is good for me?
So BlueHost and HostGator are the same company (Endurance International Group). As a whole their brands are not well rated and I wouldn’t recommend them to you. I did a big write up about one of their brands here: https://reviewsignal.com/blog/2016/01/19/the-rise-and-fall-of-a-small-orange/ but it also shows you many of the other brands and how the quality has fallen since being acquired by EIG.
I would say neither. If you just want a website builder, there are a lot of options that I think are probably better than getting a hosting account like SquareSpace/Wix/etc which are focused around being website builders.
I would avoid Wix. It doesn’t provide good SEO. Weebly is now owned by EIG, so I would choose either WordPress.com or Squarespace (in that order of preference), if you’re looking for a website builder.
I’ve had terrible experiences with Bluehost, and Hostgator has had massive outages since they were acquired.