Your tech and marketing stack is highly reliant on solid, fast, reliable, scalable web hosting. Whether you're managing bare-server hosting with your IT team, or going with a fully done-for-you solution like Webflow, the classic practice of hosting files in the cloud to serve to customers is just as relevant in 2023 as it was 20 years ago, albeit with lots of progress and changes.

But how do you decide on such a technical decision?

Choosing the best hosting is super tough – for beginners and pros alike. There are hundreds of options, and every web host claims to be the best one out there. And there's no one best host for every person or company – all situations are different. You have to determine what's best for your business and wade through too many options and too much marketing speak.

Our ever-updated review site attempts to turn jargon into clear, plain English in a causal yet helpful way.

How should you compare web hosts?

If you're choosing a host for the first time, it can be overwhelming to try to figure out what you should be comparing web hosts on

Do you compare only by price?

By customer support?

By largest disk space?

It's really tough, since the features, wants, needs are different for everyone. Let's highlight a few.

1) Compare web hosts on value not price

You shouldn't compare web hosts just purely on the price.

If you've literally got $2 a month you can afford for hosting, well, maybe you'll just have to go with that. But if you can swing a few more dollars, there's a world of other things to compare that go into value beyond just price.

Price = the raw $ amount that the hosting will cost you

Value = what you actually get for that price

Let's use a hypothetical situation, you have two options:

1. Web host A costs $30 a month, but you can only host one website, are only allowed 100 visitors a month, and you don't get email hosting
2. Web host B costs $100 a month, but you can host unlimited websites, can have unlimited traffic, and it comes with email hosting

What's a better value? Clearly it's web host B.

2) Customer service for hosting is king

If you're not an experienced developer or techie, you're going to need premium customer service support at a hosting company.

In fact, if you look at all the bad web hosting reviews, the #1 thing that comes up is customer service.

People get royally pissed off if the customer service takes 45 minutes to get on chat.

In fact, good customer service from a hosting company can more than make up for lower quality features, speed, and uptime.

If this is huge for you, check out our ranking of hosts with the best customer service.

3) Check the uptime percentages

It's one of the most basic things you want in a host: that the website is actually live.

Ideally your web host would have 100% uptime. But that's statistically impossible (I think).

So it's really, really important to check uptime percentages with a hosting company. The good ones will release these stats for you. The bad ones will try to hide it.

In reality, 99% uptime is not that good. It means your website will be down for 87.6 hours a year. That's not good enough for me.

Look for hosts with 99.999999% uptime.

Other hosting features to compare

There are so many things to compare, it's bewildering, here's just a few of them:

• Bandwith
• Storage space
• Site speed
• WordPress support
• SSL certificates
• Caching tools

The list goes on. What you need to do is create a list of your business needs and thoroughly research what's best for you!

Huge Top 25 Hosting Comparison Table (Our Research)

Looking for the best web hosting? Here are our top 10:

You'll inevitably have a set of needs depending on a multitude of factors:

• Small business or large?
• Content site, ecommerce site, lead generation site, or something else?
• Is your company a marketing-led organization? Sales-oriented? Product-led?
• Are you the person managing the site?
• Are you technical? Semi-technical? Non-technical?
• How big will your site be – 10 pages or 100,000 pages?
• How critical is pricing and value?

There are all questions we seek to address on this page and beyond.

For starters, we've narrowed things down to the top 10 web hosts, and indicated which is best for you. But please poke around the site and dig deep to find other reviews and articles that better address your needs.

Top Features of the best Web Hosts

SPEED AND UP-TIME RELIABILITY

Who wants a slow site? Nobody. A bad host can slow down your loading times and destroy your conversion rates. Good hosts load fast and optimize for scaling. Check out our ranking of the speediest web hosting companies.

FRIENDLY & 24/7 SUPPORT

There's nothing worse than “big-box” hosts that make you wait 45 minutes. You need fast, friendly, and knowledgable hosting support. This is crucial to your sanity. We found the top web hosts for customer support here.

EASY & FUNCTIONAL CONTROL PANEL

Some hosts just go with cPanel, some create their own. Either way, you need to know if you're getting something elegant, or a monstrosity from the 90s. Do that research before you buy.

REASONABLE PRICE

Reasonable means a lot of things. If you're a student, you need it as cheap as possible. If you're a real business, you need a fair value. If you're an enterprise it's more about results. Don't base your decision on pricing alone. Two cheap hosts with amazing features are SiteGround and A2 Hosting.

SECURITY BACKUP FACILITIES

How much will a hacked site cost you? You must prepare for the worst scenarios, and they will happen. From security to downtime, you need to know how your hosting company will support you through thick and thin. Make sure you have an SSL installed and prevent hacking and malware.

GUARANTEES

Don't roll the dice. Go with a trusted host that guarantees their work. From 60-day trials to anytime refunds. From 1,000 5-star reviews to a host swallowed up by a globo-corp – you need to know what you're buying.

What is a Web Host?

A web host is a service that stores files for you in the cloud to power your website. The best way to think about it is that all the files for your website are similar to a collection of Microsoft Word docs. Instead of storing the Word docs on your desktop computer, you’re storing them on someone else’s computer in a huge warehouse somewhere.

Your files are stored on something called a server, which is essentially very similar to a desktop computer. It stores your files along with many other files from many other people, for efficiency.

How Does Web Hosting Work?

Let’s get a bit more technical. Your website is made up of a collection of text, images, video, and code. This all has to be stored somewhere. Websites are made up of pages of HTML. Inside the HTML is your text, images, video, and other content. These HTML pages together link to each other and form your website.

Your website files have to be stored somewhere because anytime someone wants to visit your site, they’re requesting to look at your files. It’s similar to how if your boss wants to read that monthly report, he’s requesting to look at the PDF document, so you send it to him via email. A website is just like that except a bit more efficient. Instead of everyone emailing you every time they want to see your documents, you just put it public online so they can see the documents at any time.So all of your website files are stored on a server. While you technically can build your own server and have it sitting in your basement, it’s not the most practical thing to do.

One, if you’re not an IT person, it’ll take quite a bit of work to learn and set up.

Two, it’s not very secure to host your website in your basement because any flood, fire, or power outage would take down your site.

Third, it takes work and maintenance to keep servers running and up to date.

Web hosting companies handle all of this for you. They range anywhere from a few dollars a month to hundreds of thousands (if you're a corporation).

The hard work is deciding which option is the best for you. That's what we do.