katmandu wrote:I do this kind of stuff for a living.
Bluehost, A Small Orange, and Hostgator are now all owned by the same company,
EIG. Hostgator is OK for the money, but in my view they aren't what they used to be before the takeover. EIG is consolidating data centers for all their companies to Utah.
If you want the best, go with Rackspace or Liquidweb. They cost more but are worth it in my opinion.
Regardless, I recommend a Cpanel-based host. Cpanel is the most widely used hosting control panel, and for good reason, as most people find it fairly intuitive.
Media Temple is pretty good, but they don't use Cpanel.
Godaddy used to have a proprietary control panel, but they now use Cpanel too. I'd avoid them, because 1) I register my domains there, and I think you should keep your domains & host separate - don't give one company too much control, and 2) Some things, like simply creating a new database, take a long time to process, where with most Cpanel-based hosts the database is created instantly.
My own personal favorite host in the lower-end price range is a hidden gem called
A2 Hosting.
You might also check out MDD Hosting and Siteground. I've had clients who've been very happy with both.
Paypal and Stripe both make it pretty easy to accept payments online.
I've had a dedicated virtual server with MediaTemple for about 3-4 years now. Prior to that, I resold space on a friend's server.....
also a MediaTemple DVS. I actually like the Plesk hosting panel and find it more intuitive (a matter of personal tastes, I guess), but katmandu is correct that cPanel is by far the most commonly used interface, and will be familiar to the most number of people.
I just purchased a DVS plan from BlueHost a week or two ago, and I am in the process of migrating my client websites off of the MediaTemple server to the BlueHost server. GoDaddy now owns MediaTemple, and since the acquisition, MediaTemple's support service has gotten less cooperative, and more expensive. I have to pay for certain kinds of support now that used to be free.
Comparing my MediaTemple server to the BlueHost server:
- MediaTemple DVS:
- Service Level: (dv) 4.0 - Level 3 (of six levels)
- Price: $150.00/month
- RAM: 4GB
- Storage: 100GB
- Bandwidth: 2TB
- Control Panel: Parallels® Plesk
BlueHost VPS - VPS Level: Premium (3rd level of 4 for VPS type hosting)
- Price: $49.99 for 1st month, $89.99/month after that; OR 3 months at $69.99/month (this is what I chose)
- RAM: 6TB
- Storage: 120GB
- Bandwidth: 3TB
- Control Panel: cPanel
There are other considerations, like what versions of Linux, Apache, PHP, mySQL, etc., the servers are running. Both are roughly equivalent in this regard.......except to say that A) updating is more difficult with MediaTemple, and at least
some of the updating doesn't go that smoothly. Also, it matters whether or not the service is managed. The MediaTemple server I have is not, and so all security issues fall squarely on my shoulders. BlueHost's is managed, and that takes some of the load off for me. I offer hosting to my clients as a "value added" proposition to make using me as a designer an easier decision for them, but I'm perfectly happy if they're hosted elsewhere too. I have had some issues with a couple of customer sites that got hacked, and ended up getting my IP address blacklisted more than once for spamming. I rectified the issues, but it has been such a giant hassle to stay on top of it that I'm going to migrate all of them to a new server with a new IP, and mandate that they either be willing to update their site software OR be hosted somewhere else.
With 2-3 couple of exceptions for hosting clients who I have a personal relationship with, and whose sites I will take it upon myself to upgrade, I am going to mandate that my hosting clients either contract with me to rebuild their sites in more current versions (most are REALLY old), or I am going to no longer host their sites.
Both allow you to host multiple domains. So far, BlueHost's support has been top-notch and cheerful. I have had some familiarity with both GoDaddy and HostGator.......and a couple of others as well. StartLogic.com comes to mind.
About HostGator: they seem OK, although I haven't dealt with them for a long time.
About GoDaddy: their service seems OK also. The primary reason I never gave them my business is that I hated all their "half-naked ladies" TV ads. But I just finished migrating a client's website to their servers just yesterday. If it weren't for my moral objections, I'd probably be comfortable using them. My only complaint is that their account center is really busy to the eye, and clicking on links pops open new browser tabs to navigate the various services. To me, that's unnecessary.
But BlueHost looks like they are going to turn out well. I just now called MediaTemple to ask for a simple help with clearing the mail queue, and they wanted to charge me $80 for it. Bag that. I'm glad I'm changing.