Best Web Hosting Services for Small Businesses in 2022 [Well Compared Review]

Imagine you’re trying to buy something online.

You open your browser and go to Google.com to search for the item.

Right away the search results page opens, and you click on the first link you see. To your utmost surprise, this link keeps loading, loading, and loading.

30 seconds later, you’re still waiting for the site pages to come up, but nothing is displayed.

What would you do?

Cancel it immediately and click on the next link, right?

That’s exactly what the average internet user would do. Nobody has the time to wait around for a site to load up its pages. If it’s not happening in less than 10 seconds, we are out of there.

Meanwhile, do you know why that first link you tapped took so long to load? 

It is most likely because the site is built on the WRONG WEB HOSTING.

The truth is that not all web hosting is created equal. While some hosts are only good for small-scale websites, others are powerful enough to handle business-sized websites.

As such, when you use web hosting that’s meant for a small-sized website for a site that’s intended to attract thousands of visitors, you start to experience many problems.

Unfortunately, most website owners don’t even know this. They just choose the first web hosting they come across when building a website.

We want to make sure you don’t make this same mistake.

In this article, we’re going to teach you everything you need to know about how to select a good web hosting for your site.

Not only is the wrong web host bad for the health of your website, but it is also dangerous. Below are some of the common dangers associated with choosing a wrong or bad web host.

Danger 1: Your website will be slower than a snail.

If you choose the wrong or bad web host, you face the risk of having a slow website.

Consequences of having a slow-loading site include:

• High bounce time

Bounce time refers to how long visitors stay on your site before taking their leave. If your site loads slowly, you can imagine how infuriated visitors will become. Ultimately, they won’t stay long at all before hitting the exit button.

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• Low search engine ranking

Search engines like Google won’t rank you high on their search result pages (SRPs) if your site is slow. And without Google ranking, you and I both know you can’t attract enough site visitors.

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• Reduced revenue

A recent study by Akamai claims that if your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, you could be losing nearly half of your visitors.

Imperva Incapsula, an American cloud-based application delivery platform, conducted a survey on 4568 shoppers to find out how long people were willing to wait for a website to load while shopping. Look what they found. 

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Danger 2: Your website security can be compromised easily

If you choose the wrong or bad web host, you face the risk of having an insecure website.

Consequences of having an insecure website include:

• Visitors’ details can easily be stolen

I’m sure you don’t want to be responsible for somebody’s credit card number or personal details falling into the hands of scammers. Unfortunately, if you’re on a bad web host, this is a real possibility. 

• Your site can be attacked

Your chances of getting malware, viruses, etc. are high if your site is not on optimum security.

Danger 3: Your website will experience more downtime

Website downtime is the amount of time a website is unavailable to users over a given period. If you choose the wrong web host, you face the risk of experiencing more downtime than usual.

Consequences of a website having too much downtime include:

• Reduced revenue

Imagine you have a business and you’re only open for three hours per day instead of eight. How many customers do you think you’ll lose?

• Lack of trust

If visitors can’t rely on you to be available at all times, how will they trust you?

• Affects SEO

There is no convincing Google or any search engine that you’re a reputable website if you’re always going dark. 

At this point, I ask you: will you risk encountering all these challenges, or will you give what it takes to learn how to select good web hosting?

I implore you to do the latter and read this post till the end.

Key terminologies you’ll come across as we progress, and what they stand for

• Domain: A domain is like a website’s home address on the internet. For example, Google.com is the domain name for Google.

• Server: A server is a virtual computer that holds all the data of different websites.

• Storage: Storage space is the total amount of space on a server where you can store files, especially those used to create your website. These files can be anything from HTML files to images, content, videos, website scripts, and email.

• Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the amount of data (files) a website owner and site visitors can upload and download (cumulatively) in a given month. Say your website contains 1 MB of files and your monthly bandwidth is 10 MB. At the beginning of the month, you upload the entire site; now you’ve used up 1 MB of bandwidth. If a visitor to your site views every page, they will have downloaded 1 MB of data. That means you can have up to 9 visitors in that month (assuming each one views your whole site).

• Sub-domains: A sub-domain is an additional website you can add to a website. For example, help.Google.com is a sub-domain of Google.com. Instead of creating another website for their “help center,” which would require an entirely new web host, Google has incorporated the help page into their original domain. For your website, you can add as many sub-domains as your web hosting provider allows.

As defined by Wikipedia, a web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their websites accessible via the World Wide Web.

In short, web hosting is what allows a website to be seen on the internet. If you’re in London, and your site is being accessed in the U.S., that’s only possible because of web hosting.

Hosting a website

To host a website, you need the help of a web hosting provider. This provider allocates space for you on a webserver to store your website’s files (code, content, pages, images, etc.). Once the files are stored, the provider makes them available and viewable to anyone connected to the internet.
The amount of space allocated to a website on a server depends on the type of hosting purchased by the site owner.

From that last paragraph, you can imagine what would happen to a site if its owner purchases a space that is not enough to comfortably house its files.

Such a site will most likely experience more downtime, cybersecurity issues, and slow load speeds.

This is what happens every time a site owner buys inappropriate hosting.

Speaking of inappropriate hosting; what exactly are the types of hosting available?

Types of Web Hosting

There are 5 major types of web hosting. They include shared, dedicated, cloud, VPS, and reseller hosting.

1.) Shared Web Hosting

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Remember we said earlier that web hosting involves being allocated space on a server by a provider? Well, in shared hosting, you’ll be allocated a space on a server that currently holds hundreds or thousands of other websites. It’s like having a roommate and sharing electricity, water, and common spaces with them. Everyone will share all the resources available on this server.

The major reason people choose this type of hosting plan is that it’s cheaper than other options.
The downside of this hosting service is that you’ll have a lot more unexpected downtime throughout the year, i.e. you’ll be offline more times in a year than normal.

Who is shared hosting best for?

• A great choice for beginner websites and small websites that won’t get more than 10,000 or 20,000 monthly visits.
• All website owners looking for a cheap hosting plan.
• Any website that doesn’t require too much on-site interaction or has lots of files.

2.) VPS Web Hosting

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With VPS hosting, you’re still sharing a server with other sites. But the number of sites is reduced significantly – say, ten or fifteen instead of thousands. A VPS, also known as a “Virtual Private Server,” is more like renting an apartment in a big building full of apartments. Although you’ll still be sharing the building spaces with other apartment owners, you will have your own water, electricity, and other utilities to yourself. VPS is an upgrade on shared hosting, and it’s usually the option shared hosting websites go for when they’ve outgrown shared hosting.

Who is VPS hosting best for?

• Small or medium-sized businesses.
• Websites that can’t afford to have unexpected downtime.
• Website owners who have outgrown the resources of a shared hosting plan, i.e., websites receiving visitors in the tens of thousands.
• Websites with large files like videos and images, and complex files like plugins.
• Websites where there will be a lot of visitor interactions.

3.) Dedicated Web Hosting

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This is the best type of hosting service. As the name implies, you’ll have a dedicated server that belongs to you, and you alone. It’s like having your own private property where everything belongs to you.

The only downside of this hosting service is that it’s highly expensive.

Who is dedicated hosting great for?

• Enterprise-level websites.
• Websites that receive high volumes of monthly traffic – say, 100,000 and above.
• Large eCommerce sites.
• Sites that require the highest levels of security, e.g., sites that store financial data or visitors’ personal information.

4.) Cloud Web Hosting

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Although new, cloud hosting is quite similar in operation to VPS hosting. The idea of cloud hosting is to improve the performance of traditional hosting plans. 

Cloud hosting plans come with multiple remote servers so that if one of the servers has a problem, the other servers on the network can cover it.

Who is cloud hosting great for?

• Websites that are growing at a rapid rate.
• Websites with an unpredictable amount of traffic.
• Websites that need scaling up from time to time.

5.) Reseller Web Hosting

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Reseller hosting is not for everyone. It is meant for those website owners who wish to sell web hosting to other sites.
You could call it white label web hosting.

In reseller hosting, you buy hosting from a provider and then resell to others (usually your existing clients).
The big upside of reseller hosting is that it creates another stream of income for you.

Who is reseller hosting great for?

• Agencies, web designers, and web developers
• Website owners who already have clients in other markets who may be looking for web hosting.
• Website owners who plan to manage at least 10 different websites.

We’ve already established that choosing the wrong web host is bad for a website. And we’ve also established that there are at least five different types of hosting.

The question then is: how can you determine which amongst these five is the ideal choice for your website? Going by the intentions you have for your site, will a shared hosting plan make sense or will you be better off choosing a cloud host?

To answer the question of which web host is best for your site, you’ll need to answer the following questions.

1. What will be the size of your website?

Are you planning to build a big, medium, or small website? That is, will your site have just 5 to 6 pages, up to 10, or more than 10? Will it have any images and/or videos at all? If it will, will they be large files?

How large will the HTML documents, style sheets, scripts, and other media that make up your website be?

I know these are technical questions, and you may not be able to answer them accurately. No problem. When you’re ready to start building the site, just ask the developer: Will the site be small, medium, or large-sized?

Depending on his response, small or medium size can be hosted on shared hosting or VPS. If it’s large, you should go for cloud or dedicated hosting after considering the other factors below.

2. Will your website have a store?

If you’re going to be selling stuff on the site, then you need to be even more careful with your choice because you’re going to be completing virtual transactions.

Again, the choice you make in this case will depend on “sizing.” Sizing, as in, how many product pages are you going to have?

If you’re only going to have a few product pages (common with sites selling digital stuff like memberships, classes, etc.), you can still use a shared hosting service. Just be sure the provider of this service also offers a dedicated IP and SSL security protocol.

If you’re planning on having a lot of product pages, you should consider opting for VPS, cloud, or dedicated hosting.

3. How much traffic do you expecting?

Do you project your website to be receiving hundreds of thousands in traffic at some point in the future? Go for dedicated hosting.

Having carefully examined the purpose of your website, do you think you won’t be getting more than a few hundred or thousand in traffic?

Perhaps you think your site will receive a small amount of traffic in the beginning, but after a while, traffic will spike and it will start receiving huge numbers? Go for cloud hosting.

Having said all this, I believe you now have an idea of what’s best for your site as far as selecting a web host goes.

Now, let’s talk about where to buy a web host.

Web Hosting Service

You buy a web host from a web hosting service.

A web hosting service, or web hosting provider as it’s otherwise known, is a company that provides all the technologies and services a website needs to be seen on the internet.

Remember the term “server” we talked about at the beginning of this post? Well, that’s one of the things a hosting service provides.

There are many hosting services available today, but not all of them are of good repute.

So many bad eggs.

To make sure you aren’t buying your web host from a bad hosting company, here is a list of things to look out for.

• Check the company’s brand reputation in the market: A simple Google search on the name will reveal everything you need to know. Alternatively, you can use sites like whoishostingthis.com to read reviews about a particular host.

See for yourself:

• Support: You need your hosting company to be available 24/7 because you never know when you might need their help. So, before choosing a company, find out how fast they respond and which channels they use.
• Management: How is the control panel for the site administrator? Is it easy to understand and navigable?
• Money-back guarantees: Do they have those? The best hosting companies are so confident in their service that they offer a money-back guarantee, or at least a free trial period.
• Uptime: As far as uptime goes, you need to be as close to 100% as possible. So, before choosing a company, check whether they offer a server availability guarantee of over 99+%. If their website says they do, don’t stop there. Read what their customers are saying. You can do that with tools like Webhostinggeeks.

Other important factors to consider include:

• Amount of Storage
• Amount of Bandwidth
• Number of Domains and Subdomains
• Email Accounts and Features
• Database Support
• Framework Support and Easy Installation
• Mobile App or Website
• Tech Support

There are a lot of technical terms in web hosting. Even if you follow all the tips we’ve outlined for identifying a good host, you may still find it difficult to choose the best hosting company for you.

This is why we decided to do the heavy lifting for you. We scoured the internet for a wide variety of hosting providers and did a lot of research on each one of them. Now we have a collection of the best ones, and we’re so happy to share them with you.

Note: In order to make selecting a web hosting service provider as easy as possible for you, we’ve categorized all the providers into tables showing:

1. The best web hosting service for Shared hosting in 2021
2. The best web hosting service for VPS hosting in 2021
3. The best web hosting service for Dedicated server hosting in 2021
4. The best web hosting service for Cloud hosting in 2021
5. The best web hosting service for Reseller hosting in 2021

1. The Best Web Hosting Service Providers for Shared Hosting in 2021

Which one of the above is the best shared hosting service provider?

Selecting the best shared hosting service provider from the table above is not going to be an easy task.

Almost all providers on the list offer unmetered/unlimited bandwidth, which means they have no problem handling tons of uploads and downloads on a website.

Also, the disk space storage for all of them is quite commendable.

With the exception of a few providers like SiteGround, FastComet, and Hostinger who offer below 50 GB for their basic plans, every other service on the list offers at least 50 GB storage, which is far beyond what an average site needs to handle its files and data.

Interestingly, even those that offer below 50 GB of storage have the capacity to raise their storage offer to the unlimited mark if you purchase higher plans.
Uptime is quite close, as they all clock in at an overall average of 99.9%.

Other yardsticks we might be tempted to use to set them apart include:

• Number of sub-domains
• Number of allowable websites
• Number of email accounts

But we both know that these three criteria are not the most important. For example, the chances that a website owner would want to have more than one website are quite slim.

Also, not every website owner would fancy the idea of having access to unlimited email accounts. Just a few is enough, at least for a start.

And of course, most sites – especially business-related and blogging-related ones – don’t have the need for a ton of sub-domains.

The good news, however, is that we can easily set these services apart by putting each one through a series of performance tests, and then observing which ones perform best.

Note: The tests displayed below and the results generated are courtesy of research conducted by TheMeisle.com.

Two tests were conducted for each shared hosting web host service. These tests were:

1. Page speed tests with Pingdom – The essence of this test is to see how fast a site loads.
2. Page speed tests with Load Impact – This test serves to show how a website performs (how fast or slow it loads) under pressure (traffic).

In order to execute each test, TheMeisle.com said,

“We set up a simple website on each web hosting provider’s servers, loaded the sites with default themes, a smattering of plugins covering various essential features, and the WordPress Theme Unit Test Data. We then input our site URLs into Pingdom and Load Impact and ran the tests from several different locations.”

Note: The locations chosen by TheMeisle.com are places where each service provider is known to have their data centers, that is, where their servers are thought to be strongest.

Now, let’s see the test results for each of the providers in the table above.

Ia. Page speed tests with Pingdom for BlueHost

For BlueHost, what they did was to check the test site’s loading times using the Pingdom Website Speed Test. And they obtained the results displayed below.

Note: These loading times are each an average of three tests from the same location.

• Washington D.C.: 2.75 seconds
• San Francisco: 2.86 seconds
• London: 3.43 seconds
• Sydney: 3.73 seconds
• Tokyo: 2.87 seconds

This gives an average of 3.128 seconds loading time.

Ib. Page speed tests with Load Impact for BlueHost

When the BlueHost test site was placed under pressure (between one and fifty visitors were accessing it over a period of five minutes), these were the results obtained.

• Minimum Response Time: 0.50 seconds
  
• Maximum Response Time: 6.65 seconds

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Key: Greenline depicts the loading times and the blue line depicts the number of visitors accessing the site as time progresses.

As you can see, the load times for BlueHost began to rise dramatically as the pressure (number of people accessing the site) on the site increased.

This shows that BlueHost is impacted by the slightest of pressures.

IIa. Page speed tests with Pingdom for Hostinger

• Washington D.C.: 0.81 seconds
• San Francisco: 1.12 seconds
• London: 0.54 seconds
• Sydney: 2.49 seconds
• Tokyo: 1.57 secondsAverage load times = 1.306 seconds

Average load times = 1.306 seconds

IIb. Page speed tests with Load Impact for Hostinger

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This figure shows that for Hostinger, the load time wasn’t heavily affected by pressure. As you can see, even as the pressure (purple line) rose higher, the load times (green line) only climbed up gently. This shows that Hostinger can handle heavy traffic, at least to a reasonable extent.

IIIa. Page speed tests with Pingdom for A2 Hosting

• Melbourne: 2.24 seconds.
• New York: 480 milliseconds.
• Stockholm: 911 milliseconds.

Average load times = 1.21 seconds

IIIb. Page speed tests with Load Impact for A2 Hosting

• Minimum Response Time: 0.23083 seconds
• Maximum Response Time: 0.28949 seconds

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Wow, this is perhaps the best you’ll see from a web hosting service under pressure. Even as the pressure (blue line) moved from 0 to over 20, the load time (green line) still looks approximately the same.

If you look well, you’ll notice that A2 Hosting practically loaded a site within 0.3 seconds, even though it was under pressure from over 20 visitors.

IVa. Page speed tests with Pingdom for InMotion Hosting

Average load time = 1.75 seconds

IVb. Page speed tests with Load Impact for InMotion Hosting

• Minimum Response Time: 0.27 seconds
• Maximum Response Time: 0.84 seconds

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Load times obviously skyrocketed under pressure.

Va. Page speed tests with Pingdom for Green Geeks

• San Jose: 2.70 seconds
• New York: 1.60 seconds
• Stockholm: 0.87 seconds

Average load time = 1.72 seconds

Vb. Page speed tests with Load Impact for Green Geeks

• Minimum Response Time: 0.16 seconds
• Maximum Response Time: 111 seconds

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Obviously, Green Geeks doesn’t give an encouraging performance. Normally, one would want the green line to remain straight as the blue line goes up, but as you can clearly see from the results obtained, this is not the case.

VIa. Page speed tests with Pingdom for HostGator

• Melbourne: 1.72 seconds
• New York: 0.75 seconds
• Stockholm: 1.29 seconds

Average load time = 1.199 seconds

VIb. Page speed tests with Load Impact for HostGator

• Minimum Response Time: 0.46 seconds
• Maximum Response Time: 0.71 seconds

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This is one of the best performances you’ll see from a web host. The fact that the test site performed like this under pressure makes the service of HostGator even more commendable.

VIIa. Page speed tests with Pingdom for SiteGround

• Melbourne: 1.563 seconds
• New York: 0.645 seconds
• Stockholm: 1.390 seconds

Average load time = 1.199 seconds

VIIb. Page speed tests with Load Impact for SiteGround

• Minimum Response Time: 0.738 seconds
• Maximum Response Time: 1.480 seconds

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As you can see, SiteGround felt the impact of the pressure at various points.

WINNER: Based on the performance analysis we’ve done, the three best shared hosting web hosts are Hostinger, A2 Hosting, and HostGator. When you consider other factors such as uptime, price plans, bandwidth, storage, etc., Hostinger wins hands down.

For example, while A2 Hosting and HostGator offers their best service plan at $12.99 and $5.99 respectively, Hostinger offers you an equivalent of those plans for just $3.99. Not to mention you can even get started with as low as $0.99.

So if you want to buy shared web hosting, we strongly recommend HOSTINGER!!!

2. The Best Web Hosting Service Providers for VPS Hosting in 2021

Which one of the above is the best VPS hosting service provider?

In order to select the best VPS hosting provider in 2021, we’re going to refer to an excerpt from one of the works of Neil Patel, who, by the way, is one of the best digital marketing gurus in the world right now.

In one of his articles titled “Best VPS Hosting Plans,” Neil made it clear that in selecting a suitable VPS provider for your website, the most important factors to consider include:

• Site Performance Metrics: This includes Uptime and Speed.
  
• Dedicated Resources: This includes RAM, Storage, Bandwidth, and CPUs.
  
• Root Access: A feature that allows you to make custom changes to your virtual server at an advanced level.
  
• Operating System
  
• Customer Service
  
• Pricing

Note: You can find the source of the excerpt here.

Not sure what some of these terms mean?

Don’t worry, we’ll explain:

• RAM (Random Access Memory) – what fuels your site and allows it to work.
  
• CPU (Computer Processing Units) – cores within the server that process information. Think of it like trying to check out of a supermarket. The requests have to queue, and the CPUs are the cashiers. The more CPUs, the faster the line moves.
  
• Bandwidth – the amount of data that can flow between the server, the internet, and your site.
  
• Root Access – the ability to customize your server by installing extra software.
  Storage – the amount of space you have for things on your site (content, media, web pages, etc.).
  
• Uptime – how consistently your site is available online.

To simplify our analysis, and to make the process of selecting the best VPS hosting provider easier, we’re going to need to truncate the suggestions of Neil Patel (i.e., remove some elements) because:

• Not all websites require root access
• Customer service (whether good or bad) is not the best yardstick to determine how good the hosting service of a hosting provider is. That is, a hosting provider can have awesome customer service, but a sucky hosting service.

After this truncation, the most important factors become Uptime, RAM, Storage, Bandwidth, CPUs, Speed, and most importantly, Pricing.

Based on this, our contestants for the title of “the best VPS hosting provider in 2021” will be:

• InMotion
  
• A2 Hosting
  
• Green Geeks
  
• HostGator

Why?

Of all the providers in the table, these four boast the best numbers as far as the truncated factors above are concerned.

This brings us to the point where we finally choose a winner and disqualify some providers from the list.

To do that, we note the following:

• Green Geeks falls behind the rest in terms of storage. Its 50 GB is behind InMotion’s 75 GB, A2 Hosting’s 150 GB, and HostGator’s 120 GB. Plus its $39.95 price plan is way too expensive for a basic-plan VPS hosting. For these reasons, we’re axing Green Geeks from the list.
  
• A2 Hosting falls slightly short on the uptime front. A VPS hosting provider has to offer way more than a 99.95% uptime. It also falls short on the pricing front with its basic plan listed for $33.99.
  
• HostGator seems like a rather good one on all fronts (pricing inclusive). But its 2GB RAM makeup and 2-core CPU is always going to raise an eyebrow, and that’s the only reason we are crowning InMotion above it.

With everything taken into account, InMotion is our clear winner.

Its 75 GB storage, 4 GB RAM, 3-core processor, and 99.99% uptime is, indeed, good value for the money.

In case you’re wondering why we chose to prioritize CPUs, uptime, and RAM over other factors like storage and bandwidth in choosing between HostGator and InMotion, just remember this:

It’s nice to have huge storage space or bandwidth limits – but none of that matters if your site goes down regularly (low uptime), or doesn’t have enough fuel in its engine (RAM and CPUs).

3. The Best Web Hosting Service Providers for Dedicated Server Hosting in 2021

Which one of the above is the best Dedicated Server hosting service provider?

In order to select the best dedicated server hosting provider, we’re going to use the same approach as we did for the VPS hosting category.

The reason is that both VPS and dedicated server hosting are quite similar in terms of the things they need to function.

For example, in the VPS section, you remember we mentioned a few important factors like CPUs, RAM, bandwidth, and storage space. Well, in the world of dedicated hosting, these things are the most important, too.

And just like we pointed out before the more the merrier.

That is, the more CPU cores you can get, the better and faster your site will perform on dedicated hosting. The more storage spaces, the larger the capacity of your site. The bigger the RAM, the better the functionality of your site.

So again, in order to select the best-dedicated server hosting provider, we’re going to compare all the providers in the table above based on which ones offer the highest RAM, storage space, CPU cores, uptime, and bandwidth in their basic plan.

And let’s not forget that CPU and RAM are more important than bandwidth and storage spaces.

Now, let’s compare:

Based on storage spaces and bandwidth, the list of the best dedicated server hosting providers will be:  HostGator (1TB, unmetered), DreamHost (1TB, unmetered), A2 Hosting (1TB, 10 TB), and InMotion (1TB, 6 TB).

Based on CPU, the list reduces to HostGator (4 cores), InMotion (4 cores), and DreamHost (4 cores). We’ve axed out A2 Hosting because it only has a 2-core CPU

Finally, based on RAM, the list reduces to HostGator (8 GB) and InMotion (16 GB). We’ve axed out DreamHost from the previous list because its 4 GB RAM falls short behind the other two on the list.

Now, we’re down to the final two.

But isn’t it obvious already?

Between a 16 GB RAM setup and an 8 GB RAM, I bet we both know which is the best.

Based on these grounds, we can conclude that InMotion Hosting is the best Dedicated Server hosting provider.

4. The Best Web Hosting Service Providers for Cloud Hosting in 2021

When it comes to cloud hosting, we think of it as the mother of all hosting plans in terms of flexibility.

Think of your plan like a pay-as-you-go mobile: you decide how much resources you want for the month, and pay accordingly. 

For example, let’s say you plan to have a big marketing campaign coming up, and you expect to have more traffic than usual. Cloud hosting allows you to raise your hosting resources (bandwidth, storage, RAM, etc.) for just that one-off busy month. Once the campaign is over, you can easily switch back to your former resources.

Simply put, cloud hosting makes life easier.

Which one of the above is the best Cloud Server hosting service provider?

In this case, there won’t be an outright best. The reason is that all the providers on the list are excellent at what they do. 

What distinguishes them is the fact that each one of them offers something unique and different from the rest of the pack.

So, instead of selecting an outright winner, we’ll categorize each of the providers in the table based on what they’re best at. This way, if you’re looking for a cloud hosting service that provides super-fast site speed, you know where to look. If you’re looking for one that provides the best customer support, you know where to look, and so on.

A2 Hosting

Per multiple types of research – courtesy of Websitebuilderexpert.com and NeilPatel.com – A2 Hosting has been proven to be the hosting provider that provides the fastest cloud host. If you’re looking for a cloud hosting service that is lightning fast and reliable, look no further beyond A2 Hosting.

Cloudways

While A2 Hosting can be boastful of providing super-fast cloud web hosting, Cloudways takes pride in having its servers staged in over 25 cities worldwide. Cloudways has server centers in New York, San Francisco, London, Asia, and many European countries.

No other provider can boast of so many data centers. 

This number of data centers means that users can select servers as close to their physical locations as possible, which is good for your website’s speed.

If you’re looking for a cloud hosting service that has servers (data centers) close to where your business/website is located, choose Cloudways. Chances are they have a data center in your immediate locality.

Kamatera

If you’re looking for a fully personalized hosting plan, there is no better option than Kamatera. 

With Kamatera, users can control almost every aspect of their hosting plan at any given time. 

For example, you can control who gets root access to your servers. You can control IP allocation. You can scale your server capacity up or down. You can increase or decrease elements like CPU, RAM, storage space, and even firewalls, etc.

SiteGround

One great feature of SiteGround is that you can turn on auto-scaling. With this feature, you can automatically instruct your cloud host setup to increase or decrease certain hosting elements (RAM, bandwidth, CPU, etc.) during times of unexpected traffic spikes.

If you know your site is the type that experiences traffic spikes here and there – I mean traffic jumping from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands – this can be a good hosting option for you, as it lets you prepare for the unexpected automatically.

InMotion

InMotion’s cloud hosting selling point is their customer service. 

Unlike the rest of the pack, InMotion offers 24/7 support via:

• Live chat 
• Telephone conversation
• Help tickets
• A knowledge database with tons of resources to refer back to. 

InMotion is appropriate for you if you don’t know too much about cloud hosting, and will be needing assistance every step of the way.

Hostgator

If you’re looking for budget-friendly cloud hosting that’s still reliable, Hostgator is the way to go. Because it offers unmetered storage and bills on an hourly basis, it can also handle a site with a lot of pages or significant variations in traffic without sacrificing its great 99.99% uptime guarantee. 

DreamHost

DreamHost cloud hosting service is perfect for you if you know how to code. 

If you check the list, you’ll notice DreamHost offers one of the best pricing plans.

Don’t jump at it.

The reason their pricing is this cheap is that you’re doing the bulk of the work yourself.

So, if you don’t know how to code, you may find this challenging.

On the bright side, if you’re comfortable managing and customizing your website through a command-line text interface, you’ll love Dreamhost, as you’ll be able to keep playing around with the web development tools you’re already using.

Hostinger

Hostinger stands out for its unique control panel, which was created in-house (as opposed to the popular cPanel software that most of the providers on this list use). Hostinger’s control panel is simple to use, and easy for beginners to get comfortable with.

5. The Best Web Hosting Service Providers for Reseller Hosting in 2021

Reseller hosting is when you buy enough server power – storage space, bandwidth, etc. – from a hosting provider to run your own web hosting service (that is, sell hosting to other people).

For example, let’s say you’re a web developer, and you have your own website. You can run a reseller hosting business, wherein you sell web hosting directly to the people patronizing your web development business. So, instead of these people going out to get a web host once you finish building their site, they can easily just buy from you.

The only challenge is that you have to be sure your reseller hosting provider is a reputable one, because the fate of your site and those of your clients depends on it.

Luckily for you, our list of the best reseller hosting providers in 2021 helps see to that.

Which one of the above is the best Reseller hosting service provider?

The above-listed providers are some of the best names you’ll find in the reseller hosting industry. But for the sake of the scope of this post, it’s important that we compare and choose the best amongst the pack.

In order to do this, we’ll note the following:

• The best provider is the one that offers you the best server features. That is the largest website space (storage) and bandwidth (to accommodate traffic). We’re assuming you plan on growing your reseller hosting to a level where you have hundreds of clients.
• The best provider is the one that offers the highest number of freebies. 
• The best provider is one that offers the best price plan. Remember, the cheaper the reseller plan, the higher your chances of making profits.

Now, let’s compare:

Based on storage spaces, bandwidth, and freebies, our table of the best reseller hosting providers reduces to:

BlueHost (200GB, 4TB), and A2 Hosting (270GB, 2.7 TB). And that’s all.

We’ve axed out HostGator (140GB, 1.4TB), InMotion (160GB, 1.6TB), GreenGeeks (160GB, 1.6TB), and SiteGround (with 40+ GB storage), because they fall short on the bandwidth, storage, and freebies standard. Go back to the table and see for yourself.

Now we’re left with BlueHost and A2 Hosting.

Strangely, we won’t be able to choose between these two. 

From where we’re standing, both are the best options as far as reseller hosting is concerned.

However, the choice you make will depend on what you really want from your reseller hosting business.

If you feel your third-party clients will need lots of storage to accommodate their files and data on your server, you should go with the bigger storage space option, which is A2 Hosting (with 270 GB storage). 

Remember, the bigger the web space you have, the more clients and clients’ data you can accommodate.

But if you feel your third-party clients will require lots of bandwidth to accommodate the huge amount of traffic flocking to their sites, go with the higher bandwidth option, which is BlueHost (with 4 TB).

Remember, you don’t want to end up paying extra for additional traffic whenever your third-party websites have a higher number of visitors.

We’ve finally come to the end of our discussion on selecting the best web hosting service in 2021. 

Choosing a web host is not as simple as opting for the first name you see in a Google search result.

Thorough research and extensive considerations are required.

Luckily for you, we’ve already done that in this post.

All you need to do now is understand the type of hosting you need (you can find out how to do that at the beginning of this post). Afterward, go to the section of the post where that type of hosting is discussed, and identify the provider that best suits your needs.