The most webhosts I have been with were pretty sloppy and did just suck. During the time I was facing problems with my webhost, roughly two years ago, WPWebhost showed up on my radar. They emailed me asking if I was interested to move my sites to their servers. Initially, I thought they were just another new webhosting company, but after doing some research I was convinced in their mission and took the jump anyway.

In the time I have been hosted with WPwebhost, I have tried many aspects of their hosting to see if they are really any good. I’ve always wanted a solid webhost and WPwebhost proved to succeed in any aspect of my wishlist.

In this article, I will explain what you should look at when choosing a webhost yourself.

The Wishlist when choosing a Webhost

Webhosts always promote the hundreds of features that you will receive when ordering a plan with them. Many of these features however, are not needed and necessary for your website(s). For this reason, choosing the host with the largest plans and features will not always benefit you. That’s why you need to make a good selection of those features that you need. Let’s list them.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the number of bytes your have that ‘you can transfer’. Meaning that all bytes transferred from pages, images, videos or anything else to the computer of your visitor is bandwidth. Some hosts try to seduce you with terabytes or unmetered bandwidth, but that is not needed: you will never use it. Of course, when you have a websites that push those numbers of bandwidth you should not choose a shared hosting plan, but look for dedicated hosting.

Recommended is to choose a plan with enough bandwidth that gives you the possibility to grow. A normal blog or website (with around 500 pageviews a day) usually only push a couple gigabytes a month. Try choosing something that is around 30 to 50 gigabytes transfer, as that will allow you to start other websites in the future.

Recommended: 50 GB

Web Space

You can see webspace as the hard-disk space you have available on your computer. Usually, not more than a few gigabytes are needed to provide you with enough space to host multiple websites. For example, 10 websites generally only cost you 1 gigabytes of space, so don’t get seduced by hosts offering you 100+ gigabytes. You just don’t need that.

Recommended: 5 GB

Add-on Domains

Many plans out there try to limit the number of sites, and therefore only allow one (or very few) domain names. If you are looking to publish multiple sites, the number of domains you can add to your plan is important. Depending on the number of domain names, usually 10 add-on domains per account is plenty to deal with.

Recommended: 10+ Add-on Domains

Control Panel

A control panel for shared plans is where you can control anything that happens on your website. Usually, you can add MySQL databases, add email addresses, add domains and a lot more, so it’s important to have a control panel that is easy to work with. Cpanel is the control panel I feel most comfortable with. Most webhosts give you the possibility to sneak peak in the control panel, so be sure to check it out before ordering.

Recommended: Cpanel

Other important features

How many email addresses are you looking to use? Usually, the maximum is around 10, however, many hosts offer unlimited email addresses. That way you can create plenty of email addresses for every site you build.
Same goes with MySQL databases, you can never have enough. It is recommended to use a new database each time you build a new website, so try to find a host that – at least – offer you 10 databases.

Recommended: unlimited email addresses
Recommended: 10+ MySQL databases

What about service and support?

There comes something that is very important also. What service do they offer when you get stuck? What about the time they need to reply to your email? Do they have a phone number that you can call anytime?

When something happens (like a server fail), it is important that your webhost help you out immediately. Your website is your business, so getting back online is needed as soon as possible. Your webhost should help you with that right when something happens. Before you can see how the support team react if something happens (you aren’t signed up yet, right?), you should test them.

“Your-host Sucks”

When people are not satisfied with the services of a webhost, they will comment about that. Google will help you search for these reactions. Try searching for “the-name-of-your-potential-host Sucks”. Don’t forget the quotes (“”). The number of results you will get will indicate the number of people that have bad experiences with your potential webhost.

Servers Status

To see if your webhost is accurate and is fair about the 99.999% uptime guarantee, look for a servers status page. This page will give you a direct look at the status of the servers and how long they have been online.

Support Forums

Browsing the support forums of your webhost will give you a good indication of how fast and how accurate the support team answers questions from (potential) clients. You can also ask them a few questions yourself, to see how fast and good they are.

Money Back Guarantee

You should always pick a webhost that offers – at least – 30 days of money back guarantee. In this time, you can check the performance, the quality of the support and everything in general. If you don’t like their services, just ask for your money back.

DivitoDesign’s Recommendation

Like I’ve told you in the intro of this article, DivitoDesign (along with my other sites) are hosted on WPWebhost for two years now. During this time, I have tested many aspects of their hosting to see if I could recommended their plans to you.

I believe I can recommend you WPWebhost. Remember, my experiences will not always be an indication of how happy you will be with WPWebhost, as each situation will be different.

The “freedom” plan that powers DivitoDesign offers 50GB of webspace, 500 GBs of monthly bandwidth, 50 add-on domains, unlimited email and MySQL databases and a 100 days money back guarantee for only 5$ a month. With the coupon code divito30, you will receive an additional 30% discount on any plan, which will get you the plan for only $3,50 per month (yearly payment).

WPWebhost is not only a WordPress related hosting website, but their plans can be used for almost any kind of site. Their support team can help you with a lot more. I’ve asked questions on PHP errors and databases problems and they answered them accurate.

For all of these reasons, I highly recommend WPWebhost.