My Top Pick for New Sites: Bluehost
I recommend Bluehost for new websites that are getting under 100,000 pageviews per month. That will be the case for most people.
Why I recommend Bluehost: Bluehost has been one of the simplest to use hosts that I’ve used personally. I consider myself a tech dummy and was able to set up hosting with Bluehost. The navigation is pretty straight-forward and the customer support people are helpful.
Also, it’s super cheap… which people always love.
I used to get people asking me about hosting fairly often, so i’d always tell them I didn’t know… because I didn’t want to try and be tech-support for people. Also, I didn’t know how to do any of the stuff.
Now, I actually feel good about recommending Bluehost because they have tutorials for everything you need to do. That means I save time answering questions because the pros put together tutorials to help.
What they could do to improve: Bluehost is great for reliability, but its not the fastest host online. That makes sense because its a “shared host” which means you don’t have a full dedicated web server for your site.
Here’s my link for Bluehost (it’s an affiliate link, which means i’ll get a commission for recommending it)
What about for larger sites with more than 100k visitors a month?
This is where you need to start thinking a bit more about the return you are getting from these visitors. Hosting at this level can get expensive, especially at the higher levels.
I actually have made quite a few errors with trying to save money once my sites grew. The first RIGHT thing I did was move the sites over to WPEngine.
But after chatting with a web guy that was handling all my stuff at the time, he told me that I needed to switch over to a cheaper option, which ended up saving me about $200 a month.
The problem with saving that $200 a month was that ALL of the site’s that we moved over to that host got hacked and I lost all of the content I had spent years building up. Yep. So to save some money I lost YEARS of hard work building those sites up.
I’ve been slowly but steadily building each of those sites up and it hasn’t been easy. I wish I would have just stuck with WPEngine because things flat out worked when I used them.
They aren’t cheap. They are a fairly expensive host when you compare strictly by the #’s, but they actually kept my sites up and running when I used them. Most of the smaller niche sites I have aren’t up to the 100k a month level yet so I’m still using BlueHost, but once they grow again I will be moving them back to WPEngine.
