As someone who owns a lot of sites, I’ve had to deal with many different web hosts over the course of my business. So which is the best web hosting company I’ve used? It’s little hard to declare what the best web host is but I do have a couple of favorites. In this post, I wanted to share my experiences with each of the web hosting companies I have personally tried myself.

In general, the most important factor I’m looking for in a web host is reliability. There’s nothing more costly to my business then a web host that’s down. A close second is support. I want a web host that will reply to my support tickets in a timely manner. The best web hosting companies in my experience will be able to handle these two factors easily.

I’ll keep this post updated as I try new web hosts.

Shared Web Hosting

Hostgator – Yeah, everyone promotes them online, because they have a really nice affiliate program. But as a web hosting company, Hostgator is really good. I’ve been with them since the beginning of 2008 and reliability wise they are outstanding. Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I had any significant downtime with them. Plus, support is great and they usually respond to support tickets in under 15 minutes. They are a little more expensive then some other shared web hosts, but please, don’t make your web hosting decisions based only on price. Use the Hostgator coupon code JOSHGATOR1 to save 25% off.

BlueHost – Another popular web host, that I have a couple of sites hosted with for the past 5 months. So far, I have not experienced any downtime with them, and I really haven’t had to deal with their support much either. Which is exactly what you should want from a web hosting company.

DDos Hosting Solutions – Awhile back, one of my sites on Hostgator experienced a DDoS attack and I was asked to move it off the server. So I searched around for an affordable web host that would provide me with some DDoS protection and I came across DDOS Hosting Solutions. I couldn’t find many reviews, but I decided to try them anyway because the price was right. Fortunately, they were able to handle my site and the DDoS attack against it with no problems.

Still support really matters to me and they really don’t have much in the way of support staff. At least that’s the impression I got when the CEO was answering the majority of my support requests. Often responses to tickets could take hours or even days. I eventually got fed up with this and switched my site over to KnownHost.

InMotion Hosting – I’ve been with these guys a couple of months now. No major problems with them so far. Support though, seems to be a mixed bag. I’ve had some support tickets answered in 15 minutes, and others not even answered at all. Plus their shared hosting plans limit the number of addon domains and MySQL DBs you can create, so watch out for that.

WebHostingPad – I gave these guys a try, and I initially had some issues transferring one of my sites over. So I talked to their live support and got one of the rudest customer service people I ever met. And not only that, when I tried to talk to someone else on the live chat I ended up getting the same guy 2 more times. Suffice to say, I got a refund and I never looked back.

VPS Web Hosting

WiredTree – This is the web host that this site is currently on and I’ve been with them since June 2009. I also use them to host my Prosper202 and CPVLab tracking systems. Where WiredTree excels is its excellent customer support. There are many times when my support requests are answered in under 5 minutes or less which is fantastic. On the other hand, they’ve had a few high profile outages in the past 6 months which is a little disconcerting. It seems like they are going through some growing pains, because their reliability had been great before. Still, I’m going to continue to stick with them for now.

KnownHost – As I mentioned earlier, I recently moved one of my sites over to one their VPS plans. I went with them mainly because of their good reviews on WebHostingTalk.com. While I haven’t been with them long enough to adequately judge their uptime (it’s been good so far), I am happy with their support. While perhaps not as fast as WiredTree, my tickets all seem to get answered within 15 minutes. In terms of cost vs performance, KnownHost seems to offer very good value.

Burst.net – I initially signed up with a Burst.net VPS plan as an experiment. Their cheapest VPS plan is $5.95 a month which is the lowest price I’ve seen for a VPS. Recently, I upgraded to the next level up plan to better test their web hosting services. I encountered a couple of issues with my server that I needed to get help with from their support. So far, I haven’t found them to be as responsive as I would like. Sometimes they respond fast, while sometimes it can take quite a while. Still, it’s early and I’m going take more time to evaluate them.

As someone with a large and growing network of niche sites, being able to host them on different class C IP address is very important to me. This allows me to leverage the more powerful sites that I own and pass link juice to my new and still developing sites in my blog network. This helps my sites get ranked higher and more quickly because I can easily create contextual, strong, and diverse (from different IPs) links from my own sites. These are some of the best kind of backlinks you can get.

To do this, I’ve started to host many of my sites using SEO hosting. With SEO hosting, plans include multiple Class C IP addresses that you can host your blogs on. Most SEO web hosts offer plans in blocks of 5 IP addresses each, and you can easily upgrade your plans to get more IP addresses as you need them. Since these are Class C IP addresses, each IP address you get is seen as different from every other IP addresses in your account.

I’ve tried a couple of SEO hosting companies, including SEOHosting.com, but I think I’ve finally settled on the best SEO Hosting provider. The web host is called aSEOHosting and they’ve been getting a lot of buzz lately among internet marketers.

First of all, their plans start at $4.75 per IP per month which is an awesome deal. Hosting at SEOHosting.com by comparison, will cost you $7 per IP per month. Second, their support is really good. Every time I have sent a question to their support desk, I’ve always received a response back very quickly. Lastly, the other major difference between aSEOHosting and SEOHosting.com is that each of the IP addresses you get are dedicated and not shared. This means that only you can use your assigned IP, which is a nice benefit you normally pay extra for at other places.

If you are used to shared hosting, SEO hosting is a little bit more complex to setup then you may be used to. Although, it really isn’t that bad once you go through the process once. For each IP address you use, you need to create a new account using WHM. To do this, you just need to assign one of your domains as your main account name and then set a package for the account. A package just determines the resources that each plan gets (diskspace, bandwidth, databases, add-on accounts etc).

Once you’ve created your account, everything can then be managed through cPanel. Since most web hosts use cPanel, this should be familiar to most of you. This is the place where you can add more addon domains, create databases and install your WordPress blogs.

Some Things You Can Do With SEO Hosting

As mentioned above, SEO Hosting allows you to do some really cool things. Besides allowing you to more efficiently pass link juice to your own blogs, you can also install a script like Backlink Index Express to automatically get your links indexed more quickly.

If you are willing to spend money and buy some high ranked domains, you can also make your very own link building network. Instead of paying money to use someone else’s network, you can leverage sites you own to make one yourself. This of course takes some time to get off the ground, but once you do, it’s well worth it. The only way to do this effectively though is by using some type of SEO hosting.

As you can see, there are many things to like about aSEOHosting. The plans they have are some of the best I’ve seen (starting at $23.75 for 5 IPs), and their support is top notch. They also have a full 30 day money back guarantee, so you can try them out yourself at no risk to you. If you’re looking for some good, reliable SEO Hosting, I highly recommend them.

Have you ever banged your head on the table in frustration upon finding out that your web host is down, and all your money making sites are pulled down with it? For big-time affiliate marketers, even an hour of downtime can cost you thousands of dollars. With my previous VPS hosting, I had my ad server choke due to my web host’s inability to handle the massive traffic of a large media buy. I lost quite a bit of cash because of it, but I learned a valuable lesson. Don’t be cheap – and get a dedicated server. That’s when I did my research and decided to go with LiquidWeb. I’ve never seen anyone say a bad word about it, and a couple of my friends were absolutely raving about their reliability and support.

Why LiquidWeb?

• 100% Uptime Guarantee. Gives you the peace of mind that your sites will always be up.
• 24/7 Support. If you need help with anything, you can talk to someone at any time. Help tickets are answered in minutes, not hours.
• LiquidWeb is FAST. Uses only Tier-1 bandwidth providers so your sites are always fast and responsive
• Owns and operates their own infrastructure. That means you’re never stuck relying on a 3rd-party if anything goes wrong.

My LiquidWeb Experience

I’ve been with LiquidWeb for the past six months now and most importantly to me, I’ve yet to experience any downtime with them. I currently use Prosper202 for all my tracking needs, and LiquidWeb is the perfect web host for it. On shared hosting, Prosper202 can really degrade your server performance if you start sending a lot of traffic through it, LiquidWeb has no such problems and I’ve been able to send a million+ clicks a day to it and the server is able to handle the traffic with no problems.

LiquidWeb support is similarly awesome. I’ve had to submit help tickets several times to set specific things up, and I’ve always gotten replies within minutes. The staff is extremely knowledgable and I’ve always been able to get my questions answered. With some web hosts, it’s impossible to contact someone in a reasonable amount of time, but I never have to worry about that as a LiquidWeb customer.

Final Thoughts

Once you start earning serious money from your internet marketing efforts, you’ll want to switch from your current shared hosting or VPS account to a dedicated web hosting account. Web hosting is definitely not something you want to skimp on, and spending money on a rock solid web host is a very important investment. For me, LiquidWeb gives me everything I want from a dedicated web host, so I definitely recommend you check them out.

As an internet marketer, it is important to choose a great web hosting company for your sites. There’s nothing worse then paying for traffic to a site that is currently down. I’ve tried several different webhosting companies, and the host I recommend to most people is Hostgator.

Hostgator is extremely reliable, cost effective, and they offer great support. In this Hostgator review, I’m going to share with you why Hostgator is so popular among internet marketers.

Hostgator offers all the standard hosting plans that everyone else does, including shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS and dedicated hosting services. I started with the Hostgator shared hosting plan about 3 years ago and I now host about 20 of my sites on their servers.

In all that time, I can only think of one or two times where I’ve experienced any downtime at all. Hostgator boats a 99.9% uptime guarantee and I definitely believe it. It is very rare with hosting companies to experience their advertised uptime, but Hostgator manages to do that. This is the number one factor that I look at when choosing a good web host.

Using Hostgator

Hostgator offers several hosting plans, so which one should you choose? If you just want to run a handful of websites that get a moderate amount of traffic then I would recommend the Hostgator Baby plan. This is Hostgator’s most popular plan because it strikes a good balance between affordability and performance.

The Baby Plan is just $9.95 $7.96 a month and you can save even more than that by pre-paying yearly or applying one of the many Hostgator coupon codes out there. Plus, if you find yourself ever out-growing your shared hosting plan, you can easily transition to a Hostgator VPS or dedicated server by submitting a simple ticket request to support.

Hostgator Features

For managing your web hosting accounts, Hostgator uses cPanel. cPanel is very easy to use, and it allows you to easily add any new domains to your server, setup email address, and setup 3rd party software via Fantastico.

I mainly install WordPress for my sites, and Fantastico makes it a very simple process to do. But if you want to use an alternative CMS like Joomla or Drupal you can do that too. You can install more than 50 different popular web scripts using Fantastico.

As an internet marketer, I install a variety of different scripts on my Hostgator account and they always work out of the box. Hostgator installs the latest version of PHP which ensures that everything runs smoothly.

While I don’t really recommend installing it on a shared server, I’ve also been able to successfully install Prosper202 on my Hostgator account. You do need to contact support though to have them whitelist your Prosper202 domain and turn off mod_security for you though.

Hostgator Support

Speaking of support, Hostgator support is the best I’ve found. They offer 24/7 web hosting support and they are very fast and responsive. You always get to speak to a live person on the phone, or you can just use their live chat on the website to get answers as well.

I’ve used the live chat to contact Hostgator numerous times for various issues, and I’ve always come away impressed after talking to their support people. They are knowledgeable and patient, and they have always been able to answer any of the questions I have had.

Never downplay the importance of responsive support when it comes to web hosting. I’ve had experiences with other web hosts where I’ve had to wait a day or two to receive any response. There is no worst feeling in the world when your site is down, and you can’t get a response from support to tell you what’s going on.

Hostgator Coupons

While Hostgator is certainly not the cheapest webhost in existence, they are still competitive in price if you use the right coupon codes. Luckily, I’ve managed to get a few exclusive Hostgator coupon codes for my readers to use:

• JOSHGATOR1 – Save 25% Off Any Order.
• JOSHGATOR2 – Save $9.94 Off Any Order.
• JOSHGATOR3 – Save $24.94 Off Any Reseller Packages.

Make sure to use the Hostgator coupon code that will save you the most money. For example use the coupon code JOSHGATOR2 to get $9.94 off your first month of hosting. If you get the Hostgator Baby plan, that means you can get your first month for just 1 penny!

However, if you are looking at a Hostgator Dedicated Server plan, then use the 25% Off coupon code because this will save you more. Coupled with their 45 day money back guarantee and there really is no reason not to try Hostgator.

Hostgator is probably the most recommended web host by internet marketers, and for good reason. It’s fast, reliable, and offers exceptional support. That’s really all you need from your hosting company. So if you are in the market for a web host, be sure to check them out.

And if you’re already using Hostgator, please leave your own Hostgator review in the comments.