Which is Best WebHosting?

I don't know if OP is still reading this, but this may be helpful for others as well.

There are many things to be said about the "what is the best hosting company" question. The first, I feel, is there is no such thing as a best hosting company, for the very reason people looking for a host have different needs.

As it was said in this thread, you first need to consider what hosting option is right for you, between :

Shared Hosting
VPS
Dedicated Hosting
and other cloud based solutions.

There are also lots of points that you need to consider when choosing a host package : Linux or Windows ? 1 script install ? Backups ? Free domain ? Marketing credits (adwords, bing, facebook, twitter) ? datacenter locations ? How many visitors you site receives ? How much diskspace do you need ? etc.

Then, there are essential features a good host must provide and those are :

Speed : crucial if you don't want to lose returning visitors and rank better in search engines
Reliability (uptime) : crucial if you want your website to be online with the the fewer downtimes possible
Support : crucial when you'll need support

With that said, I didn't help OP that much so far.

There has been lots of hate from customers towards Hostgator, iPage, Justhost, Fatcow or Bluehost, which are all brands owned by one large hosting group : Endurance International Group (EIG).

EIG has a reputation of harming the quality of services of the company they buy. But to be fair, Hostgator and Bluehost are some of the largest hosting companies in the shared hosting market. And since people tend to express themselves more when they're unhappy than when they're happy, it's only normal you see more complaints about these bigger hosts.

I personally have used lots of hosts in more than 10 years online. I currently own accounts at the following hosts :

• Arvixe
• A Small Orange
• Bluehost
• Dreamhost
• Fatcow
• Hostgator
• iPage
• Site5
• Siteground
• Inmotion Hosting

I am using those accounts to run comparison tests, and the results so far :

if you're hosting HTML sites, the best options, speedwise :

• Hostgator
• Dreamhost
• Siteground

Keep in mind I'm not adding suppport or reliability to the equation, I'm just talking about speed.

if you're hosting Wordpress sites, the best options, speedwise :

• Site5
• Inmotion
• A Small Orange

Again, I'm only talking about speed here.

As far as support is concerned, it's a different story (well, not entirely) :

Hostgator takes days to respond to my tickets
A Small Orange live chat support has proved to be available almost instantly, everytime I used them.

Actually, the above are only parts of my testing, I can't post much more here so far, since I'm not done.

But to give a simple answer, I'd say go with Site5 or Inmotion if you can afford them, if you're hosting Wordpress sites.

Otherwise, A Small Orange has decent speed, but not the best, but their support is just great. ($5 a month)

For the record, iPage and Fatcow show some of the worst speed results according to my tests

Cheers !