Best Web Hosting Providers of 2023

The best web hosting providers for most people is definitely the most famous one.

But is it always like that?

Let’s quickly understand different types of web hosting, before we jump into our Best Web Hosting Providers list.

What are the different types of hosting?

Web hosting services come in different shapes and sizes.

1. Shared Web Hosting – Multiple websites will be on one server, yours will be one among them.
2. Reseller Web Hosting – A buyer buys a space, chop it up, and rents it to many sites with some perks.
3. Cloud-Based Web Hosting – Hundreds of servers work jointly, so your site is never down due to a surge in traffics.
4. Dedicated Web Server – You get a physical server on rent.
5. Virtual Private Server (VPS) – One physical server is partitioned into many independent virtual servers and you get one such virtual space.
6. Colocation Web Hosting – You place your own server in a rented data center.
7. Self Service Web Hosting – All yours, server, space, maintenance responsibility; everything
8. Managed WordPress Hosting – Hosting provider will have to keep your WordPress installation up-to-date and protect your site.

All these different types of hosting are designed for “specific requirements“.

Remember, Hosting could be a make/ break factor for your website.

The selection of a web host that suits your need depends on multiple factors. These factors are:

1. Type of website
2. Expected traffic
3. Your budget

So which hosting should you select?

Let’s check your requirement:

• For low traffic websites and beginners, the most cost-effective option is Shared Hosting.

• For non-technical users and who do not want much fuss, get a Managed Hosting.

• Once you outgrow your shared hosting, opt VPS Hosting.

• If your site is rapidly growing, go for Cloud Hosting.

• If you need to be “in control” and can afford it, opt for Dedicated Hosting.

Beginners can opt for Shared Hosting or a managed hosting.

So, before we move ahead, let’s hope, Based on the type of website you plan to build, you have a fair good idea of which type of hosting plan you need.

If you are still not clear about it, go back and read the requirement list again.

Our next challenge is to find the best web hosting service provider.

To pick up the right web host, we benchmarked these hosting providers performance against the following criteria to calculate our ratings:

• Loading Time: (Speed) – the time taken to load a site.
• Uptime: (Reliability)- the amount of time it was up and functioning.
• Downtime – the amount of time a website wasn’t accessible.

Other Factors:

• Security: Free SSL, Vulnerability Tests
• Support: support availability
• Domain: Free Domain, Number of domains
• Migration: how easy to migrate existing sites?
• Website Builder: provides free site builder?
• 1-click script installation availability?
• Technical Specs: Datacenters locations, Backup, Bandwidth,  RAM,  email accounts, number of sites, control panel, etc.

Need not to get overwhelmed by all these options and criteria. This is for your information only.

We did all the testing and hosting comparison. We tested more than 28 top hosting providers.

How we did our testing?

Except for a few, we already had hosting from almost all the well-known companies in our possession.

For those in which we didnt had our own hostings, we used sites hosted on those hosting for testing purpose.

We brought in some demo content with a heavy load.

To test and compare these hosting, We uploaded almost the same content and load on each platform.

Going by Google’s conclusion that the attention span of people is less than 3 seconds, we went for the speed test.

So, for us, “SPEED” is the first and foremost thing that matters in hosting.

To test the speed of each site, we brought in “SolarWinds Pingdom”

Each of these web hosts was tested from four or more locations worldwide. Except few…

To our utter surprise, some of the famed providers fell flat even in some basic tests.

Along with the Speed test, we continued other parameters testing using tools like GTmatrix, dotcom-monitor, and Key CDN.

We also went through the historical data to check the exact uptime and downtime data of top sites.

Using our time-based checklist, we made multiple calls from different time zones to each of the service providers to check the customer support service.

Now based on the results we got, we are going ahead with the recommendation.

The Top 15 Best Web Hosting Providers

Given below is a recommended list of the Best Web Hosting Service Providers in the market, based on specific needs.