Which hosting provider should I use?

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Doug Cunnington, PMP

Basically, just don’t get the cheapest hosting. You get what you pay for and if the hosting is $1 per month, it’s probably going to be slow and the technical support will be terrible.

(Affiliate links below…)

Here are the companies that I use:

Site Ground Hosting: My favorite hosting company right now because of the excellent service. You can me chatting or speaking with a real tech support person extremely quickly. I’m usually able to get answers in a chat in about 10-20 seconds. And this is a REAL, admin that can actually help you. (Some other companies have you talk to a customer support rep that just follows a script. If anything needs to be done on the server, then the CSR has to open a ticket for the actually tech support.) It’s more expensive, but it’s totally worth it for the high level of support.
MDD Hosting: It’s a smaller company with the same level of service as Site Ground. I’ve been able to chat or speak with people just as fast. They don’t have as many hosting options and flexibility since MDD is a smaller company. It’s a tad cheaper than Site Ground in most cases.
Bluehost: It’s a really popular company, but the customer support may or may not be good. They’re recommended by a lot of influencers and have been for years. Some of the influencers even publicly admitted that the customer support got worse. I’d avoid Bluehost right now, but I know some people will want to use them, hence, my affiliate link. Pat Flynn said this (quote is listed below) in the Smart Passive Income Podcast, Episode 292, and it’s really telling. It’s a long quote because I want to make sure you get the context here. Pat’s making tens of thousands of dollars per month from Bluehost and he’s trying to preserve his brand and name — I totally respect that. But I had major issues with one of my sites in 2017, where I was losing hundreds of dollars per day. This happened again and again for about 2 weeks. I had enough and moved to Site Ground based on a recommendation from a friend. Bluehost was fine when things worked, but as soon as there was an issue, no one was there to help. It’s not an isolated thing which is why I’m including this long quote from Pat Flynn.

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Bluehost is a hosting company. I still do recommend them. I’m going to give you the full story right now. In 2009, I began recommending them and started to make a few thousand dollars here and there from affiliate promotions, and they were taking great care of people. They took great care of me. They took great care of my audience. The next year, my income continued to grow into the tens of thousands of dollars range in terms of affiliate earnings coming from Bluehost, which was fantastic. Then starting in, I think, 2013, I started to notice a few emails here and there from people who were not very happy with the customer service that was coming from Bluehost, specifically when they had problems and issues. Then, a year later, things got a little bit better, and then they got worse again. I started to really pay attention because now the thank yous were less than the concerns. I was still continuing to get a lot of people who were very happy with the recommendation, and a few people just had some kind of outlier experiences, but I did pay attention to that. Then once I started to notice that they became regular, and this was back in 2015 and 2016, I actually flew to Utah to meet with the company and share with them, “Hey, this is not okay. This cannot happen.” This is the kind of responsibility and feeling that you need to have with the products you promote. You need to take care of your people. In order for me to best take care of them, I had to go there and speak to, really, the CEO and try to determine what was going on. It was nice because I got the full inside scoop. I did a video and an Instagram while I was there to talk and to be honest with my audience. I sent an email out about it, about what was going on and what was being done to get better. That was the nice thing that I learned. When I was there, they told me all the things that they were doing because they knew that they had this problem, that they were making changes. I was like, “Okay, these changes need to happen now.” Of course, with a big company like that, changes do take time. Thankfully, I’ve noticed that things have gotten better but could still use improvement. Now I have something that I can offer people who go through my affiliate link, which is a special connection to a person who will take care of you sooner than later, meaning for customer support, which is still kind of meh, I can help people by forwarding them to a person who I know will take care of you much faster than if you were to go through like, for example, chat. I was able to find a solution to help make sure that my audience was still taken care of. The lesson here is, especially for more longer term promotions, make sure you continually follow up with that company or the founder or owner of that product to make sure that it is still there and still helping your people in the way that it should. In most cases, it should actually hopefully improve over time, not degrade. If it does, well, then you have to make a decision. There is a point at which I know if things get to a certain level with Bluehost, for example, I’m switching who I promote. I already have somebody in mind just in case. For right now—and I’ve run the analysis and I’ve just really paid attention to what’s going on there now—I’m still really comfortable with my promotion of Bluehost, especially knowing that I have a person that I can send people to when things may not go right. Again, most people are still having an amazing experience with it, but it’s those who don’t get taken care of right away that I really worry about. That’s why I took the time and the effort to go there and just make sure everything was the way it was supposed to be or getting to that point.

-Source: https://smartpassiveincome.com

(Rant: I joined Bluehost through Pat Flynn’s affiliate link but I didn’t know I could have gotten real customer support from his special support person. I like that he went to Utah to work that out, but that’s not helpful to me.)

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