My brand-spanking new blog software told me that this title was too long: GoDaddy vs. BlueHost vs. DreamHost vs. Hostgator vs. Namecheap
Read all the way to the end if you want to find out who I chose, why it took me so long to choose, and for some nice discount buttons.
If you noticed, there’ve been some subtle changes on this site lately.
In actuality, the site has gone through a complete overhaul. I tried my hardest to create my own WordPress theme to be exactly like the old theme (which was hosted on Tumblr), with a few enhancements.
So as you probably already know, WordPress needs to be hosted on paid servers that have PHP installed. The typical players are GoDaddy et al. (the ones listed above, except for Namecheap). For the somewhat technical, your site needs to live on boxes like these:
I moved all of my domain names to Namecheap from GoDaddy awhile ago when I read about some of their shady business practices (they initially supported SOPA).
So I’m browsing around, basically just price-shopping. I know all these companies have bad reviews for poor customer service. I try to do my due diligence by noting the percentage of downtime and cPanel features. But really I just want a good price on hosting so I can test out new sites cheaply and efficiently.
Most of these guys have a 1-3 year discount rate, something like $6.99/month if you sign up for 3 years. Then it goes up to $11.99/month after that.
I’m not going to list the exact prices here because they are always changing, but approx. $5+ to approx. $10+ after the discount period is typical. The problem is, most of these sites don’t post their non-discount rate.
As a sidenote, I’ve noticed lately that a lot of sites, including banks, who you’d think would be more professional, have a lot of footnotes. Like this.1
And then, nothing on the page actually explains what it refers to. It’s like saying, “read the fine print if you want to understand how we’re going to fuck you”, and then just excluding that fine print, in hopes you’ll just forget about it.
Alright, lemme talk to their support guys to tally up what everyone’s non-discounted rate is. This helped me narrow down my options a little bit. HostGator’s support was very unhelpful. I partly wrote this post to tell you not to use HostGator. After some time doing this it hit me… Namecheap offers hosting.
I’ve been using Namecheap for years for my domains, and I’ve found their user interface and support to be above par. I look up their rate for shared web hosting and to my surprise, it’s $19.88 for the first year. After this discount period, it goes up to $78.88, which is $6.57 / month, which is way better than what everyone I mention above provides.
If you use the coupon code COOLDAYS you can get 20% off, which means you’ll only pay $15. This is basically just above $1 / month. I think (not 100% sure) the coupon code only lasts until the end of November, so get that shit now.
And since Namecheap sucks at advertising their hosting, which is why I almost signed up for an inferior service instead of theirs, I am going to post some buttons here in case you’re looking for a new domain, web hosting, and a free WhoIsGuard (so people can’t stalk you on the net, since by default your full name, address, and email are shown when someone looks you up).
Full disclosure, these are referral links, so buying from these links helps me too and helps keep this site up. =)
It’s entirely possible I haven’t covered a really awesome, cheap web host in this post, so if I missed something, please let me know in the comments below.