One of the most important decisions you can make when building a website or creating web properties of any kind is your hosting provider. You’re going to either have to live with your decision for a long time, or go through the pain of moving everything you’ve worked so hard on if you aren’t satisfied (this can be really difficult, or even impossible).

Choosing hosting is a lot like buying a house. Sure, you can always get a new one, but how much do you like moving?

The first question you need to ask yourself is…

“What kind of hosting do I need?”

W3 (The world wide web consortium) does a great job of breaking down the major types of web hosting, but I’ll make it even simpler – 9 times out of 10, you need shared hosting. 

Most folks are looking to host WordPress, or other common PHP scripts. Assuming you’re not building ebay or facebook, or running a major news organization, you are almost always going to be best served by a quality shared hosting provider.

So where do I find the best shared hosting provider?

Here is a table reviewing the most popular shared hosting providers based on the criteria I’ve found to be most important through my own personal experience. See below the chart for some more detail on each criterion.

Lowest Price	$3.96/mo	$3.95/mo	$5.95/mo	$3.75/mo	$4.45/mo	$5.95/mo
Monthly Billing (No Contract)
Unlimited Everything
Cpanel
1-Click Scripts
24/7 Chat/Phone Support
Experience Rating
	Visit	Visit	Visit	Visit	Visit	Visit

A bit about the criteria

Lowest Price is the lowest advertised price per month at the time of posting. It usually requires you to buy a year or so at once to get the lowest price.

Monthly Billing is not common among the big hosts. Of the reputable ones, only Host Gator will allow you to buy hosting on a monthly plan. I feel that offering this shows great confidence in your product.

Unlimited Everything refers to the allowed disk space and monthly transfer allotted for the cheapest plan. For example, GoDaddy offers unlimited everything, but on their top shared hosting plan only.

Cpanel is the industry standard in back-end hosting administration. It has the most documentation by a long shot and it offers everything you need to manage your hosting. If you are hiring a web developer, they will be very appreciative that you chose a host that uses cpanel. A certain few hosts have custom admin panels and they are infuriating, slow and functionally crippled.

1-Click Scripts, in this case, refer to Quick Install, Simple Scripts & Fantastico. These are services that offer 50+ popular web scripts (like wordpress, joomla, forums, chat clients, etc) that you can build on your server in seconds. The other guys that don’t use these have some custom versions of 1-click installs, but they are very limited in their abilities and are way more cumbersome and frustrating to use.

24/7 Chat and Phone Support are pretty self-explanatory. But be aware, this can be an enormous help in a pinch (for you or your web developer). Chat support in particular has saved me hours of pain and anguish in administering my hosting.

Not all chat support is made equal though. several of these companies outsource their support to other countries and aren’t always quite as helpful as others. Ultimately, knowing that Host Gator’s support team is in-house, at their Texas office has been very apparent to me in the times I’ve needed them.

The Verdict

From my fairly extensive experience, I believe the best shared hosting provider for your money is HostGator.