Website Hosting Services
Website Hosting Services Overview
Top Rated Website Hosting Products

These products won a Top Rated award for having excellent customer satisfaction ratings. The list is based purely on reviews; there is no paid placement, and analyst opinions do not influence the rankings. Read more about the Top Rated criteria.
Website Hosting Services TrustMap

TrustMaps are two-dimensional charts that compare products based on trScore and research frequency by prospective buyers. Products must have 10 or more ratings to appear on this TrustMap.
Website Hosting Products
(1-25 of 126) Sorted by Most Reviews
The list of products below is based purely on reviews (sorted from most to least). There is no paid placement and analyst opinions do not influence their rankings. Here is our Promise to Buyers to ensure information on our site is reliable, useful, and worthy of your trust.
Wix is a free, hosted website builder, designed to be user-friendly and customizable without requiring coding from the user. It is well-known for its eCommerce solution, which allows users to build an online store.
Key Features
- Library of website themes (89)77%7.7
- Page templates (92)74%7.4
- Mobile optimization / responsive design (92)68%6.8
Top Pros and Cons
DigitalOcean is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform from the company of the same name headquartered in New York. It is known for its support of managed Kubernetes clusters and “droplets” feature.
Key Features
- Pre-defined machine images (29)86%8.6
- Monitoring tools (30)76%7.6
- Operating system support (29)76%7.6
Top Pros and Cons
Google Compute Engine is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) product from Google Cloud. It provides virtual machines with carbon-neutral infrastructure which run on the same data centers that Google itself uses.
Key Features
- Operating system support (27)88%8.8
- Pre-defined machine images (27)45%4.5
- Monitoring tools (27)43%4.3
Small business owners don’t have much time to build their online presence, don’t have much money to spend on digital advertising, and don’t want to navigate the complexity of what it means to be online today. So UENI presents a solution built specifically for them. Unlike DIY website…
Key Features
- WYSIWYG editor (6)85%8.5
- Mobile optimization / responsive design (7)82%8.2
- Library of website themes (6)75%7.5
Learn More About Website Hosting Services
What are Website Hosting Services?
Website hosting services house and operate websites on computer servers, supporting connectivity to the internet. They configure and maintain the servers to meet the requirements of their clients. Website hosting services are used by businesses, organizations, and individuals who do not want to host or maintain the infrastructure required to operate websites themselves.
Web hosting options include:
Shared Hosting – a website shares a server and its resources, CPU, memory, disk space, and bandwidth with other websites. It is the least expensive option.
Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting – a portion of a server’s resources are reserved for a website. This offers better performance, scaling, and security than shared hosting. It is also more expensive than shared hosting but is less costly than dedicated hosting.
Dedicated hosting – a site has its own dedicated server and access to all its resources.
Cloud hosting – a site draws resources from multiple servers. It provides a flexible way to power your website, making it simple to scale up or down, and handle spikes. Two levels are offered. Small business-friendly cloud hosting like that offered by DreamHost or HostGator costs about the same as VPS hosting. The other level is enterprise-grade, infrastructure-as-a-service cloud hosting offered by the likes of Microsoft Azure and Rackspace providing the most comprehensive and expensive hosting option.
Managed Hosting – which provides advanced support, performance monitoring, software updates, backup, and security.
Many website hosting services offer website building services, and many website building services offer website hosting. Website building services provide domain registration and tools such as control panels, development frameworks, and CMS to create a website.
Some vendors offer green hosting, eco-friendly, website hosting solutions.
Website Hosting Service Features
Most website hosting providers will offer the following capabilities:
Hosting Options
Shared
VPS
Dedicated
Cloud-based
Custom Storage Allocations
Custom Bandwidth Allowance
Control Panel for Web Hosting Management Features
CMS Support
Web Framework Support
Ecommerce Integration
File Management
Database Support
Security Tools
Website Email
Customer Support
Website Hosting Services Comparison
Consider the following points when deciding whether to use shared, VPS, dedicated, or cloud-based hosting services.
Scalability: Are you an individual, small business, or enterprise? Ensure your hosting plan supports your bandwidth (traffic) and storage (data) requirements, that it can handle spikes, and can readily scale up as your business grows.
Uptime: Choose a plan that meets your needs for availability, the absence of outages, disruptions, or degradation of service. A minimum of 99% uptime should be your minimum standard.
Support: Make sure the provider offers the type and quality of tech support you need. Do you need 24/7 phone support? Will you or your business handle hosting administration or will the provider?
Security: Security is important to all, but many businesses have financial or sensitive personal information on their servers that must be protected at all costs. Consider whether private or public hosting will work best for your business.
In addition, consider these points as well.
Website building: Do you require website building tools as part of the service offering? If so, be sure to choose a tool that includes these features.
Technology: Linux is usually the default for server operating systems; however, some providers offer Windows hosting. If you have specific server-side applications that require Windows, such as .Net applications or SQL Server, your web host must support Windows hosting.
Pricing Information
Shared server hosting can be found for as little as $2 a month, but it usually costs between $7-$15 a month. VPS hosting ranges from $20 a month to about $100 a month and averages around $40 a month.
Dedicated hosting starts at around $80 a month and goes up to $700 or more a month. Introductory enterprise cloud-based hosting begins at a minimum of $240 a month.
Bear in mind that pricing is impacted by the amount of bandwidth, storage, level of support, and advanced features required.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What do website hosting services do?
What are the benefits of using website hosting services?
Key benefits of using website hosting services include:
- Support: Professionals configure, monitor, maintain, upgrade, troubleshoot, back up and secure your website’s infrastructure. This means less work for you and your IT team.
- Reliability: Hosting services typically have high quality standards regarding uptime, performance, support, and security standards.
- Cost savings: Eliminates the need to invest in infrastructure, servers, and software.
What are the best website hosting services products?
These are some of the more popular web hosting services.