Hey Lawrence, thanks a lot for your input and for giving us an opportunity to clarify this point.

It’s true that we take part in the HostGator affiliate program and the affiliate programs of other hosting providers mentioned here and on our website. It’s part of how we pay for the costs of running CreateaWebsiteNow.com and pay our bills.

However, as you can see from the article above, our rankings here are based on months and months of uptime and load time tracking. We also regularly update the post to reflect the latest data and providers move up and down the list depending on their performance. HostGator seem to have had a really good run in the last tracking period, which is why they made it to the second place.

Aside from that, we also don’t advertise anything that we haven’t thoroughly researched and tested, so you can be sure that we stand behind all the hosting providers mentioned here.

Hope this helps put your mind at ease. Again, thanks for your valuable input!

I have used hostinger before, My website hardly go offline and is very fast..The only issue I have with the is Database Size, Max is 3gb

We’ve actually reviewed DO here: https://createawebsitenow.com/hosting-reviews/digitalocean/

Good host indeed. Not for beginners, though.

I’ve been on cheaper hosts before but you get what you pay for. For example, if a page on your site gets a sudden boost of traffic because your site was mentioned somewhere (Reddit, etc) , your host could shut down because you overloaded your traffic. With GoDaddy, they would have just opened up more servers to handle the temporary spike. Nothing more frustrated than getting hits and nobody can visit for a couple of days.

Just my two cents.

You can input your site into a speed testing tool like https://tools.pingdom.com/. If the server response time is bad, it’s likely a problem on your hosting provider’s side. It will also tell you where you site is stalling and what changes you can make to improve it. More information here: https://createawebsitenow.com/how-to-speed-up-wordpress/

My question is:

How do I know whether the reason my website is slow is because of my website’s own inefficiencies, or because of Goddady?

The Bluehost cheap plan should definitely be enough to handle this for the beginning. If, at some point, you find that its performance isn’t sufficient, you can always upgrade and/or move to another provider.

Sure, the recommendations are the same. However, you have to think about your desired architecture. In the beginning, it might be ok to host several sites on the same server, however, as soon as more traffic starts coming in, you might need more dedicated resources some or all of the sites. It’s worth looking into how easy the different hosting providers make this.

We just need a hosting provider for a simple 10-15 page site for a local business that will likely get less than 500-1000 visits a day. We will have booking software integrated and may receive 25-50 bookings via the online booking software per day.

Only other thing I could think of is we may later want to create an online store page on site that has about 40-50 products on it but sales would likely only be a 5-40 sales per day on site.

Would something like Bluehost cheap plan be fine for us? Thanks!

Hey Caroline, WordPress.com is a bit of a different animal because you don’t run a self-hosted WordPress site on there. That means, you can’t install all the plugins you might want to (especially on lower plans, where you can’t install plugins at all) and overall have less control over your site than with a self-hosted site. That’s why we didn’t include it in this list. For more information, I recommend this article: https://createawebsitenow.com/wordpress-com-vs-wordpress-org/

Personally, I like WP Engine and Kinsta.