As I have noted before, since I work with many clients I have developed hopefully informed opinions about many web hosts. Perhaps I should not paint with a broad brush but I do have one suggestion: avoid any web hosts owned by the Endurance International Group.
Web hosting tends to be a low profit business. With so much competition, customers will shop around for the best deal. This results in many hosts offering cheap plans for $5 or $10 per month. Web hosts can hope to find profitability in volume but since there is a lot of competition profitability usually comes from consolidation. The Endurance International Group buys web hosts. It looks like they find profitability through throwing all these companies under one umbrella and one hosting center.
I used to host with Hostgator. I found their support good and their infrastructure above average, yet their pricing was very reasonable. Then they were bought out by the Endurance International Group. Almost immediately afterward their support became crappy and I noticed delays accessing my domain as well as infrastructure related issues. When my hosting contract was over, I was happy to move somewhere else.
When you call these companies for support, you are immediately placed into a third-level support queue. After you finally connect with a human, these brain-dead support people follow scripts that are designed basically to not solve your problem and make you go away. Moreover, I found myself far more knowledgable about hosting and how to solve problems than they were. They could rarely even cover the basics. If you needed real help I found I had to badger for second-tier support.
All this is to keep their costs low since one support center for dozens of companies is obviously cheaper. But it results in inferior service, as evidenced by my experience with hostgator.com.
Endurance International Group own a lot of hosts, most pretty obscure. Among those they purchased you may be familiar with include Hostgator, Bluehost, Hostcentric, iPage and Site5. You can see a full list of the brands they bought on this Wikipedia page.
Given the low margins, the hosting business is likely to continue consolidating. There is certainly a lot of smoke and mirrors in this business. What used to be good hosting can turn into poor hosting pretty quickly when they get acquired. This is true of MediaTemple, at least it’s Grid Service, based on my latest experience since it was bought by GoDaddy.
My current hosting recommendations, last updated April 2019
Right now my recommended hosts include Dreamhost for most hosting and Rackspace for dedicated and virtual server hosting. If you are considering rehosting, I’ve listed some of their advantages and disadvantages on my rehosting page. Read it over carefully because all hosts have special terms and conditions and limitations. If you choose to host or rehost with Dreamhost, please use my affiliate link. This way I earn a small commission. You will not pay extra.
If you need help moving your website toa new host, I can certainly help. You might want to send me a service inquiry.
It’s quite clear to me though that you are likely to be unhappy with any hosting owned by the Endurance International Group. So avoid.
Thank you, that’s very constructive opinions.
Hey Mark, Great reviews you have put together. We also rate SiteGround excellent in general. After seeing so many horrible reviews of EIG, we decided to do some investigating. I hope you don’t mind me passing along what we found. We will publish it at the end of the week š