6 Best personal website hosting in 2016 – 2017

Personal Websites are great to brand your identity and build a personal brand for yourself.

If you are looking to find the right web hosting for your personal website, you need to keep a few things in mind.

1. You don’t need an expensive, cutting edge hosting account – as 90% of personal websites serve minimal traffic
2. You just need minimal features – like a shared hosting account with good RAM
3. You can always upgrade to a bigger plan once you cross the traffic level.
4. Over 95% of personal websites are built in WordPress. If you plan to build your personal website in WordPress, make sure your hosting account supports WordPress.

These are the major things to consider while you are picking a hosting for your personal website. You need to be keep in mind that a personal website(in most of the cases) does not contain that much big data or functionality.

Below given are the normal structure of a personal website

• A Home Page
• About Me Page
• Portfolio Page
• Portfolio Details Page
• Blog Page
• Photo Gallery Page
• Contact Us Page

I’ve been developing websites since 2005 and have delivered more than 100’s of personal websites to more than 30 clients. From my 11 years of experience in the web development industry, I can definitely say that these are the basic/normal requirement/pages of a personal website. The whole content may not exceed 300-400 MB in most of the cases.

So thats all about the basic introduction, now lets have a look at the best hosting  providers for your personal website.

As I said, in this review, I’ll  be focusing mainly on the pricing. These hosting providers are reviewed in the order that is apt for people looking to host a personal website. All these hosting providers have the essential features required to host a personal website, in a sense  that the priority will be given to pricing.

#1 : iPage Review

Pricing : $ 1.99 /mo

This is what iPage offers

Basic Hosting Details 

• Unlimited disk space and emails
• Unlimited domain names and Mysql databases(Which means you can set up multiple websites)
• Free domain for 1 year($14.99 value)
• Free security package – This can prevent your website from virus,malwares
• One click installs for WordPress(The most widely used platform for personal websites), Weebly etc
• 30-day money back guarantee
• 24/7 phone and chat support
• File manager to transfer to files easily
• Calls answered in 1 minute
• Well documented and step by step tutorials
• Paypal Integration

Marketing your website(Bonus)

• $100 Google AdWords offer (US only)
• Free Yellowpages.com listing
• $100 Bing Ad credit (US only)

What more can you get for $1.99 (Price of a coffee) ?

If you are looking for a cost effective personal website hosting with out any hesitations, I am recommending iPage for you. Go For It!

#2 : Bluehost Review

Pricing : $ 2.95 /mo

Not as cheap as iPage but bluehost shared hosting for personal websites is available from a pricing of $3.95 per month

• Unlimited disk space.
• Unlimited email accounts.
• 1 click installation of WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and 50 more popular platforms.
• Very good uptime. Many users say that their bluehost have a very less downtime. From my personal experience, I didnt experience any downtime. Most of the users say 99 % uptime.
• Good overall security
• WordPress recommends bluehost
• Easy signup
• Free domain
• cPanel support – This makes your installation, database and file transfer more easier.
• 24 x 7 live chat support.
• SSH access, php.ini, htaccess modification allowed (This helps you modify your server settings as per your requirement). Well, this is an advanced level requirement, being a personal website you may not require this feature.
• 30 Day money back guarantee.

Biggest Negative

The biggest negative aspect of bluehost is their slow speed. One of my WordPress woocommerce ecommerce website was hosted in bluehost and I’d say the loading speed was poor. If you arent expecting huge number of visitors, then this might not be a problem.

[df_bluehost]

#3 : A2Hosting Review

Pricing : $ 3.92 /mo

A2hosting is another budget hosting which is a good choice for personal websties. A2hosting is an american based hosting company. Their primary data center is located in USA – Michigan, Amsterdam and Singapore.

 

• Fast, Superfast – A2hosting is famous for its speed. I dont own A2hosting, but many of my clients do have A2hosting. I’ve analysed number of websites in A2hosting and I can confidently say that when it comes to website loading speed, A2hosting is the best in the industry.
• 5 databases and 1 domain and 5 sub domains.
• 25 email addresses
• Anytime moneyback guarantee
• Free CDN – Free cloudfare cdn is available with a2hosting , this can boost up your speed upto 200%.
• 99.99 % uptime guranteed.
• 24 x 7 support.
• Specially optimized for WordPress to load faster.
• 24×7 network monitoring
• cPanel integrated.
• One cilck install of WordPress, drupal, Magento,Prestashop(ecommerce platforms) and other popular platforms
• SSL certificates available.

Marketing your website(Bonus)

• Free $50 Bing/Adwords credit.
• iContact Email Marketing Trial
• 20% Off TeslaThemes “A2HOSTING” Discount.Teslathemes, eventhough not as good as themeforest WordPress themes, offer some good ones.

Biggest negative

In the shared hositng, you can only have 1 website. While bluehost allows you to host unlimited websites.

#4: Hostgator Review

Pricing : $ 2.78 /mo

Now lets have a look at hostgator ,which is also a good option to host your personal website.

 

Major features of Hostgator,

• Unlimited disk space.
• Unlimited email address
• Free domain.
• Unlimited subdomains.
• One click installer(WordPress,joomla,drupal etc)
• Free data migration (If you have data to migrate ,  they’ll migrate your data to hostgator for free).
• cPanel Support.
• 99.82 % uptime, which is a little less than industrial average offer 99.90 %
• 45- Day money back guarantee.
• Awesome customer support and 24 x 7 live chat – Even in their youtube ads,  you can see that they focusing primarily on customer support than anything else.

Drawbacks

• The pricing which we mentioned ($ 2.78) is for 3 years, for 1 year, the pricing will be $ 3.58. Hostgator, owing their negative reviews have brought down their price drastically.
• Complaints about uptime and speed – If you check the internet, hostgator is often complainted about its slow loading and downtime. Anyway when it comes to late 2016, hostgator have solved many of these problems, but still not 100 percentage.

# 5: Inmotion Hosting Review

Inmotion hosting(started in 2001) is another good option for personal website hosting. Their datacenters are in US (Washington DC and Los Angeles )Even though they provide lots of hosting options, their shared hosting (which we are looking forward, the best in our case) is the most popular one.

Pricing : $ 3.49 /mo

Major featuers of Inmotion hosting

• Free domain (1 year).
• Unlimited disk space.
• Free site migrations – They will migrate your data from your old server to new inmotion server for free.
• 24 x 7 live chat and support.
• 90 days money back guarantee.
• Cpanel support.
• Good SSD drives – This can boost the speed of your personal website
• Free Data backups – The hosting takes free data backups for you. You dont need to worry about backups or file lose.
• Discounted Pricing – Sometime before, the inmotion pricing  was starting at $5.99, but recently they’ve reduced their launch package to $ 3.49/month which is very economical for a personal website.
• One click installer (WordPress, Drupal etc)
• SSH Access
• $250 worth adverstising credits.

Drawbacks

• The pricing which we mentioned ($ 3.49 ) is for 3 years, for 1 year, the pricing will be $ 5.59. Taking  a host for 3 years is challenging, but Inmotion hosting is that hosting which is popular for its quality and customer support.
• You can only have 2 websites and 2 database in one account.

# 6: SiteGround Review

Siteground is one another good personal hosting of 2016 which I would love to recommend. I don’t own any Siteground account. But I’ve managed an Siteground account of my client for  6 months. Its from that experience I am putting Siteground  into this list.

Pricing : $ 3.95 /mo

According to them this  SiteGround Plan is best for personal websites having 10,000 visits a month.

Some of the best features of Siteground are,

• Free Domain
• Free Site Transfer
• Free website builder
• SSD Storage
• 30 days money back guarantee
• Free CDN(Cloudfare) -This will improve the loading speed of your website to pull data from different servers in the world.
• Free SSL and Cpanel- SSL will  help you in getting an extra security , and now a days, even google says that having an ssl certificate is one of their ranking factors.
• Unlimited emails.