I’m working on my first real site (doing a website for a relative’s landscaping business) and things are coming along smoothly. What do you guys recommend for hosting and domain name services?
Would going with NameCheap for both hosting and domain name be a good choice? I’ve read that it’s best to avoid GoDaddy.
The site is a simple one page website with static content and a contact form. I’d like to find a cheap reliable hosting company, I don’t need anything fancy.
Hey @Nicknyr, If you wanna use free of cost go by these links:
If I may make a suggestion… since its for a business website, its better to go with paid hosting. Free hosting is fine for small personal or practice projects, but they arent the best when it comes to reliability and uptime and support services. Plus, they are notorious for shutting sites down without warning if they start getting a bit of traffic…which is true for any free service. Not the risk to take when you’re talking about someones livelihood.
I’ve used HostGator for over 10yrs now and its really good, the one I always recommend to anyone… Bluehost is another good one…I dont have personal experience but its consistently one I hear of alongside HostGator in popularity and service…people seem to love that one too.
I’ve used CINFU (www.cinfu.com) for several years, and I transferred my domains to NameCheap this year from Name.com.
Hosting for less than $10 USD per YEAR with CINFU! I’ve had no issues.
You get PHP databases, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited domains (none of that one domain per account limit), unlimited sub-domains.
I use the DA Admin panel, which is good enough for me, and are the most cost-effective plans.
Their support is ticket based, but their responses are quick.
There’s no need to pay $50 per year for features and space you’ll never use.
If you need SSL, you’ll need CINFU’s level 3 package.
I use goDaddy. just seemed the easiest solution for a newb like me. so far nothing but good things to say about them. i mainly use it for hosting wordpress sites that i build on the side for $. it has all the tools i need for that. i use other free solutions to host my side projects/fcc projects.
the customer service has actually been really good. they helped me do some rather complex stuff and were surprisingly good at their jobs. i just have simple shared hosting at the moment with two WP sites. so far no issues with using too many resources or anything like that. i bought the domains there, cpanel and wordpress were easy to install, etc. just made things easy. now for real coding 
i will probably use something cool like zeit to deploy larger nodejs app in the future. you can deploy nodejs apps from the command line and use custom domains, for any sort of traffic you would have to pay there as well. but that is another story entirely.
DISCLAIMER: 
These are just my opinions based on my experience and use case with goDaddy
Whatever company you pick, just keep this 2 things in mind.
Pick 2 separate companies for these 2 separate things.
That way, your business website will never be kept in ransom if some disagreements happen between you and the company. You can easily move it to another host and still retain control of your domain name.
That said, I’ve been using GoDaddy pre-2000 hosting hundreds of domain names there.
With your WP sites do you purchase SSL with GoDaddy for those clients ? I was under the impression that the WP admin pages at least needs to be in https to be secure when the clients login. Is this true? thanks
WP admin will work even without SSL. Of course, to prevent password snooping, SSL is preferred. But do you really think someone will be interested in getting the password for it?
There’s a site that gives out free SSL certificates.
Here you go https://letsencrypt.org/
But I think it expires after a few months (3? I think), then you’d have to get another one.
i do purchase ssl certs from godaddy for the sites. i paid around 40-50 bucks i think, thats with discounts.
Another option is Google Domains. They have a flat $12/yr for the common TLDs. Some add-ons like privacy are included for no extra cost. I have used them for a couple years and have no complaints.
Do not buy into bundled Domain Registries + Hosting. Falling out with them could be messy and a real pain. Avoid GoDaddy at all costs. They are experts in pulling switch-and-bait and microtransactions.
For domain registry, namesilo has no hidden fees, no bait and switch, no surprise upcharges, and have multiple layers of security for protecting access to your registry account. Dot com domains go start from $8.99 per year.
For webhosting, SiteGround has multiple plans in place such as shared hosting, cloud hosting, dedicated hosting and enterprise hosting.
Here’s a gist of what they have to offer:
Since this is for a landscaping business, you can’t go wrong with them.
But if you want a more robust and customizable hosting service, I highly recommend Rackspace. But cost could be an issue here.
I believe that www.neolo.com is one of the best sites to host your site. They have amazingly good and cheap plans and they provide with various useful features, most of them for free. I work for them as a technical assistant and customer service guy and since I’ve known them I just recommend them whenever I can, I really believe they make posible what in my country we call the three b’s: bueno, bonito y barato (good, pretty and cheap). They have servers in the US and Europe.
My DNS service provider is GoDaddy and I host my website for free on Github Pages.
So far my website is really stable and both of them offered really good service.
Therefore, I would recommend you doing the same.
All the best!
Don’t fall tatics of the free webhosting providers.They may provide free domain.The problem of free webhosting is "your site could disappear at any timet . If the free hosting provider you choose finds itself in any trouble, they may shut down their services. You’ll likely be warned about this as per their terms and conditions, but that doesn’t mean your site content is safe.it’s far wiser to choose an affordable, premium hosting provider (the most popular type being managed, shared hosting) from the outset, to save yourself plenty of headaches (and probably money) in the long run.
Regards,
Christian
Depending on the requirements of the product, you might think about just buying a domain name and hosting a static site for free on github or surge.sh. I do this for a lot of sites. Cost: ~$12 annually.
Namecheap’s a good registrar along with Uniregistry, as for hosting any VPS will do I’ve found that DigitalOcean has fast VPSes. Good luck with your project 
Uniregistry, Godaddy are good domain registrars, but Uniregistry is cheaper and has a very clean UI. If you have an account, you can register a domain in less than a minute, and you don’t have to click on “I don’t want this feature, I don’t want to pay extra for mail, etc.” buttons
Hostgator or Bluehost are good hosting companies. Fatcow is also great, but they deducted next year’s payment from my account even after I cancelled my plan.
Hey Nick!
I recommend you https://zeit.co/now
It is very easy to setup and use. You can also register domains
Enjoy
I really like namecheap for domain registration and siteground for hosting (that’s an affiliate link). Siteground is really easy to nagivate and they have great support anytime I’ve needed anything.
I use namecheap for domain registration and love it. But if you only have one domain, I’d recommend just getting it through your hosting company for simplicity’s sake.
Uniregistry also doesn’t censor their customers websites and threaten to suspend domains for speech they dislike. Godaddy has also been engagaged in other shady behavior that should make you wish to avoid them.