One of the questions we routinely get asked is which hosting providers we recommend for our clients. While there are many providers to choose from, there are only a small minority that we feel will work for our clients with minimal hassle or downtime.
Kinsta
We recently moved some of our clients over to Kinsta, and have been really happy with the results. Kinsta focusses more on quality as opposed to price, so for budget conscious business owners this may not be your best option. But if you generate any type of sales or leads from your website, then $60-$100/mo may not seem very expensive to you. One client I recently helped move here and spent 10 hours debugging his own site for slow performance, and those problems went away after being on Kinsta, so another question to ask is what it is worth for you not to have to deal with those problems?
Kinsta also includes a CDN for free, which is a nice added bonus to help with site speed. They don’t offer email hosting though, so you’ll have to find an alternative for that (clients I’ve helped typically use Google’s email for business).
WP Engine
WP Engine is in the same market as Kinsta, basically focussing on performance and support albeit at a slighter higher price point. Their offerings are quite similar to Kinsta, and I have a few clients on WP Engine as well. Both WP Engine and Kinsta offer routine backups with the ability to restore easily, so they are well-suited for businesses that just want to ‘set it and forget it’ when it comes to their websites.
KnownHost
If you’re looking for something that contains email and cPanel, but still has great performance, I would recommend KnownHost. They specialize in Managed SSD VPS, which mean you have a fast VPS image with dedicated resources. Unlike a lot of shared hosting, you get access to the operating system as well as WHM (the back-end for cPanel), which makes it really easy to add new PHP versions etc. And if that all sounds greek, don’t worry – these plans are fully managed, which means support is always available to give you a helping hand. This website is actually hosted on a KnownHost VPS as well.