4.5/5

Website Hosting

Bluehost is the best and the most popular choice for web hosting. It’s designed to work best for anyone new to website building and has an established reputation for beginners that’s unmatched.  They’ve catered their onboarding to beginners and that’s exactly why I recommend them. 

Quality

  • Robust Support: It supports 24/7 live chat, email, and phone customer support.
  • ECommerce Features: Bluehost WooCommerce offers the best plans for online stores, given its ability to automatically install an eCommerce theme for your website.
  • WordPress Integration: Bluehost is fully integrated for WordPress websites and has even earned a recommendation for WordPress itself.

Speed

  • It offers excellent speeds (641ms)
  • It supports a good uptime of up to 99.96% 
  • Easy installation of WordPress
  • It is beginner-friendly and easy to use 
  • It offers a free site builder and domain 
  • Supports 27/7 phone and live chat customer support

Cost

  • Basic $2.95
  • Plus: $5.45
  • Choice Plus: $5.45
  • Pro: $13.95

What Features to Look For in Website Hosting Services

1. Speed

Speed is critical for your site ranking. It will also earn satisfaction from the visitors or users of your site, increasing the conversion rates.

It’s essential to remember that your website speed will affect every aspect of the business. Therefore, look for a host that will provide for speed on your website.

You could decide to start at a low subscription plan whose speed is sufficient for your needs. However, consider the availability of higher speed upon upgrades when your business will have grown. 

You will want the speed on your website to accelerate its growth. I strongly advise you to choose a host that will allow your site to maintain excellent speeds even under high traffic.

2. Uptime

Nobody wants their website to be unavailable most of the time that customers are seeking your services. In fact, you would possibly dream of having a website with 100% uptime. But his is not practical.

Most of the host companies understand website uptime is the most critical component of a website and that their customers will make losses or gain an audience when their sites are down. Therefore, they guarantee up to 99.99% uptime.

When choosing a hosting company, you should avoid promises that don’t guarantee a measurable uptime. This will decrease uncertainties regarding the downtime on your website and assure you of the reliability of the web hosting services.

3. Cost

When choosing a web host, avoid making decisions on a price basis. There are cheap web hosting options out there, but they will end up frustrating you on service delivery. 

But this does not mean that you spend overly on web hosting. Find a site that charges averagely with an excellent service guarantee.

I also recommend avoiding distraction by promotional messages by a few companies because such offers are only available when you are new to their site.

4. Customer Support

Customer support is one of the most important factors to consider when choosing a hosting service provider. Although a host can have excellent features and technical capabilities, poor customer support will cause you frustrations.

You need someone to help you out when you get stranded or unsure about what you’re doing. In other cases, you could be faced with security concerns or challenges using some features. 

When that happens, you need prompt and responsive customer support. Lack of good support could lead to loss of revenues.

5. Scalability

Depending on your business type, you might realize the need for scaling your performance when requested and rescale when the demand wanes.  

For example, you could be running online retail where demand increases at a particular season of the year. In such a case, your host must respond by scaling you up and then down later when the demand is low. 

Look for the web hosting service providers who will support this capability of your business demands.  

How Does Website Hosting Work? 

Web hosting occurs when the files in a personal computer are uploaded to a web server from a local computer. 

This server has such components as hard drive space, RAM, and bandwidth allocated to the websites using it. 

The server resources are divided based on the selected hosting plan. The plans differ from one another on the ease of access, functions supported, and cost. 

The three principal web hosting plans include:

  • Shared Hosting;
  • Virtual Private Servers; and 
  • Dedicated Servers. 

Shared hosting is where the server resources are shared with other users. It is similar to renting a workstation in a noisy, busy, open office where other people work. It is suitable for small and upcoming businesses. 

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) are different from shared hosting because they are isolated from each other. They are suitable for medium businesses and allow individual users to organize their businesses independently. 

Dedicated Servers are more comprehensive and expensive. It suits those who value high performance and reliability. Users control the entire space and determine the configurations they need within the huge space under their command. 

Cloud software is best for web hosting because it will facilitate maintenance of the website resources in multiple virtual servers in the cloud. 

It will also be extremely easy to set up a website with cloud storage. Besides, you can enjoy faster deployment if you’re looking to start hosting on the cloud immediately.  

Summary

Based on my experience and detailed review of the various web hosting service providers, my #1 recommendation is Bluehost hosting services. 

I have selected this host because of its robust security features and excellent speed. 

Similar hosts with matching capabilities are usually much more expensive, which is why I recommend Bluehost.  

However, you’re free to choose the best option for you from our list of web host services based on your specific needs and budget. 

Remember to check such features as speed, uptime, cost, customer support, and scalability when choosing a host. 

Good luck with building your website.

WordPress Theme Site Builders

4.5/5

Thrive Themes

The site you’re on right now is from Thrive Themes and many of the sites in my portfolio are built using their tools.  I love them not only because they help me with the technical aspects of site building, but they also have a marketing toolbox to help me solve all of my needs.

Pros

  1. Conversion Focus: There are very few vendors on the market who have such a vast portfolio of tools focused on marketing, optimization, and lead generation.
  2. Hundreds of Page Templates: You can choose from almost 300 templates to help you start creating web pages quickly. 
  3. Free Training: They’ve created Thrive University, which is full of courses where you can learn everything you need to know about how to use each of the tools.
  4. Easy to Use: Thrive Themes has a very intuitive user interface. The drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to create pages – even for newbies.
  5. Great 3rd-Party Integrations: You can easily integrate with tons of other marketing tools and services, such as plugins, platforms, etc.  
  6. Fully Responsive: The Thrive Themes page builder and templates are all 100% responsive.
  7. Perfect for WordPress: The WordPress themes and plugins work perfectly for WordPress sites and are optimized for the WordPress platform.  

Cons

  1. Large Number of Products: The sheer number of tools offered by Thrive Themes can prove overwhelming for beginners. 
  2. Learning Curve:  Just like any new platform out there, Thrive Themes suite of products all have their own learning curve.  I do think the platforms are intuitive, but it takes time and patience to master them.  
  3. Only Works With WordPress: There’s no version of Thrive Themes that works with Drupal, Joomla, or any other website platform.
  4. Support Response Time:  It’s not that the support for Thrive Themes is bad, it’s actually quite good.  But sometimes it takes hours to get a response which is frustrating when you’re in the middle of doing something.

Cost

  • $97/Year For One Site

Is Thrive Themes Worth It?  

I can sit here until I’m blue in the face and tell you how great Thrive Themes is, but this video does a great job of explaining just how useful it is quickly and easily.

That being said, I’ve used Thrive Themes myself for many years and have found a way to build a portfolio of sites that generates over $25,000/month.  That’s not me gloating either, that’s me showing you through my own success that this platform is what bloggers and website owners need to succeed.  

If that isn’t proof that Thrive Themes is a great platform, I don’t know what is.  

But why is Thrive Themes so instrumental to my own success?

Simple.  

Though Thrive Themes create great WordPress themes and plugins, I think the most important thing is that their products are conversion-focused. 

This means that all of the products they offer were built not just to function, but to provide bloggers and business owners digital marketing tools they need to drive conversions and ultimately, revenue for their blog or website.  

This is why I’m such a big fan of the Thrive Themes suite of products.  Without them, I’m confident in saying that my online business wouldn’t be nearly as successful as it is today.