Hi All, I made the mistake of going with Bluehost for a friend’s project because I am familiar with it. Two days into it, and I want to jump out of the window already. I’m using Divi (yes, I know, I know), and the whole hosting has been a cluster. Not just SLOW as molasses, but pages are going missing after I asked a tech to make some changes to the memory limit (he decided that he had to go mess with some other things as well). If you were me and wanted to jump ship quickly to something with a CPanel, where would you jump right this second?
Answers:
For speed, simplicity and support. Siteground. Just for clarity – SiteGround is moving away from cPanel. The company does provide it’s own control panel for each new hosting account though and it does cover most used cPanel tools plus all SiteGround specific additions.
Moving away from Siteground (to ChemiCloud) lots of problems and bad support since their move to google and leaving cPanel. I would have agreed about a year ago but since the move to google and the recent support levels I would not recommend. If shared hosting will do, then I’ve been very happy with Crocweb. Very reasonable, great support and Litespeed servers. I have also used NameCheap.
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As for theme – I’d highly recommend GeneratePress (the Premium version – which is only $49/yr and 40% off for renewals, unlimited number of sites and the best darn support on the planet.) I use it along with Generate Blocks and WPShow Posts – two more of Tom Usborn’s projects. It’s lightweight, fast as can be, and a joy to use. You can also use it with Elementor if you wish, though I’ve yet to do so even though I bought the pro version of Elementor last year thinking I’d use it.
Their money back policy is 30 days but note they will give you a hard sell to stay. They are a terrible web host, as is HostGator and the almost 60 other brands all owned by EIG. Also stay away from GoDaddy. When you say “a CPAnel” do you mean any easy to use control panel? Or actual cPanel?
A2 Hosting is very good for shared hosting with cPanel. Pressable. Very fast. Built for WordPress and cheaper than WPEngine. WordPress, specifically the divi theme requires a bit more horse power than regular shared hosting, unless you have an idle site. You might want to get a hosting with high frequency CPU and NVMe SSD.
My story to a tee. Started with Bluehost. They put test listings on my live shop, butchered my htaccess file and changed configuration without even telling me. Caused some real problems for me. I’ve moved to Siteground and it’s better, but still a bit weird. A definite improvement though. Now I’m 10 days in to that contract and all im reading in recent days is that Siteground is going downhill. Cloudways seem to be flavour of the month but I don’t know if I can handle another migration, setup and tune up. There also seems to be hidden costs with cloudways once you’re in the door. Siteground was worth the migration and redesign though, I think. I have been with them for almost 2 years and have never had any hidden costs. Best experience I have ever had with a hosting company.
Server type, RAM, bandwidth are 3 specs which come with tiered pricing and additional cost. Not easy to know what you need or will use as a novice like me. Feels like a leap in the dark. I’ve signed up and have a trial waiting. I’m just not sure another migration and learning curve is what I want just now for a small e-commerce site with 3000 visitors a month.
I would definitely recommend Cloudways with a Vultr High Frequency server for that over Siteground Grow big. The Siteground option is shared hosting so you’re sharing resources with hundreds/thousands of other sites. Siteground has also been known to pull resources from sites that are experience traffic spikes. On Cloudways, your site(s) are the only ones using the resources on your hosting. Setup is pretty straightforward and Cloudways will even migrate one site for you for free. Once things are set up, there isn’t much of a learning curve. I host all my websites on Cloudways and it was the best move I’d ever made regarding hosting! I moved from Siteground!
it’s unfortunate that you have to go through an unpleasant experience with your web host. But it’s good that you have jumped on to this forum for hosting recommendations. However, I believe if you provide more information about your website for example its monthly traffic or the disk space it will utilize, you will be able to get better recommendations.
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