Which web hosting provider is the best?
- Namecheap.com
- Bluehost.com
- Hostgator.com
I have and and have had accounts at various hosting providers and through my own personal experience with the various hosting providers, I have found the best hosting provider to be www.namecheap.com. I have an associate degree in network engineering, passed and held multiple Microsoft and Cisco certifications and have had many technical positions throughout my life and right now I am in my mid 40’s. I have scoured the internet and have had hosting packages with various companies to host various websites and this is what I have found. Around 6/20/2024 my hosting package at Bluehost was going to expire. I purchased and built this website on my Host Gator account using their baby package. When that account was about to expire, I spoke with a member of their tech team via chat and was told that I could not transfer this domain to another Host Gator account. I though this to be odd because I purchased this domain on their platform and have it there right now. They explained to me it was not possible. I wanted to keep this domain so I searched around for another provider. I checked on YouTube and I kept seeing videos that “Bluehost” was the best. I contacted a member of their support team via chat and was told in fact they do support .blog domains on their platform. So after some thinking about it, I transferred this domain to Bluehost (Host Gator and Bluehost are under the same ownership) and I stayed with them for a couple of years. Recently, my hosting package with them was going to expire, and I have an account with Namecheap now, I really like them a lot.
Transfer into Namecheap
I asked a member of the Namecheap support team if they support the transfer in and hosting of .blog domains, and they said that they do. I really like the folks at Name Cheap too. Since 04/09/2024 I have been without any income. Earlier this year, one of my other Bluehost domains
came due and when I renewed it via name cheap it was like $10.66 or something. So I renewed it with them. Then when this domain name became due, I though it was going to be the same price through Namecheap, I checked with them, and they told me it was going to cost me
over $24.00 to renew because it was a .blog extension. So I was like fine, and I paid for the renewal. I renewed the domain at name cheap but the DNS, Email, Content, and blog posts
were still hosted at Bluehost. Then on 06/17/2024, Bluehost detected that the domain had expired and the site went down. I had like 5 email addresses on the Bluehost domain and they too went down. So I recreated the emails on NameCheap through their cPanel and asked their support staff through chat what I needed to do to transfer that content into Namecheap. So they advised me that their domain concierge team could assist with that transfer. So I asked them if there was a charge for that, as with pretty much everything, and they advised there was no charge for their help. So I chatted with them and they told me I had to get a full backup from the cPanel of my old hosting provider and then upload to Namecheap. It takes forever to get it from my old host (It needs to be generated) to my computer and then to upload that file to NameCheap and then they would do the restore. I did that but when I got the file (it was a 7.2 GB tar file package), I amended the domain name to it for clarification. I then uploaded it to name cheap. They created a ticket and continued to email me status updates as they progressed.
Failed to Restore
I went to sleep and I woke up the next day and they told me in an email that the restore failed. They told me that they tried several things with the file I uploaded them but it had failed each time. They encouraged me to try again but this time DO NOT change the file name in any way. So I did exactly as they instructed. I generated a new tar file pulled it down to my PC and then pushed it up to Namecheap. I went to sleep again. Before I was able to sleep, I just kept thinking of what I was going to have to do to rebuild this site. I knew what I was going to have to do but it was going to be a P.I.T.A.
Transfer success
I woke up the next day, and before I even checked my email, I went to this domain on my cell phone, and it came right up, exactly how it was before. I was elated. Then I checked my email and I saw that the restore was a success! So I logged in to my Bluehost account and did the exact same thing with www.justawesomeshots.com and it also was a success. Namecheap is awesome, their support is also awesome and there is never a charge for anything, pretty much. The names of their staff seem to be of Middle Eastern descent but I do not care, they are always very responsive, and super knowledgeable too. Their spelling is always very good too and their is a chat button on every page and there is an audible alert right before their response and you only get that alert from a human response, unlike Blue Host who spams you to death with their Audible alerts from their bots. I need to speak with a human, not a bot. Anyway, Namecheap is awesome for numerous reasons. They give free domain privacy to all the users on their platform, which is awesome because without that service you will get spammed to death when you purchase a domain without privacy, Bluehost and Host gator charge for that service, and they may discount their hosting packages but they never ever discount the domain privacy fee. Namecheap also gives you a free SSL certificate for the first year for free, which is very much needed. Needless to say, I am staying with Namecheap.
In conclusion:
Namecheap is the absolute best hosting provider I have ever had. Their staff is always friendly and knowledgeable and sometimes they have to deliver bad news. I appreciate that to, because I have learned that just because I don’t like the information that is delivered to me that does not make it incorrect. Namecheap is always very prompt with either type of news and the Namecheap provides the absolute best hosting service that have ever had the pleasure of being with. They provide tremendous value always. I am not sure where they get their support staff from but they are there around the clock and offer the best help that I have ever seen.
