What is the best website host?

With becoming a website developer, you probably started making websites on your personal computer(PC). Maybe even hosting from your PC. By doing this, you realize that you providing reliable 24/7 service is difficult. The solution is to host your website on the cloud, but with who?

Unless you have a degree in all things server hosting, hosting from your personal computer is ill-advised. Sure self-hosting is somewhat free, but many headache-inducing problems could arise. Your Internet Service Provider(ISP) could be upset with the network traffic. Hardware could fail and data loss occurs. Security vulnerabilities could go undiscovered for a long time. Dealing with all this and handling your time to focus on your website's development is a heavy load. Investing in a cloud service provider is an excellent solution to offset the load. The benefit of using a cloud-based service offered through a company is that server infrastructure is fully managed. Any decent company has educated full-time staff keeping servers in check. That said, you can expect reliable hardware maintenance, hardware upgrades, the minimal possibility of data loss, hardware security patching, and consistent up-time.

Best for PHP only developers

If your website is a simple PHP only website, then you probably don't need to install or customize a lot of software. All you might need is a plain cPanel website server. The best by a large margin is BlueHost.

It even has the attention of WordPress, a PHP CMS, to be an excellent solution for WordPress hosting. Using cPanel based website hosting, you could just upload your PHP files, configure your domain, and you have a website running in minutes. This is a common route for new website developers.

Best Overall

I've gone through dozens of hosts experimenting for my needs. My needs are flexibility, up-time reliability, low latency, scalability, and affordability. Hosts like Amazon Web Services(AWS) were insufficient because of its high pricing. Hosts like 000WebHost and HostGator worked only through cPanel, so that offered limited control of the server. For my requirements, I've found DigitalOcean to be the best website host.

DigitalOcean is the cheapest Virtual Private Server(VPS) starting at $5 per month. Using the link above, you can get a free $100 credit. A VPS is a plain computer but on the cloud. With it being a computer you have complete access to, you can expect absolute control over everything you'd need. Though this means that you will be your server admin. Rest assured that hardware/network maintenance will still be done by the DigitalOcean company, but there will be additional setup and management relative to something like pre-setup servers using cPanel. You would need to install software yourself and such. Though this is all easy if you follow step-by-step guides. Something like this:

Best for big budgets

If you are working for a company with a big budget, you can afford a more premium service. DigitalOcean is an excellent professional solution, but a product like Amazon Web Services(AWS) is even more flexible. With the company being large, there can be unexpected fluctuations in hardware requirements. Sudden growth and DDoS attacks mean more hardware requirements. AWS' excellent flexibility is a viable solution to tackle that. AWS offers much more than its server hosting as well. You have dedicated databases, load balancing, storage, content delivery at your fingertips. The main reason AWS isn't the top of my list is that it is expensive and complicated to work with. Google Cloud is a decent alternative to AWS.

Summary

There are several hosting options. You should avoid self-hosting and look toward cloud services. In my opinion: DigitalOcean is easily the best VPS solution for small to mid-sized companies. Amazon Web Services is the best for big-budget companies. Using Bluehost is the best for PHP hosting offered through cPanel.