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Business Choice Awards 2015: Web Hosting Services
By Matthew Sarrel
13 Jul 2015, 11 p.m.
Every business must have a website. An attractive and informative site can attract new customers and establish a business's credibility, not to mention sell goods and services. It is therefore one of, if not the top, channels for building a deeper relationship with clients.
Yet there are so many options for Web-hosting services that choosing one and getting started may seem daunting. Fortunately, we—and your fellow PCMag readers—are here to help.
SEE ALSO: How To Transfer A Domain Name
Evaluating Web-hosting services can be a confusing task because there are so many different types of hosting and so many different features and levels of those features. Web-hosting services come in a few flavours, including shared hosting plans, virtual private server (VPS) hosting for the best combo of price and power, dedicated hosting for high-traffic sites, and managed WordPress hosting plans. Check out our roundup of top Web-hosting services for 2015 for a deeper comparison and expert guidance on what we consider the very best.
This edition of the PCMag Business Choice Awards focuses on Web-hosting services, providers that maintain the underlying infrastructure (hardware, software, network, management tools) that serve the files and code that comprise your website. Here's a quick features table showing you the Web-hosting services that received enough responses in our survey to make the cut. The results of who was rated best in the survey are on the next page.
Dreamhost GoDaddy 1&1 Bluehost HostGator iPage Web.com Network Solutions
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Business Choice
Unlimited Monthly Data Transfers With All Plans
For more than 25 years, we have been augmenting our hands-on, labs-based product reviews with our Readers' Choice Awards, in which PCMag readers rate the products and services they use the most. The Business Choice Awards extend Readers' Choice by garnering feedback about the hardware, software, and services our readers deploy, administer, maintain, and use in a business environment.
Want to participate in future surveys with other PCMag readers? Click here and sign up for the Readers' Choice survey email list to receive invitations.
This survey asked respondents to rate their overall satisfaction with the Web-hosting service they use and the likelihood they would recommend it to others. In addition, we inquired about their satisfaction with technical support and the overall reliability of the service.
If you select, deploy, or administer the products in our Business Choice Awards, or if you advise or manage people in these roles, then you know how critical it is to choose the right products. The results of the PCMag Business Choice Awards survey are invaluable when doing so.
Business Choice Awards 2015: Web-hosting services
Web hosts span a huge variety of capabilities, as they should, because different businesses have different requirements for their sites. It's important to shop around, find the capabilities you need for the price you're willing to pay, and then double-check that you'll actually get what you pay for. That's what this survey is for, to help you determine the best, based on the experience of your fellow PCMag readers.
In this year's survey for best Web-hosting solution, seven companies received enough responses to be included as finalists. Dreamhost is our winner for the second year in a row.
With an overall satisfaction score of 9.7 (on a scale of 0 to 10), it blows away last year's 8.6, as well as the scores of the closest runners up: Bluehost with 7.9, HostGator with 7.6, and 1&1 with 7.5. It's clear from the scores Dreamhost receives across the board (click below for the full table) that it's the dream for hosting sites, a sentiment with which our reviewers concur, having given it our Editors' Choice award.
Reliability, in this case the ever important ability of the Web-hosting service to serve up your site day after day in a consistently speedy manner, loosely follows the trend of overall satisfaction. Dreamhost takes the lead again with a 9.7, followed by Bluehost at 8.7 and then 1&1 at 8.6. The drop-off after that puts these three in the most reliable category.
Tech support is an important consideration in selecting a Web-hosting provider. Whether you're a one-person shop with a simple site or an enterprise with a full e-commerce infrastructure, chances are that at some point you're going to need some form of help. Make sure that you're getting 24/7 support, if not by phone then at least by chat. Looking at tech support, the lowest percentage of respondents requiring help is for iPage at 40 percent (the only category in which this provider comes out on top) and GoDaddy at 41 percent; our big winner, Dreamhost, is at 44 percent (it got the same last year). The host that needed the most tech help from customers is Bluehost with 61 percent. That's an improvement over last year, however, when Bluehost had 69 percent of customers needing assistance.
But there isn't always a corollary between how much tech support is needed and the quality of that service. Tech Support ratings give Dreamhost a stellar 9.9—an almost perfect score—an amazing leap from last year's tech support rating of 6.9. Obviously, something right is happening in the Dreamhost help trenches. No other Web host holds a candle to that; the next best is Bluehost at 7.5, which isn't bad, considering how many users had to call for support help. If tech support is an important consideration for you when contracting for Web-hosting services, then steer clear of Web.com / Network Solutions, where just over half of survey respondents required tech support, but still rated it as substandard with a 4.7.
When it comes to recommending a Web host, we again see a large spread in responses, starting again with our respondents' beloved Dreamhost. It towers above the competition with a 9.6, followed by Bluehost with the next best at 8.2.
This question is used to calculate the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which echoes the results of the likelihood to recommend different Web-hosting services and accentuates the differences between them. Dreamhost stands alone on top (81.1). NPS shows that people recommend Dreamhost whole-heartedly, and are pretty tepid in their recommendations of the rest, then actually steer their colleagues away from Web.com / Network Solutions with its negative number score. These results are consistent with last year's results, where Dreamhost was a dream come true and Bluehost a close second (albeit closer last year than this year).
See all survey results for Business Choice 2015: Web-hosting services.
Business Choice Winner: Web-hosting services
Dreamhost wins our Business Choice Awards survey for best Web-hosting service with far and away the best scores in overall satisfaction, reliability, likelihood to recommend (and Net Promoter Score), and average tech support satisfaction. Kudos to Dreamhost for not only winning, but improving its ratings from last year across the board, including an almost perfect Tech Support satisfaction score.
We email survey invitations to PCMag.com community members, specifically subscribers to our Readers' Choice Survey mailing list. This survey was hosted by SurveyMonkey.
Respondents were asked to rate their Web-hosting service provider over multiple questions about their overall satisfaction, as well as experiences with technical support within the past 12 months.
Because the goal of the survey is to understand how the Web-hosting services compare to one another and not how one respondent's experience compares to another's, we use the average of the Web-hosting services' rating, not the average of every respondent's rating. In all cases, the overall ratings are not based on averages of other scores in the table; they are based on answers to the question, "Overall, how satisfied are you with your service provider?"
Scores not represented as a percentage are on a scale of 0 to 10 where 10 is the best.
Net Promoter Scores are based on the concept introduced by Fred Reichheld in his 2006 best seller, The Ultimate Question, that no other question can better define the loyalty of a company's customers than "how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?" This measure of brand loyalty is calculated by taking the percent of respondents who answered 9 or 10 (promoters) and subtracting the percent who answered 0 through 6 (detractors).
If you would like to participate in PCMag's monthly Readers' Choice surveys and to be eligible for our monthly sweepstakes promotion, please sign up today.
Bluehost Web Hosting
Dreamhost Web Hosting
HostGator Web Hosting
Web Site Hosting ...
Web.com Web Hosting
1&1 Web Hosting
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Matthew Sarrel Contributing Editor
Matthew D. Sarrel, CISSP, is executive director of Sarrel Group, a technical marketing consultancy. He is also a technical marketing consultant and technical writer. To read his opinions on games please browse http://games.mattsarrel.com and for more general information on Matt, please see http://www.mattsarrel.com. See Full Bio
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