Today, I want to talk to you about my experiences before, and different hosting plans for my websites. Now I’ve gone through most of the main ones that people sort of try out in the first couple of years blogging Bluehost, WPX, Kinsta, and Cloudways. So I’ll just walk you through my experiences with different features of them as speed, and support. So we will give you Best Compare Web Hosting, and we will know which one is the best in 2022.
I started out with Bluehost like most people, and I still have a Bluehost plan because I bought the three-year plan because it was the most effective one or the cheapest one of all per month. So I’m still kind of stuck on Bluehost and in fact, some of my websites are still on Bluehost.
Then I moved over to Kinsta. I didn’t have any problems with Bluehost when I moved over, but I moved over to Kinsta because everyone was talking smack about Bluehost saying they’re no good, they’re no good change before you have any issues. So I moved to Kinsta, it was awesome. Then I moved to WPX because Kinsta was a little bit too expensive for me. And then more recently I’ve moved over to Cloudways, which is sort of one of the most popular ones these days. So let’s talk about my experiences with each.
Contents
1. Cloudways Vs Kinsta Vs WPX Vs Bluehost
1.1 Bluehost Hosting
The first thing you need to know about Bluehost People who recommend Bluehost may have had great experiences with Bluehost, but they may also only be recommending it because of its amazing affiliate program. So just be really cautious about what people say. If people are recommending Bluehost dig a little bit deeper and see if we’ll have they, are they using themselves Have they tested it? Just do your research.
1.1.1 Bluehost Plan & Support
One thing that I would recommend if you go with Bluehost is to get the plus plan. It costs maybe $1 or $2 extra per month more than the first plan. But it allows you to use multiple domains. When you start on your blogging journey, you’ll often only have one domain and think oh, I’m only going to have this one website, but before long your imagination gets the best of you and you just buy more and more and more domains. I think I own somewhere around 15 domains. You need the plus plan in order to have to add on domains in Bluehost So I would strongly recommend if you get Bluehost to start with the plus plan.
What I did was I had to go and request to step up from the Basic plan to the Plus plan and I just skipped that. that fourth point about support giving me different information in the past when I called them and said or texted them on the chat and said I want to step up to the plus plan, can you deduct what I’ve already paid So that I don’t have to start all over again and I wasted $100 or whatever. And the support person said, no, you have to pay the whole rate and You just lose that money that you’ve already spent on the basic plan, even though the basic plan still had maybe 12 months left on it.
So I’ve kind of rolled my eyes and got on with life and then a week later I tried again and the second support agent said, yeah, totally, I can totally do that for you. I’ll give you the refund and they sorted it out. So the support was kind of just inconsistent in my experience and that’s just my experience.
1.1.2 Bluehost Shared hosting & reputation
it is shared hosting. So you’re sharing a server with a bunch of other people, which can kind of give you the bad neighborhood effect. Apparently in, you know, google if you’re on the same server as some, you know, casino websites or something, people say that maybe that will have an effect on the rankings of your site. I don’t know. I don’t think that there’s evidence of that or I haven’t seen evidence of that.
The other thing about Bluehost is it does have a pretty poor reputation amongst people to who you talk. even though I’ve never had terrible issues with Bluehost you can talk to people who say, you know, the support has not been very useful for me or my sites went down there, enough of my friends have had bad experiences with Bluehost that I’m a little bit wary of them even though I personally haven’t.
1.2 Kinsta Hosting
Okay, I stepped up to Kinsta when my website had, it was getting about 100,000 page views a month and I was still on basic Bluehost and people were saying that’s terrible. Like you’re probably losing so much speed, so on and so forth. So I thought, okay, I’ll set up the Kinsta. I’ll try something new out. So I set out to Kinsta and it was really nice. The dashboard is amazing. It’s a private server. So you’re not sharing the server with anyone. So you’re not in a bad neighborhood.
The customer service was sensational. You would send them a text message on the chart. They will get back to you straight away. The customer service representatives had the technical skills to solve your problems right there. And then on the spot, they were really knowledgeable. What you’re getting in exchange for this really white-glove service is that it’s expensive. It’s a $30 baseline price For they say 20,000 page views. I am still stuck With the $30 baseline price up to like 130 or 40,000 page views potentially that may be because I was using the Ezoic name server. So Ezoic was carrying a bit of the burden as well.
1.3 WPX Hosting
then I moved over to WPX. When finally Kinsta messaged me and said you’re gonna have to step up from the $30 plan because you are starting to sort of exceed your limits. So I did some research and I saw the Matthew Woodward review. And the Matthew Woodward review is something that’s really popular in our space. Basically, he did a really detailed study of a whole bunch of different plans and he said WPX Is the best. And I think he said Kinsta was the second best. So I looked at WPX. And even though it was shared hosting, not private hosting.
So it was a little bit of a step-down, he said, look it works really well it’s fast as if not faster than Kinsta and it’ll save you money. So I stepped over the shared hosting with WPX. It cost me $25 per month and I could put five domains on it whereas, with her, I can only put one domain. So I moved five of my domains directly straight to WPX, 25 bucks a month, unlimited amount of page views. Really happy with it.
A couple of little downsides. 1st 1 is often because I’ve put five domains on it. Now I did come up across an SSL certificate issue. The SSL certificates just weren’t working the way that they work on any other hosting plan and I don’t know why this was the case but I had to get in touch with support several times and they made me download plug-ins and install plug-ins to make sure SSL certificate was working. Of course, plug-ins add an extra blow to the plant.
WPX also comes with one of the cashing premium cashing plug-ins free for you so that you can do some additional cashing, which was really nice. And to be honest, I didn’t really notice any difference in switching from Kinsta to WPX in terms of speed or performance. WPX’s support is also quite good, Maybe a little bit slower than Kinsta in my experience but nothing terrible. I was perfectly happy with WPX the whole time I’ve been with them and I still do have five domains on WPXE.
1.4 Cloudways Hosting
Then I moved to Cloudways. Now the reason I moved to Cloudways is I still had several of my domains back on Bluehost because Bluehost has unlimited domains. You can put as many domains as you want. If you’ve got the plus plan already used Up all of my five spots with WPX. So I just put all my new sites on Bluehost. I was having some indexing issues. I don’t Have absolute nightmares for the past six to 12 months indexing my new sites, and I thought it was part of my stack. I thought maybe Bluehost might have been part of the problem with that.
So I thought, I’m going to solve this problem or at least make sure that Bluehost isn’t a reason, I don’t even think the Bluehost was the reason, I’m not sure. But I just wanted to eliminate that possibility. So I moved over to the Cloudways. People say Cloudways is fast and but you know, I never acted on it. And then when I moved over to Cloudways, it is sensationally fast. when I moved to WPX and Kinsta barely noticed any speed differences, There might have been some speed differences, If you put them through tools like GT metrics or google page speed insights.
But when you’re on Cloudways you can feel it’s fast! on the backend of the WordPress If you click to add a new post. You might not notice, but click add a new post, if you’re on WPX or Bluehost or something like that, there’s a little bit of a delay and then it slowly sorts of loads. with Cloudways, It is almost instantaneous. You click a button and things appear straight away when you load the page, things really do appear quicker to the extent that it’s noticeable to the human user. it’s not just some tool telling you which one’s pastor to me. It feels as if Cloudways is incredibly quick. So they use a virtual private server.
So essentially or virtually you are on a private server. Not shared hosting, it’s cloud hosting. I think that’s a little bit of trickery there in terms of the cloud creating it, making it into a private server but on the back end it’s not, I’m not sure. but it’s nice to have it as a VPS and not the whole shared hosting. Another really awesome thing about them is you can have as many domains as you want on it, but once you reach certain bandwidth limits, they will ask you to increase the amount of money that you give them per month.
1.4.1 My problems when I moved to Cloudways
There are a few little small issues So the payment system is, was kind of confusing. It might have been my fault but when I moved over to Cloudways I had migrated everything within the three days that we have of the trial. and I expected it just to step me up after the trial and take money out of my account. But instead of it stepping me up, it just said the trial is over! maybe I missed an email but I didn’t get any warnings about it. And all of a sudden My sights were down for about 24 hours. And the reason I’ve realized that my sites were down was when I was trying to force index the articles in google, and it is giving me red signs being like, your sites don’t exist. Might have been my fault.
The other thing was the migration issue I migrated all of my sites to Cloudways, and they said migration is complete. and When I did my DNS search. It said that my DNS, and IP addresses and everything had been switched over. So everything said that it was fine and everything had migrated.
So I started writing blog posts. I uploaded 15 blog posts to one of the sites that day, went to bed, and woke up the next morning, all of the work of those 15 blog posts completely disappeared. I contacted Cloudways support. They’re pretty good. It took a little, it said I was in a queue for a couple of minutes and then it gave me a support person. The support person looked into it and said, we have no idea what happened, I can’t help you So I Lost a day. So if you migrate it, make sure you just wait 20 four hours before working on the site to make sure none of those issues happen.
So you can see there are a couple of sort of issues that I had moving over to Cloudways, but at the same time, I’m really happy with the fact that I moved over to Cloudways because they are super fast.
2. Compare Web Hosting
In order to be fair and have the idea complete, we will compare them in speed, price, number of domains, and of course not forgetting the support. Then I will speak my personal opinion about which one is better. Of course, after we make a compare web hosting that I tried.
2.1 Speed Comparison
So starting with speed, in my subjective opinion, Cloudways seems to be the fastest, visibly really really quick. Kinsta WPX that were kind of tired in my opinion, they both neither of them were as fast as Cloudways for me, but they did the job. Bluehost has a little bit of lag, but if you’re brand new you probably won’t even have that much of an issue, you won’t be too upset by it.
2.2 How many Domains are you Allowed?
how many domains can you put on the basic plans? in Cloudways, you can put as many as you want onto the server, they call them applications and you kind of put them underneath the server and they aren’t add-on domains. So with Bluehost, you can have one primary domain and then a bunch of add-on domains. So you can have as many domains as you want on Cloudways.
Kinsta, you can only have one domain On the base $30 plan, which was a big downside for Me WPX. You can have five domains in the $25 plan. You run out of five domains really quickly as everyone who’s been in this game for long enough knows you end up with a ton of domains and websites But it’s still pretty good. five Domains for $25 isn’t too bad. And Bluehost if you have the plus plan, you can have an unlimited park or add-on domains but make sure you get the plus plan flat.
2.3 Support & Price Comparison
The support in my opinion, just from my experiences with Kinsta support, is absolutely amazing. WPX support and Cloudways support are pretty good. And then I put Bluehost down the bottom there as I said, I’ve had one or two small issues, but nothing significant with them. But I have got friends who have had some big problems with Bluehost support So I would put them last in my sort of subjective opinion
Okay about the price, pricing Bluehost is obviously the cheapest. It could be as low as $5 per month, but when it renews it does renew at a higher price. So I’d be really cautious about that. So a lot of people, probably most people, start with something like Siteground or Bluehost, which is around about $5 a month, give or take. And then after their trial, their first year, which is sort of the year where you get cheap hosting, they’ll switch over to something better like WPX or Cloudways, which is what I did, what most people do. I don’t have a problem with people doing that, that’s, it’s fine.
So WPX Was about $25 per month. Something I do like about WPX Is they do have a transparent flat price. Upon renewal. I would say WPX Is probably one of the most popular hosts for people who have affiliate websites. So they’ve got a really good reputation in our space, Kinsta starts at $30 per month. It is a white-glove service So it’s gonna be a lot more expensive and that’s just the start, they’ll ask you to step up before long too I think the next step up is $60 per month.
So Cloudways, you can Get it for $11 or $13 per month depending on whether you go with a DigitalOcean or Vultr as they’re sort of their backup host. I don’t know what to call that, because once you click to get started and you choose your plan, if you click on that bottom plan, it will say to you, hey, as a blogger, you’re gonna run out of space instantly. We strongly recommend you step up to the next plan up, which is like 25 or $26. Honestly, this happened because my sites became large, and I got more than one hundred thousand visitors per month for one site.
So in reality realistically you’re probably going to be spending about $25 a month on Cloudways, which is comparable to WPX, but remember you can put as many domains as you want on Cloudways so long as you don’t exceed your bandwidth. And again Cloudways does have a transparent, flat price upon renewal, which I really appreciate.
3. My Final Judgment
I would still recommend Cloudways, just based on my experience, Bluehost, I would probably if I was starting again I’d probably just skip it because I’ll just jump straight to Cloudways. But then again, I remember not having much money and thinking it was a big investment to put $5 a month into hosting, so I can understand why people go with Bluehost or Siteground.
WPX my final verdict on them I’ve been really happy with them, but the shared hosting plus SSL certificate issues were some small downsides but at the same time I’m really glad that I tried them out and I think they’re good people over there WPX. Kinsta had amazing support and dashboard, they’re amazing service. If you have just unlimited amounts of cash on hand, I would recommend Kinsta really, really good quality. Cloudways are unbelievably fast. The fastest host that I’ve ever experienced, that runs on a virtual private server there about roundabout mid-price, for the speed that you’re getting, it is the best value.
3.1 My Top Recommendation
So what I would recommend if you’re willing to spend the money or you want to step up from your basic Siteground, Bluehost sort of hosting, I would recommend Cloudways. For me. It has been really just incredibly fast, visibly fast. “if you’re running on the smell of an oily rag”, which I that’s an Australian saying, I think it means if you’ve got no money at all and you’re just trying to get by, I wouldn’t be against Bluehost or even Siteground or some basic hosts like that, and then as soon as you have the money, I would recommend stepping up to Cloudways. You will feel the speed improvement really quickly.
Okay, so that brings us to the end of my experiences with those four hosting plans. After we made a compare web hosting, the most popular in 2022, I said, that’s just 100% my subjective experience. But I think for people starting out or thinking of changing hosts, we’d like to hear someone’s personal experience with each of those different hosts. So hopefully that has been useful to you if you’re thinking of changing hosts.
