The web hosting landscape can be difficult to navigate. It literally took me months before I could reliably discern what allows certain companies to stand out given all the data and “noise” on the subject. The companies, thus far, who receive my pick as Premium Web Hosts are ICANNWholesale, HostGator, and DreamHost.

What is Premium Grade Web Hosting?

Premium Grade Web Hosting is a grade I’ve assigned to web hosting companies that stand out in service, speed, and reliability. Using a simple analogy, you can say that these are the high octane forms of web hosting while the others are regular. Most people use and need regular gasoline but there are certain customers that need or prefer premium gasoline.

There are as many opinions about web hosting and needs as there are people who are concerned about web hosting. Many of the concerns can be, at best, be termed preferences and, in some cases, “religious” beliefs. Oft times discussions about hosts breaks down into personal stories and debates that carry little substance other than strong personal opinions. Many forums and reviews are filled with “the host is no good or dishonest” or “the host is great”. Many times these posts are written by competitors, proponents, or merely by people who caught the wrong tech on the wrong day. A successful web hosting company will, at best, keep services up and running almost continuously. It is impossible to never have problems but the company that uses “best practices” is generally noticed and repeatedly praised in forums. Sifting through the information you can see which truly stand out in spite of posts that can be best described as anomalies.

Factors that contribute to the Premium Grade Web Hosting rating are servers used, number of users per server, connections to the internet backbone, quality of data center, backup strategies, knowledge of support staff, and company philosophy to name a few. What the user sees on the other end is a bit more uptime, faster loading of web pages, and very responsive support. Since there is no “one” factor, and web hosting companies do not allow everyone to see all the inner workings of the company, the qualities are “detected” roughly by what can be seen and generally measured from the outside.

Why Buy Regular Grade Hosting?

This is really a question that can only be answered by the customer. I am very careful not to say “consider nothing else” because, for many web hosting users, price, extra storage, and bandwidth may be over-riding considerations. Remember, that when it is said that Premium Grade Web Hosting is better in some tangible and intangible categories, other Web Hosting companies still provide excellent reliability, service, and speed. That is why the fuel analogy is used. The regular gas does not harm a vehicle in any way and will save you money.

Don’t be dissuaded by hosting “zealotry” that considers hosts that offer lots of features like bandwidth and storage at a low price to be off-limits. You can see forum posts with people railing against them even though they’ve never hosted with them – it’s just what they’ve “heard”. Remember, not all web pages are mission critical. What is the difference to you to receive 99.9% uptime as opposed to 99.999% uptime? That is, can you accept that your server might be down for a few seconds during the day as opposed to being down for fractions of a second during the day? Might you also be willing to wait for an answer to a support question for 2 hours instead of 15 minutes if you could save $3 a month? Those value determinations cannot be made for you (although some will insist otherwise) and you are not getting a “lemon” by buying anything other than premium grade web hosting.

Some can only see their own need or desire for “the very best” and cannot understand why any would buy something else. I might prefer Toyota over Ford because of a consistent track record in Consumer Reports but Ford still has great reliability and is less expensive to own. It is fine if I make a personal value judgment and buy a Ford but, in the web hosting world, the “Toyota” proponents think buying “Ford” web hosting is stupid.

Web hosting is a product like anything else and the value decisions vary by requirements and preferences. I have hosted with many different web hosts, including those that some complain have poor service or are slow. Would I host with them again? Absolutely, because, in their niche and for certain applications, they are what I need and I am willing sometimes to sacrifice a small service and reliability difference to get a better price for storage and bandwidth.