Today, we will discuss web hosting services, and we will reveal who offers best web hosting services in India
Lets us define what is a web hosting service in simple plain English:
Web Hosting is a simple term that describes a process of hosting a website on a web server. In simple language, it is the way to make your site live on the internet.
There are two types of web servers if we classify by the underlying operating system.
- Linux OS based web servers
- Windows OS based web servers
Among these, the major stake goes to Linux Web Servers, due to their stability, support for most open source scripts and systems, reliability and vast online community of developers, system administrators, and users.
For a typical man or regular person, they could not identify the fundamental differences between Linux servers and Windows servers.
Here are some most common questions people post on Quora and other places:
“What is the best web hosting?”
“What is the best web hosting Linux or Windows?”
“What is the best web hosting company in India?”
“What is the best hosting for a personal website?”
“What is the best hosting for an eCommerce website?”
“Can I host more than one website on a single hosting account?”
“If I host on US servers the latency will be more then India servers if my visitors are from India?”
“Which is most reasonable and best web hosting provider in India?”
“Which company offers cheap and best web hosting?”
“Which company offers domain hosting?”
“Which is the best web hosting for my website?”
“Which is easy to use web hosting that is cheap?”
“Which is the most inexpensive web hosting?”
“Which is the cheap and best WordPress hosting?”
“Cheap and best monthly hosting in India?”
“Cheap and best hosting for small businesses?”
“Cheap web hosting plans prices in India?”
Likewise, there are endless questions posted by users, and often most of them are repeatedly asked and answered.
The issue is the Quora community is flooded with affiliate marketers, whose only job is to promote the host that pays them the maximum commission.
They just copy-paste answers, and most of the time, the answers are biased towards a single web hosting company or a group.
The moderators and other users are together formed as a group and mislead the customers or users who want to know the recommendations from real users.
Affiliates never buy the hosting, they promote. They do not know how servers and hosting works, they just exist in communities like Quora to promote links (affiliate links) which set up cookies in your web browsers, whenever you click the link developed by them.
For example, suppose if your questions are “which is the best web hosting Bluehost or HostGator or GoDaddy?”
Then you will get say 10 answers, among them 2 people propose Bluehost, 3 people support HostGator, 1 person supported GoDaddy and rest of them supported other people.
What you will do is you will click the links of Bluehost, HostGator and GoDaddy based on the answers that impressive to you.
Now, these are affiliate links, set cookies, which will track you, for say 60 days or 90 days. It will further get retargeting ads which will be displayed to you wherever you go, just like Hutch dog.
Suppose you clicked on Bluehost link and visited their website and did not purchased it, and you are Gmail user, then you will start seeing ads in your Gmail, similarly on Facebook, other websites that have google ads.
This is called remarketing. You will never know that you are persuaded until you buy the visited products from the respective internet site.
By purchasing the products or hosting recommended by the affiliates, you are making the following mistakes
- You do not know, whether the server is good or not, you are blindly buying the products based on some person recommendation
- You do not know, whether it suits your website requirements or not. Yes, for an asp.net website you need Windows server, but you buy Windows server and want to run WordPress or Magento think about it.
- It is like the purchase of a Maruti car and expects it to be like Mercedez benz like facilities.
- You do not know if the after sales support is good or not.
- You are not aware of the renewal prices because 90% providers out there mislead customers by showing a small price during the sale and charge high at renewal this is a marketing tactic.
- You purchase things, that you never need. Suppose most providers say that everything is unlimited but in fact, there is not such thing as unlimited hard disk or unlimited bandwidth totally.
- Even if bandwidth can be provided to some extent, unlimited storage or space is pure false promotion. Did you ever purchased unlimited hard disk or solid state drive? Think once.
- You are purchasing things that should be offered as standard like, SSL, Backups and Email Accounts. These should be standard with any hosting provider, but most of them charge for SSL, Backups and additional email accounts.
- You waste your money by locking yourself for 3 years, 5 years or even 10 years.
- Hosting should be never purchased for more than 2 years, why because the industry is ever changing, new technology is emerging every day.
- By buying for more than 2 years, you are simply blind. You may think that you will save money, but there are honest providers, who do not ask you to purchase for too many long terms to get a discount. You should look such things instead.
- If hosting is too much costly, I will get better services, and this is a myth. Service and support do not depend on pricing. It depends on the integrity of the company and their commitment toward customer satisfaction. You cannot come to a conclusion based on pricing. There are providers, who offer affordable pricing and still manage to provide best services than costly hosting providers, so you cannot judge based on pricing.
- What you see is what you may or may not get. Most of the providers mislead customers with false advertising, suppose they say something like this
For example, see bigrock, they say Linux hosting starts at rs 179/ month but it is not month to month billing nor it is for yearly pricing.
It will be for 3 years, that means if you purchase for 3 years upfront that is the monthly break down of pricing. This is totally misleading customers with false pricing tactics.
Also, there is not a single provider in India which allow customers to pay monthly. The lowest term is 3-month advance, this is not good for small startups, individuals and businesses which cannot afford to pay upfront.
- There is no provider out there, that offers you to try before you buy. No one is offering 100% free trial plans. So you have blindly put your money without knowing if it is good or not.
- On top of this, you are lured to purchase long-term plans because without that you cannot save money. So for 179 per month price, you have to purchase for 3 years that is 36 months. That will be 6444/- Rupees without knowing anything, plus taxes.
- Apart from this pricing, there is another misleading things, that is hosting providers never reveal the renewal charges, so the discounted price will only apply to the first term or first invoice. Suppose if you purchase a domain for 99rs for .com today from Godaddy, you will have to renewal it for 700rs or more after first year.
- Likewise in hosting, if you purchased hosting for Rs 99 per month (paying 99X12 months = 1188 plus taxes) for first year from Godaddy. The same plan will cost you at renewal the double price that is Rs 199 per month that is in second year you will pay 2388 plus taxes. This is another misleading trick used by providers.
- Paying for free stuff, SSL is free of cost now, with the help of lets encrypt, but providers are still not offering it to customers because they loose easy money.
- Now SSL is sold at Rs 2k to Rs 5k for basic DV (Domain validated) SSL. So what happens, suppose you have 3 website, for each website you have to put SSL, as now SSL is essential in 2017. So you will have to shell out around 10k just for SSL certificates which are free.
- Backups, these should be standard. if your host does not offer free backups means, it does not care what happens to you. Do you need to buy such hosting?
- Backup is like insurance, and it should be free in hosting and standard. But unfortunately, all so called top web hosting companies or providers never offer free backups.
- They charge hefty prices just to have your backup somewhere. Now, these backups are charged yearly or monthly that is around 2k per year.
- To have all these goodies, you need to shell out anywhere between 10k to 20 k rupees per year. And you do not know, if that is worth or not, as you did not test hosting and support before buying.
- The hosting companies are merely brands of Endurance International Group. Someone asks or says if HostGator is good or Bluehost is good. But I will tell you, they are all of the same company and same level support and hence same level of servers.
- There are more than 200 brands that EIG owns, apart from these they set up review sites, small other websites and forums just to divert people and make them think that only the brands owned by them are the best in the world.
- You can see any blog or any review site, you will see the familiar sites promoting or recommending to everyone the reason is simple. They get paid huge money and that money is yours, did not belive?
- The parent company has to pay the person who promoted it. So in that way, they make sure that affiliates will be paid from customers amount, that’s why they price the plans like that way. It means you are freely paying someone who does not even help you with website setup or anything, after all, you clicked their link.
Now, if you check any blogs or blogger they just promote promos, coupons, and links just because they want to earn money. This is called affiliate marketing.
These bloggers and people who recommend you Bluehost or Hostgator or bigrock or GoDaddy will not come to solve any issues you have after you buy their suggested hosting.
As a consumer, you should know all of this and should not blindly trust those review websites, bloggers and other people over there. Trust no one, not even us, even though we are honest.
When buying any web hosting, talk to their support, whether it is via chat or phone or email. First of all talk to them, see how friendly are they. Signup for a small plan and short term, no matter how old the company may be and whether too many people recommend them or not. First, try yourself and see.
Also remember, if someone is not advertising or not heard till date, that does not mean that they are not good. They may be just word of mouth publicity likes and just focus on delivering the best instead of boasting.
See Suzuki, they advertise less, but the quality is never compromised.
Now you have read a lot till now. I appreciate your patience in reading this lengthy post. So you may now ask what the best web hosting in India is and how one should choose to host website.
Great, let me break down some points to remember when purchasing web hosting:
- Determine, your website requirements and framework. Suppose you want to use PHP, MYSQL, HTML, CSS, JS and Similar stack CMS scripts and websites. Then you are good to choose Linux Web Hosting for your needs.
- In the same manner, if you want to use ASP, MSSQL, HTML, CSS, JS and similar stack CMS and website applications. Then you should choose Windows Web Hosting for your needs.
- Choose resources, not all hosting plans will suit everyone’s needs. For small business websites, bloggers, startups, and individuals shared hosting is sufficient in most cases as the traffic will be not more than 5k visitors per day. And most of the times, if you implement, caching and other optimization, shared web hosting is more than sufficient.
- VPS will be useful for those people who have high traffic and want the flexibility to add software and packages as they like as they grow.
- Remember if you purchase VPS, you should be able to manage it yourself. VPS can be bad choice, if you use CPanel on VPS with less than 4 GB RAM and less than 20 GB Disk Space. Also not all VPS providers are created equal, do not get fooled by low price. Someone may be overselling the resources and such VPS hosting will be worse than shared hosting.
- Do not use VPS with 1 GB RAM or less with CPanel. You better stick with shared hosting, if you do not have the budget to buy or spend on VPS with proper specifications.
- Cloud, this is overrated services in hosting industry, I see some people even naming shared hosting as cloud hosting and selling at hefty prices. If you really want to use cloud hosting, look for amazon web services or google cloud or other high-end enterprise providers that offer real cloud. All others are just waste, someone will say buy cloud hosting instead of shared or vps hosting.
- Let me tell you, they are not going to show you how to operate cloud servers, they simply sell and fly away. You will sit wasting your money and time.
- If you want to learn to use cloud, setup a Virtualbox in your PC or Laptop install a Linux OS and learn to use the Virtual Machine and build things from scratch. Once you are familiar with everything, you can buy any small low end cloud like Digtial Ocean or Linode and practice online and see if you can actually manage live sites without GUI or not. Do not fall prey for cloud tag line.
- Dedicated servers are for those people, who can manage full server themselves that includes networking, software installation and maintenance and other things.
- Remembers shared hosting is no way inferior to vps or cloud or dedicated server. All these run on the same software, only resources are changed. Dedicated servers are only useful for those people who knows end to end server management. Unless you know what you are doing, never buy a dedicated server just because your host says that you need to upgrade to the dedicated server.
- Always try before you buy, if your provider is not offering a free trial, then check if they offer refunds read their terms and then signup for a plan and try and see.
- If they are not good, you can cancel within the time mentioned in refunds and get back your money. This way you test out who is right for you. If your hosting provider offers the free trial, that is best web hosting.
- See social media, see their twitter handle, facebook and google plus, you will see customers who are not happy with them. See what problems they faced, it’s better to see social media than review websites, at least social media is somewhat transparent.
- Always read terms and conditions, renewal prices, the scope of support and refunds policy. Reading those will be time-consuming, but it’s for your own Good, read them always, and you will be in the right way.
- Always have backups, keep your own backups at your own schedule. Prefer to buy hosting from a company that offers automated backups for free.
- Always prefer hosting that provides latest standards like SSL, HTTP2, Security, Virus Scanner and Firewall. Something is better than nothing, so prefer these features as standard.
While we cannot recommend every provider out there for you, but we have someone in India, who meets all the criteria we listed above and provides quality shared Linux web hosting in India.
Features of shared Linux web hosting:
- Unlimited Addon Domains
- Unlimited Parked Domains
- Unlimited Sub Domains
- Unlimited Databases
- Unlimited Email Accounts
- Unlimited FTP Accounts
- Unlimited Mailing List
Special Features as Standard:
- SSD Storage Space
- CloudLinux OS
- LiteSpeed Web Server
- HTTP2
- Maria DB
- PHPMyAdmin
- Multiple PHP Versions from PHP (5.3 to the latest PHP 7.1)
- PHP Extensions and configuration right from CPanel
- 1 Click Script and Application Installer
- ModSecurity
- ClamAV Enterprise Scanner
- Email Authentication
- 1 Click FREE SSL Installation
- Daily Backups
- 2FA for best security
- 24/7 Customer support
- 99.9% Uptime, you can check live on their website.
- 30 Days FREE Trial, no payment or credit card needed.
This provider is called Rank My Hub. Offers best features, pricing, flexibility and plans in shared web hosting (Linux) in India. If you are interested, check out web hosting India plans on the website or web hosting plans for the global audience for more space and bandwidth.
Only hosting company in India to offer 100% Transparent pricing and honest services and servers.
We can say and suggest you that Rank My Hub, offers the best web hosting in India for Linux shared hosting users.
