Business Choice Awards 2018: Web Hosting

A website is a great place for a strong first impression. Roughly half of consumers say they won't trust a business without a website. As Bill Gates says, "if your business isn't on the internet, then your business will be out of business."

These days, it's hard to imagine a business that wouldn't benefit from an online presence, even one as easy to create as a single page that prospective customers can use to find you with an internet search. More than 80 percent of consumers research purchases online, so if you're not online, a lot of potential revenue is going up in smoke.

As easy as establishing a web presence has become, there's still more to it than simply choosing a template and filling in content. Are the tools to build the site easy to use? Is site performance reliable? Is tech support readily available and helpful? Choosing the wrong web hosting provider will end up wasting your business time and money.

To help you get the most out of your website, we asked our readers to evaluate rate their web hosting service. The highest rated earns our Business Choice Award. For more 30 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 extends that by garnering feedback about what readers deploy, administer, maintain, and use in a business environment.

Read on to see which web host is right for not just you, but probably for everyone.

You can be part of Business Choice! Sign up for What's New Now to receive invitations in the future.

Looking for an expert opinion? Read our roundup of the Best Web Hosting Services and The Best Small Business Web Hosting Services.

Web Hosting Services for Business

There are many service options (shared, dedicated, application-specific, various hardware and software configurations, and more) when choosing a hosting provider, so it's best to look before you leap. Assess your needs and then look for services that offer the capabilities you need for the price you're willing to pay. Combining our expert reviews with ratings from your peers gives you a strong foundation to make the best choice for your business.

This year there were 106 companies (down significantly from last year's 207) nominated in the Business Choice Awards for Best Web Hosting Service. Only six received enough votes to be considered for top honors. We should note up front that Dreamhost, our top winner from 2014 through 2017, is noticeably absent from our list of finalists—it did not receive enough responses to be included this year. It remains one of our Editors' Choice services, however.

This year's Business Choice winner is Bluehost. It had the top or tied scores in an overall satisfaction score (8.0 out of 10), reliability (8.6), likelihood to recommend (8.4), and a decent Net Promoter Score (NPS). Bluehost's web hosting dominance faces serious challenges from 1&1, which tied with Bluehost for overall satisfaction and reliability, but trailed slightly in NPS, likelihood to recommend, and tech support.

Digging deeper into NPS, Bluehost earned a decent 44 percent, down from last year's 50 percent. 1&1 was at 40 percent, down from last year's 54 percent. Both tower above the competition. HostGator (26 percent, down from 53 percent) and GoDaddy (23 percent) are followed by Web.com (4 percent) and Network Solutions with our only negative score at -4 percent, meaning that survey respondents actively steer their colleagues away. This is the fifth year in a row Network Solutions held this dubious distinction.

The only cause for Bluehost's customers to feel blue is that the service provider had the largest percentage of respondents requiring tech support (25 percent); our other finalists fell in between 17 percent (Web.com) and 23 percent (HostGator). Web.com earned the highest tech support satisfaction rating, 8.1. If you think you may need more hand-holding than the average business, then Web.com may be the best choice for you.

See all of our survey results for web hosts.

WINNERS: WEB HOSTING

Business Choice seal

BlueHost
Stepping into the Business Choice Award circle for the first time, BlueHost's web hosting is the top pick among PCMag readers for its reliability. They like it so much, they're willing to recommend it while overlooking that it requires a lot of tech support. That's a sign of a quality service that makes web customers happy.

Methodology

We email survey invitations to PCMag.com community members, specifically subscribers to our Readers' Choice Survey mailing list. The surveys are hosted by SurveyMonkey, which also performs our data collection. This survey was in the field from June 25, 2018 to July 16, 2018.

Respondents were asked to rate their web host using multiple questions about their overall satisfaction with the solution, as well as experiences with technical support within the past 12 months.

Because the goal of the survey is to understand how the email marketing solutions compare to one another and not how one respondent's experience compares to another's, we use the average of the email marketing solutions' 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 web host?"

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). (For more, read PCMag's Top Consumer Recommended Companies for 2018.)

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.

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