Where I Host My Sites (And What I Recommend to Clients)

Every few weeks a web design client asks me who they should host with. Rather than answer it in an email again, here is what I use and why.

I am not a hosting reviewer. I have never run a benchmark for fun. All I can tell you is what I have paid for over the years, what broke, and what I moved to afterwards. Take it for exactly that much.

First: skip shared hosting

This is the one part I feel strongly about. Shared hosting means your site sits on a machine with a few hundred other sites, and you all take turns with the same processor and memory. When your neighbours are quiet, everything is fine. When one of them gets busy, your site is the one that goes slow, and there is nothing you can do about it.

It is cheap for a reason. If your site is a brochure that nobody visits, you will probably never notice. But the moment you start running ads, sending an email campaign, or getting a decent week of traffic, that is exactly when it stumbles — and that is exactly when you cannot afford for it to.

What I have actually used

I started on HostGator. It worked until it didn’t, and support was a long conversation every time something went wrong. I moved to SiteGround, which was genuinely better — faster, and the support people knew what they were talking about. But the renewal prices climbed every year, and at some point I was paying a lot for a small site.

Then I moved to a VPS, which is your own slice of a server rather than a shared one. I ran on DigitalOcean for a while. It is a serious platform and plenty of people are very happy on it. For what I was doing, though, I was paying more and getting less than I do now, and more of the day-to-day management was mine to deal with.

I ended up on Hostinger, and that is where I have stayed. I want to be careful about how I say this, because it sounds like an advert and it is not meant to: it is not that Hostinger is magic. It is that for the money, I get noticeably more machine than I got anywhere else, and I have not had a reason to move since.

What this site runs on

So you know I am not recommending something I do not use myself — both of my own platforms sit on one Hostinger VPS:

• Plan: Hostinger VPS — KVM 4
• Running: graphicreserve.com and webdesigntemplates.net
• Headroom: both sites together stay under 80% of it

Two production sites, a template store with thousands of products, and we still are not pushing that box to its limit. That is the part I would want to know if I were you: there is room to grow into, rather than a ceiling you hit in six months.

Which one should you buy?

There is really only one question that changes the answer, and it is about email.

If you don’t need email hosting — get the Hostinger VPS

You are already using Google Workspace, Outlook, or you are happy to keep email separate from your website. Get the VPS. It is the better machine and it is the one I would put my own site on.

If you want mailboxes included — get Hostinger shared hosting

VPS plans do not come with an email service, and running your own mail server is genuinely not worth the trouble. Their shared plans include free email, so if you want you@yourbusiness.com bundled in, take the shared plan for that reason alone.

That is the whole decision. Everything I said above about shared hosting still applies — but a shared plan from a host I trust, chosen deliberately because you want the mailboxes, is a fair trade. Choosing shared hosting purely because it is the cheapest line on the page is the thing I would talk you out of.

On plan size: start smaller than you think you need. Upgrading later takes minutes. Nobody has ever thanked me for talking them into a bigger plan on day one.

A discount, and the honest disclosure that goes with it

We have an arrangement with Hostinger that gets our clients an extra 20% off any of their services, on top of whatever they are already running. Use our link and the discount applies at checkout.

Being straight with you: we earn a commission if you sign up through it. That is why the discount exists. It is also not why this post recommends them — the sites you are reading this on have been on Hostinger since well before any of that, and I would give you the same answer over the phone.

Get 20% off Hostinger →

If you are a client of ours and you are not sure which plan fits the site we built you, just ask. It takes me a minute to look at what the site actually needs, and I would rather you bought the right thing than the expensive thing.

Once your hosting is sorted, the theme installation guide walks you through getting your template live.