Here are the top rated web hosts for shared web hosting, ranked in no particular order.

Bluehost

Bluehost is one of my top recommended web hosts for shared hosting. Not just because I have a personal experience with them, or because their CEO personally replied back to my email.

I love Bluehost because of their superior performance and uptime, their commitment to customer support (I usually get replies to my emails withing minutes!), their rich feature set, and competitive pricing.

Jumpline Web Hosting

I like Jumpline because of their superb infrastructure that enables them to have a 100% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA) and reliable connectivity. They have a great offer going at the time of this writing, letting you get two years of free shared hosting with them.

Summary:

Jumpline web hosting has two great offers apart from their regular offers – a two year FREE shared web hosting account (click here) and a six months FREE VPS hosting account (click here). (These offers are not available on their regular pages.)

The company was founded in 1997 and has been providing reliable web hosting services to several thousands of customers since then.

Quick Facts About Jumpline:

  • Number of domains hosted: Over 100,000
  • Services: Domain name registration, shared hosting, VPS hosting, bare metal hosting, dedicated server hosting, managed server hosting, and even custom hosting solutions for you
  • Location: Columbus, Ohio (USA)
  • Guarantees: 30-day money back guarantee, 100% uptime, under 4-hour support ticket resolution, daily backups
  • Contact information: Call 1-800-651-2028 (toll free), or 00+1+614-859-1170 (international), or visit their contact page

Products and Services By Jumpline Web Hosting:

Domain registration (at $9.95), Shared hosting (starting at $7.95/month), Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting (starting at $27.95/month), Bare Metal Hosting (starting at $59.95/month), Dedicated Server hosting (starting at $99.95/month), and even custom hosting solutions.

They also have a two year FREE shared web hosting account (click here) and a six months FREE VPS hosting account available (click here). These offers are not available through their regular website and you need to click the above links to see them.

Hostorian’s Jumpline Review:

Jumpline’s Performance

Jumpline has a really impressive infrastructure to boast of. They have multiple Tier 1 providers for bandwidth and IP services, providing reliable connectivity and round the clock monitoring. They take all these providers and blend them into a single handoff thereby providing a superior performance.

They have a 100% uptime service level agreement (SLA), which is possible due to their advanced physical and logical network architecture, six-carrier blend and fault tolerant cores. Factor in redundant cores, redundant power, and daily backups, and what you get is a state of the art high performance data center, virtually guaranteeing that your site is never down.

They get an excellent rating for performance and uptime.

Features of Jumpline web hosting

Jumpline web hosting doesn’t really offer a rich feature set. Most of their products and services are a bit expensive compared to other web hosts, and the feature set they offer is really lackluster in comparison. They don’t even offer a free domain with their shared hosting account, which most hosting providers do these days.

They do let you choose your control panel though (cPanel or Parallels Plesk Panel), and you can switch from one control panel to another and vice versa as you wish.

Jumpline’s Support and Customer Care

Their customer  support is simply fantastic, according to most people who have reported about it on the Internet. They have a US based call center, which means no more struggling with foreign accents and timely resolution of issues. An in-house customer support facility also means problems can get sorted out quicker than if it was outsourced to a third world country in a different time zone than the rest of their staff. They claim a 1-hour average time for support ticket resolutions and 24/7/365 customer support.

All in all, great customer support! They do lack online chat support though, which is a must if you want to ask quick questions before you decide upon a particular web host.

Pros

  • In-house customer support staff (US based), so you don’t have to deal with call centers in third world countries with accents you don’t understand.
  • Great customer support with awesome resolution times. They respond to your emails within a couple hours at the most.
  • Extremely good performance and reliable hosting
  • Great prices for dedicated and VPS hosting.
  • If you want to experience their level and quality of service, you can give them a try before committing. Click here to get a shared hosting account for free (two years!), and click here to get a VPS account for free (six months).

Cons

  • Their shared hosting plans are a little expensive compared to other shared web hosting providers, but when you consider the high speed connectivity and almost 100% uptime, it may be worth it for your business. Besides, they do offer a free two year shared hosting plan for you to check them out.
  • You need to install the applications yourself. But this is easily taken care of by their robust and extensive documentation for everything. And if you need more help, you can always reach their customer support staff 24×7.
  • They don’t offer a lot of features and limited amount of bandwidth and disk space compared to other web hosts.

Actual Customer Feedback About Jumpline Web Hosting:

Terrible customer service. Always playing the blame game and never taking responsibility for their service issues. I’d recommend staying far, far away from this company.sp ( sibyl2(at)yahoo(dot)com )

I have been a customer of Jumpline.com for about 9 years. I have seen other companies come and offer better deals but one thing has kept me a loyal customer to them, a 800 number that I can call and get someone. I am a reseller through them and have over 30 websites. I am extremely satisfied with Jumpline.com service, support and applications. The only thing that i wish they offered is the ability to host my own server. I HIGHLY recommend them.Alexander ( ah5890 at aol dot com )

They are the best free hosting server you can get (like a dedicated server at no cost). They do not charge you, but you need to add the credit card number.Anonymous

These guys have incredible up time and great customer supportChad Brosious

Verdict Of This Jumpline Web Hosting Review:

Although Jumpline web hosting does seem a little expensive and lacking in features, they more than make up for it by offering two free years of shared web hosting and six free months of VPS hosting. A great customer service, 100% uptime SLA, and redundant power supply, redundant cores, high speed connectivity and their attention to a lot of small details make this a web host that can be trusted to host your website.

Verdict: It’s OK to host your website with Jumpline web hosting.

  • Jumpline offers two years of FREE shared hosting. Check them out!

Shared hosting has a number of potential advantages and disadvantages.  It seems like everyone prefers to have a dedicated server, but that doesn’t mean that a dedicated server is always the best option.

In order to decide whether or not a shared server is right for you, it is important for you to weigh the advantages and disadvantages for yourself.

Advantages of Shared Hosting

Let’s first take a look at some of the advantages of shared hosting.

1.    Cost

This type of hosting is the logical first step when starting a website because it is relatively inexpensive.  You can find a solid plan, with unlimited domains, for as little as $10 a month or less.

The reason that the cost is significantly less for a shared hosting plan is because on shared server, there could be 100′s or 1000′s of websites.  This allows hosting providers to leverage the large amount of people sharing the server to lessen the price.

2.    Ease of Use

With shared hosting, you have no responsibility to maintain the servers, it is the responsibility of the shared hosting company.  This means that you will never have to deal with time consuming issues like hardware and software updates, connectivity, and other server administration tasks.

Additionally, these plans also include software that makes managing your website easier such as cPanel and website builders.  This also means that you don’t need to worry about the rapid evolution of technology.

Disadvantages of Shared Hosting

And now, to complete the picture, here are some disadvantages of shared hosting.

1.    Security

If some other web master on your server makes a mistake or gets their website hacked, the hacker can get access to the server and make a big mess of other websites including yours!

While providers go to extreme lengths in order to maintain the security of their servers, it only takes one stupid mistake from another person on the server to leave the entire server wide open to attack.  The worst part is that you often will not even know what happened until it is too late.

2.    Slow Performance or Crashes

While this server doesn’t inherently mean that your website will fall victim to slower performances, there is always a chance.

The worst part is that you have no control over it.  If another web master gets a sudden burst of traffic, everyone else’s website could grind to a halt because there are no more resources available for the other websites.

Even worse, the server could get overloaded and crash.  While there are a number proactive actions taken by a shared hosting provider, crashes are part of the business.

  • Jumpline offers two years of FREE shared hosting. Check them out!
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Summary

Bluehost is one of our recommended web hosts. They have been around since 1996, and currently host over 750,000 web sites. They provide professional web hosting plans that include all the features one can possibly want, and at the best possible price. From top-notch support (I personally have seen answers to my support requests within minutes) to great service and features, there is everything to like about Bluehost, and nothing to dislike, from my personal experience.

Why I’m so impressed with them: Among other things (read below for more), I once sent an email to their CEO Matt Heaten, just to see what happens. I got back a personal reply from him! Now look. It’s not like Bluehost is a company running out of someone’s basement or anything. They host 750,000+ websites with them! So the CEO replying back to an unknown person is a BIG DEAL, as far as I am concerned. It shows how much he cares about his customers. This is reflected in everything that the company does. They keep improving their technology, their packages, their support system, and everything else.

Website: Click here to go to the official Bluehost website

Quick Facts

  • Number of domains hosted: Over 750,000
  • Services: Shared hosting (at $6.95/month) with free set-up, no hidden fees, domain included, unlimited disk space, unlimited domains and sub-domains, unlimited data transfer, and support for almost every script you can imagine
  • Location: Provo, UT (USA)
  • Guarantees: 30-day money back guarantee, highest uptime, no hidden fees, free domain for life
  • Contact information: Call (888) 401-HOST, (888) 401-4678, or visit their contact page.

Click here to go to the official Bluehost website

Products & Services

Shared Linux hosting (at $6.95/month) with free set-up, no hidden fees, domain included, unlimited disk space, unlimited domains and sub-domains, unlimited data transfer, and support for almost every script you can imagine.

Hostorian’s Review

Performance

While Bluehost does tend to oversell like every other web hosting company out there, they have tried really hard to not let that affect the overall performance of the servers. Judging from the feedback by other people who host their sites with Bluehost, and other reviews (and my own personal experience), they’ve just got to be one of the better performing hosts in the shared web hosting space.

With the rapid growth that Bluehost has been experiencing in the recent past, they have constantly been upgrading their bandwidth as well as servers and data centers to keep up with the increasing demand.

Overall, they seem very reliable for hosting serious websites.

Features

The number of features offered by Bluehost just boggles the mind – unlimited storage, unlimited domains and sub-domains, unlimited data transfer, drag and drop site-builder, support for 100 databases, e-commerce support, several plug-in scripts and shopping carts, blogs, forums, wiki, multi-media support, and so many other things, it just boggles the mind.

They offer almost everything you would want from a Linux web hosting service – cPanel (the best hosting control panel), fantastico support, .htaccess customization, custom php.ini files, and more. They even allow shell access (SSH), and have DDOS protection and power backup and complimentary site backup services.

Support and Customer Care

Here again I can speak from personal experience. Their support is unlike ANYTHING I have ever seen. They are the best!

I have received answers to my questions within minutes of sending emails to their support no matter what the time was. And the biggest surprise (!) was that the support person used to actually read my email and give me exactly the answer I needed!

They even helped me with a problem I had with a PHP script I had installed on one of my websites.

Not surprisingly, they have won several awards for customer support. And why not, when they take such good care of their customers.

Click here to go to the official Bluehost website

Actual Customer Feedback

Used bluehost for 2 years now. Always up, good customer service, and good value. - g torregrassa

They are definitely WELL worth the $6.95 per month and even more! I’ve been very impressed with their service, speed and features. The uptime could be a bit better, but I’m guessing it’s about 98%. Just a few unannounced outages over the year. Overall, I couldn’t be more stoked about a Web host. I run 30k unique users and about 20gb of monthly bandwidth no problems! - Jason Mitchell

I’ve been with Blue Host for one year now. They are the BEST! Best overall and best value. Outstanding customer service. The company is always making improvements AND they are HONEST. A novice might find it a little challenging to figure everything at first, but once you do the number of features is unbeatable. - Brad

Bluehost is amazing. Their service is really amazingly outstanding. They go well beyond what is required and are always eager to help. - Amit

I have been with Bluehost for over 5 years and as a web designer, appreciate a good host. I recommend Bluehost to all my website clients. I have worked with many different hosts and have not found one yet that I liked more than Bluehost. - Chantal

I have been with bluehost for over a year, and have not had a single hick up, i am running 3 domains. Whenever i have needed help their support has been able to promptly help me. - Isaac Witton, Australia

Click here to go to the official Bluehost website

Verdict Of This Review

Bluehost beats almost every other web host in the Linux shared hosting space. Unbeatable pricing, unmatched features, what more could one want?

Highly recommended!

Rating: 5 out of 5

Click here to go to the official Bluehost website

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