My clients often ask me who to buy hosting from. Aaaaand… sometimes I wish they had asked me first because there are a few I love and a few I… er… don’t.
My top recommendation is BlueHost, they’ve been great to me, they’re inexpensive and their up-time is very good. They did have a major outage once in 2014 for a good day, but were very communicative about it and posted constant tweets regarding their progress. Nobody has 100% up-time and for me the customer service during a downage is a big deal. At last check they were the top pic from wordpress.org. I will say this, though, they always try to throw in a few extra charges that you may or may not need. When signing up, just remember to read everything and uncheck services that you don’t want to pay for.
Some other hosts that I’ve used and have never had a problem with:
- Hostway
- Pair (not the most intuitive interface, but not terrible)
- Fatcow (a bit slow but the lowest price I’ve seen)
And a few that I steer people away from whenever possible:
- 1and1 – inexpensive, but terrible customer service.
- Blackbaud/eTapistry – glitchy
- Godaddy – difficult interface to navigate, and once you’re logged in almost everything there is trying to up-sell you. I’ve had a good experience with their customer service recently, though. A client signed up for the wrong service and they fixed it for me via live chat.
- Dreamhost – no, just no. Their interface is impossible for a novice. I have two clients on it, and even I dread having to go in there.