What’s the best web hosting for designers?
Web designers often ask me what web hosting I use to host my portfolio website and my client’s websites, so I thought I’d write a quick post about who I use to host my websites and why. I’ve been using Media Temple Grid Hosting since 2010 and it’s been great so far. I tried a bunch of other web hosting providers initially, but there was always an issue, whether it was downtime, poor support or slow website loading times.
Over the years I’ve found Media Temple to be fast, reliable and easy to use. There’s great support when you need it too which is rare these days. They actively support the design industry too, so I’d definitely recommend them to other designers looking for a web hosting solution.
Host multiple websites on a single account
Most web hosting providers only allow you to host a single website, but like most web designers, I’ve got more than one site. Media Temple allows you to host up to 100 domains on a single account, so you can host your own sites and your client’s from a single account.
Very reliable
Reliability is one of the most important things when it comes to web hosting. I’ve kept a log of my website uptime over the years and I’m pleased to say that I’ve only experienced a few outages of over an hour and just a couple of smaller 15 – 45 minute outages here and there. No web host is perfect and there will always be short outages required here and there for system maintenance and various technical issues, but I’m quite impressed with the reliability I’ve experienced over the years.
All the features you need
I’m not a Server Administrator so I won’t lie and pretend to understand the technical ins and outs of web hosting. What I do know is that if you’re a designer like me who creates websites for small to medium businesses, whether it’s using WordPress, Drupal or simply hand coding them, there’s more than enough bandwidth and space to host all of your websites.
Even if your website is featured on high traffic sites like Designer News or Hacker News, your bandwidth will scale with traffic spikes to ensure that you don’t need to worry about your site going down. If you need more grunt you can always upgrade to a VPS hosting plan. I’ve listed some of the basic Grid Hosting specs below along with a screenshot of the easy to use admin panel:
- 100GB storage
- 1TB bandwidth per month
- SSD database storage
- One click WordPress and Drupal setup
Great customer support
I’ve been lucky enough to only have a few issues where I’ve needed customer support as Media Temple’s vast knowledge base usually answers my questions. The few times I did require support I lodged a support ticket, and to my surprise it was answered promptly and competently. There’s also online chat and phone support too if you’re in a real rush and @mediatemple is famous for being very responsive on Twitter, so you can always reach them there if you have an urgent issue.
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