Far too many web hosting companies offer cheap accounts on overloaded servers. These companies often run affiliate programs that get pushed by popular bloggers. That's unfortunate, because many newbies have no comparison and may take years to learn what is quality hosting versus what they have.
The problem with many of the web hosting companies is their business strategy. They want to get as many web hosting accounts as possible. Some of them will make their money up selling services that should already be provided with the account. Others are merely playing a numbers game knowing that most websites hosted will never get any traffic.
These web hosting companies are now getting help from the search engines, who are punishing poor performing websites. They avoid websites that are slow loading and instead focus on websites that load content fast.
If there is one area to spend money, it's on web hosting, even if you're just starting out. You want to get a great rank from the search engines and a great web hosting company will help you stay out of the dog house.
I'm not saying you need to spend $100/month for hosting, you don't. Expect to pay $25 to $60 per month. I know this may seem expensive, especially compared to the bulk web hosting companies, but ask yourself what your time is worth? Do you want your customers to get your site every time they search for it? Are you willing to risk having search engines penalize you for a slow site?
I admit, I thought I would try the lower cost web hosting solutions first. It didn't take me long to realize how much cheap web hosting cost me. Poor performance, lack of sales and loss of my time, quickly woke me up.
From the very start, I've been testing web hosting companies. I still do to this day. If I can find a better performing hosting company, I will go with them. If I use them, I will recommend them, if I don't use them, I won't recommend them. It's that simple!
Right now, I recommend two hosting companies, both of which do manual setups, helping them with quality control. They don't accept everyone who wants to host on their servers. That keeps bad eggs from using their servers as spam machines.
The two companies I recommend are Rochen Performance Hosting and Netwisp. Only one of the two has an affiliate program and that means I will receive a commission when you sign up. I don't get paid for referring the other, but I do use them and they are good. I just hope you choose the one that has the affiliate program!
If I find others that have as good as performance, I will add them to this post, giving you more choices.