When it comes to making your website accessible by millions of people from all around the world, it all goes down to one single word: hosting. It doesn’t matter if you have an outstanding website with extremely valuable information. If the visitor can’t reach it then you have a big problem. Simply put, one of the worst nightmares that a website owner can have is having his website offline. That being said, after you have spent money or time on developing your website, you need to have a separate budget for hosting it.

There are hundreds of hosting providers out there with prices starting from just a couple of bucks to thousands of dollars per month, but before going on a shopping spree you need to evaluate your website in order to estimate its impact and number of visitors. Many owners are getting greedy and don’t want pay more than $10 per month on hosting because they believe that it’s not worth investing more if you have a small website. Sure thing, if you have only an online CV or a corporate website and you are not Google or any other uber popular company, than you don’t need a dedicated server but this doesn’t mean that you must jump in and buy the very first shared hosting that you find.

You need to know that paying $10/month for a web hosting means that you probably receive a $10 service. This means that you have a lot of limitations that can quickly make your account unusable, such as: you are not allowed to have more than one domain, you cannot create more than one database, you can’t use more than 10 sub-domains or you can’t create more than a couple of email accounts. Furthermore, many hosting providers are disabling your account’s backup service if you have more than a specified number of files on your server, also known as inodes.

So, when someone is asking me what hosting I recommend, the first thing I ask is the purpose of the website because every type of website needs a particular set of services. For bloggers or for websites based on the world’s famous WordPress platform I usually have two suggestions: Hostgator.com and MediaTemple.net. The first one I can call it the backup solution and I only recommend it if you need something for the short run because they do have some hidden or let’s say some not so well known limitations such as: even if they say that you have unlimited hosting, if you reach 100,000 files, they won’t backup up your account anymore; even worse, if you hit 250,000 files, your account will be suspended. I really hate when someone is saying one thing but doing another thing and that’s why I prefer (mt) Media Temple.

(mt) Media Temple is a hosting built from the love of the design and art industry and it was initially focused on the creative thinkers. Sure, they are a bit more expensive, but they don’t give you unlimited things but they are the ones. In case you didn’t knew about (mt) Media Temple, they are truly passionate on what they are doing and every time you do something with passion, the result will be outstanding.

The Grid Web Hosting from (mt) Media Temple, in my opinion, is the only solution for a blogger or why not, a small website owner that do cares about his work and about his visitors. At only $20 per month you receive 1TB bandwidth, 100Gb storage space, PHP5.5 support with FastCGI, 1.000 email accounts and a huge grid of servers, which are working for you.

The Grid is different than a classic shared account because it is built in the cloud, which means that you’ll never have to fight for the resources of a single server. This means that you get bullet proof stability and a very fast loading speed. In other words, you get cloud hosting.

A hosting which is simply gorgeous

They have over one million websites hosted in their grid system so just imagine the sheer amount of power that their servers are providing constantly, 24/7. One thing that I have on almost all web hosting solutions is that they have some extremely ugly interfaces when it comes to administration or a built-in email client. Well, on (mt) Media Temple you will find a gorgeous control panel and a clear and beautiful web email client, which works pretty great.

A hosting which simply works

They have a system called “One click install” with which you can deploy world’s most popular applications such as WordPress, phpBB, Joomla, Drupal or ZenCart so you can start website in a matter of minutes.

A hosting with a kick ass security

The Grid comes with Cloudmark’s spam detection technology built right in and RailGun which protects you against hackers, spammers, and other unsavory characters. Furthermore, the Grid support team blocks would-be attackers at the gate by monitoring and patching potential vulnerabilities.

That being said, if you are looking for a great web hosting which is reliable and you don’t have a website with a huge traffic for which you would better use a dedicated server, then I strongly recommend the Grid from (mt) Media Temple.