When it comes to web hosting, speed and performance are essential.
Fast load times is great for customers and even better for search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines like Google prefer fast-performing websites and will rank them higher than slower sites.
Research even reveals that for every second viewers spend waiting for a website to load, 20% will leave. That’s quite a loss, especially for businesses trying to make sales or increase viewership.
So don’t take the cheap route when considering your hosting options! It’s also important to note that loading speeds can greatly differ depending on the hosting plan a web host offers. As you can probably guess, the more resources a hosting plan provides, the better the performance. Shared hosting speed depends on the technologies the hosting provider has implemented, such as SSDs, CDN, caching software, etc. Let’s take a quick look to see how they differ.
Shared Hosting — With a shared plan, other websites can potentially affect your site’s performance. This is always the risk you take by opting for a more economical shared hosting plan.
VPS Hosting — Based on the bandwidth this hosting plan offers its users, VPS typically offers better overall performance. While VPS hosting allows you more flexibility to configure your applications on the server, you’ll want to ensure you have a dedicated system administration to keep your server running efficiently. This is a great option for websites with high traffic demands.
Shared Hosting: Can it be Fast?
As its name implies, with shared hosting, you are sharing the same server with many other sites.
This can give your website some performance issues and limitations since you are sharing your resources, but this doesn’t mean your site will be slow and yield poor performance.
There are many web hosting providers that specialize in web solutions for shared hosting plans with the promise of high performance and fast load times.
Here are the top five fastest web hosting platforms to consider:
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A2 Hosting
Coming in at the #1 spot is A2 Hosting. Billing themselves as the fastest hosting provider available, A2 lives up to the hype by ensuring their customers’ websites load as fast as possible. Their average speed is 155ms.
A2 Hosting may not be the most widely recognized name amongst hosting providers, but they are truly a hidden gem founded back in 2001 in Ann Arbor, Michigan with privately owned servers. Their bread and butter primarily lies in shared hosting solutions, but they also provide dedicated, VPS, and cloud plans to boot.
In addition to solid state drives (SSD) on all their server types (shared, dedicated, virtual, cloud), A2 Hosting also uses an overall server platform called SwiftServer that uses turbo drives to provide optimum page loading speeds.
InMotion Hosting
InMotion is one of the fastest growing and respected hosting services, it’s also one of the oldest. Founded in 2001, InMotion Hosting provides a wide range of web hosting solutions, including VPS hosting, shared hosting, dedicated, business class hosting, and they also offer custom web design for their clients.
As far as speed goes, InMotion clocks in at an average speed of 182ms, making them one of the fastest and highest performing web hosts out there on the market. They offer a variety of plans for any kind of website.
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HostGator
HostGator is another big name hosting provider offering reliable web hosting solutions for individuals and small businesses along with hosting over 8 million domains. Founded in 2002, they quickly grew to become one of the biggest hosting companies in the world, with their tremendous growth mostly attributed to their shared hosting plans.
HostGator is #3 on our list when it comes to page load speed, hitting an average 188ms. They offer shared hosting, dedicated servers, VPS hosting, and managed WordPress hosting plans.
Web Hosting Hub
Web Hosting Hub is another contender for offering some of the fastest page loading speeds for shared hosting plans with an average of 197ms. Founded in 2010, Web Hosting Hub is owned by InMotion Hosting, so it’s no surprise they are fast.
Headquartered in Virginia Beach, VA, Web Hosting Hub services over 40,000 customers with a simple platform geared towards providing small businesses with affordable shared hosting.
Web Hosting Hub utilizes solid state drives on all of their plan types which factors into their fast page loading times, making them 38% faster than competition.
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eHost
Owned by Endurance International, eHost offers shared Linux hosting in a single unlimited plan. While they’ve been around for some time, eHost has only recently been relaunched by their parent company.
With average speed times of 197ms, eHost is risen in popularity in the past few years and boast excellent value for their services. Their single shared hosting plan is low-cost and comes with a good number of impressive add-ons. Like most shared hosting providers, eHost also provides a website builder, email, and more freebie services, making them a great web hosting solution.
What Contributes to Speed and Performance?
Now that we’ve reviewed the top five fastest shared web hosting providers of 2017, it’s important to have a good understanding of what exactly contributes to a website’s speed and performance.
Geography — Believe it or not, but geographical distance has a great impact on how fast a website performs. It’s always recommended that you find a web host with a close location or data center near you and your website’s audience. The further your site’s visitors are from the location of the servers, the more time it takes for the page to load.
Website Optimization — Another component independent of your web host is website optimization. Keeping your website optimized plays an important role in increasing it’s speed. A well-optimized site has a lower percentage of CPU usage and uses less bandwidth, leading to improved performance. A few ways to optimize your site includes script and image compression and caching.
Web Hosting Plan — Another speed factor is choosing an appropriate web hosting plan for your website. Many web hosts will throttle your website if it begins using using up too many resources.
If you find your website loading slowly, begin thinking about upgraded your hosting plan.