If you haven’t already, try searching for “best hosting company” or something similar, and you’ll find a ton of results with up-to-date lists for the current year.
It can appear that these are reliable listings, examined by reliable individuals…however, they’re not.
These days, search results are so heavily influenced by SEO strategies that sometimes the top 10 results are entirely meaningless. But that discussion is for another time.
This is entirely accurate while searching for a hosting provider. Most likely, you won’t find any genuinely reputable hosting businesses, just a list of paid placements.
When you can write about the hosting firms that pay the highest affiliate commissions and really profit from your recommendations, even if they are terrible, why bother writing about the best hosting companies?
And the majority of lists do exactly that.
However, we’re taking a different approach by ranking the WORST hosting providers.
We’ve tried a ton of hosting providers over the years as we’ve created thousands of websites, and we’ve eliminated the absolute worst ones.
Any business on this list is one I’ve personally used once and won’t use again. Before adding a company to this list, I give them several chances; hence, there have been multiple negative experiences with these businesses. All of the websites were powered by WordPress, thus I’d say that WordPress hosting firms should never offer these as a choice.
A large number of the businesses I’ve listed here as “the worst” can be found if you look through any Google results. It’s unbelievable that anyone would endorse these businesses, and that’s how you can tell that those listings are completely false, created solely to rank highly in search results and earn affiliate commissions.
There is no particular order to this list; they are all awful web hosting providers, and you should never do business with any of them.
The Worst Web Hosting Companies:
- Godaddy
- Their hosting is bad but their domain buying and management experience is the best
- Hostgator and any associated companies. This company owns many similarly named companies – avoid all of them.
- Bluehost and any associated companies. This company owns many similarly named companies – avoid all of them.
- Inmotion hosting
- We’ve seen it many times over the years – the hosting starts off fast but then slows down after a few months to the point where the site is unusable. Their support always blames it on WordPress being “slow”.
- Hostinger
- We’re now on the fence about this company. With recent testing, we’ve had and continue to get good results with their hosting. However, due to their past poor performance, we still include this company.
- Dreamhost
If you’re curious, we’re fond of ASPHostPortal, HostForLIFE.eu, WP Engine, Cloudways, DigitalOcean (and most cloud hosting companies), and Greengeeks.
