I’m thinking about starting a small personal WordPress website. Any suggestions for who would be good (and cheap) to use to register the domain name / and or host the site? I would like to use .com.

Thanks 🙂

You’ll get loads of answers here – firstly ignore any blog posts telling you to sign up with BlueHost, HostGator etc – they earn £100 commission if you use their links so they won’t be impartial.. That’s how most successful Lifestyle Bloggers earn their living, through recommending their users to start a blog using whichever hosting company pays the most commission.

I personally use Heart Internet, having used dozens of hosts over the years.. probably not the cheapest, but the most reliable and helpful in my experience.

Thanks Joeydeacon, that’s part of the reason why I asked – I gave up trying to search for recommendations on Google given the referral bonuses. I’ll take a look at Heart internet.

TSO Host have been my favourites for about 3 years now.
I’m still amazed that every time I call them, a techie answers the call and can always advise/fix/etc.

Prices seemed too cheap for that level of service, but they’ve proved themselves over and over.

I think I have about 12 client sites on them now.

I’ve always used 123-reg for domain registration (well, not always, the first one I used was a shyster). Simple, cheap, fuss-free. Dunno about hosting, I self-host.

+1 on TSOHost.

Good experiences personally and from organisations I’ve recommended them to

ignore what the above have said. TSO host and vidahost are terrible shared hosting providers.

Go with siteground and either get your domain with them or ideally with a separate provider (vidahost are fine as a domain registrar).

Setup your domain to point to cloudflare for nameservers and then back to siteground… feel free to email me if you want.

I have a lot of experience in this field… and can tell you if you go with TSO you’re making a mistake!

If you want emails associated with the domain – go with Google apps for around £2.60 a month per unique inbox.

I have a lot of experience in this field… and can tell you if you go with TSO you’re making a mistake!

Reasons?

Erm, TSO Host have been marvellous for me as a non-techy who needs questions answered quicksmart and doesn’t want to spend much.

Highly recommended.

Classic STW non-consensus, haha! Thanks all.

A good starting point might be a provider who is accredited with Nominet

We’ve been with 1&1 for a good few years now – we had a sticky patch a few years back when they cocked up our billing/hosting between two accounts and took ages to get it sorted, but to their credit they said sorry by giving us a year’s free hosting for one of our accounts. Other than that they’ve been fine, and they seem to have sorted some early hiccups with WordPress compatability.

If you do use them, it might be worth noting that I steer clear of their inhouse WordPress install, and upload my own via FTP. The last three years have been uneventful, which is pretty much exactly what I want from a webhosting service – to forget they exist most of the time.

I used 1&1 for about 7 years, cant say i was particularly impressed with them when things went wrong. I’ve got friends who run large websites who recommend TSO quite strongly so I’ll probably dabble there next.

TSO, Heart and 123-reg are all the same company and all owned by GoDaddy now. I tend to use Site5 in the US; their support is great and I rarely, if ever, have any serious technical issues. I’ve used them for the last 6-7 years. FWIW I’ve worked in the hosting/domains sector for over 10 years.

Just to balance this out another happy TSO Host user here. (also fronting it with Cloudflare) it just works and their support is excellent. I’ve never before had a courtesy (NOT SALES or Canned email) after signing up asking if I wanted any help setting up, I didn’t I’ve working in IT for 28 years, but it was damn nice to be asked!

I use godaddy and have slowly moved all of the domain names and sites I have over to them as they seen to just work for me and their tech help has always been great. However I’ve found godaddy sometimes is not so responsive on the lower traffic sites so they might be doing some funny caching. Cloudflare would fix that though for a blog.

However, for wordpress you might just want to use wordpress.com unless you are using fancy addons. Register the domain elsewhere though just in case you want to move the site later. The benefit of using wordpress.com is that they will automatically keep it up to date which is nice

I wont go into detail lets just say we did a rescue job and moved over 200 sites from TSO’s horrific control due to a lot of factors which add up to a terrible product.

If you’re after cheap supported shared hosting go for siteground you’ll struggle to find much bad on them and they are cheap as chips.

If you want to get a little geeky have a look at serverpilot and spinning up a vultr or digital ocean droplet with them.

The advice is there should you head it or not.. from a professional not personal perspective. GoDaddy are the devils work! Site5 also got a lot of crap recently too

Just to throw another name in the mix, I hunted around a couple of years ago for someone to host family email etc after changing ISPs and going through the hassle of changing email addresses. Went with Vidahost and they seem sensible, helpful and fine for what I need which seems pretty similar to what you want.

Use both reg-123 for Urls and Webfusion for a couple of sites (same company in essence) – http://www.unsponsored.co.uk. Not the cheapest but pretty stable and support when needed is good.

Thanks so much for the information all – I’ve just registered the domain name with 1&1, and I think I will go with siteground for hosting. Top advice about cloudflare too, as that wasn’t something I was aware of at all. I’m sure it will be a bit of a learning curve!