4 Best Website Hosting Services for Authors

Whether you’re choosing to self-publish or not, knowing how to brand and promote yourself will help your career and success as an author. These days, authors are required to kickstart their own branding and web presence before a publisher will even touch them, and why wouldn’t they? Investing in someone with an established fan base and readership is safer than taking a chance on someone largely unknown. Even if you hire someone else to build, design, or even update your site, your website will still need to live on a hosting account. So how do you even go about choosing a web host? Not to worry, I’ve compiled a list of the best website hosting sites for authors:

Disclaimer: I may receive customer referral fees from companies mentioned on this page at no additional cost to you. All data & opinions are based on my experience as a paying customer or consultant to a paying customer.

Siteground

Siteground is well known for hosting plans as low as $3.95/mo. Even their basic accounts come with plenty of add-ons that make it worth it. Their Web Hosting vs. WordPress Hosting account are equal in price and features.

Siteground does a great job keeping their servers (and your account) upgraded to the latest stable version of pHp and take care of everything for you. I just got an email yesterday saying they would be changing all accounts over to pHp 7.3, which is faster, sleeker, and more responsive. If you’re tech savvy, they also give you control to choose it manually for yourself with the click of a button.

Site speed and pricing are some of Siteground’s most impressive features that set them apart from the others. If site performance is your top priority, Siteground is a great web host for you.

Pros:

• Fast hosting speeds
• Affordable
• Low downtime
• Email included with hosting plan
• Free CDN
• Free SSL certificate
• Daily backups
• Security monitoring
• SG Optimizer plugin helps optimize site speed and caching
• Transfer services from other hosts

Cons:

• Tech support not available by phone, only chat and ticketing system
• Domain registration slightly more expensive

HostGator (Website Hosting)

HostGator is easily one of the most competitive website hosts on the market. Best in price and unmetered traffic, Host Gator offers Website Hosting at $2.75 a month.

However, there is a difference between HostGator’s Website Hosting accounts, and their WordPress Hosting accounts. If you are using a different content management system (CMS) than WordPress, this is the better plan for you.

Pros:

• Hosting starting at $2.75/mo
• Unmetered Bandwidth
• Includes email
• Cheap domain registration
• 24/7 phone and chat support
• Free website transfer with every hosting plan
• Includes free SSL Certificate
• Clean Energy Powered
• 99.9% Uptime guaranteed (and delivered)

Cons:

• Fairly minimal cPanel
• Average web speed
• Server crowding
• Requires some tech knowledge to use

HostGator (WordPress Hosting)

Why is HostGator on this list twice? Simply because their Web Hosting and WordPress Hosting accounts offer different things. If you’re planning to run a site with a different CMS like Joomla or Drupal, this won’t do at all. If you’re committed to using WordPress, this plan has a lot of built-in advantages that don’t require extra setup, like the impressive CDN and cloud hosting.

Pros:

• Less setup
• Built-in CDN
• Pricing as low as $5.95/mo
• 24/7 phone and chat support
• Optimized for speed (at least 2.5x faster)
• Included SSL
• Included email
• Cheap domain pricing
• Free site transfer with every hosting plan

Cons:

• More expensive than the web hosting plan
• cPanel still minimal
• Server crowding, but less than the web hosting account

Bluehost

BlueHost is an affordable hosting option for more tech savvy people. It helps if you know your way around a cPanel, but picking it up isn’t too hard to learn.

Pros:

• 24/7 phone and chat support
• Free SSL included
• WordPress Pro all-in-one marketing suite helps those new to websites and web marketing

Cons:

• Requires more tech knowledge to use
• Pricier domain registration
• Without a intro special, a basic account starts at $7.99