What is the best and most reliable web hosting company these days?
GoDaddy was my go to for over a decade.
Suddenly they are difficult to reach and hard to deal with when I do get a live person.
And it seems they have outsourced their entire customer service / tech support.
Surely some other company has risen to first place.
Thanks, Mary
After much due-diligence on the same topic (GoDaddy has been in sunset mode for years) I came across a relatively new host/domain registrar, Spaceship. They offer many services/add-on’s for free where most others keep the pay-to-play payment schema. I registered a handful of domains (which automatically come with “privacy” where everyone else charges extra) and for less than everyone else. Their uptime/reliability reports are quite high.
Don’t know about phone support but that’s disappearing across the board from Uber, Lyft, MacSales and dozens of other companies that have dropped live support because of cost-cutting efforts. I think you’ll just have to get used to web-chat for help or just trouble tickets. But nothing but good things to say about Spaceship thus far.
I’ve been happy with Pair Networks (pair.com), been a customer with them since last century. Domain registration, hosting, webmail. Reasonable pricing, telephone, chat and email support. They’re located in Pittsburgh, PA.
Most hosting providers now provide support via a webchat of some form. A few mega corporations own most webhosting companies. I prefer to seek out the more independent ones and in the past I’ve used InMotion and Siteground (both were top notch in support terms, perhaps someone who still uses them can confirm if this is still the case?) and only moved away from them a few years ago when, for environmental reasons, I went to Greenhost (beware greenwash if you go this route).
These days web hosting is pretty much use and forget, so you should rarely need to call for support. Also beware of companies that just offer wordpress support (unless you need it for non-Sitely reasons). Also worth making sure they offer sitewide HTTPS support, most do nowadays and offer free SSL/TLS and CDN as standard.
Oh, and with the UK Government wanting to spy on everyone, as per the current Apple announcement, perhaps host outwith the UK 
!
In itself this is very worrying, but I have no “trade secrets” to hide in anything I do… having lived and worked in China for fourteen years, where I was pretty sure all my internet and phone usage was monitored, I made sure that nothing I said or wrote could be used against my friends or myself, and continue that habit.
But I was going to recommend the UK-based Clook, which I have found to be very responsive both on the phone and online chat (with a human being…) all based in the UK and not outsourced. I still recommend them, but if the UK government stance is of concern, then look elsewhere.
We have the worst government in 1000 years of parliament. and Apple just caved. Don’t understand! In the meantime, try to find an independent host. The bigger companies have gone the way of no customer service. Another thing I just don’t get!
I’ll speak up for inmotionhosting.com in the US. They also have a European presence. They let you use just about everything cPanel exposes, good with email spam reduction, can keep prices reasonable with shared servers or pay more for dedicated ones. I support my own business for two domains happen to reside on different servers. They have a good website of their own, so they eat their own dogfood. I was a “Mac centric” guy once. Doesn’t seem to matter anymore.
Spaceship has been developed by the Namecheap team, which I’ve used for 20+ years. Until I check out Spaceship more, I’ll recommend Namecheap. It works seamlessly with Sitely and I have, really, no complaints with its customer service. All questions have been addressed professionally and promptly; they have been stellar. Namecheap did lag a bit when Ukraine was attacked in 2022, unsurprising since many of the staff lived there, but I’ve noticed nothing over the recent couple years.
So, for now, Namecheap gets my recommendation but Spaceship may be a great upgrade.