best web host?

Honestly, I've used and am using about half the ones you name.

Bluehost and Dreamhost are pretty comparable, it's very much a matter of personal experience and preference. Hostgator has been really super for some of the sites I admin for others.

It really is a matter of individual luck and taste. Just make sure that they have a CPanel or Fantastico installer for WordPress unless you're comfortable rolling your own.

Read the fine print regarding content policies very carefully.

Make your own backups no matter what the ISP/Host says they do.

A better path might be to go with a free hosting platform first. The best (I say this as a software & systems engineer who researched this) is WordPress.com. Here is their propaganda page which several years experience with them has shown to be truthful.

https://en.wordpress.com/features/

The big advantage of WP is that their is an enormous variety of themes (overall looks-and-feels) to choose from as a starting point. You can then customize your site to suit your specific needs. You need only to descend into HTML and CSS for your very-most specific needs.

Once you have a working site if you want the extra flexibility of a self-hosted site WP makes it easy to make the transition. I've not yet needed that, though some of the people I've helped set up sites have done so. (A self-hosted WP site can have plugins such as a mailing list or purchase cart.)

I moved from Dreamhost to Bluehost a few years ago because I was unsatisfied with Dreamhost -- they started out great, but ran into some frustrating downtime issues for our site. (Every host has a little downtime, but this was at the level of interfering with people being able to access us.) I remember customer service interactions with Dreamhost on the issue being frustrating.

I've had no issues with Bluehost at all and have been very happy with their service. My site stays up, handles spikes in traffic just fine, and has had all the bells and whistles I have needed thus far. (I found BH through pretty exhaustive reading and research at the time; I chose them because they were consistently highly rated by users as far as I could find.)

I made the switch a few years and several websites ago, so I don't know if that was a momentary hiccup for the Dreamhost server we were on or a more widespread problem. This is just my own experience.

Laer Carroll said:

A better path might be to go with a free hosting platform first.

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Unless the OP is intimidated by the idea of a WP.org install -- which it sounds like you're not at all -- I'd de-recommend starting with WP.com. Personally, I would find WP.com far too restrictive for my needs.

Another vote for Bluehost. I use them for a couple of different sites. I never have had a problem, and their customer service is always available to answer really dumb questions!

M.S. Wilson said:

Cool, thanks. I guess I'll just pick one and hope for the best. I think I'll do a custom install instead of one-click (more secure that way) and I was planning on doing my own backups...just in case! Thanks for the reply.

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If you're doing a custom install, check the pathnames first for where Web files go and for MySQL.

Other things to do: use a different identifier for your WordPress tables than WP; I'd suggest something that's a mix of letters and numbers and punctuation marks, if your host allows them. This will affect your config file.

Once you have the site installed and have run through the script for completing the install, create a new user with a username that isn't Test or Install or anything similar, and make that your Admin. Then kill the Admin named account (you can't change usernames, so you'll need to kill it).

Be careful of your templates if you don't download them from within WordPress; lots of them with backdoors, adware and malware.

Check on the ht access policy of your host; lock down those directories!

M.S. Wilson said:

Yeah, I think I'd rather start with WP.org, just so I don't have to mess around migrating the site later (assuming I build up a following).

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Usually people go the WP.org self-hosted path when they want to add specialized plugins such as a purchase cart or a mailing list. But finding, adding, and keeping up those plugins costs time and often money. Do we really want to learn and deal with MySQL, for instance? Then there is the monthly cost to the host which is on the order of $10 a month.

WP.com or Blogger are free and for most authors are more than adequate. I'm an aerospace software and systems engineer. I could set up a self-hosted site almost in my sleep. But I found Blogger filled my need, WP.com even more so when I migrated from Blogger to WP (a process made easier by WP).

M.S. Wilson said:

...I kinda like the idea of having my own domain...it has that patina of respectability that I probably need

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You buy (or rent yearly, actually) a domain name independent of whether your site is self- or freely hosted. The link in my sig is an example of that. Costs me $17 a year and WP.com automatically renews it every year until I tell them to stop.

There's more to having your domain than respectability. It makes it more convenient for people to find your site and refer to it.

Laer Carroll said:

Usually people go the WP.org self-hosted path when they want to add specialized plugins such as a purchase cart or a mailing list. But finding, adding, and keeping up those plugins costs time and often money. Do we really want to learn and deal with MySQL, for instance? Then there is the monthly cost to the host which is on the order of $10 a month.

WP.com or Blogger are free and for most authors are more than adequate. I'm an aerospace software and systems engineer. I could set up a self-hosted site almost in my sleep. But I found Blogger filled my need, WP.com even more so when I migrated from Blogger to WP (a process made easier by WP).

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You really don't need to learn MySQL to host a website on your own domain. It's extremely unlikely that an average user doing something as common as hosting a wordpress site would need to touch it.

I use Dreamhost and have been happy with everything except their email handling.

Cath said:

You really don't need to learn MySQL to host a website on your own domain. It's extremely unlikely that an average user doing something as common as hosting a wordpress site would need to touch it.

I use Dreamhost and have been happy with everything except their email handling.

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You have to at least know enough to create the database, and the user that (in this case) Wordpress software will use to access that database. Unless the installer can locate MySQL and create the necessary DB, tables, user, etc.

It's true, however, that once it's all up and running, there's very little need to ever deal with MySQL again.

robjvargas said:

You have to at least know enough to create the database, and the user that (in this case) Wordpress software will use to access that database. Unless the installer can locate MySQL and create the necessary DB, tables, user, etc.

It's true, however, that once it's all up and running, there's very little need to ever deal with MySQL again.

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Actually, no you don't. Not always, anyway.

Dreamhost offers an installer that does all of that in the background. If I remember correctly, GoDaddy does the same. You get an email when it's set up and go to a URL where you can set a user name and password via a simple web-based interface.

It's been several years since I manually had to create a database to set up a Wordpress blog, and I've set up many in the last four years (for myself and for others).

Cath said:

Actually, no you don't. Not always, anyway.

Dreamhost offers an installer that does all of that in the background. If I remember correctly, GoDaddy does the same. You get an email when it's set up and go to a URL where you can set a user name and password via a simple web-based interface.

It's been several years since I manually had to create a database to set up a Wordpress blog, and I've set up many in the last four years (for myself and for others).

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Yup, Bluehost has one-click installs as well. You only have to install manually if you choose to.

It's quite easy.

(eta: And I don't know any MySQL.)

The other advantage of hosting on wp.org is other wp users can follow your site. I use it all the time to follow blogs I like.

Cath said:

Dreamhost offers an installer that [sets up SQL and other such advanced facilities] in the background. If I remember correctly, GoDaddy does the same.

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If you want to use any plugin you need to learn how to use it. A mailing list plugin, shopping cart plugin, etc, each have a learning curve. It is such plugins that make WP.org a better choice than WP.com.

Else you might as well stick to WP.com. Which (among other advantages) has a virtual server which is several geographically separated servers. They are mirrored so that the whole system stays up if one server goes down (by a possibly catastrophic event).

lance.schukies said:

The other advantage of hosting on wp.org is other wp users can follow your site.

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Not a problem on WP.com, or for that matter Blogger. And probably other free hosting sites.

typo I meant wp.com , I think there is a plugin for self hosted sites but I never tried it.

Plugins work the same way on both Wordpress.org and Wordpress installs on your own sites. And again, in most cases they require minimal to no programming or SQL knowledge.

Wordpress is designed and intended for the ordinary blogger. It's intended to be an easy platform for those folks who don't want to worry about digging into the code, but it also offers those who do the opportunity to do so.

I've done a lot of work helping local charities update and improve their websites. One of the first things inevitably do if they're not already using Wordpress is switch them onto it. We do that because it's really straightforward for them to update, configure, and extend without calling in expensive IT support. It is extremely well documented online, and there are all kinds of books and resources available (M.S. Wilson mentioned the Dummies book, I'd also recommend O'Reilly's Wordpress: the missing manual).

What I'm trying to say is that hosting Wordpress on your own domain and hosting really isn't significantly different from using the free Wordpress.org option for the average user.