If you are the owner of a dental business and you are looking to grow your presence and reach online, your website is hands down your most important tool. After all, it’s from where you display your photos, develop SEO, and run ads. Since hosting is where your website is built upon, getting a strong hosting foundation is critical to your success in the digital world.
For the past 2 years of my website developing career, I have used BlueHost as the primary hosting platform for my clients. The price point of $2.65/mo and the free SSL that came with it was a surprising upgrade to the $14.95+/mo that I was accustomed to with HostGator, Squarespace, and other website hosts that I had used before. Further, because their marketing gave off the impression that they were a new and budding company that could offer such prices because of its partnership with WordPress, it seemed as if there was no downside.
Unfortunately, I was wrong.
Why BlueHost is a Poor Dental Website Hosting Choice
BlueHost has been plagued with poor customer service, underperformance, and a tendency to take shortcuts.
While many people are drawn in from their price point and the tremendous marketing they do, almost every experienced web developer I have discussed this matter with has also made the transition out.
In my research, complaints included lacking security encryption, outsourced customer service, upcharging, A Name editing issues, email sending issues, forced auto renewals, SSH disables, affiliate marketing, and lacking a backup restore function.
General Issues with EIG
BlueHost is run by a company called EIG. They own a conglomerate level of domain hosting services which include: BlueHost and HostGator. I’ll include a list of all companies owned by EIG at the end of the article.
I only have personal experience with HostGator and BlueHost. While I have never personally encountered issued with either, here’s how one blogger describes EIG in general.
“To reduce their costs, EIG programmers pack tons of websites into one server. Sometimes the server just can’t handle so many websites so it crashes. The programmers get it back up, but the underlying problem, too many websites, is still there. Of course, the server crashes again somewhere down the road, and the cycle continues.”
Clearly their cost cutting and money-centric focus has caught up to the quality of their services.
The Problem
At Pharo, we are always looking to raise the bar in the quality of digital marketing that we offer. While I have never personally experienced the majority of those issues, the case was clear.
BlueHost does not provide a suitable level of service for our clients.
Our Solution
If providing the best web hosting service meant scouring the top performing hosts, that’s what we would do. I spent the next four hours comparing the best of the best, as recommended by other experts.
5 Important Criteria of Dental Web Hosting
Now, many websites have different functions and, therefore, different needs when it comes to hosting. My criteria would be to find a hosting solution that would compare the following criteria, in order of importance, to make sense for a dental office:
- Security
- Performance
- Ease of Use
- Price Point
- Customer Support
1. Security
Security for us was paramount. When you want to work with email, it will go through your hosting provider. You don’t want to be the victim of any malicious attempts at your emails or your patient’s information. Because of the sensitive nature of a dental practice, a secure hosting provider becomes critical during the lifespan of your website.
Furthermore, certifications of security like SSL will increase your credibility with potential patients who view your website while simultaneously boosting your SEO.
2. Performance
After bulletproof security, the next most important criteria is the provider’s performance. Ideally, you do not want to be on shared hosting. Shared hosting brings on the liability of website crashes and other performance issues. Rather, get a dedicated hosting provider if your budget allows. On the other hand, running with shared hosting and then upgrading on demand can also be effective.
A hosting service with great performance will very rarely crash; and if it does, revive quickly. It will help with your pagespeed times which will in turn help your SEO and Google Ads, two of the best inbound marketing strategies for dental practices.
3. Ease of Use
Many dental practices like to create their own publications, upload information onto the server, or just do general admin work. If you would like to eventually part ways with your digital agency or freelancer after their initial help, or you just like the idea of being able to jump in yourself, ease of use becomes important.
4. Price Point
If your website is bringing in a few thousand users per month and generating tens of thousands of revenue, that’s great! However, your website’s effectiveness at conversion won’t scale linearly with the amount of money you spend on hosting. That’s because most dental practices’ clientele are local in nature. While high performance is important, you won’t ever need Facebook levels of service. Therefore, once security and performance are taken care of, you only need the hosting package that will cover your maximum needs.
If you are planning to branch out in the future, you can always upgrade down the line.
5. Customer Service
For many people, customer service makes or breaks their decision to work with a business. However, when we created this list, we prioritized the criteria with clients who would work with us in mind. If a hosting provider is offering great security, performance, ease, and price to you, we don’t mind taking on the burden of a long call line.
The Best Website Hosting for Dentists
With that said, these are the hosting services I looked into:
- SiteGround
- InMotionHosting
- Liquid Web
- Mocha Hosting
- WPEngine
- Pagely
- Kinsta
- DreamHost
- Digital Ocean
- Flywheel
- Cloudways
- NameCheap
To avoid technical jargon, I’ve broken down my research into rating each criteria from Terrible, Poor, Average, Good, or Excellent.
These are my results.
- SiteGround – Starting from $4.35/mo
- Security: Excellent
- Performance: Excellent
- Ease: Excellent
- Price: Good
- Customer Service: Good
- InMotionHosting – Starting from $6.39/mo
- Security: Excellent
- Performance: Good
- Ease: Good
- Price: Average
- Customer Service: Excellent
- Liquid Web – Starting from $29/mo
- Security: Excellent
- Performance: Excellent
- Ease: Good
- Price: Poor
- Customer Service: Excellent
- Mocha Hosting – Starting from $2.48/mo
- Security: Good
- Performance: Poor
- Ease: Good
- Price: Excellent
- Customer Service: Average
- WPEngine – Starting from $35/mo
- Security: Good
- Performance: Good
- Ease: Excellent
- Price: Poor
- Customer Service: Average
- Pagely – Starting from $199/mo
- Security: Excellent
- Performance: Excellent
- Ease: Average
- Price: Terrible
- Customer Service: Good
- Kinsta – Starting from $30/mo
- Security: Excellent
- Performance: Excellent
- Ease: Excellent
- Price: Poor
- Customer Service: Good
- DreamHost – Starting from $2.59/mo
- Security: Good
- Performance: Good
- Ease: Average
- Price: Excellent
- Customer Service: Good
- Digital Ocean – Starting at $5/mo
- Security: Good
- Performance: Average
- Ease: Average
- Price: Average
- Customer Service: Poor
- Flywheel – Starting from $23/mo
- Security: Excellent
- Performance: Good
- Ease: Excellent
- Price: Poor
- Customer Service: Good
- Cloudways – Starting from $10/mo
- Security: Excellent
- Performance: Excellent
- Ease: Good
- Price: Average
- Customer Service: Average
- NameCheap – Starting from $3.88/mo
- Security: Excellent
- Performance: Poor
- Ease: Average
- Price: Excellent
- Customer Service: Good
Winner
SiteGround. Starting at $4.35/mo for a shared hosting server, SiteGround has all the security, performance, and user-friendly functionality that can be asked for. Prices are medium-high for the industry. While some complaints exist of customer service reps who are quick to push you off to advanced care, many testimonials exist of reps who will go above and beyond to support you.
Runner Up
Liquid Web. Starting at $29/mo, Liquid Web’s base package offers everything, and more. It was neck and neck with SiteGround but I didn’t feel like the typical dental practice would need all the features and performance upgrades that came with the heftier price tag.
Conclusion
Choosing the best website hosting provider won’t necessarily make or break your digital marketing efforts. However, if you are a dental practice that is looking to grow or start inbound marketing campaigns, having a hosting provider that can handle that is a must.
Additional Resources
Hosting Companies Owned by EIG:
2slick, A Small Orange, AccountSupport, ApolloHosting, AptHost, Arvixe, athenixinc.com, BerryInfoSysLLC, BigRock, BizLand, BlueDomino, BlueFur, BlueHost, Cloud by IX, Directi, Domain.com, DomainHost, Dot5Hosting, Dotster, EntryHost, Escalate Internet, FastDomain, FatCow, FreeYellow, Globat, Homestead, HostADay, HostCentric, HostClear, Host Excellence, HostGator, HostMonster, HostNine, HostYourSite, HyperMart, Idea Host, IMOutdoorsHosting, impress.ly, Intuit Websites, iPage, iPower, IX Web Hosting, JustCloud, JustHost, LogicBoxes, MyDomain, NamesDirect, NameZero, NetFirms, Networks Hosting, Nexx, PowWeb, PureHost, ReadyHosting, ResellerClub, SEOHosting, Site5, sitebuilder.com, Sitelio.com, Sitey.com, SouthEastWeb, Spry, StartLogic, SuperGreen Hosting, TightHost, TypePad, UsaNetHosting, Verio, virtualave.net, VPSlink, Web2010, WebDevHosting, WebHost4Life, webhosting.info, websitebuilder.com, WebstrikeSolutions, Webzai, wwwh.com, Xeran, and YourWebHosting
Useful for Purchasing Domain Names:
GoDaddy (avoid for hosting), NameCheap
