We provide web hosting and email services for roughly half of our web site clients at the moment. Now and again I’ll get questions from other web developers asking me what hosting provider we use and I always recommend the same one.

The best hosting solution for clients, and the one I always recommend you use, is whatever host the client currently has.

If a business is happy with their current web hosting and/or email provider there is no reason to switch unless there’s a valid technical limitation with the current setup. Isn’t that throwing money away though? Absolutely.

Email administration, for a web development business the size of our own, is the biggest time sink with the smallest return. Trust me when I say that the money you’ll earn through hosting will never equal the time and effort you’ll invest in providing tech support for email administration alone.

What if you need to take over web hosting and email in order to get a new client? The sites we’ve built and maintain are small enough that we can use one of the popular shared hosting providers like DreamHost or Media Temple. Most people either love or hate both of those companies and they both have had and will continue to have their ups and downs. In the end, they’re both pretty even. For a reasonable price, they offer great hosting options for small web developers.