Finding the Best Real Estate Website Hosting: 5 Years of Trial & Errors

If you are like thousands of other real estate professionals struggling with finding that reliable, yet affordable hosting for your real estate website, this unbiased case study will be your last piece of information to help you make an educated decision.

Before we dive into the case study itself, let me first introduce myself to give you a perspective of why you should trust the content of this guide.

My name is Oleg Donets. I’m the founder and a head digital marketing strategist at Real Estate Bees, a leading real estate platform dedicated to empowering industry professionals.

Here are two undeniable facts that make me uniquely qualified to provide you with the guidance on this subject:

1. First-hand Experience – My team and I have been serving the real estate industry since 2013 and we’ve literally tried every web hosting available on the planet over the years. So we know a thing or two about this subject.
2. Unbiased Opinion – This in-depth case study is absolutely unbiased. None of the mentioned hosting companies neither asked nor paid me to write this consumer guide. I decided to do this solely on my own to shed light on this quite confusing topic because, we as a company, have gone through the same struggle ourselves.

7 Major Pain Points Every Real Estate Professional Wants to Solve

I’m closely familiar with the struggles real estate professionals go through while searching for a real estate website hosting.

Based on the feedback we have received over the years from thousands of real estate professionals who have had some sort of experience with server providers in the past, I can confidently say that the seven the most frequent pain points real estate professionals want to be addressed while looking for a hosting are:

• Affordability – They want an affordable hosting that even a beginner agent with a limited budget can afford.
• Performance – They want the hosting provider to effectively handle one of the most important features on the website – Internal Data Exchange (IDX) integration for property search.
• Peace of Mind – They want to have easy access to website backup and recovery features that will allow them to keep their website’s content and database safe.
• Control – They want to keep a full control over their website whenever they need to provide an access to third party freelancers to perform various tasks.
• Security – They want to make sure that their website is properly secured and constantly monitored by the hosting provider to prevent all the possible malicious intruders.
• Support – They want to have competent, quick and helpful tech support in case something happens to their website.
• User Friendly – They want to have a user-friendly experience to easily navigate through their web hosting account to take various basic setups like, adding a new user, for example.

Over the years of helping real estate professionals with their web presence and technology, we’ve figured out that these seven factors are the major aspects you should look for in a hosting company when planning to host your real estate website on a reliable server.

5 Years of Trial and Errors

I’ll be honest. It was a long and frustrating journey for our team to identify a perfect hosting company that will cover all the above-mentioned seven key aspects to satisfy our clients’ needs.

We literally have tried every possible hosting provider out there.

It took us about five years of active trial and errors to sort through all the clutter in the marketplace to get to that only provider that we haven’t stopped using ever since for all of our enterprise-level real estate projects as well as for all of our hundreds of real estate clients.

But before I let you know what our real estate website hosting of choice is, I want to tell you what we went through before we uncovered that gem.

It all started from reading hosting reviews online on various websites. I’m sure you probably have visited some of these sites yourself already and got exposed to some of the most frequently recommended cloud hosting companies.

The problem with this approach is that 99.99% of all those websites serve biased content! You will ask “what do you mean they serve biased content?” and “why would they do that?”

Well, the answer is very simple – MONEY.

They are getting paid a handsome commission whenever someone signs up for any of the hosting services that they mention on their websites.

What is even more disturbing is that those sites highlight and push harder those hosting companies that pay the highest commissions (even if those hosting providers are not really that good in reality)!

Some of those hosting providers pay from $70 to $150 per sign up. This is a significant amount of money to be made.

I’m not saying that you should stop trusting online review and comparison websites. Not at all. There are definitely many legitimate sites that publish genuine reviews based on their own experience (not based on how much each company pays in commissions).

Unfortunately, in the hosting industry, most of the biggest players base their reviews and ratings according to payouts.

I’m telling you that with absolute certainty because we personally tried every single one of those hosting providers you see on all those online review sites.

And let me tell you something else, from our experience. The majority of those featured servers are probably some of the worst hosting companies you can possibly work with, especially if you run a real estate website.

Unfortunately, when we first faced hosting issues back in 2013 and started looking for the best possible hosting solution, we too got misled by these online review websites.

I’ve listed the majority of the hosting providers we have worked with throughout the course of five years from 2013 to 2018, includes: Bluehost, HostGator, InMotion, Hostinger, GoDaddy, SiteGround, HostPapa, A2Hosting, GreenGeeks, DreamHost, iPage, WP Engine, Kinsta, Liquid Web, and few other. see bluehost alternative and dreamhost alternative .

I’m sure I have probably missed a few more companies but from the list above you can clearly see that we have tested 25+ hosting providers over the years. It is important to note that every provider from the list above was tested during a minimum period of one year.

This allowed us to make an objective conclusion whether a hosting server provider meets our 7-key-factor criteria or not. Unfortunately, neither of them was even close to meeting our standards, which made us keep searching.

It finally happened somewhere in 2018. Back then I had no clue that this would be our last hosting provider!

Believe me or not, I got exposed to Cloudways by not giving up my research through search engines. I remember I was researching something related to web servers and their article came up in the search results.

At first, I didn’t know this company. I have never heard about them before. But I did read their article that covered my hosting-related question in such details so that I got curious what that company was about.

When I started reading about what they offer, it quickly got my attention. Their offering and overall approach was totally different from what was offered by all the rest of the hosting providers.

Cloudways Platform offered average consumers a managed cloud hosting, previously available mainly to larger businesses with in-house development teams and significant technology budgets, for an introductory price no higher than other popular cloud hosting providers!

It sounded too-good-to-be-true to me. And so, as usual, whenever we came across a new server provider, we signed up and hosted a few of our real estate websites.

After a few months of testing the new platform, the results were quite remarkable. Six months in, we started migrating all of our own as well as our clients’ websites to Cloudways platform and have  never looked back since then!

Today, our only hosting provider at Real Estate Bees is Cloudways. We cancelled all the subscriptions with all the rest of the server providers that we used to work with for years.

11 Advantages of Cloudways Over Other Server Providers

Cloudways Platform quite literally beats any of its competing cloud hosting providers in any aspect. However, I want to discuss individually some of the key advantages of Cloudways Platform compared to other hosting service providers.

#1 Pay As You Go Pricing

As I have already mentioned above, historically the only companies that could take advantage of popular cloud infrastructures such as AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean and others were those that either employed in-house software engineers or were able to outsource it to third-party development firms.

Either way, you can imagine that a company had to have a significant budget to be able to utilize this top-of-the-line technology solutions.

This has changed after the emergence of platforms like Cloudways that allows even the small and average businesses to be able to utilize popular cloud infrastructures without breaking a bank.

Since the majority of the hosting providers mentioned in my list above don’t even offer cloud-based hosting in their introductory plans, I want to compare Cloudways’ pricing to its closest competitors, which are Kinsta and WP Engine.

For more information about the benefits of cloud-based solutions over traditional hosting resources, read this article.

If you compare the starter packages of all three providers, you’ll instantly see that both Kinsta and WP Engine are almost 3x more expensive than Cloudways while providing significantly lower resources! See kinsta alternative

In other words, if you want to run your real estate website on robust cloud infrastructure, you can pretty much get started for $10 a month on Cloudways Platform. This is insane and unheard of before!

#2 Robust Performance

The performance of our real estate websites has always been on the top of the priority list. With all of the web hosting providers we used to work with in the past, without an exception, the performance of our websites was pretty poor.

I don’t even mention advanced technology like real estate Internal Data Exchange (IDX) that require extra resources due to utilization of Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS) that has been introduced by the National Association of Realtors (NAR) in 1999 and is currently used in the United States and Canada to process the exchange of Multiple Listing Service (MLS) data.

Our clients’ real estate websites that utilized IDX technology had an extremely slow load time. It was all down to unacceptable user experience that significantly lowered conversion rates.

Before switching to Cloudways Platform, according to WebPageTest tool, on average web pages that contained IDX feature (map property search), loaded in 10 seconds with 1.1 seconds Time to First Byte (TTFB).

We even documented a specific case study for one of our clients, a national real estate team – Morales Team. On their website, whenever users visited their map property search page, the page was loading within 10-15 seconds with an average TTFB of 1.1 seconds.

After we switched to Cloudways Platform, we have seen an instant improvement in both load time and TTFB. In fact, to be more precise, we have seen 3x improvement! Isn’t that an amazing result?

#3 Top-notch Support

The Support Team at Cloudways is very impressive. They are available to provide support 24/7/365! This is an extremely important aspect when choosing a hosting service provider.

Despite the fact that many of their competitors are also available 24/7/365, the support team at Cloudways is very knowledgeable and well-trained.

This is important because a non-competent support personnel will quickly drain your valuable time by misleading you with inappropriate solutions, and sometimes can even damage something on your website.

I, personally have witnessed various support incompetency cases where my time was wasted due to poorly-trained personnel while in others, we had to re-deploy applications due to unprofessionalism of a support member.

Either way, incompetent support will cost you time and money! In this regard, you can rely on the Support Team at Cloudways.

#4 User-friendly Control Panel

Many traditional hosting companies still run on outdated cPanel and WHM control panel. For an average user, the interface of these control panels will make them lost without a doubt.

That being said, other hosting providers that don’t use cPanel and WHM software as their control panel still have quite unfriendly user interface. It seems like the User Experience (UX) of their control panel dashboards was created by not very professional user experience professionals.

When I first logged into my Cloudways control panel, I was pleasantly surprised. It is so intuitively done. There is no unnecessary stuff that gets you confused. You can easily navigate through your account and see all the important aspects right away.

Inside the dashboard, you can easily switch between list of all your servers and list of all your websites. If you are like me, who used to use cPanel and WHM, you will immediately appreciate this interface.

It is amazing to be able to see all your servers and all your websites in such an easily available and user-friendly interface.

The control panel designed by Cloudways Team is the most intuitive and user-friendly admin panel I have ever used, hands down; and mind you, I have used multiple control panels over the years.

#5 Advanced User Access Control

To give you a little context regarding user access control, historically all those outdated control panels like cPanel and WHM didn’t have any feature for the account holder to add an additional user for one reason or another.

I’m quite sure that to this day they haven’t added user access permission feature on their platforms. Think about it, you need a developer whom you have hired on some freelance site to access your server to do some sort of task.

But in order to give him access, you need to reveal your own login credentials because there is no such feature that will allow you to simply add an additional user with restricted access.

What a calming situation it is, right? You give away your own login credentials to a developer from another country whom you have known for 5 minutes, only. Wonderful!

Well, this has been a normal situation for a very long time until progressive platforms like Cloudways started emerging.

Frankly, I think control panels like cPanel and WHM will soon go extinct unless they bring some innovation.

I honestly believe that currently, when it comes to user access control, there is no other cloud hosting provider that can compete with Cloudways Platform.

They nailed it. Look at the level of user access permissions you can set to your users.

This is an amazingly useful feature! You can set your users’ access permissions based on their needs.

Instead of every time resetting your own login credentials whenever you share them with your users (which is absolutely ridiculous by the way), you can just deactivate a particular user or reset their individual login credentials.

You can grant/revoke access to any server level or application level on your account to any user in your team. I can’t stress enough how efficient this user access control module is.

There is nothing similar to this on any other hosting platforms that I know of. Huge kudos to the Cloudways Team!

#6 Proactive Security

Being able to rely on your hosting provider, when it comes to the security of your server, is an important consideration. Unfortunately, not all the hosting server providers proactively secure their infrastructure.

Here is an extreme story but it is true. It happened with us and it indicates what you can potentially face if you choose a wrong hosting company.

We worked with a server provider named LeapSwitch. They claimed that they follow the best practices and processes to ensure clients’ data and account is safe and secure.

On the contrary, working with them was a nightmare! I admit, we stayed too long with them. Knowing everything I know today, I’d immediately take all of our sites – hosted on their servers – away from them.

Despite their claims regarding security and safety, while working with them, we were constantly alarmed by third party tools that our websites hosted on LeapSwitch servers got infected with all kinds of phishing attempts and various malware injections.

We first thought that this is our fault and so this is us who need to take better care of our stuff. However, after a closer look at our websites, we realized that we were properly securing our websites from our side.

After all, only the sites hosted on that server provider got constantly infected. After digging a little dipper and consulting other companies that have dealt with LeapSwitch in the past, we realized that we were not alone.

We were told that not only many companies that hosted their websites on LeapSwitch’s servers were complaining about phishing attempts and malware injections. It could potentially have been intentional!

I don’t know if this is true or not but what I can tell you for sure, the moment we moved all of our sites away from LeapSwitch servers, all the phishing and malware warnings vanished.

Besides this serious safety and security problem, it was a nightmare to communicate with their support team. In short, it was horrible to work with that hosting provider.

I highly discourage you from ever doing business with them. This is by far the worst experience we have ever had with a server provider. I’m surprised they are still in business.

Yes, this story sounds crazy and unreal, but it did happen to us and many other companies. So be aware of it. Always make sure a hosting provider follows security practices to keep all your websites safe and secure.

As far as Cloudways Platform is concerned, we have no complaints about their servers’ security. They do a great job in securing their infrastructure with dedicated firewalls that filter out malicious traffic and keep out the intruders.

They also take proactive steps by performing regular OS patches on their servers, which ensures a secure managed cloud server and prevents vulnerabilities.

#7 Flexible Backup & Recovery

Another extremely useful feature Cloudways Platform has to offer is the ability to control automated backups of your website files and database.

Most of the traditional hosting providers either don’t even have a built-in backup and restore feature at all, or have it, but with such complexities, it feels it doesn’t exist in the first place.

Unlike many traditional hosting providers and alternatives hosting providers like cPanel alternative, Cloudways Platform allows you to set automated or on-demand backups that can be restored with 1-Click!

You can also set your backups to any frequency as you wish. For example, you can set the Cloudways system to take a backup of your server every seven days.

Or maybe you want to schedule daily backups. You can even set the system to take backups as frequently as every hour.

And all that can be easily achieved in a few clicks by navigating to “Backups” tab and selecting your desired frequency in the “Backup Frequency” dropdown menu.

So if you want to have easy access to your real estate website’s backup and recovery features that will allow you to keep your website’s content and database safe, Cloudways Platform is for you.

#8 60+ Data Centers

Another important advantage of Cloudways Platform over other server providers is the choice to select a data center for your server. Why is it important you will ask?

Well, it is important because it allows you to choose a geographical location of your server (data center) close to your target audience, which in turn, helps speed up your website.

In other words, if you target home buyers and sellers in Dallas TX, having a data center in or close to Dallas will significantly benefit your website loading speed and ultimately – improve conversion rates.

As far as I know almost no traditional server provider lets you choose a data center. They usually automatically apply a data center that is available at the moment of your server’s deployment.

Cloudways, on the other hand, lets you pick from their 60+ global data centers while deploying a new server. So you end up being able to control your server’s location, which is a great advantage.

#9 Easily Scalable

Scalability of your web hosting resources is an important consideration to keep in mind when choosing a hosting service provider.

It is important because when your website starts attracting more eyeballs, more visitors, and needs more resources, you can face some issues in enhancing your server without user interruptions.

We had a particular client, HouseCashin, a national platform that connects motivated home sellers and real estate investors, that started getting extremely popular very quickly.

When we first launched this website, we opted for the smallest plan, which was enough in the beginning. But as it started growing, we needed to quickly scale by adding more resources.

The cool thing is that our team didn’t even need to do anything because we gave the client access to their server account. When we informed them that they needed to upgrade, they simply went to their control panel and scaled the server with 1-Click!

Here is what our client said regarding their experience:

“I have launched multiple tech startups before HouseCashin but I have never had such a pleasant experience with being able to manage our server resources in such a ridiculously simple manner! Every time we needed to upgrade our hosting capabilities, we used to schedule a downtime closely monitored by our development team. It has been a pleasure using Cloudways.com Platform as our server infrastructure provider.” Derek Alverez, CIO of HouseCashin.com

The great news is that Cloudways Platform offers a seamless vertical scaling of your server with a 1-click approach. You can easily upgrade your server’s resources such as RAM, CPU, Disc space, etc. without any disturbance for your users!

#10 Full SSL Certificate Solution

It is true that many server providers started allowing their customers to use various free SSL certificate solutions on their platforms.

However, there are enough fairly large hosting companies that still don’t even have this functionality and so their clients need to keep purchasing SSL certificates while they can get it for free.

Don’t get me wrong. You still can register a free SSL certificate through a company like Let’s Encrypt, for example. But the whole installation of that certificate on your server will be a nightmare.

So it is always preferred to have an ability to register a certificate directly through your server provider because the installation process could be simplified (but not always).

Nonetheless, even though it is important to have an ability to register a free SSL certificate directly through your server provider, there are two additional, not less significant functionalities that need to be available to make it worthy.

i. Simple Installation

These days many of the traditional hosting providers require you to go through quite a technical process to install an SSL certificate for your website.

I personally have done it hundreds of times over the years, but I always was forgetting something throughout the process which slowed down the process.

Think about someone who has never done that before. Yeah, this shouldn’t work this way. You shouldn’t be hiring a developer for such minor things. A server provider should provide an easy solution to handle SSL certificate installations.

Thanks to Cloudways, now we have a solution! Cloudways offers 1-click SSL installation for the free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates.

This is awesome! It saves tons of time!

ii. Automated Renewal

If you have ever either purchased an SSL certificate or registered a free one, you know that you should renew it every year.

This is a really time-consuming procedure especially if you own a number of websites with SSL certificates on each. Before Cloudways, I remember we had to constantly renew these certificates once a year.

It is just a waste of time. There was no hosting provider that offered an automated renewal of these certificates. Well, as you have  probably guessed already, Cloudways thought about this too!

With Cloudways Platform, you can both register a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate and set it on auto renewal mode. I can’t stress enough how such little features made our lives easier!

We no longer need to be worried about a certificate to expire and the website stopping functioning because of it. The Cloudways Team has got us covered.

#11 Unlimited Applications

If you look at other comparable server hosting providers, you’ll notice that all of them restrict the number of applications/installs (websites) you can host on a server.

This is so ridiculous! I always hated it because the only reason they do it is to drive the price up but a customer to select a more expensive plan.

I always believed there should be a better and more honest way to address this. Well, I found this solution on the Cloudways Platform.

When you subscribe to Cloudways, you will have the freedom to host unlimited websites regardless of the plan you choose.

Such little things like this one, for example, just shows you that the organization truly cares about the customers’ bottom line in the first place and not how to make more money in the detriment of their clients (like many other hosting companies do).

Conclusion

To wrap it all up, I hope this in-depth guide has shed some light on your real estate cloud hosting research efforts. I personally would definitely love to have a similar guide when I was doing my own research.

It would certainly dramatically shorten our company’s research timeframe. Instead of having to go through our own trial and error process that cost us tons of money, five years of testing and a lot of stress!

Luckily for you, through this informative case study, you can learn from our mistakes and get it right, right away.

If you are a solo realtor, a team lead, a brokerage owner or an investor who is searching for a reliable and affordable web hosting for your real estate website, I strongly recommend you to sign up for Cloudways’s free trial.

For local real estate websites, websites that don’t target the entire country but rather a specific geographical area, I’d recommend to get one of the Cloudways’ introductory cloud hosting plans with any of the following leading cloud providers: DigitalOcean, Linode or Vultr.

Any of these plans will suit your purpose of successfully running a real estate website.