Website Hosting Recommendations:

Siteground is our absolute favorite! We’ve dealt with Namecheap, Godaddy, Bluehost, A2hosting, and more you’ve never even heard of but hands down, Siteground is our favorite.

Why? Customer service and reliability.

Are we an affiliate? Yes, and we make a small percentage off of any referrals we send to them but we love their service, use it ourselves and for as many clients as we can because of the reliability and service.

You pay the same price whether you use our link or not.

Sign up for hosting with Siteground through our affiliate link here.

Why don’t we recommend other hosting companies?

From our experience…

With Godaddy their service has gone down significantly from years past, you sit on wait for a long time waiting to get help when needed, their sites are slower and in SEO tests sites on Godaddy are lower in the website ranks and more spammers use Godaddy hurting those that are legitimate sites. When we had sites on their servers they also had more down time then we’ve had with siteground. We were getting notifications at least monthly that our site was down for any given period of time from 5 minutes to 8 hours. When you have a website, having it up 24/7 is important! Also, if you are on older hosting you will have a hard time keeping your website updated using WordPress. GoDaddy doesn’t automatically move you to better hosting as technology changes – from our experience and clients.

Bluehost has some of the worst customer service out there and really seems to just want to sign you up, not take care of you for life. Our clients who have used Bluehost have had tickets in for MONTHS that never got resolved – PHP versions were turned back many versions on their websites and their sites crashed frequently.

Namecheap isn’t really friendly for hosting – buy your domain here, don’t buy your hosting.

Where should you buy your domain?

Buying your domain matters less than where you host.

You can buy a domain with hosting from Siteground or here are others that we use:

Namecheap.com
Godaddy.com
Name.com

If you are looking to have everything in one place – buy it where you are hosting – this is generally an option.

If you are looking to buy based on price – check Namecheap.

If you are looking to buy based on having the most options – check Godaddy – but be prepared to buy when you are searching because we have seen instances where the name you searched for yesterday doubles, triples, or goes sky high a day or two later in price from GoDaddy if it has good keywords.

We recommend you start searching on Namecheap not Godaddy to see if something is available.

Who should I use for email marketing?

Hands down we think Mailchimp is the best for new businesses who have no experience with Email Marketing (and even for those that do).

There are tons of options, integrations with other systems (super important), and ways for you to grow your email list easily and safely.

It is also easy to use and very intuitive.

Best of all you can generally start using their service for free if you are a new business and still have a lot of great features like Automation.

And once your list grows, you can easily get into a plan that is right for you without it costing a small fortune every month or without having to take crazy certification courses in order to figure out the system like you would with Infusionsoft or the like.

How can I cut down on time on social media?

We recommend considering services like Later or Buffer that allow you to auto post to social media platforms so you don’t get sucked in and so you aren’t visiting multiple platforms and getting sucked in on each!

Buffer allows you to connect some basic platforms for free, connecting more advanced ones like Pinterest will cost you. But in our opinion – it is oh so worth it – especially if you have employees managing this for you – less time wasted!

If you are more of a creative and need Pinterest – Later.com is a great option because Pinterest is included even for free. But you won’t find LinkedIn with Later. So it all depends on your needs.

If you have multiple businesses you are running and need a more robust solution – contact us, we have agency software that can help you add multiple accounts or workspaces for a better price than most and has better analytics, ways to reply to comments from the software and more.

Do I really need a Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, or releases from a lawyer?

Oh my goodness, YES!!

Whether it is GDPR you are trying to be mindful of or you are just getting a new website started – one of the most important things you can do is have solid Privacy, Cookie, and Terms of Service Policies and even releases for things like testimonials and podcasts.

And we recommend you don’t just make it up yourself! This is dangerous! You need to stay protected and having the right legal documents on your website will help.

One of our favorite new resources is Creative Contracts from lawyer/Mompreneur Brittany Ratelle. She is changing the way you do business with lawyers to get the legal documents you need.

Think of her as Legal Zoom for online creative businesses. Or you can do 1:1 services.

Here is our affiliate link to get yourself protected online with the right Privacy and Terms of Service policies and so much more.

Yes, we are affiliates for her digital products, yes, we get a small percentage back for referring you, but you’ll pay the same price either way!

Check Out All The Documents She Has To Offer On CreativeContracts.co