‘On the contrary to seemingly popular belief (as evident by search trends) that Mac users need Mac hosting service, you can host your website at pretty much any web hosting companies running any platforms.
11 rows Nov 26, 2019 Running Web Servers on Your Mac Node.js is known to always be up-to-date. MacHighway has the same “Web hosting for Mac users, by Mac users” slogan (and also uses Linux servers). Its least expensive plan is only $29.40 per year ($2.45 per month) and includes 5GB of disk.
Now if you are not technically proficient, this might come as a shocker to you. Surely users of such a distinct OS like Mac would need Mac hosting. No?
Ermmm… nope.
What you are using as your operating system has nothing to do with where you host your websites. They are completely irrelevant things. Plus, while Mac OS X has server solution, it is not widely used as web server for so many reasons. For one, Linux operating systems are a lot more robust and created specially to be used as server OS. Oh and if you want to use Microsoft technologies like .NET, then you will have to go with Windows Server hosting.
Plus, you can host any websites designed and developed on your Mac on any kind of servers. There is no issue at all. Only thing you may want to look for is a hosting company with customer support team that knows Mac in helping out Mac users. This is because there can be Mac specific software to use for FTP uploads and so on.
Here “knowing Mac” can range from “we use Mac everyday in our lives” to “oh yes, we have one guy who once touched his girlfriend’s Macbook Air”. So you gotta choose carefully, which we already did for you. Right after the break, you will see top 5 hosting companies for Mac users.
Summary
| Rank | Provider | Starting Price |
1 | $80/year | |
2 | $4.95/mo | |
3 | $4.95/mo | |
4 | $4.95/mo | |
5 | $3.95/mo |
Winner – Little Oak Hosting – From $80/year
Little Oak might be perfect example of web hosting company suitable for Mac users. Created by Mac lovers for Mac lovers, it is one of those few rare hosting companies that guarantee 100% uptime guarantee. If your site is down for any consecutive period of ten minutes, their SLA states that you will get back 10% of your monthly fee back! That’s how committed they are to their customers.
Little Oak, although established since 2007, is a a company with start-up culture and family-oriented values, and you can’t really go wrong wit them. Their customer support team is really friendly, and always there to help. Since they are also Mac lovers, they can assist you with anything related to managing your website and uploading it from Mac, to using RapidWeaver, a web design software on Mac, with their hosting service. By the look, they might seem small. But heck no. They are the home for over 400,000+ accounts on their servers!
They have three shared hosting plans to choose from and pricing begins from $80 a year. Basic plan provides you with 5GB disk space and 50GB data transfer (a strong indicator that they are not overselling). You can host unlimited domains on any plans, and as a gift they will give you $100 credit for Google AdWords and $25 for Yahoo adCenter.
2. Web Hosting Buzz – From $4.95/month
Well-reputed for higher end hosting plans, Web Hosting Buzz is an industry veteran with 11 years of experience. They are currently serving 30,000 clients worldwide, with most of them on higher end hosting like reseller or VPS although they also provide affordable and decent shared hosting services.
They are using Linux as their web servers but don’t worry, because you can host websites designed or uploaded from Mac on Linux or any server platforms. And Web Hosting Buzz has a customer support team that uses Mac pretty well so that they can assist you in uploading your website using Mac tools too.
There are three shared hosting plans to choose from. The pricing for plans are $4.95, $6.95 and $9.95 a month respectively. Since all plans come with a 45-day money back guarantee, you can simply ask for refund if you are discontent with their services. The basic shared hosting plan provides 400GB disk space and unlimited data transfer, but you can only host 2 domain. The remaining plans will give you unlimited storage space and data transfer, and you can host unlimited websites on them if you have a lot. The highest priced plan comes with Comodo Positive SSL certificate, dedicated IP and free 2Checkout Merchant account but it will be useless if you don’t need them. If you are looking for blazing speed though, then perhaps you should try out the highest plan since it will be hosted on servers with NGINX frontend.
3. Site5 – From $4.95/month
Mac users love Mac because of its reliability and awesomeness OS X provides. Then you will absolutely love Site5. 15 years in business shows the credibility and reliability of the company, and 18 locations of data centers with over 250 servers worldwide just assert their reliability even further. Not only that, they guarantee 99.99% uptime and even their customer support team has a “within 24 hours response” SLA. In case they fail to meet that SLA, they will credit your account as a token of apology. Now how awesome is it? Plus, their support team only uses Macs!
While their specialty is in shared hosting, they also provide reseller hosting, VPS, dedicated servers and cloud hosting. You can just go with shared hosting if your website is not going to be super high traffic one. The pricing plan starts from $4.95 a month while the highest priced shared hosting plan is just $11.95 a month. That’s totally a steal, actually. You will get unlimited storage and bandwidth on all shared hosting plans.
If you are really interested in cloud hosting option, the pricing starts from $20 a month. You will enjoy better load balanced and higher uptime solutions.
4. Eleven2 – From $4.95/month
Eleven2 has an absolutely gorgeous website that every Mac fans will like. But that’s not the indicator of their service. Oh their service? Fantastic, we would say. 60 days money back guarantee is what you will get when industry standard is 30 days. You get 24×7 live chat support and amazing level of dedication to customer support too.
They currently operate 4 data centers across US, UK and Singapore, and you can even choose where you want to host your website. If you want to be closer to main audience in Asia, go with Singapore. Europe and UK? UK is your choice. Heck, even in US, you can choose from two data centers to be geographically closer to your website visitors. This way, they can enjoy better speed when they surf your website.
There are four shared hosting plans you can pick from, with the starting plan priced at just $4.95 a month but you will have to go yearly. With this plan, you get 10GB disk space, 50GB bandwidth and you can host up to 10 domains. That’s a lot, actually. And no, don’t worry about not getting “unlimited” storage and bandwidth. You will not use up that much unless you have super high traffic. The remaining shared hosting plans cost $7.5, $15 and $30 a month respectively, and you will get increasing storage and data transfer on each plans.
Best Website Software For Mac
5. SiteGround – From $3.95/month
Free Web Hosting Software
A privately owned hosting company established since 2003, SiteGround is founded by a group of IT professionals who can support Mac users pretty well. Their mission is to provide affordable hosting without overselling their resources. We tried digging up WebHostingTalk and other forums but can’t find a lot of negative sentiments towards SiteGround so it seems like they are doing a good job with their over 150,000 customers’ websites.
Best Web Hosting For Mac
Their shared hosting plans run on powerful servers which are really well-optimized. Pricing for shared hosting plans start from only $3.95 a month and you will get unlimited disk space and data transfer. However, there is a one-time setup fee of $14.95 which will be waived if you commit to 12 months or longer billing cycle. They also have semi-dedicated plans which basically give you a guaranteed share of system resources, or VPS which are more powerful than semi-dedicated plans.