It’s time for our annual look at web hosting for photographers. Being involved with photography for some time now, I’ve had a lot of experience creating photography sites and dealing with all types of web hosting solutions for photographers. Since there is an increasing amount of avenues that photographers can take to get their websites online, for this year’s web hosting recommendations for photographers, we’ve chosen traditional web hosting plans, a website creation package, and a hybrid WordPress solution.
This is by far the category with the most choices for photographers. Honestly, there are a lot of web hosting plans from traditional web hosts that can be effectively used for your photography websites. Traditional hosting plans also include features for your photography business like email and advertising credits.
The main features I recommend you look for are:
Storage and bandwidth are obviously important to those of us with tons of photos to display or store. And since websites with images can take longer to display, you definitely want your web host to have multiple data center locations or a content delivery network to speed up your web page loading times. You’ll also want to make sure you’re provided with multiple options for building your website. Besides the top content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, you also want a web hosting plan that provides you with other quality website building options. And, since most photographers I know are extremely busy most of the time, you certainly want to be able to reach customer support when you need it. In particular, be sure your web host offers phone, email, and live chat support—preferably with 24 chat support.
On my list of best web hosting for photographers, I would advise you consider GreenGeeks, InMotion Hosting, or SiteGround.
For those photographers that don’t want to spend as much time working on their website but would rather be shooting photos, you might want to consider one of the growing website creation plans now available. With these website packages, your websites are almost ready-made, and you just need to choose your template and supply your some basic information.
While SquareSpace and Wix have received a lot of the attention, for photography websites SmugMug would be our choice if you’re going with a website creation plan. What’s great about SmugMug is that in addition to using it for a photography business site, it can also be used by photography enthusiasts who need a platform for storing and viewing all of their photos.
Although website creation packages can speed up and simplify the process of creating your site, there are also some disadvantages. Basic website creation plans usually don’t include features such as your own domain, email, unlimited storage, etc. You’ll need to pay extra for them. More importantly, once you sign up for a website creation package, you’re really locked into that companies system (i.e. you can’t move your website somewhere else).
If you want the features you get with a traditional web hosting plan, but also like the ease and simplicity offered by website creation packages, here’s a possible hybrid solution for you. InMotion Hosting’s BoldGrid is a website builder that lets you quickly and easily create professional looking WordPress websites. Using BoldGrid, you get the benefits of InMotion’s traditional hosting features plus the ability to use BoldGrid’s templates and drag and drop site builder to speed up the process of getting your website online.
The other great feature about BoldGrid is that you have 100% ownership of your WordPress website. You can actually move your site to another web host and use BoldGrid there if they offer WordPress. Here’s the link to my full review on BoldGrid.
Traditional Web Hosting:
GreenGeeks
InMotion Hosting
SiteGround
Website Creation Package:
SmugMug
WordPress Website Builder:
BoldGrid
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