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2018 was a great year for phones. We saw huge leaps in the power of computational photography, cheap phones that look and feel like they could pass for a model three times the price, and glass designs as far as the eye can see.

Will 2019 top it? Judging by what’s coming, quite possibly.

Next year we’ll get 5G phones, the first true folding screen model from one of the big names, still more CPU power. And, with any luck, even more progress in phone cameras.

Here are the launches you need to watch out for in 2019 that will bring these goodies.

• The best smartphones of 2018: US | UK | AU | AE

Samsung Galaxy S10 and Galaxy S10 Plus

When? March 2019

Sure, by the end of 2019 we may end up recommending you buy a Galaxy Note 10 rather than the Galaxy S10. However, it’s the Galaxy S10 we’ll see first, and it will set the tone for Samsung’s 2019 phones.

The big feature here is the follow-up to the notch. Instead of a lip on the top, screens will look as though they’ve been attacked with a hole punch. While you may be able to make fingerprint scanners that sit behind screens, standard camera sensors aren’t designed to deal with that hurdle. That hole is needed.

It looks a bit odd at first glance. But hopefully once your eyes have adjusted it’ll stop looking like someone has stolen a tiny portion of your OLED.

Sony Xperia XZ4

When? March 2019

Sony has had a bit of a struggle in staying relevant as a maker of top-end phones. In 2018 it did a pretty good job, though, with an OLED screen and a price far lower than some of the direct competition, in the Sony Xperia XZ3.

The Sony Xperia XZ4 may go bold with its screen tech once more, and use a 21:9 aspect display without a notch. This would make the phone arguably the most “cinematic” to date, as it is close to the 2.39:1 anamorphic standard.

Sony reportedly designed a 21:9 phone in 2017, the Xperia X Ultra, but it was never released.

Huawei P30 Pro

When? March/April 2019

If you’re not impressed by Huawei’s phones these days, you should be. After the amazing P20 Pro and Mate 20 Pro in 2018, the Huawei P30 Pro is right near the top of our ‘most wanted of 2019’ list. 

The big question is where Huawei can go next with its camera technology. Early reports suggest it will use a 38-megapixel main camera sensor, the Sony IMX607. However, it will be tough to improve the already-great low-light image quality of the P20 Pro.

From a user experience point of view, though, perhaps speed rather than a drastic image quality change is what Huawei wants. The P20 Pro can take up to 6-7 seconds to shoot a low-light photo. If it can bring that down to a second or two, the P30 Pro will be even more fun to use.

Motorola Moto G7 and G7 Plus

When? March/April 2019

We’re in the recommendations game. As much as we love new and exciting tech, telling you which phone, laptop, speaker or graphics card to buy is perhaps our most important job. And that’s why the Moto G7 and Moto G7 Plus are so important.

Motorola’s G-series phones may not be the flashiest around, but each year since 2013 they’ve offered some of the best value choices for those after a phone that works well and doesn’t cost too much.

The Moto G7 is expected to have a small teardrop notch, to fit more display onto its front, and have at least two cameras on its back.

LG G8 ThinQ

When? May 2019

LG’s early 2018 flagship the LG G7 ThinQ stood out because it had an ultra-wide rear camera instead of the more popular zoomed kind. But nowadays several phones have both a zoom and a wide. Including LG’s own five-camera LG V40 ThinQ.

What LG will do next to stay relevant is a head-scratcher. We’ve written an entire article on what we want from the LG G8 ThinQ.

Right now the price seems the most important part to get right. Sorry LG, but you might struggle if you try to go dollar for dollar against the Samsung Galaxy S10.

Samsung Galaxy X

When? Mid-2019, TBC

The top candidate for strangest phone of 2019 is an easy one to call. It’s the Samsung Galaxy X, the foldable phone rumored for half a decade. And it is almost here.

A prototype version of what is presumed to be this foldable monster was seen in 2018 at the Samsung Developer Conference. 

It’s effectively a vehicle for Samsung’s Infinity Flex display technology, the OLED panel and folding mechanism and makes such a futuristic-looking design possible. OK, so it’s “2002-era futuristic”, but we still want to give it a try.

You effectively get a phone-shaped handset with a screen on the outside that can open up to reveal a tablet-size display. It’s one way to let a phone take on the serious jobs you might otherwise use a laptop for. One snag: it’s likely to be hugely expensive, enough to make the Galaxy S10 look cheap.

OnePlus 7

When? Before end of May 2019

OnePlus thrives on “leaks” and teasers rather than carefully keeping them to a tight pre-release schedule. And we already know the next OnePlus phone, which may be called the OnePlus 7, will have 5G mobile internet.

It will make it one of the first to offer 5G mobile internet. And unless you live in a country with some of the best mobile network infrastructure in the world, it also likely means that extra speed won’t be meaningful for a while.

Still, shiny new things still shine. OnePlus let this tease out at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon conference in December 2018, suggesting the phone will use the Snapdragon 855 CPU. You can expect existing OnePlus goodies too, like an in-screen fingerprint scanner and, probably, largely glass build.

The one snag is the price. OnePlus has suggested the 5G version of the OnePlus 7 will be $300 more than the norm, so let’s hope there’s a 4G version for us mere mortals too.

iPhone 11 and 11 Max

When? September

As ever, it’ll be months before we see anything vaguely reliable leaked about the next iPhone. Apple likes to keep its surprises fresh for the big day, and that big day isn’t until (most likely) September.

The roll call of current spurious suggestions about what the iPhone 11 will be like include a pop-up camera module, a TouchBar display on its side and an iPad Pro-like stylus. 

We don’t believe a word of it, but we’re happy to be proved wrong.

Google Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL

When? October

It’s too early for any major Pixel 4 leaks. But some references to 2019’s upcoming ‘first-party’ Android have already appeared. Product codenames were spotted in the ARCore developer kit. This is what developers use to make Android AR apps.

“Bonito and Sargo” may be the behind-the-scenes names for the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL. This also suggests they may have next-generation augmented reality abilities. 

Such a feature would work in Google’s favor, as it may well mean they have something rivals around at the same time lack.

Xiaomi Mi 9

When? TBC

This is a very important time for Chinese phone maker Xiaomi. After racking-up massive sales in China and India, the brand is moving further west. It finally made its official UK debut in 2018. 

And while the US may be a tougher proposition thanks to the continuing friction between the US government and Chinese giants Huawei and ZTE, Xiaomi’s intentions are clear.

The company has many phone series, but the Xiaomi Mi 9 will be one of its key 2019 flagships. You can expect a large screen, in-screen fingerprint scanner and, most important for many buyers, a lower price than those of Samsung and Apple, for a comparable phone.

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Speech is a much more natural way of interacting with devices than poking at buttons and screens, and its popularity has exploded in recent years, with voice-enabled digital assistants now integrated into virtually every household device imaginable.

That growth has been made possible by the works of companies like XMOS. The name might not be immediately familiar, but if you’ve ever used an Amazon Echo speaker then you’ve benefited from its technology.

XMOS is a fabless semiconductor company specializing in voice processing. Its algorithms are capable of detecting softly-spoken voice commands from across a room – even in challenging conditions (like rooms with a lot of hard surfaces). So why has voice taken off so rapidly?

“I think it makes life easier,” says Alex Craciun, algorithm engineer at XMOS. “You don’t have so many cables and complicated instructions that you have to take care of. You can just give commands and the device tunes itself, or tells you something that you want it to. That’s a lot easier.”

“I play IT support to my parents, and we think voice is going to end that, because your technology will tell you how it works,” adds director of corporate marketing Esther Connock. “It won’t need to come with a remote; it won’t need to come with an instruction booklet – you just talk to it in a very natural, conversational way, and that for us democratizes technology because you don’t need to learn how to use it. You don’t need to come at it with knowledge.

“So if you think about people with low literacy or low levels of education, suddenly it’s a much more open playing field. Vulnerable sectors of society can use technology and become less isolated. So for us, voice is the most natural thing in the world.”

It’s good to talk

XMOS part of the blossoming tech industry in Bristol emerging from the city’s two universities, which also includes Ultrahaptics (which uses ultrasound to create a sensation of touch in mid-air), Reach Robotics (creator of the Mekamon augmented reality robot) and Graphcore (a spin-off from XMOS).

Its speech detection and isolation tech includes beamforming (which tracks a person’s voice as they move around a room and moves the microphone to follow them), acoustic echo cancelation (separating the user’s voice from sound being played by the device itself), deverberation (compensating for echoes), noise suppression, barge-in (which stops audio playback when the device’s wake-word is detected), and fixed or automatic gain control (ensuring all voices in conference calls are heard at the same volume, regardless of how loudly the person is speaking).

The company was founded in 2005, built on research from the University of Bristol. “They developed a micro-controller that could do a lot of processing, had a lot of power and capability, and could perform a lot of tasks concurrently,” explains Connock, “so that was hugely exciting.”

Apple’s decision to kill off the FireWire port in 2008 opened up the market for USB audio, where XMOS found its niche. The company diversified, working for big players like Harmon Kardon and Yamaha, but also for DJs with their mixing decks, before turning to multi-channel audio. 

“With a board with a lot of processing power, we could produce something with up to 32 channels of output, so we could get fantastic multi-channel audio,” explains Connock. “And that specialism in sound and audio led us into voice as it started to emerge. One of our clients said, ‘With all your expertise, you should be thinking about microphones and capturing voice.’ And that’s exactly what we did.”

For us [voice] democratizes technology because you don’t need to learn how to use it

In 2017, XMOS gained Amazon certification for its far-field voice interface. “We’re still their only qualified partner with a stereo solution, so for anyone developing TVs and soundbars and set-top boxes and doing work in true stereo, we’re the only provider that can do acoustic cancelation in stereo,” says Connock. “That’s really important to us, and something that we’re focusing heavily on this year at CES. But we’ve also just qualified with Baidu, so that’s very exciting, and we’re doing some work with NTT Docomo as well. We’re expanding across the regions.”

Outside the home

XMOS currently specializes in edge-of-room voice applications, but it’s investigating other areas too, including in-car interfaces.

“The technology that we’ve been developing over in Boston – sound source separation, which extracts multiple voices in a conversation – works really well for automotive,” says Connock. “So if you can imagine that I can be on the phone to you and I’m driving, it strips out everything that you can hear except for my voice. The kids can be shouting in the back, they can have a film that’s playing, and all you’ll get is my voice.”

The company also has an interesting prediction for the future of voice: as a personal assistant (in a flexible, wearable smartphone) that will sit between us and the big companies that currently provide voice recognition services.

“If I look at Amazon and Google (and to a degree Apple, with Apple music), they have a bias because they’re trying to sell us stuff. And I love Amazon for selling me stuff, but what I don’t want is voice spam, and the minute that starts to happen, people will switch away from voice,” explains Connock.

The solution would be a kind of mid-layer that filters out any spam, and points you to the service that has the most relevant content for you (which it will learn based on your preferences).

Your digital twin

It’s not just a theory – XMOS is already having conversations to make it happen. “It will happen quickly,” Connock says, “so we are looking at partnering, building, buying to create that ecosystem. So there’s a lot within that – there are lots of people we know operating in that space today. It’s open and it’s ready and we want to be taking advantage of it.

It will learn not just my music preferences, but my everything preferences

According to Connock, this will result in the creation of a ‘digital twin’ – a term that she admits sounds a bit twee, but is useful. It will learn and adapt to the way you use it. For example, it could learn that you don’t want it to speak to you unless you’ve spoken first.

“It will learn not just my music preferences, but my everything preferences. When I want to be disturbed, my friends that I will prioritize talking to – everything.”

Naturally speaking

However, even with a truly personal assistant to filter out any spam, voice recognition still faces some resistance. 

“When you look at this,” Connock says, picking up her smartphone, “this is always on, it has a camera, it can always hear you, it’s got sensors, it gathers a lot of data, you type everything into it, and because we’re so used to it and so reliant on it, and it’s so close to us, people don’t see this as a privacy issue at all.

The field is advancing really, really fast. It could even be tomorrow that something more natural comes up there

“And yet when you put a speaker in the middle of the room, everyone says ‘Oh, it’s listening!’ Well it is, but not as much as [the phone] is!”

Connock believes that relevant, trusted content will be the key to voice becoming widely accepted. The moment the industry puts sales ahead of the user’s experience, it will have a problem, so XMOS is making sure it’s on the front foot, and prepared to react in case that happens.

There’s also the question of natural speech, as opposed to commands. Alexa Skills are very handy, but they’re not the same as talking to another human. XMOS’s algorithm engineers are working on making the interaction much more organic. 

“You need to feel like the machine understands your emotions – like it’s frictionless – then it will take off,” says Connock.

It might sound like science fiction, but Craciun says it’s closer than we realize. “I think it’s already happening,” she says. “We’re seeing lots of developments from Amazon; every single month there’s something new coming up that you can read about. So the field is advancing really, really fast. It could even be tomorrow that something more natural comes up there.”

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Website hosting is normally a service you’ll buy just for your own use, but sometimes it pays to think bigger. If you’re running your own business, for instance, perhaps as a developer or web designer, offering web space as an extra service to your customers could make a lot of sense.

Many web hosts offer reseller schemes where you can buy a block of resources – disk space, bandwidth, a number of cPanel accounts – to divide and sell in any way you like. Costs can be very low, sometimes just $1.40 or $2.80 a month per account, so you could bundle hosting in other business products with very little impact on your bottom line.

There are some significant issues to think about. For example, reseller hosting may look cheap, but that’s because you’ll probably have to be the first line of support for your customers. If they encounter any questions or technical difficulties, you’ll be their first port of call. You can pass anything complicated onto the web host, but they won’t deal directly with clients for you.

You will get more help in other areas. Many reseller accounts come with a free licence for WHMCS, an industry standard application to manage and automate hosting setup, billing and support. You’re usually able to customize the control panel with your own branding, and the best hosts have special reseller tutorials and support to help keep your business running smoothly.

There’s no single way to identify the best reselling plans, because this varies depending on the products you’re hoping to sell. Your first step should be to identify web hosts who provide the range of plans and support you need, and then compare whatever reselling schemes they offer.

To help you understand what to look for, we’ve listed five interesting reseller products from some top industry names. Check them out to get a feel for the features you should look for, and the prices you might expect to pay.

1. InMotion Hosting

[Great exclusive offer from Inmotion Hosting – Get a free upgrade to the R2000S plan when you buy the R1000S plan by TechRadar’s #1 rated Web Hosting provider] 

InMotion is a capable web host which offers a vast range of products and services, including one of the most comprehensive reseller hosting plans around.

These start simply and with minimal restrictions. The R-1000S plan costs $13.99 a month initially ($27.99 on renewal) for 80GB of disk space and 800GB of bandwidth, but there’s no limit on the number of cPanel accounts you can create, and everyone gets unlimited (within the available disk space) subdomains, email addresses, databases and FTP accounts.

Buying through TechRadar means that you will get an automatic upgrade to the R-2000S slice with 50% extra bandwidth and storage space.

Ramping up to the Reseller VPS-1000 plan gets you 4TB bandwidth, 4GB RAM and free SSL. There’s still no limit on the number of cPanel accounts you can create, and the service is priced at $41.64 a month for the first term, $54.99 on renewal.

While this is a little more expensive than some, InMotion offers plenty of extras and benefits. There’s a free licence to WHMCS, the industry standard package for managing your client’s billing and support. 

A bundled eNom Domain Reseller account allows selling top-level domains and SSL certificates, and white labelling support allows you to create custom hosting packages, use anonymous name servers and apply your own branding via customizable themes.

Perhaps InMotion’s real advantage is its excellent support, something that will be very important when you’re trying to solve problems for your clients. In our experience the company offers a high quality service, although there’s no need to take our word for it: the exceptional 90-day money-back guarantee means there’s plenty of time to check it out for yourself.

2. Tsohost

Calculating disk space requirements is a challenge for every hosting reseller. Many plans allocate less than 1GB per user, but will that really be enough, and what happens if you need more?

Tsohost’s Reseller Hosting plan aims to help you sleep easier by providing unlimited storage and bandwidth for up to 100 sites. That’s not bad for only $44 (excluding VAT) a month.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a small catch: your customer’s 100 sites are limited to a total of 1,000,000 page views per month, or an average of 10,000 each. We suspect that’s less likely to be an issue than disk space, as most personal and small business sites won’t get close to this limit, but it’s something to bear in mind.

The plan doesn’t come with a WHCMS licence, or any other assistance with billing, marketing or support. The company bills you for the reseller plan, and it’s your responsibility to bill your own customers.

If that’s not an issue for you, Tsohost does offer some compensations. The core service is a decent one, including Let’s Encrypt SSL support for all your customers, daily backups – not something you always see with reseller accounts – and a single free domain name for your own business, if you need it.

Tsohost also allows customizing your client control panel with your own branding, and even supports custom nameservers to hide any trace of the Tsohost name.

3. SiteGround

Many hosting reseller plans are focused on the most basic and underpowered products. That may keep the price low, but the lack of features will also make it more difficult to sell the plans later.

SiteGround’s reseller plan is a little more ambitious. Every user gets 10GB of disk space and cPanel site management, and there’s unlimited bandwidth, email addresses, databases, and FTP accounts. Highlights include Spam Experts-based spam filtering, free Let’s Encrypt SSL, daily backups and an integrated Cloudflare CDN.

These accounts cost more than the very low-end competition, but they’re hardly expensive, with prices starting at $3.5 a month over a year.

There’s more good news in SiteGround’s pricing structure. Other companies often ask you to pay upfront for the resources to support perhaps hundreds of clients, whether you need those resources right at the outset of your venture, or not.

SiteGround allows purchasing plans in much smaller numbers – five to get started, 11 or more to get the best price – and these are only activated when you sell them. If you buy 20 plans in June, for instance, they’ll never expire. Whether you sell them in days, weeks or months, each one will still get you a full year of hosting from the date the account is launched or renewed.

How you manage and run the business is up to you, but SiteGround offers a simple control panel to review your accounts (there’s a tutorial here), and a white label option and private DNS upgrade ensures you can use your own branding everywhere.

4. Krystal

Established way back in 2002, Krystal is a UK-based company which offers various simple reseller accounts for its shared web hosting.

Krystal’s product has a decent specification. A mid-range block of 50 cPanel accounts comes with 100GB of storage, and you get unlimited bandwidth, MySQL databases, mailboxes and subdomains, a bundled website builder, free SSL certificates, plus weekly and monthly backups.

The bundled WHM (Web Host Manager) and WHMCS billing system allow you to manage your customers’ cPanel accounts, automate billing and more.

These are all white label versions, too, which means customers will only ever see your branding.

Krystal’s Trinity plan is probably the best value, giving you 50 cPanel accounts with 100GB storage for $35 a month on the annual plan (at the moment you pay $1 for the first month). There’s a single free domain if you need one (that’s one domain for the entire plan, not per cPanel account), no setup fee, and you’re protected by a 60-day money-back guarantee in case something goes horribly wrong.

The Infinity plan allows unlimited cPanel accounts and doubles the storage to 200GB. We’re not sure whether that’s worth the $82 a month price tag (annual plan), but it’s available if you need it.

5. GoDaddy

As we’ve seen, reselling web hosting generally involves some significant work in customizing your plans, marketing and selling products, and providing technical support to your clients.

GoDaddy’s reseller program gives you much more assistance. Signing up gets you a pre-built customizable store with your own branding (there’s no mention of GoDaddy), bundled credit card processing to handle orders, and afterwards, customer service via GoDaddy’s own teams.

You’re able to resell all the major GoDaddy products, including domain names, hosting, SSL certificates, managed WordPress plans, GoDaddy’s Website Builder, and more.

The plans provide some help with sales and marketing. Your store can use a range of customizable promotions, including giving discount prices to specific customers, and detailed sales reports help focus your efforts where they’ll deliver the best results.

The Basic reseller plans gets you all this and a 20% discount off GoDaddy’s retail prices for $8.99 a month. But the Pro reseller plan offers a 40% discount for only $14.99 a month, well worth the extra unless you have very few customers.

There are no commission rates or fixed margins – you can set your preferred price for anything in the range. GoDaddy’s Reseller Profit Estimator is an online calculator to help you understand how much money you could make, and whether you would be better off with the Basic or Pro reseller plans.

The GoDaddy approach doesn’t give you the freedom you’ll benefit from with other resellers, where you’re completely free to divide up resources in any way you like. But it’s also very easy to set up, and if you want a simpler way to get into reselling, it could be a wise choice.

You might also want to check out our other website hosting buying guides:

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Every business needs a website, but finding the right website hosting package isn’t always easy. Many plans are targeted primarily at home users, and don’t have the power that businesses need.

Take email, for instance. We’ve seen hosting plans offer as few as five email addresses for a website, and with inboxes limited to a few hundred megabytes, that’s potentially a major issue for any business. Be sure to check out the email specs of any hosting plan before you sign up.

An SSL certificate is a must-have these days for any professional or business website, but these aren’t included with every plan. Fortunately, they don’t have to be expensive. Many hosts now offer free SSL certificates from the Internet Security Research Group’s Let’s Encrypt project, and although web stores might need something more, these are perfectly adequate for standard sites.

Business websites can’t afford to fail – ever – so reliability is key. Choose a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or dedicated hosting plan, if you can afford it, to avoid the hassles of shared servers. Look for support that can be accessed at speed with telephone and live chat available, as well as emails and tickets. You’ll probably want a plan that includes automated backups, too, but that’s another area where you’ll need to check the small print: backups are often an optional extra.

Think about an upgrade path, too, especially if you’re starting with a basic shared hosting plan. If your business grows then your website needs might also expand, and it will make your life much easier if your chosen host has the add-ons and extras to cope.

There’s a lot to think about, but fortunately, there are also some excellent hosting providers around that understand exactly what small businesses need. In this article we’ve highlighted five web hosts who have something to offer everyone, from the smallest home business to demanding corporate users.

1. DreamHost

Shared hosting is slower and less reliable than VPS and dedicated plans, but it’s still perfectly adequate for many simple websites, and the best plans will handle all the main business needs.

DreamHost’s shared hosting plan scores well on the fundamentals. There are no limits on bandwidth, emails or MySQL databases. Your site is secured by a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate, and preinstalled WordPress allows you to get a quality site up and running in an afternoon – plus SSD storage as standard will keep performance high.

Handy extras include the ability to host unlimited domains from a single account. And in a nice touch, DreamHost doesn’t just offer a free domain name with each shared hosting plan (except the monthly plan): there’s free privacy protection, too. If you’ve registered a domain without that, and been inundated with emails and phone calls from ‘website designers’ and assorted scammers, you’ll know how valuable that can be.

It’s a strong all-round package, but if you need more, DreamHost also offers everything from managed WordPress and WooCommerce, to VPS, Dedicated and Cloud Hosting plans.

Billing is flexible. You can avoid long-term contracts by signing up for monthly billing, which costs $10.95 (£7.80) a month for shared hosting. Choose the three-year plan and the price drops to $7.95 (£5.70) a month, though. Don’t be put off by the longer term: DreamHost products are protected by an exceptional 97-day money-back guarantee, so there’s plenty of time to test the service for yourself.

2. HostGator

Cloud hosting is a smart technology which spreads your website content across multiple devices, improving redundancy and speeding up load times. It’s an interesting idea which has many business benefits, but if you choose wisely, you can try it out for less than the cost of some shared hosting products.

HostGator’s Business Cloud, for instance, delivers on the business basics with support for unlimited websites, unmetered storage and bandwidth, and a private SSL certificate.

As this is a cloud plan, three mirrored copies of your website are spread across multiple devices. If there’s a hardware failure, your website can immediately be switched to another server.

All HostGator cloud plans give you shared access to a defined level of system resources (CPU time and RAM). Another benefit of cloud hosting is that you can purchase more of these and see the benefit immediately, with no downtime or time-consuming migrations required.

The high-end features continue with a distributed Varnish caching setup to accelerate the loading of your static content, freeing up RAM and CPU time for producing dynamic content.

Despite all this functionality, HostGator’s Business plan is reasonably priced at $9.95 (£7.10) a month for up to 36 months, $17.95 (£12.80) on renewal.

Optional extras are also good value, with CodeGuard’s daily backups available for $2 (£1.45) a month, and SiteLock’s malware scanning service is only $1.67 (£1.20). We’ve seen other hosts charge two or three times as much for similar functionality.

While we’ve highlighted HostGator’s cloud plans here, as an interesting improvement on regular shared hosting, the company also provides managed WordPress hosting, good value VPS packages, dedicated servers and more. There really is something here for everyone.

3. GoDaddy Business Hosting

Most business hosting products are focused on power and functionality above ease of use. That’s not a problem if you know what you’re doing, but small businesses don’t always have the technical expertise to manage this kind of hosting, and it could take quite some time and effort to figure out how the service works.

GoDaddy Business Hosting is a hybrid product which aims to offer the dedicated resources and similar performance to Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting, with the simplified cPanel-style management of a shared hosting service.

GoDaddy’s baseline Launch plan gives you 2GB RAM, one CPU and 60GB of storage, for instance. These resources are solely for the use of your website, which should give you improved and more consistent website performance, no matter what’s going on with other sites hosted on your server.

Restrictions elsewhere are kept to a minimum, with support for unlimited websites, databases and emails, and unmetered bandwidth. (‘Unmetered’ means there’s no fixed limit, but GoDaddy reserves the right to complain if your site is hogging resources.)

There’s a SSL certificate thrown into the mix, and GoDaddy has included a one-year, one-user subscription to Microsoft Office 365 Business Email.

GoDaddy’s Enhance plan is available for $49.99 (£39.50) a month, renews at the same price. The Grow plan gives you 3 CPUs, 6GB RAM and 120GB of storage for $69.99 (£55.30) a month, renews at the same price. The high-end Expand plan (which is for resource heavy sites) increases RAM to 8GB and storage to 150GB, with 4 CPUs. The price is – $99.99 (£79) a month, same on renewal.

Overall, the range is a little more expensive than some VPS products, but if you’re looking for easy setup and simpler website management, GoDaddy could be worth a look.

4. Liquid Web

Basic shared, cloud and similar hosting plans are easy to use and can deliver good performance, but they also limit your control over the server environment. You can’t choose to install Windows, for instance, or do anything else that would affect other websites hosted on the same server.

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) are isolated environments which you can tweak, adjust and customize however you like. As a bonus, you also get CPU time and RAM allocated just for you, improving both performance and stability.

Liquid Web’s starter VPS product gives you two CPUs, 2GB RAM, 40GB SSD space and 10TB bandwidth, for instance, and is priced from $59 (£42) a month.

Some hosts have cheaper VPS plans, but that’s often because specifications have been trimmed to the bare minimum. Liquid Web takes a more honest approach, with even the most basic plans including items that are often chargeable extras elsewhere. For example, that $59 gets you built-in backups, Gigabit transfers, unlimited sites, a dedicated IP address, CloudFlare CDN, DDoS protection, antivirus, antispam, cPanel/WHM or Plesk Onyx, and more.

All VPS plans are highly configurable, with Linux options including CentOS 6, CentOS 7, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 16.04 and Debian 8, and high-level plans support Windows Server 2012 and 2016.

Whatever you’re installing will include server management by default, which means Liquid Web will handle maintenance tasks such as operating system updates. Proactive system monitoring allows the company to detect and fix some problems before you even notice them, and speedy, responsive 24x7x365 support will help you with anything else.

Factor in the 100% uptime guarantee and generous service level agreements and Liquid Web has a lot of business hosting appeal.

5. OVH

Dedicated server plans are the top of the standard hosting tree. Instead of sharing resources with others, you get the entire system to yourself, ensuring the best possible performance and reliability.

The OVH dedicated hosting range has several benefits, and these start with its choice of data centers. While other providers can typically host your site in just two or three locations, OVH has a far more global reach, with centers available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Poland, Singapore and the UK. Hosting the site nearer to your target audience will improve performance all on its own.

Configurability is another highlight. Operating systems supported include CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, CloudLinux, Gentoo, Slackware, ArchLinux, OpenSUSE, Fedora, FreeBSD, SmartOS, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2016, SQL Server, VMware, Citrix Xen, Hyper-V Server and more.

Advanced options include support for NVMe, non-volatile memory-based storage which can be five times faster than SSD.

Prices are reasonable, especially considering the range of functions on offer. You can get a very capable system for between $74-$137 (£56-£104) annually, and there’s plenty of extra power available if you need it.

If there’s an issue here, it’s the OVH website, which does a poor job of presenting your options. There are too many baseline server configurations, they’re poorly organized, and it’s hard to find what you need or figure out your configuration choices.

We found our way around the product range eventually, though, and overall, OVH’s extensive set of features and data centers make it a must-see for demanding business users.

You might also want to check out our other website hosting buying guides:

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