We made our first website in 1998 and have since used various forms of hosting. Google has stated that user experience is at the core of their ranking algorithm, and this means, among many other things, that the loading speed of a website is taken more seriously than before.
Loading speed is primarily about two things: effective design/crafting and hosting. Therefore, we share the experiences we have gained, and we update this article quite often because new companies emerge, and the old ones get new hardware or are updated, so their service changes. Some even just get worse…
We only focus on the facts. This means uptime, availability, the usability of the control panel, speed, and customer service. There may be differing opinions on customer service, so it’s an area where it is not possible to be 100% objective. We have tested a lot of different sites, including our clients’ sites. In these cases, however, we have uploaded our own test site, which is a regular blog with a webshop and AdSense. The test site is www.TrinitySisters.org, which is a smaller copy of www.TrinitySisters.net.
Tools we have used:
UptimeRobot.com
Betteruptime.com
WebPageTest.org
GTMetrix.com
Google Pagespeed Insights
thinkwithgoogle.com
Websiteoptimization.com
A common factor for ALL the hosting companies we have contacted is that their service is generally mediocre. But they are cheap! Some are worse than others, but top-notch customer service is hard to find in this industry. What we have focused on is:
Website load speed. Both TTFB times and overall load times. TTFB times should ideally be around 300 ms. But because we are on a speed trip, the pages we create going forward should be BELOW 300 ms. TTFB times should, however, be taken with a certain reservation because the server needs to prepare the page for delivery, and larger pages take longer. Therefore, other optimization factors should also be taken into account. Image optimization, CDN, and local caching are the most important. Larger pages result in slightly higher TTFB times but can be kept down with caching.
Access to support.
The usability of the control panel from the perspective of a website owner.
The stance on load speed here in our company is that a website should NEVER take more than 3 seconds to load, under ANY circumstances! In fact, our requirement for our clients’ websites is that the load time MUST be under 2 seconds when we hand it over! Many smaller sites we can squeeze down to around 1 second on an effective shared server. Many of the links we have included to hosting companies are affiliate links. But these are only for the GOOD hosting companies! We have NOT included links to the worst ones in the test because we simply do not recommend using them. Ping times are excluded because they say more about the journey to the host’s first gateway than about the web servers.
Hosting companies we use or have used:
Most hosting companies in Denmark have both advantages and disadvantages. Here is an overview of the hosting companies we have used over time. We currently have web hosting at:
Gigahost (7 sites, 5 of which are our clients)
cHosting
WebHosting.dk
Dreamhost
Siteground
GreenGeeks
TMDHosting
NordicWay (5 sites)
Previously, we have used:
One
Simply
i123
e-studio
Site5
Gigahost
We have used Gigahost to host our sites since January 2010. It wasn’t very stable back then, but they were the only ones who offered the ability to host multiple websites on one web hotel – which saved us a lot of money because we have many websites online. Most other providers require you to buy a separate hosting plan for each domain, and that becomes very, very expensive!
Gigahost has 3 employees. Fortunately, Gigahost became much better over the years until around 2015, when the load times started to increase significantly. Another very big advantage of Gigahost, which all non-technical website owners will find extremely positive, is their incredibly simple control panel. Most providers use cPanel, which some love and others hate. If you’re not into technical stuff and geekery, Gigahost is a good choice. Gigahost’s control panel is by far the simplest of the ones we’ve tested. It’s straightforward, clear, and efficient.
One weakness of Gigahost is that, like most others, they ONLY offer email support, and it can take up to 24 hours before they respond. It doesn’t always take 24 hours, but if they are busy, it can! However, they are very helpful, and their email support is top-notch. Gigahost can almost be used to host your clients’ sites. In the beginning, all sites had the same FTP and database access, but they’ve since implemented isolated FTP access. However, they still need to create isolated database access for it to work correctly. They have plans to implement this, but right now, anyone with database access can see all other databases – so they’re missing this last piece before a reseller solution can function properly.
We host a few websites for others on Gigahost, but only because those clients have waived any work with the site and DO NOT need backend access. Gigahost’s servers are not the fastest, and response times can vary widely. This is usually the price for shared hosting. Gigahost has slow servers. Far too long TTFB times. Often at 1000ms or higher! 4000-8000ms is NOT uncommon. That is very unstable. They also experience dropouts on their servers. They’ve had this issue for a few years now. It’s just not good enough! The times fluctuate a lot, and this is because they host too many sites on individual servers and experience too many peak loads, where the server cannot respond to requests.
For some time now, we have used UptimeRobot.com and betteruptime.com to document these dropouts. The five hotels we have all experience dropouts of around 5 minutes once a day. This doesn’t matter too much if you just have a hobby site or two you’re working with. You’ll never notice it. However, if you have a professional site that NEEDS to rank on Google or makes you a lot of money, Gigahost is not suitable! Among the hosting providers we have tested, none of the others have downtime of the same magnitude as Gigahost.
Gigahost has the slowest servers in the test and is not suitable if you want a super-fast website.
Gigahost offers cron jobs.
Check out Gigahost here.
cHosting
cHosting (Fiona IT ApS) has faster servers because they run LightSpeed instead of Apache, but their control panel is a rather complicated version of cPanel. However, if you are used to cPanel, it’s not a problem. We moved www.TotalWpOptimization.net from Gigahost to cHosting solely to test the difference, and it was significant. If you have a heavy and slow-loading website, you can gain A LOT in load time by moving to cHosting. Of course, you can also optimize your site in many other ways. cHosting offers cron jobs. We’ve chosen to keep TotalWpOptimization.net on cHosting because they have fast servers. And they’re actually affordable!
However, the TTFB times are a bit on the high side. Ranging from around 500ms to 1500ms. BUT this could be because the site runs MyBB forum software. Fiona IT has 5 employees. At cHosting, you pay a small amount every month. cHosting has 4 employees. Read more about Apache vs. LiteSpeed here if you’re into the techy stuff.
cHosting is one of the hosting providers we recommend.
Check out cHosting here.
Webhosting
We initially only used WebHosting to store domains. Either domains that were waiting for a project or domains that were simply redirecting to other active domains. They are simply the cheapest for that purpose. Their control panel is not as simple as Gigahost. It’s very unique, but it’s significantly better than most others and definitely not difficult to work with. Webhosting.dk is one of the oldest hosting companies in the country. There is only 1 employee. He is the ultimate tech nerd. Their prices are absolutely competitive.
Update: We needed to buy a couple of domains on a SATURDAY afternoon, which were just supposed to be parked for a few months, and for some reason, the payment page never appeared. We tried back and forth but it didn’t work, so we quickly wrote a support ticket to Webhosting and ended up buying the domains from Giga instead. It wasn’t long before the phone rang. It was the tech nerd from Webhosting himself. He thought it might be an antivirus/firewall issue, and before we knew it, we had been chatting about tech nerd stuff for an hour!
I’m no longer sure which browser I was using, but later it occurred to me that it could have been Chrome — where I have a popup blocker on… The conversation led to the idea that Webhosting should also be tested. We had used them for so many years, so why not? They run Apache servers, and it turns out they are highly optimized! If you have multiple websites, they spread them across different servers for security reasons, even though it appears as if everything is running on just one server. And that’s smart, both for security and load balancing.
If the worst should happen, the customer doesn’t lose their entire hosting during the time it takes to restore from the backup. As far as an Apache configuration goes, we must say they perform really well. On the sites we tested, the TTFB time was consistently between 300-430ms, which can be considered perfectly fine. In fact, it’s quite good for an Apache server! This actually shows that many other hosting companies don’t know how to properly set up their Apache servers!
Webhosting.dk has email support, and they respond quickly to inquiries.
One
We have used One.com since around 2001, when they were called B-one and Be-one. One is 100% owned by Tribes (Holdings) Limited in London, with a Danish board of directors. They have 157 employees, but they don’t only work with hosting. They develop software for domain-related services and domain registration. Shortly after we signed up, we received an email from them saying that they had experienced server outages and were in the process of restoring our (the customers’) websites. The next day, we received another email from them where they had to admit that their backups couldn’t be restored… This was a long time ago, and we don’t return to them. But there are other reasons for this.
However, many of our customers use One.com, so we’ve had to keep track of what’s going on. The control panel gets 5 out of 10 points. Their chat support is almost not worth mentioning. We do work a lot with One.com because many of our clients use it. One.com is a bit like buying a Seagate hard drive. Due to their marketing, you think you’re getting quality, but the truth is that Seagate drives over the last 10 years have had an average failure rate of about 10% within the first 3 years of the drive’s lifetime, while most other hard drive manufacturers are below 1%!
One’s servers, however, belong to the mid-range now, and you cannot underestimate the fact that load time is one of the factors Google emphasizes when users should have a good experience. Who wants to sit and wait for the website to load…? TTFB times of about 300-600 ms are just on the edge. Their service, however, is laughable. The support staff can often help with the most basic issues, but as soon as things get a little complicated, their chat support suddenly takes hours.
If your website is attacked by a virus, they shut EVERYTHING down. It’s ridiculous that they block FTP access, especially since that’s what you need to restore the site. They force you to change the database password and FTP password before you can get your site back. They make things MUCH more difficult than necessary. Finding and removing/reparing infected files takes 3-15 minutes via FTP for us. But with One, it takes two hours! The extra cost for our clients is added on top of their hosting subscription at One.
Their stinking poor sense of reality means that you, or those you pay to fix your site, need to spend MUCH more time on it, and that costs many times more than several years of a subscription with One. However, there is one thing One is good at: marketing. Notice that every time you search for “hosting, dk-hostmaster” and similar terms, One dominates Google. Both with ads and articles. In short: Stay away from One.com!
Internet123
We used i123.dk a few years ago, and it was quite a messy affair – but it should be fairly mentioned that they have since made significant changes to the user interface. Measured TTFB times ranged from 440 to 990ms, which is probably on the high side if Google is to assess the user experience. They use SSD drives on their regular hosting plans, and on their Pro hosting plans, they now use NVMe drives, which are the fastest available. We dropped out because a website had 3 logins. One for the site. One for the database and one for FTP. With 3 sites that was 9 logins…
They don’t offer phone support on their cheap hosting plans, so if you need immediate support, you’ll have to buy a Pro solution, which is still competitive in terms of price. This test is on their cheapest plan, which does not include cron jobs. You’ll need to upgrade to a PRO solution to get them. We are planning a test of their Pro hosting, especially due to the NVMe drives, sometime soon. We no longer use i123 today, but we have customers who use them without issues. www.EtLivOppe.dk is hosted here.
Site5
Site5, based in Texas, offers reseller solutions so you can host for others. Their servers are not particularly fast, and their control panels are the most complicated we’ve ever tried. Additionally, they are expensive, and the cPanel, which handles the central part of the management, is stripped down so you only get the basic tools and have to pay extra to get the rest.
We used them for 4 years, and it just kept going downhill. We no longer use Site5!!
For a few sites, we were able to get the load time down to 650-750ms! Which is still too much if you really want to be at the top of Mount Google. Site5, like many other hosting companies, has been bought by a private equity firm. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean they get more money. They’re cutting costs and downsizing! Their servers haven’t been updated in a long time, and their support is now nearly nonexistent.
SSL is a foreign concept to them. This means that a pretty large number of the sites they host do NOT have SSL! They have a lot of issues, and you can waste quite a bit of time here. Our best advice is: Stay away from Site5! As things look now, it’s a sinking ship.
GoDaddy
GoDaddy is the worst mess we’ve ever seen. Control panels like they were designed by labyrinth experts. Expect to spend quite a bit of time finding your way around. Their servers are in the mid-range when it comes to speed. We won’t be coming back to them. We didn’t even bother doing a detailed speed test…
Siteground
Siteground is relatively easy to navigate if you’re used to cPanel. Normal Apache servers run with a timeout of 300 seconds. Siteground has set theirs so low that large templates—especially when you’re already logged into your site—time out. This is not very smart, and we had to ask them to set the timeout to normal, as we couldn’t work without running into that timeout too often.
They usually have chat support, but be aware that it gets shut down during periods of high support ticket volume! In 2021, they made significant changes to their setup. They are quite stable in terms of response times, even though it is shared hosting. Their TTFB times range between 100 and 300ms, which can be considered really impressive! Their first-level chat support is not the best in the world. Make sure to ask as many complicated questions as possible so that you get quickly escalated to second-level support! The great thing about Siteground is that they are CONSTANTLY working to improve. They are also more expensive than most others, but it’s worth paying for good quality. They are serious and now have data centers in:
Iowa, USA
London, UK
Eemshaven, Netherlands
Frankfurt, DE
Sydney, AU
Singapore
www.KoesterAndersen.dk & www.ShoulderSink.com are hosted here.
Simply
Simply is owned by Zitcom.dk (see the bottom of the article). Simply.com is used by several of our customers. We don’t complain much, but large sites become slow on Simply. Everything works fine, though, and it’s not particularly difficult to navigate their panels. The server speed is okay. We don’t use Simply ourselves, but the experiences with our customers’ websites are absolutely positive. Simply offers cron jobs on their hosting, and support is via email, though they usually respond fairly quickly. TTFB times range between 200-1600 ms. Yaz.dk & Vedfelt.dk are hosted here.
e-Studio
e-Studio has 3 employees, all of whom are owners of the company. They use LiteSpeed servers, which are somewhat faster than Apache. Unfortunately, there was no speed gain when moving our test site from Gigahost to e-Studio. Their TTFB times range from 1,700ms to 2,300ms. That’s too much! On top of that, it was a terrible hassle and took several days to get Cloudflare working. Their support believes the information they send out on how to set up CloudFlare records (MX records, etc.) is precise. However, it still didn’t work for us, even though we followed the instructions meticulously!
I don’t think their servers are optimized enough. Webhosting.dk, which uses Apache, is much faster with the same test site.
Email support works quickly, and we even had the luck of getting a response within two minutes on a Saturday! Nothing to complain about there! BUT you need to be clear and precise in your email to their support, otherwise you risk getting a response that doesn’t match your question. The servers are fairly stable, but we expected faster response times due to LiteSpeed. Note that Cron jobs are NOT included in the cheap hosting options, and you only get 2 GB of disk space with the smallest plan! This is only enough for a business card page. If you have even a small webshop like our test site, you can’t settle for their cheapest solution!
GreenGeeks
Recently, we decided to find a hosting company that offered lightning-fast shared hosting with the option to upgrade to VPS and reseller solutions. We chose GreenGeeks, even though there were a couple of other options (A2 & Hostinger) that seemed slightly faster. Many of the speed tests we find online are based on ping response times, and while it’s good to have stable and fast ping response times, it’s far from reliable to judge server speed based solely on that.
There are about 10 hosting companies that belong to the top league of shared hosting, and GreenGeeks is one of them. There are hundreds of affiliate reviews online, and funnily enough, they don’t all agree – maybe because they have different affiliate agreements??? We chose to use GreenGeeks for our heavy sites because of LiteSpeed, SSD disks, their eco-friendliness, and the fact they have a data center in Amsterdam. Denmark would be better because our customers are primarily here, but the servers in Amsterdam are faster than most Danish servers! Within a day, they transfer an existing website from your previous host. This is something that more and more companies offer now, and it definitely makes things a bit easier.
And we are impressed! It’s fast! Their ping and TTFB times are pretty stable. TTFB is always under 500ms, in fact, often between 200 and 300ms, and both we and Google are very happy about that. Sometimes we had TTFB times of 60-90ms, but although it’s remarkable, it shouldn’t be seen as average performance. GreenGeeks has cron jobs on all their hosting plans.
Keep in mind that Google assesses the user experience on your website, and load speed is a significant factor in this regard. Unfortunately, like many other American hosting companies, they have some hidden conditions that they DON’T advertise, and that are IMPOSSIBLE to find before you’ve bought the hosting. They advertise UNLIMITED DOMAINS and UNLIMITED WEBSPACE, but they have an inode limit of 300,000 on the small plans and 600,000 on the larger one. Companies that work with inode limits either don’t know anything about inodes or they want customers to upgrade. Not just to one package but often multiple ones. Inodes are a Unix concept, and companies consider an inode to be any file on your website – database files, emails, and WordPress files. But an inode isn’t a regular file. It’s a metadata file that contains information about other files and is pointed to by those files. So, it’s a meta-file. And if you challenge these companies, it quickly becomes clear they don’t know what they’re dealing with.
Now, the thing is, a simple WordPress site takes up about 20,000 files plus database files and emails. If you have a webshop, you’ll be closer to 50,000 files, and you should ALWAYS make sure to clean up your WordPress installation. Especially cache files (from caching plugins). They can go completely haywire. If you have many images in your media library, that adds up quickly because WordPress stores an image in 11 different sizes. So, 100 images are 1,100 files. When we transferred website number 5 to GreenGeeks, we got the unexpected warning that we had reached 280,000 inodes, and because they don’t disclose this information before purchase, we considered it false advertising.
After a long support thread, they decided to close the hosting account, as they realized it would cost too much in support… Now we are well aware that unlimited domains are probably more of a sales gimmick than reality, but there’s a LONG way from 5 websites to unlimited! That kind of marketing is NOT allowed in the EU. It’s false advertising, and there are NO companies in the EU that hide these limitations. We actually enjoy a lot of user protection in Denmark and the EU. But it’s quite normal to fiddle with marketing in the US. It has no consequences over there.
TMD Hosting
So we did a test on TMD Hosting. We started by copying a small test site over and see what happened. And as long as it was small it ran fine. But it was VERY small in the beginning. WordPress, no plugins and 3 sub pages.
But soon we began guilding on the site and that’s when we ran into problems. Pages wouldn’t load and we suddenly began getting getting load times on several minutes and we also sarted getting a TON of 503 Service Unavailable errors.
We looked at the stats and we used less than 1% of the available CPU and memory consumption was less that 10% of max. So we should NOT be having these problems.
It took some time and we were at the verge of giving up trying to make them understand that resources were messed up and we got way lower execution time than we should have. We did spend a few weeks on this and decided to stop working with TDM as they didn’t seem to be willing to look into what caused our load problems. Very small site still, fully optimized and there were MUCH less resources available than cHosting and Nordic way who also run LiteSpeed.
That’s when we got a mail where they told us they have investigated the matter and found a bug in CloudLinux (the underlying Linux system) which also is responsible for resource assignment! They contacted CloudLinux, they made an instant fix and VOILA! Everything was running exactly as we would expect on a LiteSpeed server. This bug affected ½ a million servers worldwide!
We didn’t move our site – it is still running on TMD and we are happy they did examine the system and found the bug. We have had nothing to complain about since then so we are happy running just another lightning fast website one a LiteSpeed server.
They have datacenters in Chicago, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Tokyo, Singapore, Santiago, Johannesburg and Sidney. With servers spread all over the globe you can always find one close to your customers. We are on the Frankenfurt center and it works great.
NordicWay
It’s 2021, and the turn has come to NordicWay. And it was a surprise! A good one. Our first test (with a larger DIVI setup and WooCommerce) showed a TTFB time of 181ms! Our jaw dropped lower than a whale’s!
We consider that an insanely good TTFB time, given that Google likes times between 200-500ms! And NordicWay stays under 200ms in 9 out of 10 tests. There is just that tenth one, which, funnily enough, can reach a couple of seconds…
It’s likely a peak load issue, but that’s the next thing we’ll investigate.
NordicWay is highly recommended! Great email support and the fastest servers we’ve seen in Denmark to date. If you’re serious about getting your site to the top of Google, you should start with the fastest server you can find. That’s NordicWay. And the price is very reasonable!
It should also be mentioned that with NordicWay, you can have multiple sites on the same hosting, but this will reduce the speed of all sites. If it’s small, simple sites, it doesn’t matter, but if it’s a mediocre webshop, you should keep it on its own server.
Greenlytica, DontFuckWithDaddy.com, BilligBlog.dk, PassionBlogist.com and AnnaDreyer.dk are hosted here.
Conclusion
So far, the best LOCAL hosting in this test is NordicWay.dk, closely followed by WebHosting.dk and cHosting.dk. So far, it’s one of these two you should use if your site is going to have a chance to meet Google’s requirement of 200-500ms response time for the first byte. The price of both is incredibly good, and the support is really top-notch at both.
So, if anyone asks us who they should use for hosting in Denmark, the answer is: WebHosting.dk, NordicWay, or cHosting.
Are you looking for INTERNATIONAL hosting, go for TMD Hosting. We haven’t tried all hosting companies in the world, but they are running on the fastest possible data centers with the latest hardware. There are more companies operating with approximately the same speed, but this is top notch and the fastest hosting you will get today!
For general information:
Zitcom A/S is a merger of: Team Blue Denmark A/S, 123HOTEL A/S, WANNAFIND.DK A/S, CURANET A/S, SERVERHOSTING A/S, WEBGLOBE A/S, ADUX A/S, A/S SCANNET.DK, A/S SCANNET, KJD A/S, Kronjyllands Data Center A/S, Danhost A/S, UNOEURO DANMARK A/S (CLOUD A/S, CLOUD.DK A/S, MEEBOX A/S, TALK ACTIVE A/S), Surftown A/S (SURFTOWN AFRICA A/S, SURFTOWN ASIA A/S, SURFTOWN EUROPE A/S, SURFTOWN INTERNATIONAL A/S), DANDOMAIN A/S (ARCNET A/S, DANFINANCE A/S, DANHOSTING A/S, PAYNET A/S, WEBEDIT A/S), SMARTWEB ApS (ITCONCEPT ApS, SMART-WEB ApS, SMARTWEB INTERNATIONAL ApS, MONZUME ApS, XLWEB ApS).
This article is updated regularly. Latest update: 09 May 2025.
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