Best Website Hosting for Photographers – Top 7 Reviews in 2021

Do you have excellent photography skills but lack marketing ploys to let your audience know you exist? In this time and age, you have to take advantage of the online platform to showcase what you’ve got.

It is not enough that you have a website. You have to use the best website hosting for photographers. This is where this guide comes in handy. In the list below, I have narrowed down your choices of the best hosting sites for photographers.

You will find out vital information about these sites, including the pros and cons of using them to up your game and reap its rewards the soonest.

Do You Have a Clear Idea of Web Hosting?

Before delving further into web hosting, you have to understand what it’s all about. Web hosting is often confused with website building. However, they are different concepts. There are traditional web hosting companies where you will pay for the server space but use another site, a content management system, to put up your website.

This is website hosting. You own the website, including its configuration and code, and you can utilize other web hosting providers for your website whenever you want. When you use website builders such as Weebly, SmugMug, or Wix, you are utilizing their platform to build your website and host it as well.

Anything you do on one platform is not transferable. What you own are the images you upload to the platform, your branding, content, and whatever you have decided to put up on the site you created. Whenever you choose to use another website builder service, you can’t transfer the galleries and pages you have created from one platform to another.

You will start from scratch, upload your images, and create new galleries, pages, and content on your website on the new platform. However, what can you possibly gain from using a web hosting service? Showcasing your portfolio is one thing.

It would be convenient to send a link to your clients where they can view your work samples. Aside from that, you can also use the platform to sell digital photographs and set up a stock photo website. The best thing about it is that you can do all these things in one web hosting site.

Top 7 Best Website Hosting for Photographers Review

Without further ado, here are 7 of the most useful web hosting sites that can make you look like a pro in the digital platform no matter what your level of expertise is:

1.Wix

This is hands down one of the many web builders’ favorites for its features, speed, and ease of use. This WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) site building provider gives you thousands of templates to choose from. All of these templates are broken down into categories so you won’t have a hard time choosing which ones to use.

You can quickly learn how to navigate Wix even when you are not familiar with website creation in the first place. The Wix Editor enables you to drag and drop items on your site wherever you want to put them. You can play with items or experiment with the site’s background image, visual sliders, or buttons.

Aside from that, you can even use Wix free of charge at the start. This will allow you to navigate the features without giving your commitment or paying anything. The best thing about Wix is that it keeps on improving. It continues to upgrade its templates and customizations features among others.

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2.SmugMug

This is both a hosting service and an image sharing site in one. Whether you are a newbie or pro, you can use it to feature your work and sell photographs. You can work on its customizable design templates that let you choose if you want a grid-style design, a full-screen layout, and others.

You can easily personalize your space without any coding. Aside from the intuitive user interface, you can utilize more than 20 of the site’s premade designs.

The most expensive plan, the Portfolio, includes professional features such as integration into known print laboratories, adding customized watermarks to your photos, and many more. It also has the eCommerce feature with product integration and a shopping cart that makes it easier for you to put up an online gallery store.

3.Weebly

The site is easy to navigate, especially for those who don’t have experience in web building. Weebly started and became popular as a free drag-and-drop editor browser-based site. Now, it is making a mark as a value-added service to many popular hosting plans online.

It gives you up to 500 MB of storage if you are a free plan user. The rest of its plan holders get unlimited storage and bandwidth. Each plan upgrade gives more eCommerce-specific tools. It’s okay to begin with Weebly’s basic plans when you are a beginner.

As you expand your site and services, it would be best to migrate to a host that includes Weebly and all its features. Doing so will help you increase your revenue and boost your site traffic in a cost-effective manner.

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4.A2 Hosting

A2’s hosting packages prioritize the specific needs of their clients above pricing. They include several SSD speed boost plans, 24/7 support from the Guru Crew, and a free Cloudflare content delivery network. You will find Softaculous in its cPanel control panel which features one-click installations of the in-demand online app.

It also provides clients with Perpetual Security features which guards your page against viruses and other types of online schemes. Aside from that, it also provides 24/7 network monitoring. The company created the Turbo hosting platform that it is using.

Its Turbo servers can load pages 20 times faster than the other providers. It enables faster loading of pages using less memory and CPU.

5.Hostinger

Hostinger is a service that’s often recommended for photographers who want to create a professional portfolio online. It provides an excellent platform to showcase your work, whether you are a newbie or a pro. besides, you’ll find it easier to use if you have experience in handling a WordPress website.

The site allows you to access different site scripts and tools used for site building, including WordPress. You can also create a fully customized site through WordPress photography themes. Needless to say, Hostinger is one of the most popular platforms out there, with more than 29 million users around the world.

One of the best parts about this service is that they have very responsive customer support as well as a 99.99% uptime guarantee. You can also find a number of hosting options for your needs, including Shared Web, VPS, WordPress, and even Minecraft hosting – all for a very affordable monthly subscription!

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6.500px

The platform is mostly about community building. It is now being used by more than 15 million creatives, including photographers. They all share their outputs to get noticed by people from around the globe. Once you become a member, the site will provide you with your own profile.

This will give you access to look into other users’ profiles and like their works. You can also access history and advanced analytics which you can use in devising your marketing ploys. Upgraded plans will be allowed to offer workshops and their services to other users.

Those new to the 500px community can even receive promotional credits that they can use to further enhance their portfolio. Besides, even its most basic plan can provide you with all those essential information to help develop your brand.

These will allow you to figure out which of your photos attract attention the most, the type of audience who are interested in your works, and more.

7.Zenfolio

Zenfolio is a versatile platform that can display a range of creative outputs. You will get unlimited storage when you subscribe to their plans, so you won’t need to worry about uploading as many high-resolution photos that you want. Moreover, this hosting platform is more suited to event photographers since they can have the client login option aside from the unlimited storage.

Unfortunately, its SEO functionality is poor, so if you’re expecting to get new traffic, it might not be your best option. The good thing is, that downside can be easily mitigated by the various benefits Zenfolio offers.

Not counting the ones we mentioned previously, it also offers tons of templates that you can customize according to your brand’s theme. It even comes with image protection and security, a built-in payment system, and image optimization among others.

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Top Considerations in Choosing the Best Photo Hosting Site for Photographers

How do you pick the right website hosting for professional photographers? Well, you have to weigh your requirements and budget then choose according to the kind of website you want to put up.

Here are some of the most important considerations when choosing the best website hosting for photographers:

Traffic Allowance and Bandwidth Allocation

Bandwidth is crucial when it comes to photography website hosting. It is different from internet speed despite often being mistaken as such. Bandwidth, which is calculated in Mbps or megabits per second, is the amount of data that can be sent through in a measured amount of time.

For this reason, you have to look into sites with high bandwidth allowances. Let us look at it this way. You would want 10 people to view a 500KB photo. The process will consume bandwidth of around 5MB.

The more photos you upload on the site, the more bandwidth you’ll need to enable more visitors to see them without the site crashing or slowing down. For your photo hosting site to be popular, you have to ensure a hosting package that includes a good bandwidth.

Storage Capacity

Your storage space is your lifeline in this online platform. It dictates how many categories you can create per gallery and how many pictures you can post. You can always save space by choosing to compress your images, but this would mean lower quality for your images.

As a photographer, you have to provide your clients with your best shots in high resolution all the time. You are not only aiming for their attention, but you also want them to get interested and keep coming back for more.

An image file takes up more space than a text document. A small image with only 300×400 pixels can take about 60KB of storage space while a 2000-characters of a web page will only eat up about 2KB of disk space.

Since you will obviously upload images with each file having a size of 500KB to 1 MB, you will need the best website hosting for photographers that provides ample disk space for the big volume of images you intend to upload.

Support for High-Resolution Photos

The site has to provide you with a platform that will allow you to display your photos in high-resolution. Certain websites provide a pixelated version of the images to their visitors to make sure that the site will run smoothly and fast all the time. As a photographer who intends to showcase every detail of your work, you have to find a hosting site that will give you an excellent resolution without affecting how fast the site loads.

If the provider has a money-back or trial period, you may want to grab the chance and use the time to test it for flaws and bugs. You can upload sharp images to check if the site will show the photos’ real quality and how fast or slow it will load each image.

During the trial period, take the time to view your uploaded images on different gadgets – mobile, tablet, or desktop. You need to experience what your future clients would see once the site is up.

Admin Support

You need to be clear about this aspect, especially when you have limited technical knowledge. You have to ask about the provider’s support team’s availability and how you can get in touch with them. You can also try calling or sending them an email as a client to get an idea about how fast they will respond and how efficient they are in answering their clients’ queries.

Ease of Usage

If you intend to manage your web hosting, you would want something easy to work on as much as possible. Upon signing up on the platform, try to gauge whether or not you can easily navigate through it on your own. It has to take care of the majority of the technical aspects which should leave you focused on your photos, content, and dealing with clients.

The Integration of CDN in Photography Hosting

A CDN or content delivery network works by loading a web page faster by utilizing multiple servers distributed around the world. For the kind of web hosting you have, your pages must load quickly to serve your site visitors. If loading took too long, these visitors wouldn’t hesitate to click another site, which eventually means losing potential clients.

Using a CDN is crucial when you want your photos to be seen by a national or international audience. CDN will use the server nearest the location of a website visitor when they visit the site, which will make the page load faster.

Stand Out Portfolio Website Design

As an artist, you have to showcase your work in a way that it will become your proud online representation. You have to be proud of it once it’s out there. This is why it is crucial to choose a web hosting service that will enhance your work instead of detracting its value. Before signing up for the services, review the available templates and check if some styles and designs match your taste and brand.

Speed of the Web Hosting Site

Your hosting provider must be capable of loading with efficient speed since your site will be filled with images. You can’t afford to invest in a provider that will take too much time to load. All the web hosting sites featured above have above average speed capacity.

Before choosing one, you may want to perform speed testing of each website on your own to learn about the site’s speed on your own before clicking the sign-up button.

Data Restore and Backup Functions of the Provider

You need to have a guarantee that your work will be automatically saved and restored in case of any glitch. The last thing you need when putting up an online portfolio is to do everything from the start.

While most of the sites are easy to use, you will still spend a lot of time uploading, arranging, and rearranging your files to ensure that your website visitors won’t have a hard time navigating through them.

Ask their customer support or read through the FAQs to ensure that your data will be restored if a malfunction happens to their server.

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Final Notes

You always have a choice when it comes to photo web hosting – whether you are going to avail of a paid or a free service. Free services mean limited features and a lack of customization options. These free sites include PhotoBucket, Google Photos, Imgur, or Flickr.

All of them can serve as a learning ground for those who are still starting in the business and want to find out how things work. Your photos are your masterpieces that you want to showcase to the world for various reasons – whether for art or commerce.

Whatever your reason is, make sure that you get the kind of service that will make you look good, especially to the eyes of the people who may be needing the type of services that you can provide.

If you are a pro or you want to look like one, it is best to invest in the best website hosting for photographers. You can enjoy more features, and it will let you focus on your photos instead of spending too much of your time finding out how it works.