Kits Media endorses products that meet our high standards for performance. We hope you find these resources useful.
Hosting
We recommend very few hosts and offer three main reasons in brief.
We do not recommend hosts that allow adult sites of any kind (pornography, gambling, etc) on shared hosting, because your Google rankings will be affected. Popular hosts that allow adult content include Hostgator, Dreamhost, Justhost, Omnis, Supergreen, Hostican and Canadian Web Hosting, but the list is much more extensive because most hosts allow adult content. When you get an account with a host, you are assigned storage space on one of their servers. The storage space has an address called an “IP” address, and it is shared with other websites. If Google flags or bans a website sharing your IP because it has adult or spam content, the whole IP address is flagged or banned – including your files. To avoid this situation entirely, we only recommend hosts who do not accept any kind of adult sites.
In addition, we only recommend hosts who do daily or weekly backups of your files - especially for WordPress sites. WordPress files are vulnerable to hacking. The only copy of your files is on your host’s server. We have had clients who hosted with GoDaddy, Hostpapa, Canadian Web Hosting and other popular hosts, and lost all their files to hackers. This was a major loss because there were no backup files we could re-install. Therefore we do not recommend these hosts for WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or Magento sites.
Third, we only recommend hosts who make access to the back end (administration panel) of your site easy and efficient. WordPress currently has more than 1000 files in an installation and we have found that the only way to ensure the installation is complete is to do a manual installation.
We do not recommend hosts who use Windows servers, and we do not recommend servers hosted by individuals. If you’re looking for a Canadian host, it is difficult to find one that actually hosts in Canada. From the top 10 lists, an average of 8/10 “Canadian” web hosts use servers in the US or England for their own sites. (You can easily do an IP check to see where a company is located, although the servers they use to host their customers could be anywhere in the world.) Hosts who are actually located in Canada tend to be much more expensive, on a network that is not sufficiently secure, charge disproportionate monthly rates for backup, or a combination of these issues.
Bluehost is our #1 host of choice, and it is the #1 choice of server by WordPress itself. The administration panel (cpanel) is simple, intuitive and easy to use. WordPress and other CMS software can be installed through the back end or a wizard. (We recommend the back end.) Bluehost makes it easy to install databases. They do weekly backups and do not allow adult sites. Their support staff is available by phone 24/7 and we can personally guarantee that – having phoned them late at night many times, even on holidays.
Like Bluehost, Hostmonster is a top-rated site. They do not allow adult hosting and they do daily backups. Both services offer their clients unlimited disk storage on their servers, both services offer an unlimited amount of bandwidth; and both services offer their plans with free domain names.
Templates
We recommend Theme Forest and Woothemes as the best sources of templates for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Shopify and more.
Audio files
We recommend Audio Jungle as a good source of audio files for music, tracks, sound effects and more.
Stock photos
Our favourite sites for stock photos are Photodune and iStock. Most images cost less than a few dollars and are very high quality. Also read more about where to find copyright-free images.
Graphic River is a great source of graphics files. Graphic River also offers templates for print products like stationery, business cards and brochures, plus an extensive range of web elements for developers.
Free fonts
Our favourite source for free fonts is www.dafont.com. Read more about how to find a free font for your project.
