Introduction

Last Update Jan 18, 2021

Millions of people around the world need a website, and there are literally thousands of web hosting services to choose from. So, how do you know which one is the best? When shopping for a web hosting provider, there are few key things you should consider. Overall, you should be looking for a web host that is fast, secure, has good uptime, and provides good customer support.

• Uptime:
  • Always look for 99% or better, anything less should be setting off alarm bells.
• Speed:
  • Some shared hosting plans may not perform as well as others. Speed is important as many studies show customers and users will drop from your landing page if it takes more than 2 seconds to load. If it takes more than 5 seconds, nearly 50% of people won’t wait.
• Traffic
  • Many hosts offer “unlimited” traffic, but this is never actually true. It’s hard to anticipate how much traffic your site will generate, but consider looking at the higher tier plans, as you may have to upgrade if your site becomes popular.
• Resources:
  • Resources are things like RAM, disk space and CPU power. The amount you need will vary for each person and business, but should be thoughtfully considered. Resources are used based upon number of visitors, general amount of web traffic that your site may experience, files uploaded, and scripts or functions you website may execute.
    • Disk Space: a subsection of this would be disk space. Are you hosting a lot of files, images, videos or other types of content that take up a lot of space? Or, are you just creating a simple landing page? Those who are considering resource intensive websites should be very mindful when choosing a host.
• Customization(s):
  • This shouldn’t be an issue for most people. Nevertheless, some people might want to install custom software or operating systems on their server. These people should avoid most standard type hosting packages and rather opt for VPS or dedicated options.
    • Control Panels: Most hosts theses days provide cPanel as the interface between you and the server. Nevertheless, be sure to check what’s on offer, as some hosts don’t use cPanel and have their own custom interface. Generally this isn’t an issue but if you plan to transfer a website it may cost more if it’s not a cPanel type website.
• Technical and Customer Support:
  • Most hosts these days offer 24/7 chat and phone support. We like hosts that are willing to go the extra step and help out as much as needed when it comes to support. Technical support, we feel, is the most important thing. A good technical support staff that can find issues and address them quickly is a friend indeed.
• Price:
  • Last but not least, is price and value for money. You can find really cheap hosting, but sometimes penny pinching can hurt in the long run. Everyone should consider the type of website they are planning to run. Simple websites, portfolios, or small sites can usually do fine on budget hosting. Nevertheless, if you’re setting out to build a business, opting for premium hosting can be a smart choice.

Top Hosts

Value for Money: NameCheap

Benefits

• WhoIS protection included
• Unbeatable prices
• Wide Selection of domains available
• Above average load times

Promotions

• Limited offer: $84% off your perfect .co domain
• Save up to 65% on Namecheap Shared Hosting today!
• VPS hosting: up to 20% off!

NameCheap offers the overall best value for your money. It has extremely competitive pricing, great features, and good speed!

Namecheap is more than just hosting, they also are a domain registar service. This makes them a great one stop shop for buying a domain and hosting it.

They offer 24/7 support, which is slowly becoming industry standard for most hosts. Nevertheless, after speaking with a support representative, we felt their service lacked refinement. When we asked about transferring a site over to them, they just sent us some links to a FAQ page instead of taking the time to really understand what we were after. After I told them I had already read the FAQ, they then told me to open a support ticket with a different department. Although I eventually got the answer I was looking for, it would have been nice if they could have told me to open a support ticket from the get-go.

Recently, as of Jan 2021

Since writing the previous paragraph about support, we’ve had several more instances of interacting with NameCheap technical support. We’ll have to give them bonus points for our more recent experiences with the support team.

We didn’t have to wait to chat with anyone, and they were friendly, knowledgable, and helpful enough to sort out our issues with an SSL certificate.

Prices and Plans

Note that these prices are for 2 year contracts. The renewal fees are also easy to find. Even their most expensive shared hosting plan renews at $208.88 for 2 years, and it delivers extreme value for money because they include so many features:

Features Included:

• SSD storage
• WhoIS protection
• A free domain for 1 year
• Free automatic SSL
• 30-day money back guarantee
• Choice of datacenter location

Moreover, Namecheap has great offerings on WP hosting, VPS, and dedicated options. Offering great value with good speed, SSD storage, 24/7 support and extremely affordable pricing, you’ll be hard pressed to find better value for money elsewhere.

Best For Speed: A2 Hosting

Benefits

• Super Fast
• Good Support
• 99.9% uptime
• 30 day money back guarantee

Promotions

• Up to 66% off shared hosting and WP hosting

A2 Hosting with their turbo servers A2 holds the rank of fastest host in the market; averaging an impressive 317ms loading time.

Speed is surprisingly important because there is a direct correlation between longer load times and users dropping off. Ideally, your site should load in under 2 seconds! Anything above 2 seconds and you’ll start seeing users drop off. A2 has the fastest hosting in the market.

Shared Plans and Price

Key Features:

• 24/7 live support
• Free SSL certificate(s)
• Website Staging
• Choice of data center location
• Transfer in unlimited websites
• CDN network
• Easy to use cPanel
• Unlimited e-mail accounts

Growth features (only included on drive tier and above)

• 2x the resources
• Free server rewind data backup protection
• Unlimited databases
• Traffic spike protection option

Turbo Features (only on Turbo Boost and Turbo Max plans):

A2 Hosting also is a great option for WordPress Hosting. They offer shared WP hosting and Managed WP hosting. Lastly, they offer VPS and dedicated options if you need a more robust option.

Overall, A2 hosting delivers great quality hosting. They are the fastest hosting provider, boasting really impressive load times. Their prices are a bit on the higher end, but we feel that for the speed, good customer support, and overall great quality of the hosting it is money well spent.

Best Premium Host: SiteGround

Benefits

• Amazing customer support
• Premium hosting
• Super secure
• Company reinvests profits to constantly improve the business.

Promotions

• Up to 72% off shared hosting and WP hosting (promotional pricing)

SiteGround spends a lot of time improving their business. They re-invest a lot of their profits into making their services better, more efficient, and easier for their clients to use. All of this comes at a premium though. Siteground is one of the more expensive hosts around. Nevertheless, you get what you pay for, premium service, features, and quality.

Shared Hosting Plans and Price

Siteground offers Shared Hosting, Managed WP Hosting, and eCommerce Hosting. In reality, they are all the same package you see above. You can see one of the features included in the shared plan is “managed WordPress”. Essentially, they’ve set all their plans up to included WordPress optimization features.

Features:

• Automatic backups
• Automatic core WP updates
• Staging environment
• 30 days money back guarantee

SiteGround Cloud Hosting

If you ever outgrow your shared hosting services, you’ll likely have to upgrade to one of their cloud hosting plans. Normally, this wouldn’t be such a big deal. But, after you see the prices, you might understand why this is a serious thing to consider if you’re aiming to set up a website that has big growth potential. On their lowest tier cloud hosting plan you’ll be paying near $1000 per year to keep your websites online!

Wrap-Up

We really like Siteground, their customer service is great, the load times are great, and the managed WP is awesome. They have implemented their own custom interface to manage your websites, so you won’t get a cPanel. It’s very simple, and straightforward. Advanced users might be a little put off by this as it feels a bit limiting compared with cPanel. It might also make migrating your sites off SiteGround a bit more costly if you ever decide to move them.

Best Hosting for Small Projects– BlueHost

Benefits

• Lots of different hosting package choices
• WordPress Recommended
• 30-day money back guarantee
• Great options for eCommerce
• Easy to use SEO and social media dashboard

Promotions

• Up to 63% off shared hosting and WP hosting (promotional pricing)

BlueHost offers a wide variety of hosting packages, which is why we chose them as best host overall, as they should have the perfect plan to suit your needs. Ranging from basic packages, awesome managed WordPress, all way up to dedicated hosting options, there is something for everyone.

Recently(Nov 202), Bluehost has updated their hosting packages with new WordPress options, eCommerce options and shared deals. One awesome feature that BlueHost has is the integrated SEO, social media and marketing centers. Essentially, you can view all your data from one easy to manage control panel, instead of having to switch between Google analytics, and whatever other plugins you may be using. An all in one solution for your marketing, and SEO needs at your fingertips.

Overall we’re very impressed with the recent updates from BlueHost. We believe that the all in one marketing center adds great value for money, offering tips, and insights on how to improve your SEO and saving time and money by consolidating your workflow into a single easy to manage location. Their plans are very fairly price, and offer loads of options to fairly priced upgrades if your business or site grows enough to warrant that.

Best Budget Hosting– DreamHost

Benefits

• Custom intuitive control panel
• Great value for money
• Recommended for WordPress
• 97 day money back guarantee (only on shared web hosting)

Promotions

• Check The Latest Promotions Here

DreamHost offers very affordable hosting that doesn’t skimp on features, services or quality. Even if you’re looking for more robust hosting options such as VPS or dedicated services, Dreamhost provides great value for money .

Shared Hosting

A few notes about DreamHost’s shared hosting plans are: The plans pictures are for 3-year terms. The starter package does not include e-mail, and has no renewal fees. Whereas, Shared Unlimited does include e-mail, but it renews at $7.95/month. The promotional pricing is exceptional coming out to about $59/per year. Over three years you’d pay only $178 dollars! After renewal the prices are still exceptionally fair clocking in at just under $100/year for the unlimited plan.

WordPress and VPS offerings

Notes:

These plans are only available for 1 website. The key offerings are:

• Staging
• Free WP site migrations
• Automated and on-demand back-ups
• Easy to use website builder
• Jetpack Professional on higher tier plans

These plans might work nicely for someone with a single business or website. For those of us who have multiple websites or need more robust hosting can opt for their extremely affordable VPS hosting. We think that the Dreamhost VPS hosting packages are some of the best value for money available anywhere.

VPS and WP VPS Hosting

Key Features include

• Fully managed VPS environment
• Custom easy to use control panel
• NO root access
• 100% uptime guarantee

Dreamhost is an independently owned and operated company which clearly has allowed them to deliver great value for money. We like all the included features, fast load speeds, and plans that can scale without crippling your wallet. Some may see the fact that they don’t use cPanel as a downside, as migrating your site away from DreamHost will be more difficult and possibly cost more, but you’ll likely never leave them once you’re there anyways.

Honorable Mention– HostGator

Benefits

• Good for Beginners
• 45-day money back guarantee
• Fairly priced

Promotions

• Up to 60% OFF NEW Hosting + $4.99 on Select Domains with Promo Code Spring2017
• Get started with WordPress! Big Discounts on WP Hosting!

Used globally by thousands of people, HostGator deserves a mention purely because it’s such a large hosting provider. Nevertheless, their size alone fails to claim a title in the top hosts category. They do offer very affordable plans, which can scale well if you need to ever upgrade, but generally their customer support falls short, failing to offer things like e-mail support and not doing enough to make sure clients are happy.

We suggest then if you’re looking for a basic, cheap option for hosting and not too concerned with customer service, HostGator could be a good option for you.

Shared Hosting

The renewal fees are a bit hidden, which we think is somewhat duplicitous. For the Baby Plan you’ll be looking to renew at just under $10/month. Keep in mind that extras cost more. Useful features like SEO tools, and site back up will cost you extra $46 per year. IF you can do without the extras and stick to what’s included then the prices offered are very reasonable.

Basic Plan Comparison

Note- GREEN PRICE indicate promotional period pricing, selected for the longest term offered. RED prices(renewal pricing) are for when it comes time to renew your plan. This table is for BAISC plans only.

Best Value Plan Comparison

We’ve also decided to make a comparison table for the middle, and higher tier plans. We selected what we though was the best value for money plan based on; features, allocated resources, price, and value. Most hosts push these plans as being “recommended” or “most popular”, and they tend to included unlimited domains, email, SSL, and lots of other goodies.