Compare The Top Best Web Hosting Service Providers in 2022.
Signing up for a top quality web hosting provider is an important step in your journey towards creating, growing and maintaining an online presence for yourself or your business.
Want to jump straight to the answer? The best web hosting provider for most people is Hostinger or Bluehost.
Your chosen hosting provider is critical to the success of your website. A reputable hosting provider keeps your site online and helps you avoid unnecessary downtime.
We provide detailed summaries for each web hosting provider and highlight their respective strengths and features, which may be important for your choice, and pricing information and why each specific web host may be suitable for you.
The Top 10 Best Web Hosting Providers
Bluehost – Best Web Host for Beginners
Bluehost is one of the most popular and best choices for web hosting.
This is because they provide great shared web hosting solutions at incredibly affordable prices. They are designed for people who are new to website building.
Shared hosting starts at $8.99 per month, but there are big discounts if you are a new customer. You can sign up for three years and lock in at $2.75 per month. This is a good deal, especially with what you get.
If you get stuck or have a problem, they have 24/7 support via phone or live chat. They list their support numbers and live chat options directly on their site, so you can reach for help in two clicks.
Bluehost offers fantastic analytics and SEO tools to help optimize your site’s performance – while attracting more visitors.
Their SEO tool that scores and tracks how well your website is ranking for specific keywords. This gives you a good idea of how your site should be optimized for the best search rankings.
They also offer hosting that will support the growth of your business in any direction.
Let’s say you start with a standard shared hosting plan and want to install WordPress. They have a simple 1-click install to make this happen.
If your site is constantly growing and you want to upgrade to WordPress hosting to increase the speed and security of your site, they have it too.
Or, if you want to gain more control by upgrading to VPS or Dedicated Hosting, there are plans for both.
Bluehost covers everything you need from your host. This is what makes them the best for new website builders.
If you start with them, you will never have to switch to another service.
Hostinger – Most Affordable Hosting Plans Overall
Hosting is the best choice if you want to save money.
In fact, their minimum plan is $ 1.39 per month. It is under the rock.
And if you take a look at what each plan has to offer, I think you’ll find that a new site includes everything you need.
All of these rates are promotional, so they will increase the renewal time. But you are able to lock in this ridiculously low price on long subscriptions.
They offer four-year single shared hosting for $66.72, which is $1.39 per month if you pay in advance for four years. This is an amazing deal. However, be aware that very low prices do not include domain names or domain privacy. Despite the additional costs, the total advance charges are lower than others on the list.
Even after the promotional pricing is over, the price is still very affordable. The single-site plan costs $ 2.99 per month after renewal, which is one of the lowest rates in the industry. In fact, it’s the same as Bluehost’s promotional price.
The best part? Hostinger doesn’t feel like cheap hosting.
From marketing to UI to managing your site, this is a premium host with an in-depth list of features in each plan.
Hostinger offers a separate plan for email hosting only. It starts at just $ 0.99 per month.
Uptime, site speed and support are all pretty good. They have a 99.9% uptime guarantee with 24/7 support whenever you need help.
SiteGround – Best for Making Your WordPress Site Speedy & Secure
Fast loading times are best if you want your website to gain traction. If a site takes five seconds or more to load, nine out of ten potential page visitors will get bail.
SiteGround is designed to provide its customers with top-class speed, as well as rock-solid security. And especially for WordPress sites.
It all starts with the technology that makes them hosting. SiteGround uses Google Cloud to maintain fast and stable connectivity and their SSD ensures continuous data storage low latency.
Not only that, the innovative developers of SiteGround have come up with their own, better PHP solution by the end of 2022 UltraFast PHP. With this, SiteGround provides site speeds that are 30% faster than standard PHP, as well as halves first byte time and reduces memory usage by 15%.
I’ll save you the hassle of doing the math yourself — SiteGround will speed up your site so much that you’ll be counting page loads in fractions of a second instead of a whole page.
Ultrafast PHP also exemplifies SiteGround’s commitment to active security. They update this proprietary PHP Weekly Firewall Rules.
SiteGround disconnects accounts on their servers, so shared hosting customers never have to worry about a compromised account negatively affecting others.
Beyond that, they are always careful to keep their customers’ sites secure and stable. SiteGround runs a server health check every 0.5 seconds, and its AI-powered anti-bot system blocks between 500,000 and 2 million brute force attack attempts per hour.
This combination of speed and security can work for most sites. However, as one of the recommended web hosts for WordPress, SiteGround is particularly suitable for providing this functionality for WordPress sites.
They constantly scan for emerging platform vulnerabilities and offer automatic updates, adding an extra level of protection.
Also, all SiteGround plans not just their WordPress hosting options include one-click WordPress installation, automatic updates for both WP Starter Site Builder and the WordPress platform and its plugins.
Altogether, that’s a lot of value included:
- StartUp: $3.99/month for one year, paid annually
- GrowBig: $6.69/month for one year, paid annually
- GoGeek: $10.69/month for one year, paid annually
Keep in mind that each plan will be renewed after one year at a decently high rate. SiteGround also gives you the option to pay for a 24-month or 36-month period instead of a checkout.
However, SiteGround offers excellent discounts on renewals over a period of one year. Two year renewal base gets 20% discount on renewal rate and three year renewal gets 30% discount.
So, in terms of long-term value, you’re still getting the best deal by capitalizing on their great intro rate for one year.
All in all, SiteGround offers the best technology and services to host your WordPress site and keep it fast and secure for all visitors.
A2 Hosting – Fast & Reliable Shared Hosting
A2 hosting differs for their great speed and low price.
At each hosting level (Shared, VPS, Dedicated), A2 hosting loses to other hosts in speed. If you’re coming from another shared web host, you’re probably going to see an improvement in loading speed after you move to A2.
With their Turbo Boost and Turbo Max plans, you get access to their turbo servers. They’re proud that it’s 20x faster than their other servers and includes:
- 40% faster AMD EPYC CPU performance
- 2x faster than the first byte
- Manage 9x more traffic
- 3 times faster read / write speed with NVMe drive
- All A2 hosting plans also have a 99.9% uptime commitment so you know you will have a reliable host that will not shut down often.
They offer free site migration with each plan. This is a great deal if you set up your site on a bad host and want to move. This will save you dozens of hours trying to rebuild your site. The A2 hosting team takes care of it for you.
Like other web hosts, 1-click is installed for popular CMS tools like WordPress, Magento and Drupal.
Note: There is only one website in their startup plan.
If you plan to host more than one website, you will need to get a Drive Plan which is an additional 2 / month after the end of the promotional period.
A strategy to save money through A2 hosting: promotional value ends with renewal. To lock in 63% discount as long as possible, go for three-year billing that will bill for three years at a time. You will get 2 years free hosting.
Hostgator – Best for Lean/Minimal Needs
HostGator is the best website for any business looking for general.
If you do not need an additional feature bootload from your web hosting provider, go with HostGator.
I’m talking about a website or portfolio where you only need the contact information of one visitor. Or maybe you just need a about page. Or a landing page for collecting leads.
HostGator offers a comprehensive list of how-to guides for technical support. If you can’t find the answers you need, you can go for phone, live chat and email support.
Unlike some hosts, Hostgator includes support in all its plans. If you want a hosting plan that is inexpensive and includes support, this is the host for you.
If you want to get your hands dirty, they have a learning curve to take advantage of.
In addition to Linux, HostGator offers a variety of options for upgrading to Windows hosting, as well as cloud hosting, VPS hosting, managed WordPress, and a dedicated server. Shared hosting plans start at $2.64 / month with a three year contract.
GreenGeeks – Best Eco-Friendly Hosting
GreenGeeks is an eco-friendly alternative to other web hosting providers.
What does this mean? This means that they have used renewable energy to strengthen their web hosting services.
As well as being good for the planet, their web hosting services are top notch. They offer fast speeds, solid uptime and great solutions for:
- WordPress Hosting
- WooCommerce Hosting
- Reseller web hosting
- Virtual private server
- Shared hosting
Bottom line: they’re a great option for eco-conscious businesses and websites.
See their prices for shared hosting here.
Like other hosts, they provide an automated 1-click WordPress installer and auto-update to keep your WordPress site up to date.
They also provide daily backups and enhanced security features to help you keep your data safe and secure.
GreenGeeks also stays up to date with the latest technology like PHP7, SSD, CDN, and more. This helps ensure that your website is always fast and secure.
They offer 24/7 support via phone, chat or their ticketing system. They usually respond very quickly and can help with a wide range of problems.
I am a big fan of GreenGeeks for their great service and dedication to helping the planet with their eco-friendly web hosting plans. If you are looking for a “green” hosting company, GreenGeeks is all you need.
Dreamhost – Most Affordable Month-to-Month Plan
Dreamhost offers month-to-month pricing with extremely tough hosting performance.
In fact, their month-to-month plans start at $1.99 / month. This plan includes 1 website with unlimited traffic, a free SSL certificate and a big deal.
Keep in mind that this is only a promotional price, which will increase after the contract expires. You will then pay the current monthly rate, which is $ 7.99 per month. This is still a lot less than what you pay per month compared to other top web hosting providers.
They also offer one year and three year contracts starting at $ 2.59 / month which allows you to save even more money. While it’s not the lowest on this list (see Hosting below for the lowest deal hosting plan), it’s still a good deal.
Overall, their month-to-month value is a perfect choice for those who aren’t sure about long-term commitment for any reason.
In addition to the great price, Dreamhost is also different for the way they manage their web hosts. They do not use the standard cPanel that most hosts use. Instead, DreamHost offers a complete custom control panel to manage your website. This is great for developers who want more control over their website.
There is a catch: it makes it more difficult to move from Dreamhost. However, migrating to DreamHost is easier than ever.
Their free migration plugin lets you migrate in a few steps. As your site grows you will be able to scale your hosting.
If you run a nonprofit, I highly recommend DreamHost. They offer a free unlimited shared hosting plan for 501 (c) (3) organizations. It’s a deal you can’t lose.
DreamHost is another of WordPress’s three proposed hosts, and its basic shared plans include some managed WordPress hosting. It also offers a managed plan with more bells and whistles called DreamPress. It has an industry-leading free trial period – a full 97-day money back guarantee.
Customer service is a little less traditional: email support is available 24/7, but live chat is only available during business hours. If you want technical support over the phone, you’ll need to pay an extra $ 9.95.
However, if you spring for Dreampress Plus or Pro powered WordPress plans, phone support is included along with other premium features.
Sign up with DreamHost today for the lowest cost of hosting without long term commitment.
InMotion – Best VPS Hosting
InMotion offers a really excellent technology, a wide assortment of plans and a team of long time customers.
Emotion gives you a huge self-help knowledge base. So if something goes wrong, there is probably a guide to help you.
Customer support is also among the best. Can’t believe it? Try it for yourself. InMotion’s 90-day free trial period for shared hosting is the longest around and gives you plenty of time to check out InMotion’s support team.
InMotion’s plans are really straightforward and almost identical. With the upgrade you will get faster servers and additional databases, websites and subdomains. This is a simple method I like, especially for small businesses and websites that are not overly complicated. There are no pressing upsells or confusing levels to worry about.
Even entry-level plans have excellent customer support. It is available 24/7 through 5 communication channels: Phone, Chat, Email, Tutorial and Q&A, which were actively answered.
I also appreciate that none of this support is hard to hide or find. The phone number is transmitted at the top of the page and the chat support login is easy to find in your admin panel.
There is nothing more annoying than 24/7 support for which you first have to discover your own communication methods. It is a waste of time and tells me everything I need to know about the host.
I also realize that support is available at your level – you are just getting started and with friendly and supportive behavior you need someone to walk you through the basics, or you want someone who can talk like a professional with glasses and technical acumen, Emotion support covered you.
InMotion has some of the best VPS hosting options. They even have two types of VPS hosting so you can get the amount of support or flexibility you want:
InMotion regularly sets promo prices with deals starting at less than 5 / month. The average price for a shared hosting bump is $ 8– $ 9 / month after the initial contract expires.
In addition to shared hosting, InMotion offers upgrades to managed WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated servers.
WP Engine – Best Managed WordPress Hosting
WP Engine is one of the best (if not the best) WordPress hosts. Beard.
They provide a really great product, highly optimized for WordPress websites. If you want to get all the storage and speed for your WP blog or online store, this is the host for you.
Although it comes at a price. A fully fledged WordPress host is significantly more expensive than shared hosting providers.
The WP Engine low-cost plan is $ 30 / month, and it’s only for a 10GB site with a maximum of 25,000 visitors / month. However if you sign up for one year you will get two months free, and you can get a better deal to sign up with Quick Sprout.
Yes, the price tag is higher than other hosts, but when you consider what WP Engine does, it is an incredibly attractive option for WordPress site owners.
As a managed WordPress host, WP Engine only serves WordPress users, which means its entire infrastructure can be optimized for WordPress. Your site will deteriorate quickly, there is virtually no downtime and lots of maintenance work will be taken care of automatically.
They offer special plans for those who are running an online store with WordPress. These are much more expensive than managed WordPress hosting, but you’ll get access to premium WordPress eCommerce themes and other tools that will cost hundreds of dollars to sell separately.
Bottom line: if you want a burning fast site where everything is taken care of automatically, you will want a WP engine.
Customer support is also laser-centric in WordPress, providing highly skilled knowledge support staff through tracked tickets and 24/7 live chat.
You pay more to get more. The WP Engine is the ultimate choice for any business running on WordPress. If you do not want to waste time managing the hosting content of your website, you need to go to these people.
Nexcess – Best for scaling and growth
Nexus is a web hosting solution for Liquid Web – one of the providers I have listed in my list for the best dedicated web hosting, the best VPS hosting and the best WordPress hosting.
So it’s no real shock that Nexcess made my list for the best web host. Where they really managed to shine ecommerce hosting. In fact, they offer eCommerce hosting for:
- Magento
- Woocommerce
- WordPress
- Drupal
- BigCommerce
- Celias
- Expression engine
- Craft CMS
- Orocrm
So if you want to create an online store, they should be a top consideration for you.
Their Nexus Cloud Accelerator is a feature that adds a layer to the cloud stack that speeds up the loading time of your website. This is a huge boon because speed is everything when it comes to keeping your customers on your website and browsing.
They offer a huge suite plan for each of their web hosts. Here are the three most affordable, but many more:
This makes Nexus perfect for any growing business. No matter where you are with your business, Nexcess has a plan for you.
After all, they have a dedicated support team 24/7 to solve any technical problem you may have. It is very important when it comes to web hosting.
If you are running an ecommerce website or if you have a startup that you know will grow fast, Nexcess is a must consider.
Prices vary depending on which CMS platform you want to use. But their WordPress plan starts at $15.84 / month.
How I find the top best hosting providers for you.
You do not need to know anything about web development to get hosting.
But it does help a lot to know how to evaluate a few key points.
I’ll hit on each of these sections. You will be able to evaluate your options, get something that works for you and not have to worry about hosting again for a while.
So how do I evaluate a web host? What’s the matter?
Let’s go through all the basic items.
Site uptime
Uptime is the most important element of a good web host. Without your site, you will not be able to monetize or gain visitors.
First and foremost, you want a web host with great uptime This means your site is always available and never goes down.
To try to avoid the “just trust us” promise of near-perfect uptime, most hosts offer some sort of guarantee of at least 99.9 percent uptime. However, that guarantee is not too much of a guarantee. This means that in case of any unplanned downtime your bill can be discounted.
Hostgator, for example, will give you free hosting credit for one month if your uptime drops below 99.9%.
These guarantees include many fine prints (for example, a hurricane), including not accepting self-reported or third-party uptime data and not refunding for downtime that is beyond the control of the host.
Site speed
Site speed affects everything related to your site. Want search rankings? Get a quick site. Want to convert your site? Hurry up. Want happy users? Speed up.
Every part of your business is affected by the speed of your site.
When visiting different web hosts, make sure that you are choosing a host that can serve the linear partitions of each page.
There is some subtlety to the speed of the site.
In the early days, you need a host that is quickly “enough”. It doesn’t have to be a blister fast, but it has to be fast.
Think of Amazon. In the days when Amazon just sold books, their site needed to be fast, but it didn’t have to be instantaneous.
Now that so many people use it for all their purchases, Amazon’s site may not be fast enough.
The bigger you get, the faster you want to be. If you are planning to build a high-traffic site, you will want a host that can maintain crazy-fast speeds on large sites.
Customer Support
When running your own site, web host customer support is the single most important thing that a web host can offer.
Digging up usage reviews doesn’t always give you a definitive answer about the quality of support on a particular web host.
Beware of bright reviews in the top publications, they do not always reflect reality.
Any host has a true test for evaluating the quality of customer support.
Free trial customer support test.
Almost every web host has some kind of refund guarantee in their shared hosting plans, which means you can set up your website and see what you think about the service with relatively less partnership – just your time and any add-on fee domain. Choose like payment for registration.
I recommend going to town with customer support during that trial period. Go to live chat, open tickets, jump on the phone as much as possible to see if you like what you are being offered.
Most web hosts offer some sort of free trial time. I recommend using this time to help your host’s customer support knowledge center and especially staff across all channels. This will tell you the real story.
Traffic volume
The amount of traffic you receive has a huge impact on the hosting you need.
For a site that gets 300 visitors per month, pretty much any standard hosting package would be good enough. As long as your web host has strong customer support, you better go.
As you grow older, all sorts of small details become more important.
Is PHP being updated regularly on your server? Do you have a CDN for your content?
Is your site being backed up every day and if something goes wrong you can restore it in 15 minutes?
Do you have an SSL certificate? Can your server handle a huge traffic spike during a marketing campaign?
Whenever I have a big site, I look for premium hosting that takes care of all this for me. And if I’m planning to build a large site, I’m looking for a host that can easily scale millions of visitors each month. I’m happy to offer a premium price to guarantee easy upgrades in the future.
If you are growing up, do not skip.
And if you plan to stay below 50,000 visitors / month, get a standard shared hosting package. There is no reason to worry about advanced things.
Price
While you don’t want to pay extra for hosting, you certainly don’t want to pay less.
Avoid selecting hosts exclusively on price.
Most basic web hosting plans range from 10- $ 20 / month. Yes, there are cheaper alternatives. Some of them are promotional offers that go away during renewal. Others are hosting plans with awesome support and uptime.
My rule is if the price seems too good to be true, maybe it is.
I don’t even think about following the promotional offers to save some dollars. For every site I’ve ever managed, I’ve never used the same host without switching. Once you have a host you are happy to change, saving some money will not be worth it. Promotional offers come and go very quickly.
Migration features
The ability to easily and quickly transfer an existing site will save you weeks of time.
Even moving to a basic WordPress site can be a real hassle. First you need to set up a new WordPress install on your new host. Then you need to export the database of content from your old site and import it into your new one. Finally you need to reconfigure everything like WordPress themes, plugins and settings.
This is a real pain and that is why I have put together a complete guide on WordPress migration.
All this can be avoided.
Some hosts will offer 1-click migration for popular site builders like WordPress.
If you switch hosts and manage the migration manually, find a simple migration feature. This is a great way to make the final decision after you have narrowed it down to a few final options.
Managed hosting
Here’s how a simple host works:
- After you sign up, you will receive a login.
- Login will take you to cPanel. cPanel is an app on your server that lets you manage your UI without knowing how to code.
- Configure your server if you want.
- Your server has an FTP option for manually uploading files.
- There are quick options for installing WordPress and other site software if you want.
- You get full access and you can do whatever you want. It’s a “choose your own adventure.” Install WordPress, Drupal, Magento or code your entire site manually.
Alternatively, have a managed web host. These hosts customize the hosting environment and manage much more of it for you.
WP Engine is the best example, they are a managed host for WordPress. Instead of getting a cPanel login that lets me do whatever I want, WP Engine gives me a login in their custom interface that is specifically designed to manage WordPress sites.
When a web host is exclusively optimized for WordPress, three basic things happen:
- A faster performing site than shared hosting. Everything can be made to make WordPress work better, whether it’s optimizing website caching or tinkering with the command line tool. The host only needs to know how to support WordPress, as opposed to Joomla and a node server and some sort of custom-made site and so on.
- More security and stability. A managed WordPress host can create a system that predicts, compromises, and patches all vulnerabilities in WordPress. This means less malicious attacks and less downtime.
- Admin and site maintenance is much easier. And that service is vital because managed WordPress hosting is significantly more expensive than shared web hosting services.
While I give up some flexibility from not having a basic web server like other hosts, a managed host takes care of a lot of running tasks that I usually have to manage myself.
If you have a small business site then a simple host is fine. If you build a larger site, a managed host will save you a ton of time in the long run and is worth the extra cost.
Top web hosting providers in summary
The best hosting providers offer a wide variety of web hosting including shared hosting, cloud hosting, VPS hosting, WordPress hosting and managed hosting. You also need to evaluate things like uptime, site speed and support.
As your traffic grows you need a hosting provider that can scale with your site. Whether you’re starting a new website or wanting to change providers, this guide covers you.